THE LANDES--THE BORDEAUX AND TESTE RAILWAY--NINICHE--THE LANDSCAPE
OF THE LANDES--THE PEOPLE OF THE LANDES--HOW THEY WALK ON STILTS,
AND GAMBLE.
Turn to the map of France--to that portion of it which would be
traversed by a straight line drawn from Bordeaux to Bayonne--and you
will observe that such a line would run through a vast extent of
bare-looking country--of that sort, indeed, where
"Geographers on pathless downs
Place elephants, for want of towns."
Roads, you will observe, are few and far between; the names of
far-scattered towns will be unfamiliar to you; and, indeed, nine-tenths
of this part of the map consists of white paper. The district you are
looking at is the Landes, forming now a department by itself, and
anciently constituting a portion of Gascony and Guienne. These Landes
form one of the strangest and wildest parts of France. Excepting here
and there small patches of poor, ill-cultivated land, the whole country
is a solitary desert--black with pine-wood, or white with
vast plains of drifting sand. By these two great features of the
district, occasionally diversified by sweeps of green morass,
intersected by canals and lanes of stagnant and often brackish water,
the Landes take a goodly slice out of La Belle France. Their sea-line
bounds the French side of the Bay of Biscay, stretching from Bayonne to
the mouth of the Gironde; and at their point of greatest breadth they
run some sixty miles back into the country; thence gradually receding
away towards the sea, as though pushed back by the course of the
Garonne, until, towards the mouth of the river, they fade away
altogether.
So much for the _physique_ of the Landes. The inhabitants are every whit
as rugged, strange, and uncultivated. As the Landes were four centuries
ago, in all essential points, so they are now; as the people were four
centuries ago, in all essential points, so they are now. What should the
tide of progress or of improvement do in these deserts of pine and sand?
The people live on French soil, but cannot be called Frenchmen. They
speak a language as unintelligible to a Frenchman as an Englishman; they
have none of the national characteristics--little, perhaps, of the
national blood. They are saturnine, gloomy, hypochondriac, dismally
passing dismal lives in the depths of their black forests, their dreary
swamps, and their far-spreading deserts of white, fine sand. Such an odd
nook of the world was not to be passed unvisited; besides, I wanted to
see the Biscay surf; and accordingly I left Bordeaux for the Landes--not
in some miserable cross-country vehicle--not knight-errantwise, on a
Bordelais Rosinante--not pilgrim-wise, with a staff and scrip--but in a
comfortable railway-carriage.
Yes, sir, a comfortable railway-carriage; and the railway in
question--the Bordeaux and Teste line--is the sole enterprise of the
kind undertaken and achieved in the south-west of France.
"Railways!" said the conductor of the Paris and Bordeaux diligence to
me, with that magnificent condescension with which a Frenchman explains
to a Briton all about _Perfide Albion!_--"Railways, monsieur," he said,
"as all the world knows, have achieved the ruin of the Old England, and
presently they will do as much for France. _Tenez_; they are cursed
inventions--particularly the Paris and Bordeaux Railway."
But if the ruin of France is to be consummated by railways, France, like
bankrupt linendrapers, will take a long time to ruin. The Bordeaux line
crawls but slowly on. In 1850, we left the rails and took to the road at
Tours; and, barring the bits of line leading down from some of the
Mediterranean towns to Marseilles, the Bordeaux and Teste fragment was
the sole morsel of railway then in operation south of Lyons. The
question comes, then, to be, What earthly inducement caused the
construction of this wilderness line, and how it happens that the only
locomotives in fair Guienne whistle through the almost uninhabited
Landes? The fact seems to be, that, once upon a time, the good folks of
Bordeaux were taken with an inappeasable desire to have a railway. One
would have thought that the natural course of such an undertaking would
have been northward, through the vines and thickly-peopled country of
Medoc to the comparatively-important towns of Paulliac and Lesparre. The
enterprising Bordelais, however, had another scheme. Some forty miles to
the west of the city, the sands, pines, and morasses of the Landes are
broken by a vast shallow basin, its edges scolloped with innumerable
creeks, bays, and winding friths, into which, through a breach in the
coast line of sand-hills, flow the waters of the Atlantic. On the
southern side of this estuary lie two or three scattered groups of
hovels, inhabited by fishermen and shepherds--the most important of the
hamlets being known as Teste, or Teste-la-buch. Between Teste and
Bordeaux, the only line of communication was a rutty road, half sand and
half morass, and the only traffic was the occasional pilgrimage to the
salt water of some patient sent thither at all risks by the Bordeaux
doctors, or now and then the transit towards the city of the Garonne of
the products of a day's lucky fishing, borne in panniers on the backs of
a string of donkeys. Folks, however, were sanguine. The speculation
"came out," shares got up, knowing people sold out, simple people held
on, and the line was actually constructed. No doubt it was cheaply got
up. Ground could be had in the Landes almost for the asking, and from
terminus to terminus there is not an inch of tunnel-cutting or
embankment. The line, moreover, is single, and the stations are knocked
up in the roughest and most primitive style. The result, however,
astonished no one, save the shareholders. The traffic does not half pay
the working expenses. Notwithstanding that some increase in the amount
of communication certainly did take place, consequent upon the facility
with which Teste can now be reached--a facility which has gone some way
to render it a summer place of sea-side resort--the two trains which
_per diem_ seldom convey more than a dozen or so of third-class
passengers, and the shareholders at length flung themselves into the
hands of the Government; and, insisting upon the advantages which would
accrue to the State as soon as the Paris and Bordeaux line was finished,
by a direct means of communication between the metropolis and a harbour
in the Bay of Biscay, they succeeded in hypothecating their line to the
Government for a small annual subvention. Such is the present agreeable
position of the single railway in the south-west of France.
I was somewhat late, as I feared, for the train, and, calling a
_citadine_, got the man to urge his horse to a gallop, so that we pulled
up at the terminus with the animal in a lather. A porter approached, and
grinned. "Monsieur has made haste, but the winter season begins to-day,
and the train does not go for an hour and a half." There was no help for
it, and I sauntered into the nearest _café_ to read long disquisitions
on what was then all the vogue in the political world--the "situation."
I found the little marble slabs deserted--even the billiard-table
abandoned, and all the guests collected round the white Fayence stove.
Joining them, I perceived the attraction. On one of the velvet stools
sat an old gentleman of particularly grave and reverend aspect--a most
philosophic and sage-like old gentleman--and between his legs was a
white poodle, standing erect with his master's cane in his paws. All the
company were in raptures with Niniche, who was going through his
performances.
"Niniche," said the patriarch, "what does Monsieur Tetard do when he
comes home late?"
The dog immediately began to stagger about on its hind legs, sometimes
losing its balance and then getting up again, looking all the time with
a sort of stupid blinking stare at its master. It was clear that M.
Tetard, when he came home late, did not come home sober.
"_Tiens! c'est admirable!_" shouted the spectators--burly fellows, with
black beards, and honest tradesman-looking people, with glasses of _eau
sucreé_ in their hands.
"And now," said the old gentleman, the poodle's proprietor and
instructor, "what does Madame Tetard do when Monsieur Tetard comes home
late?"
The dog straightway began to utter, with wonderful volubility, a series
of loud, shrill, yelping snaps, jerking itself up and down on its
haunches, and flinging its paws about as if it had the hydrophobia. The
spectators were enraptured. "It is actually her voice," said one. "Only
the dog is too good-looking for her," said another. "_Voilà petite!_"
vociferated a third, holding a huge piece of bluish-tinted beetroot
sugar to the performer, when suddenly the group was broken by a fussy,
fat old gentleman with a white baggy cravat, very snuffy, and a pair of
heavy gold spectacles.
"_Je dis--moi!_" shouted the new comer, in violent wrath; "_que c'est
abominable ce que vous faites là Père Grignon._" A murmur of suppressed
laughter went through the group. Père Grignon looked considerably taken
aback, and the speaker aimed a hearty kick at Niniche, who dodged away
round the stove. It was evident that he was no other than the injured
and maligned Tetard himself. Instantly he broke into loud objurgations.
He knew how that atrocious old _Père Grignon_ had taught his dog to
malign him, the _bête misérable_! But as for it, he would poison
it--shoot it--drown it; and as for Père Grignon, who ought to have more
sense, all the quartier knew what he was--an _imbécille_, who was always
running about carrying tales, and making mischief. But he would appeal
to the authorities; he would lay his complaint before the commisary of
the quartier; he would--he would--. At this moment the excited orator
caught sight of the offending poodle slipping to the door, and instantly
sprung vigorously after him:--
"_Tenez-tenez_; don't touch Niniche--it's not his fault!" exclaimed the
poodle's proprietor. But the dog had bolted, with Tetard in hot chase of
his imitator, and vowing that he should be _écraséd_ and _abiméd_ as
soon as caught. There was, of course, great laughter at the whole
proceeding; and then the group betook themselves to the marble slabs
and dominoes--the instructor of the offending quadruped coolly lighting
his pipe, as he muttered that old Tetard was, after all, a _bon enfant_,
and that over a _petit verre_ he would always listen to reason.
At length the tedious hour and a half wore away, and I entered the
terminus--a roughly built wooden shed. The train consisted of a first,
second, and third-class carriage; but there were no first-class
passengers, only one solitary second-class, and about a dozen
third-classes, with whom I cast my lot. Miserable as the freight was,
the locomotive whistled as loud and panted as vehemently as if it were
yoked to a Great Western express; and off we went through the broad belt
of nursery gardens, which encircles every French town, and where the
very best examples of the working of the small proprietary system are to
be seen. A rapid run through the once greatly famed and still esteemed
vineyards of Hautbrion, and we found ourselves scurrying along over a
negative sort of country--here a bit of heath, there a bit of
vineyard--now a bald spot of sand, anon a plot of irregularly-cut
stubble; while a black horizon of pine-wood rose gradually on the right
and left. On flew the train, and drearier grew the landscape; the heath
was bleaker--the pines began to appear in clumps--the sand-stretches
grew wider--every thing green, and fertile, and _riant_ disappeared. He,
indeed, who enters the Landes, appears to have crossed a French
frontier, and left the merry land behind. No more bright vineyards--no
more rich fields of waving corn--no more clustered villages--no more
chateau-turrets--no more tapering spires. You look up to heaven to see
whether the sky has not changed, as well as the land. No; all there is
blue and serene as before, and the keen, hot sun glares intensely down
upon undulating wastes of marsh, fir, and sand, among which you may
travel for leagues without seeing a man, hearing a dog bark, or a bird
sing. At last we were fairly among the woods, shooting down what seemed
an eternal straight tunnel, cleft by lightning through the pines. The
trees stood up stark and stiff, like cast-iron; the fir is at once a
solemn and a rigid tree--the Puritan of the forest; and down the side of
each Puritan I noticed a straight, yellowish gash, running
perpendicularly from the spread of the branches almost to the earth, and
turned for explanation to an intelligent-looking man, evidently a
citizen of Bordeaux, opposite me.
"Ah!" he said, "you are new to our Landes."
I admitted it.
"And these gashes down the trees--these, monsieur, give us the harvest
of the Landes."
"The harvest! What harvest?"
"What harvest? Resin, to be sure."
"Ay, resin," said an old fellow with a blouse and a quick eye; "resin,
monsieur; the only harvest that man can grow in sand."
"_Tenez_," said my first interlocutor; "the peasants cut that gash in
the tree; and at the root they scoop a little hollow in the ground. The
resin perspires out of the wood, flows slowly and glutinously down the
gash, and in a month or so, according to the heat of the weather, the
hole is full, and the man who rents the trees takes up the sticky stuff,
like soup, with a ladle."
"That's a very good description," said the old bloused gentleman. "And
then, sir" (addressing me), "we barrel our crop of the Landes. Yes,
indeed, we barrel it, as well as they do the crop of the Medoc."
"Only you wouldn't like to drink it so well," said the Bordeaux man.
Presently we pulled up at a station--a mere shed, with a clearing around
it, as there might have been in Texas or Maine. I observed the
name--TOHUA-COHOA, and remarked that it did not look like a French one.
"French one!" said he of Bordeaux; "you don't expect to find French in
this chaos? No, no; it is some of the gibberish the savages hereabout
speak."
"No such gibberish, and no such savages either," said the little
keen-eyed man. "_Moi, je suis de Landes_; and the Landes language is a
far finer language than French. French! phoo, phoo!"
And he took a pinch of snuff indignantly and triumphantly. The Bordeaux
gentleman winked blandly at me, as if the keen-eyed man was a character
to be humoured, and then looked doubtful and unconvinced.
"Tohua-Cohoa," he said; "it has a _sacré tonnerre_ of a barbarous sound;
has it any meaning?"
"Meaning!" exclaimed the man of the Landes; "I should think so.
Tohua-Cohoa means, in French, _Allez doucement_; and the place was so
called because there was there a dangerous swamp, in which many a
donkey coming up from Teste with fish to you of Bordeaux was smothered;
and so it got to be quite proverbial among the drivers of the donkeys,
and they used to shout to each other, 'Tohua-Cohoa!' whenever they came
near the slough; meaning to look out, and go gently, and take care of
the soft places."
The man with the blouse, who was clearly the champion of the Landes,
then turned indignantly from the Bordeaux man and addressed himself to
me. "The language which the poor people here speak, monsieur, is a fine
and expressive language, and liker the Spanish than the French. The
people are poor, and very ignorant. They believe, monsieur, in ghosts,
and witches, and sorceries, just as all France did two or three hundred
years ago. Very few of them can read, monsieur, and they have bad food
and no wine. But nevertheless, monsieur, they are _bons enfants--braves
gens_, monsieur. They love their pine-woods and their sands as much as
other people do their corn-fields and their vines, monsieur. They would
die, monsieur, if you took them away from the sand and the trees. They
are not like the Auvergnats, who go in troops to Paris to carry water
from the fountains, and who are _betes--betes--bien betes_! They stay at
home, monsieur. They wear their sheep-skins and walk upon their stilts,
like their forefathers before them, monsieur; and if you are coming here
to see the Landes, and if you lose yourself in the woods, and see a
light glimmering through the trees, and rap at the cottage door,
monsieur, you will be welcomed, monsieur, and have the best they can
offer to eat, and the softest they can offer to sleep on. _Tenez, tenez;
nous sommes pauvres et ignorants mais nous sommes, loyals et bons!_"
The tears fairly stood in the keen black eyes of the Landes man as he
concluded his harangue, of which I have only reported the main points;
for, truth to tell, the poor fellow's vehemence was so great, and his
utterance so rapid, that I lost nearly as much as I caught. The Bordeaux
gentleman hammered the floor with his umbrella in satirical approbation,
the rest of the passengers looked curiously on, and, the engine
whistling, we pulled up again at a station similar to the first--a
shed--a clearing, and black pine all around. There were just three
persons on the rough platform--the station-master in a blouse, and two
yellow-breeched _gens-d'armes_. What could they find to occupy them
among these drear pine-woods? What thief, who had not made a vow of
voluntary starvation, or who had not a morbid taste for living upon
resin, would ever have ventured among them? But the authorities! Catch a
bit of France without an "authority!" As they certainly are omnipotent,
and profess to be omniscient, it is only to be supposed that they should
be omnipresent. One man left the train at the station in question--a
slouching, stupid, swarthy peasant, the authorities pounced upon him,
evidently in prodigious glee at catching somebody to be _autoritised_
over, and we left them, spelling and squabbling over the greasy-looking
"papers" presented by the profoundly respectful Jacques or Pierre.
And now, before proceeding further, I may be allowed to describe, with
some minuteness, the landscape which will greet the traveller in the
Landes. Its mere surface-aspect I have already sketched; but general
terms go but a small way towards indicating the dreary grandeurs of that
solemn wilderness. Over all its gloom and barrenness--over all its
"blasted heaths" and monotonous pine-woods, and sodden morasses, and
glaring heaps of shifting sand--there is a strong and pervading sense of
loneliness, a grandeur and intensity of desolation, which, as it were,
clothes the land with a sad, solemn poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging
from black forests of fir, the wanderer may find himself upon a plain,
flat as a billiard-table, and apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in
one unvaried, unbroken robe of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and
ridges, or great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine;
sometimes belts of scraggy young fir-trees appear rising from the
horizon on the left, and fading into the horizon on the right.
Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and
coarse water-weeds, giant rushes, and marish-mosses, and tangled masses
of dank vegetation, will tell of the unfathomable swamp beneath. Dark
veins of muddy water will traverse the flat oozy land, sometimes,
perhaps, losing themselves in broad shallow lakes, bordered again by the
endless sand-banks and stretches of shadowy pine. The dwellings which
dot this dreary, yet, in its way, solemnly poetic landscape, are
generally mere isolated huts, separated sometimes by many miles, often
by many leagues. Round them the wanderer will descry a miserable field
or two, planted with a stunted crop of rye, millet, or maize. The
cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and unhewn and unmortared stones,
clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes,
pine stakes, and broadleaved reeds, beneath which cluster, when not
seeking their miserable forage in the woods, two or three cows, mere
skin and bone, and a score or two of the most abject-looking sheep which
ever browsed.
Proceeding through the Landes towards the coast, a long chain of lakes
and water-courses, running parallel to the ocean, breaks their
uniformity. The country becomes a waste of shallow pools, and of land
which is parched in summer and submerged in winter. Running in devious
arms and windings through moss and moor and pine, these "lakes of the
dismal swamp" form labyrinths of gulfs and morasses which only the most
experienced shepherds can safely thread. Here and there a village, or
rather bourg, will be seen upon their banks, half hidden in the
pine-woods; and a roughly-built fishing-punt or two will be observed
floating like the canoe of a savage in the woodland lakes. Sometimes, as
in the case of the basin of Arcachon, which will be presently described,
these waters are arms of the sea; and the retreating tide leaves scores
of square miles of putrid swamp. Sometimes they are mere collections of
surface-drainage, accumulating without any means of escape to the ocean,
and perilous in the extreme to the dwellers on their shores. For,
forming the extreme line of coast, there runs, for near two hundred
miles, from the Adour to the Garonne, a range of vast hills of white
sand, as fine as though it had been sifted for an hour-glass. Every gale
changes the shape of these rolling mountains. A strong wind from the
land flings millions of tons of sand per hour into the sea, to be washed
up again by the surf, flung on the beach, and in the first Biscay gale
blown in whirlwinds inland. A winter hurricane again from the west has
filled up with sand square miles of shallow lake, driving the displaced
waters inland, dispersing them in gleaming lakes among the pine-woods,
flooding, and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people,
and burying for ever their fields of millet and rye. I shall presently
have occasion to touch upon some disasters of this sort. Meantime,
having made the aspect of the Landes familiar to the reader, I pursue
the thread of my journey.
The novelty of a population upon stilts--men, women, and children,
spurning the ground, and living habitually four or five feet higher than
the rest of mankind--irresistibly takes the imagination, and I leant
anxiously from the carriage to catch the first glimpse of a Landean in
his native style. I looked long in vain. We passed hut after hut, but
they seemed deserted, except that the lean swine burrowing round the
turf walls gave evidence that the pork had proprietors somewhere. At
last I was gratified; as the train passed not very quickly along a
jungle of bushes and coppice-wood, a black, shaggy figure rose above it,
as if he were standing upon the ends of the twigs. The effect was quite
eldritch. We saw him but as a vision, but the high conical hat with
broad brims, like Mother Red-cap's, the swarthy, bearded face, and the
rough, dirty sheep-skin, which hung fleecily from the shoulders of the
apparition, haunted me. He was come and gone, and that was all.
Presently, however, the natives began to heave in sight in sufficient
profusion. There were three gigantic-looking figures stalking together
across an expanse of dusky heath. I thought them men, and rather tall
ones; but my companions, more accustomed to the sight, said they were
boys on comparatively short stilts, herding the sheep, which were
scattered like little greyish stones all over the waste. Anon, near a
cottage, we saw a woman, in dark, coarse clothes, with shortish
petticoats, sauntering almost four feet from the ground, and next beheld
at a distance, and on the summit of a sand-ridge, relieved against the
sky, three figures, each leaning back, and supported, as it seemed, not
only by two daddy long-legs' limbs, but by a third, which appeared to
grow out of the small of their backs. The phenomenon was promptly
explained by my bloused _cicerone_, who seemed to feel especial pleasure
at my interest in the matter. The third leg was a pole or staff the
people carry, with a new moon-shaped crutch at the top, which, applied
to the back, serves as a capital prop. With his legs spread out, and his
back-stay firmly pitched, the shepherd of the Landes feels as much at
home as you would in the easiest of easy chairs.
"He will remain so for hours, without stirring, and without being
wearied," said my fellow-passenger. "It is a way of sitting down in the
Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of
stockings, ay, and not have an ache in his back. Sometimes they play
cards, so, without once coming off their stilts."
"Ay, and cheat! _Mon Dieu!_ how they cheat!" said the Bordeaux
gentleman. The native of the Landes reluctantly admitted that was
the truth, and the other went on:--
"These fellows here on the stilts are the most confounded gamblers in
Europe. Men and women, it's all the same--play, play, play; they would
stake their bodies first, and their souls after. _Tenez_; I once heard
of a lot of the fellows playing in a wood till they were all but
starved. In the day they played by daylight, and when night came, they
kindled a bonfire and played in the glare. They played on and on, in
spite of hunger and thirst. They staked their money--not that they had
much of that--and their crops--not that they were of great value
either--and their pigs, and their sheep, and their Landes ponies, and
then their furniture, and then their clothes, and, last of all, their
stilts--for a Landes man thinks his stilts the principal part of his
wardrobe; and, _sacré!_ monsieur, three of the fellows were ruined out
and out, and had to give up their hats, and sheep-skins, and sabots,
while the man who was the greatest winner walked home on his own stilts,
with the stilts of all his comrades tucked under his arm."
"Gaming is their fault--their great fault," meekly acknowledged the
blouse.
"Not at all!" said his antagonist. "Cheating is their great fault. A
Landes shepherd would cheat the devil with a greasy pack of cards."
"The fact is," replied the apologist, "that they count cheating part of
the game. Their motto is, win anyhow; so it is no worse for one than the
other. Cards is chance; but cheating needs skill, and _voila tout_."
We were fast approaching Teste, and had passed two or three clusters of
poor huts, and a party of women up to their waists in a sluggish stream
washing fleeces, while yellow patches of ripening maize began to recur
quicker and quicker, showing that we had reached a comparatively
thickly-peopled district, when all at once there burst upon my eyes a
glorious-looking prairie of gently undulating land, of the brightest
green I ever looked upon. The green of the greenest lawns of England,
the green of the softest bogs of Ireland, the green even of the most
intensely green patches of the Curragh of Kildare, were brown, and
fuzzy, and rusty, compared to this wonderful hue. The land looked like
one huge emerald, sparkling in the sun. The brightness, the freshness,
the radiance of the tint, was almost supernatural, and the eye, nursed
for it, as it were, after our journey over the brown moors and black
pines, caught the bright fresh beauty of the colour with rapture.
"Come," I thought, "there are, at least, oases in the Landes. Never was
turf so glorious; never was sward so bewitching." And then, gazing far
and wide upon the prairie, I saw it dotted with human figures labouring
at the soil, and great wains and carts drawn by oxen, looking like black
specks upon a great, fresh, green leaf. But, in a moment, I saw
something more. Could I believe my eyes? A ship! Yes, verily, a ship,
fast aground, high and dry upon the turf! and not only one, but two,
three, four, good-sized schooners and _chasse marées_, with peasants
digging about them, and country carts high heaped with green
rural-looking burdens.
The Landes man saw my bewilderment. "The green-looking land," he said,
"is the flat bottom of part of the bay of Arcachon. It is now dead
low-water, and the country people have come down with their carts to
fill them with that green slimy seaweed, which makes capital manure; and
some of them, perhaps, have brought casks of resin for those ships which
principally belong to Bordeaux, Rochelle, and Nantes, and come here and
into other bays along the coast for the harvest of the Landes."
The engine whistled. We were at Teste--a shabby, ancient little village,
with a deep stream flowing sluggishly around it, and dividing itself
into a many-forked delta along the level sand; fishermen's hovels
scattered on the beach, brown boats drawn up beneath them, nets drying,
a considerable fishy smell pervading the atmosphere, with, beyond again,
the black, unvarying mantle of pine-woods. There is a very good hotel at
Teste; thanks to its being one of the Bordeaux watering-places; and
there, for dinner, was provided red mullets, which would have made the
red mullet-loving Duke of Devonshire crazy, as he noted the difference
between the fish from the bay of Arcachon and their brethren from the
coast of Weymouth.