THE LANDES--THE BAY OF ARCACHON AND ITS FISHERS--THE LEGEND OF
CHATEL-MORANT--THE PINE-WOODS--THE RESIN-GATHERER--THE WILD
HORSES--THE SURF OF THE BAY OF BISCAY--THE WITCHES OF THE
LANDES--POPULAR BELIEFS, AND POPULAR CUSTOMS.
The sun was low in the heavens next morning when I was afoot and down to
the beach, the glorious bay now brimming full, and the schooners and
_chasse marées_, like the swan on St. Mary's Loch, floating double,
ships and shadows. The scene was very strange. The green meadow had
disappeared, and where it had been, a gleaming lake stretched brilliant
in the sunshine, set in the pine-woods like a mirror in an ebony frame,
cutting slices of sweeping bay out of their dusky margins, and piercing
their depths with silent, weedy water-veins.
[Illustration]
Where the villages lie, there have been clearings made in the wood,
precisely as one would expect to see in a New Zealand or Australian bay.
Close to high-water mark, rows of rounded huts serve as storehouses for
nets, and spars, and sails. Before them straggling jetties run on piles
far to seaward; behind, huddled amid scanty vineyards and patches of
broadleaved Indian corn, groups of houses--their roofs nearly flat, and
their walls not above six feet, in some places not four feet, high--seem
cowering away from observation. For every cottage built of stone, there
are half-a-dozen out-houses, sheds, pig-sties, and so forth, piled up
with old oars, broken masts, furze, pine-cuttings, and Irish-looking
sod. I made my way to what seemed the principal landing-place--a
bleached jetty. A dozen or so of boats floated round it, roughly built,
very narrow, and very light, lying upon the very top of the water, and
just, in fact, as like canoes as the scene about resembled some still
savage country. Three boats were starting for the oyster fishery, manned
each by four as buxom, blithe, and debonnaire wenches as you would wish
to see. They had short petticoats--your Nereides of all shores have--and
straw hats, shaped like a man's. In the stern-sheets of each boat a
venerable, ancient mariner held the tiller; and as I approached, the
damsels, who were getting their clumsy oars inserted between the
thole-pins, clamoured out in a torrent of vociferous gabble, offering me
a day's oyster-fishing, if I would go with them. They were evidently
quite _au fait_ to ridding the Bordeaux loungers of their spare francs,
in the shape of passage-money, for a frolic on the oyster-banks; but I
had determined to pass the day in another fashion. I wanted a sail on
the bright, still bay, a walk in the pine-woods, and a glance at the
surf tumbling in from the Bay of Biscay; so I scrutinized the faces of
two or three lounging boatmen, with as much reference to Lavater's
principles as I might, and selecting the most intelligent-looking of the
lot--a mild, grey-eyed man, who spoke gently and slowly--we soon made a
bargain, and were speedily afloat in the bean-cod looking canoe of which
he was the skipper. I was gazing doubtfully at the heavy oars, and the
expanse of water, when a flying cat's-paw made just a pretence of
ruffling it.
"_Merci, le bon vent!_" said the fisherman. Up went a mast; up went a
light patch of thin white canvass, and straightway the bubbles flew fast
and faster by the gunwale, and there arose a sweet gurgle from the
cleaving bow.
"You can see how fast we're going by the bottom," said the boatman. I
leant over the gunwale, and looked down. Oh, the marvellous brightness
of that shining sea! I gazed from the boat upon the sand through the
water, almost as you might through the air upon the earth from a
balloon. Ghost-like fish gleamed in the depths, and their shadows
followed them below upon the ribbed sea-sand. Long flowing weeds, like
rich green ribbons, waved and streamed in the gently running tidal
current. You could see the white pebbles and shells--here a ridge of
rocks, there a dark bed of seaweed; and now and then a great flat-fish,
for all the world like a burnished pot-lid set in motion--went gleaming
along the bottom.
"Once," said the boatman, "all the bottom of this great bay that you are
looking at was dry land, and there were cottages upon it, and an ancient
chateau. That was the chateau of Armand de Chatel-morant, an old baron
of these parts, a wicked man and a great magician, who had a familiar
spirit, which came when he blew a horn, and who was able, by his
sorceries, to rule the winds that blow. Only, once he raised a storm he
could not quell; and it was that storm which made the Bay of Arcachon;
for the wind blew the sand of the sea-shore up the country, like a
snow-storm, and the sand-hills rolled before it; and what the wind
began, the _coup de mer_ finished, and the ocean came bursting through
the breach it had battered in the sand-ridges of the coast, and
swallowed up the chateau and drowned the magician, and there was an end
of him."
"Well," said I, "so be it; he deserved his fate."
"For many a year after the flood the baron had made," the boatman
continued, "you could see, out of a boat, the pointed tops of the towers
of the chateau below you, with the weather-cocks still pointing to the
west, and the green seaweed hanging to them, like pennons from a ship's
vanes."
"But I fear it is not to be seen now."
"Oh! no. Ages and ages ago it rotted and rotted away; but the old men of
the village have heard from their fathers that the fishermen only
ventured there in calm summer weather and in good daylight; for, in the
dark, look you, and when a Biscay wind was blowing, they said they heard
the sounding of Chatel-morant's magic horn, and they saw his imp flying
above them and wailing like a hurt seabird."
Of course, I was on thorns to hear all the story; and so my boatman
recounted a rude, disjointed tale, which I have hitched, legendwise,
into the following narrative:--
The Baron Armand de Chatel-morant sat in his dim studio high up in the
most seaward tower of the chateau of Chatel-morant. His hair and his
beard were white, but his eyes were keen, and his cheeks as ruddy as the
eyes and the cheeks of a young man. He had a furnace beside him, with
implements of projection, crucibles, and powders. On the table were
astrological instruments, and the magic crystal, which his Familiar had
given him, and in which--only, however, when the Familiar pleased--the
baron could read the future; but, for every reading of the future, the
baron was a year older--the Familiar had a year of his life. The baron
was clothed in a long furred robe, and he wore red shoes, with peaked
toes, as long again as his feet. His face was moody, and clouds went
driving along his brow. He took up his instruments, and laid them down,
and opened a big book, full of spells and cantrips, and shut it; then he
walked about the room; and then he stopped and blew a silver whistle.
Very prompt at the sound came an old man--reverent and sorrowful
looking--with a white wand; for he was the seneschal of the chateau of
Chatel-morant.
"Your niece," said the baron, "who comes hither from the town of
Bordeaux to visit you, and whom I saw but yester even,--has she
returned?"
"She went this morning, monseigneur," said the seneschal; "she has
preparations to make; for, God save the pretty child! she is to be
married on the day of Blessed St. John."
The baron frowned; for he was not an admirer of the saints, being quite,
indeed, on the other side of the hedge.
"Say the number of the day, and the name of the month," he replied,
angrily; "and do not torment me with that shaveling jargon which they
talk in the monastery of Andrew, whom they call St. Andrew at Bordeaux."
The seneschal, who was accustomed to be bullied, particularly upon
religious subjects, crossed himself behind his back; for he was a
prudent man, and, owing to the absence of mind of the baron, who was
always experimentalizing in the black art, managed, one way or other, to
pick up so much as to make his place a tolerably profitable one.
"Married!" said the baron; "and to whom?"
"Just to honest and brave Jacques Fort--the stoutest mariner who sails
out of the Garonne. He has got a ship of his own, now--the _Sainte
Vierge_; and to-day he sails upon his first voyage, as far as Bayonne."
"He sails to-day--so; and the maiden's name--your niece's name--what is
that?"
"Toinette, so please you, sir."
"You may go."
And go the seneschal did, wondering very much at the uncommon interest
his master seemed to be taking in vulgar, sublunary things.
Then Baron Armand de Chatel-morant paced the room a long time in gloomy
meditation. At length he sat down again, and said aloud: "There is no
doubt of it--I am in love. That face haunts me; Toinette's face is ever
floating opposite to me. 'Tis an odd feeling; I was never so before.
But, since it is so, I must even have the maiden--she will cheer me--I
love her face. I will send to-morrow to Bordeaux, as from her uncle; and
when she comes here, by the star of Aldeboran, she stays here, Jacques
Fort to the contrary notwithstanding!"
"Wrong--quite wrong!" said a voice.
The baron turned coolly round, and saw, sitting upon the arm of the
chair close to him, the figure of a very thin dwarf, with a long,
unearthly face, and fingers like hawks' claws. This was the imp--the
baron's Familiar.
"How, Klosso!" said Armand; "you come without being called?"
"Yes; but you would have called me soon."
"You know what I am thinking of--of Toinette. I love her--I must have
her."
"You will not have her."
"Why so?"
"Because it is so decreed."
"Klosso," said the baron, "I don't believe you. You know the future;
but you lie about it when you speak."
"Will you, then," answered the demon, "look into the crystal: that can't
lie. Come--it's only another year--give yourself a treat--come!"
"I have given you many years already," said the baron, musing; "look how
grey my hair is!"
"Dye it," said the imp, who, if he was a Familiar, certainly behaved as
such. But the baron took no notice of his impertinence. He was
dreadfully smitten by Toinette, and said he'd have a twelvemonths' worth
of knowledge of futurity for her sake. The thin dwarf grinned, and then
made a motion of relief, as one who saw before him the speedy end of a
long, long watch. So he took the crystal, uttered, as may be supposed,
some magic words; and the baron looked upon the clear surface.
"Malediction!" he exclaimed, as he saw in the crystal a huge hearth,
with pots on the fire, and poultry roasting before it, and Toinette
tending the cookery, and a stalwart fellow helping her clumsily.
"That is Toinette!" cried the baron; "but who is the rascal with her?"
"Her husband, Jacques Fort."
"Curses on him!"
Here the baron saw Jacques fling his arm round Toinette's waist, and
kiss her so naturally, that he ground his teeth.
"Domestic felicity," said the imp; "a charming picture, baron--they're
cooking the christening feast for young Jacques."
The baron flung the crystal down.
"Pay me," said the imp; and he passed the bird-like hand over the
baron's face, and each of his fingers drew a wrinkle. A shudder went
over the sorcerer's frame, and then he breathed heavily, and looked
wistfully at the imp. He was a year older.
"Klosso!" shouted Armand, leaping to his feet, "I will fight fate!"
"Better not," said Klosso.
"Curse the future!" exclaimed the baron; "I will alter the future, and
give the lie to the crystal, as to you!"
"If you try," replied the imp, coolly, "you will belong to me before the
morning."
"Silence, slave!" cried Armand, who was not a man to be put out of his
way; "you rule the winds--I rule you. Make the west wind blow."
The imp raised its hand, and they heard the whistling of a strong, gusty
wind, and the creaking of the weather-cocks, as they all turned towards
the sea.
"Stronger--stronger--stronger!" shouted the baron; and the whistle
became a roar, and the roar a howl; and the castle shook and swayed in
the blast.
"Good--good!" laughed the baron; "something more than a puff there--ha!
ha!--as Jacques Fort has found by this time on the deck of his new ship
in the Bay of Biscay."
The Familiar gently remarked that the weather was roughish, when the
seneschal rushed into the room in a dreadful state of terror at the
storm.
"My lord--my lord!" he said, "we shall all be blown away; the air is
full of sand; you would be suffocated outside. The wind is tearing up
the pines; and oh, poor Jacques Fort is at sea, and drowned--drowned, by
this time, to a certainty!"
"Yes," said Armand, "I should rather think so. Toinette must take up
with somebody else.--Stronger!"
The last injunction was addressed to the imp, and instantly complied
with. The tempest roared like the up-bursting of a volcano, and
screeched and screamed through the sugar-loaf turrets and the lattices,
which it had burst in, and the loop-holes, like a hundred thousand
devils' whistles. The seneschal fell on his knees.
"Stronger still!" said the baron.
And meantime what was Jaques Fort doing in his new ship? With every rag
of canvass torn out of the bolt-ropes, the _Sainte Vierge_ was flying on
the very top, as it seemed, of the driving spray, on to the breakers.
Jacques was the only man left on deck--every one of the rest had been
washed overboard, and were already sleeping in the sea; and he knew that
in a moment he would follow them. The staggering ship rose on the back
of a mighty breaker; and the captain knew that with its fall upon the
beach his vessel would be ground to powder.
"Oh, Toinette!" he murmured, as the ship was hove forward like a bolt
from a bow, and then fell shooting into a creaming current of rushing
water, while the sand-hills appeared right and left for a moment, and
then were left astern. The last grand wave had burst the barrier, and
the frail ship and the kneeling mariner were borne onward on the ridge
of the advancing flood, which formed the lake of Arcachon. Jacques Fort
saw a light, and steered towards it: it was the light in the baron's
chamber at the chateau of Chatel-morant.
There, by the burst-in lattice, stood the baron, his grey hair flying
above his head, and ever shouting to the imp, "Stronger,
Klosso--stronger!" And every time he used the words, the hurricane burst
louder and louder upon the rocking turrets. And still Armand clung to
the stone-work of the burst-in lattice, through which the flying sand
drove in, and clustered in his robes and hair.
And now the terrified domestics began to rush up to the chamber of the
baron.
"My lord, such a storm was never heard of!"
"My lord, the devil is loose, and riding on the wind!"
"My lord, the end of the world is at hand!"
"Klosso!" shouted the baron, "stronger!"
As he spoke, the wind burst like a thunder-clap over them, and they
heard the crash of a falling tower. The serving men and women grovelled
in terror on the floor; the baron clung by the window; the imp, visible
only to him, sat on the back of the arm-chair, as he had sat since his
appearance.
But hush! Another sound, mingling with the roar of the wind, and deeper
and more awful still. It rapidly increased, and the baron found his face
besprinkled with driving drops of water--they were salt.
"My lord--my lord!" screamed the seneschal, sinking, as he spoke, at
the baron's knees; "my lord--the sea!"
A cry was heard without; the lights of the hamlet beneath disappeared;
and then a shock from below made the chateau swing and rock, and white
waves were all around them.
"The sea, my lord," said the seneschal, "has burst the sand-banks; the
castle stands on low ground. We are all dead men--the sea--the sea!"
The Baron Armand turned to Klosso: "Does he speak truth?"
"The worthy gentleman," said the imp, "is perfectly in the right; you
are all dead men; and, Monseigneur le Baron, when you gave me last a
year of your life, you gave me the last you had to give."
Up rose the water, and higher dashed the waves. Up, foot by foot, and
yard by yard; and still the baron stood erect amid the raving of the
elements--his face as white as his hair, but his eyes as bright and keen
as ever.
"Klosso," he said, "I am yours; and the future is the future."
He looked at the iron lamp swinging above his head.
"It will soon be out," said Klosso.
Jacques Fort still steered to the light. It came nearer and nearer; and
he saw, even through the gloom and the driving spray, that it shone from
a castle-turret, and he seized the tiller to change the course of the
vessel; but as he did so, the grand, triumphant, finishing blast of the
hurricane fell upon the seething flood like iron--heaved up one
bristling, foaming sea, which caught the _Sainte Vierge_ upon its
crest, and flung the ship almost into the air. The light gleamed for a
moment almost beneath him; and Jacques, rushing to the bow, saw below
it, as in a prison, a fierce convulsed face, and staring eyes, and
flying white hair; and the eyes saw him. As Jacques recognised the
sorcerer Armand of Chatel-morant, so did Armand recognise the face and
form he had seen helping Toinette to cook the christening feast.
The next instant the _Sainte Vierge_ was borne over and over the highest
turret of the chateau, her keel a fathom good above the loftiest and the
gaudiest of all the gilt weather-cocks.
The event foreshadowed in the crystal duly took place on the anniversary
of the day which saw the chateau de Chatel-morant swallowed in the Bay
of Arcachon.
The legend of the submerged chateau, with which I plead guilty to having
taken a few liberties, but "only with a view" (as the magistrate said
when he put his neighbour into the stocks)--"only with a view towards
improvement," occupied us during the greater part of our smooth and
pleasant sail. Dismissing matters legendary, we talked of the fishermen
of the bay, and their neighbours, the shepherds on stilts. The man of
the sea held the men of the land cheap. The peasants were never out of
the forests and the sand, he said; the fishermen often went to Bordeaux,
and sometimes to Rochelle, and sometimes even to Nantes. They (the
boatmen) never used stilts; but as soon as the peasant's children were
able to toddle, they were clapped upon a pair of sticks, and many a
tumble, and many a broken face they caught, before they could use them
easily. "They are a good set of people, but very ignorant, and they
believe whatever you tell them. They are frightened out of their wits if
you speak of witches or sorcerers; but we know that all these old tales
are nothing but nonsense. We go to Bordeaux very often as pilots, and to
Rochelle, and even to Nantes." I was further informed, that in the
winter time the fishermen pursued their occupation in the bay in such
boats as that in which I was sailing; and that in summer they went out
into the Atlantic; but never ventured more than a few miles to sea, and
never, if they could help it, stayed out a night.
This kind of conversation brought us tolerably well to the narrow
passage, all fenced with intricate sand-banks, which leads to the open
sea. A white, graceful lighthouse rose above the sand-banks on our
right, into which the pine-woods were stretching in long, finger-like
projections; and the boat, beginning to rise and fall upon the slow,
majestic heave which the swell without communicated to the shallow water
within the bar, assured me that if we went further, the surf would
prevent our landing at all. We ran the boat upon the beach, and drawing
her up high and dry, plunged into, not the greenwood, but the black-wood
tree. It was hard walking. The pines grew out of fine bright sand, bound
here and there together by carpets of long bent grass, and the air was
sickly with the peculiar resinous smell of the rich sap of the tree
fermenting and distilling down the gashes. In our ramble, we encountered
two of the peasants, whose dreary work it is to hack the pines and
ladle up the flowing proceeds. We heard the blows of the axe echoing in
the hot silence of the mid-day, and made our way to whence the sound
proceeded, speedily descrying the workman, perched upon a slight bending
ladder, gashing the tree. This man, and, indeed, all his brethren whom I
saw, were miserable-looking creatures--their features sunken and
animal-like--their hair matted in masses over their brows--their feet
bare, and their clothing painfully wretched. Their calling is as
laborious as it is monotonous. Starting with the dawn, they plunge--a
ladder in one hand, and an adze in the other--into the recesses of the
pine-wood, repeating the same process to every tree. The ladder in
question is very peculiar, consisting of a single strip of elastic wood,
about ten feet long, dotted with knobs cut plain upon one side for the
foot to rest upon, and thus serving instead of rounds or steps. This
primitive ladder is sliced away towards the top, so as to rest more
commodiously upon the tree. When in use, it is placed almost
perpendicularly, and the workman ascends it like a monkey, never
touching the tree, but keeping the ladder in its position by the action
of his legs, which, from the knee downward, seem to cling round and
round the bending wood, and keep it in its place, even when the top,
laid perhaps against the rounded side of the trunk, appears to be
slipping off every moment.
"Well," said my guide, the Teste boatman, "I would rather reef topsails
in a gale of wind than go up there, at any rate."
The ladder, its proprietor told me, could not be used except with naked
feet. The instrument with which he cut the tree was as sharp as a razor,
and required long practice to acquire the knack of using it. I wondered
that the gashing did not kill the trees, as some of the largest were
marked with half-a-dozen cuts from the ground to the fork. Here and
there, indeed, you found one which had succumbed to the process, rotted,
and fallen; but the majority seemed in very good case, nevertheless.
"Look at that tree," said a resin-gatherer. More than half the bark had
certainly gone in these perpendicular stripes, and yet it looked strong
and stately "That tree is more than a hundred years old; and that is not
a bad age for either a man or a fir."
Leaving the peasant behind, we pushed steadily towards the sea. The
ground, thanks to the debris of the pines, was as slippery as ice,
except where we plunged into fine hot sand, half way to the knees. Every
now and then we crossed what I cannot describe better than by calling it
a perfectly bald spot in the woods--a circular patch of pure white
sand--in certain lights, you might have taken it for snow. All around
were the black pines; but not a blade or a twig broke the drifted
fineness of the bald white patch. You could find neither stone nor
shell--nothing but subtle, powdery sand--every particle as minute and as
uniform as those in an hour-glass.
"That," said my guide, when we came in view of the first of these
singular little saharas--"that is a devil's garden."
"And what does he grow there?" I asked. The man lowered his voice: "It
is in these spots of fine white sand that all the sorcerers and witches,
and warlocks in France--ay, and I have heard, in the whole world--meet
to sing, and dance, and frolic; and the devil sits in the middle. So, at
least," he added, after a pause, and in a more sprightly tone--"so the
peasants say."
"And do you say it?"
"Well, I do not know. There's witches, for certain, in the Landes,--old
women--but whether they come flying out here to dance round the devil or
no--the peasants say so for certain--but I don't think I believe it."
"I should hope you didn't."
"They enchant people, though; there's no doubt of that. They can give
you the fever so bad that no doctor can set you to rights again; and
they can curse a place, and keep the grass from growing on it; but I
don't believe they fly on broomsticks, or dance round the devil."
"Are there any young women witches?"
"Well, I do hear of one or two. _Mais elles ne sont pas bien fortes._ It
is only the old ones make good witches, and the uglier they are the
better."
"Well, now, did they ever do any harm to you?"
The man paused, and looked at me with a puzzled expression. "Our little
Marie," he said, "has fits; and my wife does say--" Here he stopped.
"No, monsieur," he said, "I do not believe in witches."
But he did, as firmly as King Jamie; only now and then, in the bright
sunlight, and with an incredulous person, he thought he did not.
On, however, we went mile after mile, over the slippery ground, and in
the shadow of the pines, ere we saw gleaming ahead, the region of fine
sand, and heard--although the little breeze which blew was off the
shore--the low thunder of the "coup de mer"--the breaking surf of the
ocean. Presently, passing through a zone of stunted furze, and dry
thin-bladed grass, we emerged into the most fearful desert I ever looked
upon--a sea of heights and hollows, dells and ridges, long slopes and
precipitous ravines--all of them composed of pure white, hot, drifting
sand. The labour of walking was excessive. I longed for the stilts I had
seen the day before. Every puff of breeze sent the sand, like dry
pungent powder, into our faces, and sometimes we could see it reft from
the peaks of the ridges, and blown like clouds of dust far out into the
air. All at once my guide touched my arm, "_Voila! donc, voila! des
chevaux sauvages!_" It certainly only required a breed of wild horses to
make the country an exact counterpart of Arabia; and I eagerly turned to
see the steeds of the desert, just succeeding in catching a glimpse of a
ruck of lean, brown, shaggy ponies, disappearing round a hill, in a
whirlwind of sand. There is, undoubtedly, something romantic and
Mazeppaish in the notion of wild horses of the desert; but stern truth
compels me to add, that a more stunted, ragged lot of worthless brutes,
not bigger than donkeys, than were the troop of desert steeds of the
Landes which I had the fortune to see, could be nowhere met with. My
fisherman told me that, when caught and tamed, they were useful in
carrying sacks and panniers along the sandy ways; but that there were
not more vicious, stubborn brutes in nature than Landes ponies.
A doubly fatiguing trudge, unbroken by any further episodical visions of
desert steeds, but enlivened by the fast increasing thunder of the surf,
at length brought us to its foam. Winding through a succession of sand
valleys, we climbed a steepish bank, sinking to our knees at every step,
and from this last ridge beheld a long, gentle slope, as perfectly
smooth as though the sand had been smoothed by a ruler--fining away down
to the white creaming sheets of water which swept, with the loud
peculiar hiss of the agitated sea, far up and down the level banks. The
full force of the great heaving swells was expended in breakers, roaring
half a mile from the land; and from their uttermost verge to the tangled
heaps of seaweed washed high and dry upon the beach, was a vast belt of
foaming water, extending away on either hand in a perfectly straight
line as far as the eye could reach, and dividing the shipless expanse of
water from the houseless expanse of land. The scene was very solemn.
There was not even a seabird overhead--not an insect crawling or humming
along the ungrateful sand. Only the grand organ of the surf made its
incessant music, and the sharp thin rustle of the moving sand came
fitfully upon the ear. I sat down and listened to it, and as I sat, the
continually shifting sand gradually rose around me, as the waters rose
round the chateau of Chatel-morant. Had I stayed there long enough, only
my head would have been visible, like the head of the sphinx.
I dined that day at the hotel, _tete-à-tete_ with a young priest, who
was returning to Bordeaux from a visit to his brother, one of the
officers of the Preventitive Service, whose lonely barracks are almost
the only human habitations which break the weary wilderness stretching
from the Adour to the Gironde. One would have thought that there could
be but little smuggling on such a coast; but the Duaniers are always
_autorités_, and the waves of the Gulf of Gascony could not, of course,
break on French ground without _autorités_ to help them. With respect to
the priest, however, he had one of the finest heads and the most
perfectly chiselled features I ever saw. The pale high brow--the keen
bright eyes, with remarkably long eye-lashes--the tenuity of the
cartilage of the nose, and the perfect delicacy of the mouth--all told
of intellect in no common development; while the meek sweetness of the
noble face had something in it perfectly heavenly. Fling in imagination
an aureole round that head, and you had the head of a youthful martyr,
or a saint canonized for early virtues. There was devotion and
aspiration in every line of the countenance--a meek, mild gentleness,
beautifully in keeping with every word he uttered, and every movement he
made. I was the more struck with all this, inasmuch as there is not an
uglier, meaner, nor, I will add, dirtier, set of worthy folks in all the
world, than the priests of France. Nine times out of ten, they are
big-jowled, coarse, animal-looking men, with mottled faces, and skins
which do not take kindly to the razor. The arrangements about the neck
show a decided scarcity of linen, and a still greater lack of soap and
water. They are seldom or never gentlemen, their figures are ungainly,
their motions uncouth, and--barring, of course, their scholastic and
theological knowledge--I found the majority with whom I conversed
stupid, illiterate, and unintelligent. Now, the young priest at Teste
was the reverse of all this. With manners as polished as those of any
courtly _abbé_ of the courtly old _regime_, there was a perfect
atmosphere of frankness and quiet good-humour about my companion, and
his conversation was delightfully easy, animated, and graceful. I do not
know if my friend belonged to the College of Jesus; but, if he did, he
was cut out for the performance of its highest and subtlest diplomacy.
We talked of the strange part of the world I was visiting, and I found
he knew the people and the country well. I mentioned the submerged
chateau and its legend, and he replied that it was an undoubted fact,
that both chateaux and villages had been overwhelmed--both by the
inbursting of the sea, and by great gales blowing vast hills of sand
down into the existing lakes, and so forcing them out of their ancient
beds. The sand, indeed, he said, was more dangerous than the water.
Often and often the coast-guard stations had to be dug out after a gale;
and he believed that, on one occasion, a small church near the mouth of
the Gironde had been overwhelmed to such a height that only a few feet
of the spire and the weathercock were left apparent. The story put me
forcibly in mind of the remarkably heavy fall of snow experienced by my
old friend, Baron Munchausen; but, for all that, I see no reason why it
should not be literally correct. The pines, the priest informed me, were
the saving of the country, by fixing the unstable soil, and the
Government had engineers busily engaged in laying out plantations all
along the coast--the object being to get the trees down to high-water
mark. I mentioned the superstitions of the people.
"Alas!" said the priest, "What you have heard is perfectly true. We are
improving a little, perhaps. The boys and girls we get to come to school
are taught to laugh at the notion of their old grandmothers being
witches, and in another generation or two there will be a great change."
"And how do your witches work?" I asked. "As ours in England used to
do--by spell and charm?"
"Precisely. They are said to make clay figures of their victims, and to
stick pins in them, or bake them in a fire; and then they have rhymes
and cabalistical incantations, and are greatly skilled in the magic
power of herbs. The worst of it is, that a year seldom passes without an
outrage on some poor old woman. A lout, who thinks himself bewitched by
such a person, will attack her and beat her; and occasionally a bullet
has been fired at night through the cottage-window."
"The Landes people have, or had, other queer notions, as well as the
witch ones?"
"Oh, yes! They long held out against potatoes, which, they said, gave
them apoplexy, and they have only lately begun to milk their cows."
"Why so? As a pastoral people, they ought to be great in butter and
cheese."
"On the contrary, they dislike them, and use lard or goose-grease
instead. Indeed, for centuries and centuries, they religiously believed
that Landes cows gave no milk."
"But was not the experiment ever tried?"
"Scores of times. An anxious reformer would go to a Landes farmer, and
urge him to milk his cows. 'Landes cows give no milk,' would be the
answer. 'Will you let me try?' would, perhaps, be replied. The Landes
man would have no objection; and the cow would be brought and milked
before him."
"Well, seeing that would convince him."
"Ah, you don't know the Landes people--not in the least; why, the farmer
would say, 'Ay, there are a few drops, perhaps; but it's not worth the
trouble of taking. Our fathers never milked their cows, and they were as
wise as we are. And next day he would have relapsed into the old creed,
that Landes cows never gave milk at all."
I inquired about the rate at which the stilt-walkers progressed--whether
they could, as one sometimes hears, keep up with a horse at the gallop;
and found, as I expected, that six or seven miles an hour was as much as
they ever managed to achieve. The priest went on succinctly to sketch
the costume and life of the people. When in regular herding dress, the
shepherd of the Landes appears one uncouth mass of dirty wool. On his
body he wears a fleece, cut in the fashion of a rude paletot, and
sometimes flung over one shoulder, like a hussar's jacket. His thighs
and legs are defended on the outside by cuisses and greaves of the same
material. On his feet he wears sabots and coarse worsted socks, covering
only the heels and the instep. His remaining clothing generally consists
of frayed and tattered home-spun cloth; and altogether the appearance of
the man savours very strongly of that of a fantastically costumed
scarecrow.
So attired, then, with a gourd containing some wretched _piquette_ hung
across his shoulders, and provided with a store of rye-bread, baked,
perhaps, three weeks before, a few dry sardines, and as many onions or
cloves of garlic, the Landes shepherd sallies forth into the wilderness.
He reckons himself a rich man, if his employer allows him, over and
above his food, sixty francs a-year. From the rising to the setting of
the sun, he never touches the ground, shuffling backwards and forwards
on his stilts, or leaning against a pine, plying the never-pausing
knitting-needle. Sometimes he drives his flock home at eventide;
sometimes he bivouacs in the wild. Unbuckling his stilts, and producing
his flint and steel, he has soon a rousing fire of fir-branches, when,
gathering his sheep-skins round him, he makes himself comfortable for
the night, his only annoyances being the mosquitoes and the dread of the
cantrips of some unchancy old lady, who may peradventure catch a glimpse
of him in the moonlight, as she rides buxomly on her besom to a festal
dance in a devil's garden.
"Yet still," continued the young priest, "they are a good,
honest-hearted, open-handed people. For their wild, solitary life they
have a passionate love. The Landes peasant, taken from his dreary
plains, and put down in the richest landscape of France, would pine for
his heath, and sand, and woods, like a Swiss for his hills. But they
seldom leave their home here in the forests. They live and die in the
district where they were born, ignorant and careless of all that happens
beyond their own lonely bounds. France may vibrate with revolution and
change--the shepherds of the Landes feel no shock, take no heed, but
pursue the daily life of their ancestors, perfectly happy and contented
in their ignorance, driving their sheep, or notching their trees in the
wilderness."