LANGUEDOC--THE "AUSTERE SOUTH"--BEZIERS AND THE ALBIGENSES--THE
FOUNTAIN OF THE GREVE AND PIERRE PAUL RIQUET--ANTICIPATIONS OF
THE MEDITERRANEAN--THE MISTRAL--THE OLIVE COUNTRY ABOUT
BEZIERS--THE PEASANTS OF THE SOUTH--RURAL BILLIARD-PLAYING.
Again in the banquette of the diligence, which, rolling on the great
highway from Toulouse to Marseilles, has taken me up at Carcassone, and
will deposit me for the present at Beziers. We have entered in
Languedoc, the most early civilised of the provinces which now make up
France--the land where chivalry was first wedded to literature--the land
whose tongue laid the foundations of the greater part of modern
poetry--the land where the people first rebelled against the tyranny of
Rome--the land of the Menestrals and the Albigenses. People are apt to
think of this favoured tract of Europe as a sort of terrestrial
paradise--one great glowing odorous garden--where, in the shade of the
orange and the olive-tree, queens of love and beauty, crowned the heads
of wandering Troubadours. The literary and historic associations have
not unnaturally operated upon our common notions of the country; and for
the "South of France," we are very apt to conjure up a brave, fictitious
landscape. Yet this country is no Eden. It has been admirably described,
in a single phrase, the "Austere South of France." It _is_
austere--grim--sombre. It never smiles: it is scathed and parched.
There is no freshness or rurality in it. It does not seem the country,
but a vast yard--shadeless, glaring, drear, and dry. Let us glance from
our elevated perch over the district we are traversing. A vast, rolling
wilderness of clodded earth, browned and baked by the sun; here and
there masses of red rock heaving themselves above the soil like
protruding ribs of the earth, and a vast coating of drowthy dust, lying
like snow upon the ground. To the left, a long ridge of iron-like
mountains--on all sides rolling hills, stern and kneaded, looking as
though frozen. On the slopes and in the plains, endless rows of scrubby,
ugly trees, powdered with the universal dust, and looking exactly like
mopsticks. Sprawling and straggling over the soil beneath them, jungles
of burnt-up, leafless bushes, tangled, and apparently neglected. The
trees are olives and mulberries--the bushes, vines.
Glance again across the country. It seems a solitude. Perhaps one or two
distant figures, grey with dust, are labouring to break the clods with
wooden hammers; but that is all. No cottages--no farmhouses--no
hedges--all one rolling sweep of iron-like, burnt-up, glaring land. In
the distance, you may espy a village. It looks like a fortification--all
blank, high stone walls, and no windows, but mere loop-holes. A square
church tower gloomily and heavily overtops the houses, or the dungeon of
an ancient fortress rears its massive pile of mouldering stone. Where
have you seen such a landscape before? Stern and forbidding, it has yet
a familiar look. These scrubby, mop-headed trees--these formal square
lines of huge edifices--these banks and braes, varying in hue from the
grey of the dust to the red of the rock--why, they are precisely the
back-grounds of the pictures of the renaissance painters of France and
Italy.
I was miserably disappointed with the olive. It is one of the romantic
trees, full of association. It is a biblical tree, and one of the most
favoured of the old eastern emblems. But what claim has it to beauty?
The trunk, a weazened, sapless-looking piece of timber, the branches
spreading out from it like the top of a mushroom, and the colour, when
you can see it for dust, a cold, sombre, greyish green. One olive is as
like another as one mopstick is like another. The tree has no
picturesqueness--no variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not
irregular enough to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the
elm, or the oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest and its
poorest and most meagre prose. So also, to a great extent, of the
mulberry. I had a vague sort of respect for the latter tree, because one
of the Champions of Christendom--St. James of Spain, I think--delivered
out of the trunk of a mulberry an enchanted princess; but the enforced
lodgings of the captive form just as shabby and priggish-looking a tree
as the olive. The general shape--that of a mop--is the same, and a
mutual want of variety and picturesqueness, afflict, with the curse of
hopeless ugliness, both silk and oil-trees. The fig, in another way, is
just as bad. It is a sneaking tree, which appears as if it were growing
on the sly, while its soft, buttery-looking branches--bending and
twisting, swollen and unwholesome-looking--put you somehow in mind of
diseased limbs, which the quack doctors call "bad legs." In fact, it
seems as if the climate and soil of Provence and Languedoc were utterly
unfavourable to the production of forest scenery. One of our noble
clumps of oak, beech, birch, and elm, at home, is worth, for splendid
picturesqueness and rich luxuriance of greenery, every fig-tree which
ever grew since fig-leaves were in vogue; every olive which ever grew
since the dove from the ark plucked off a branch; and every mulberry
which ever grew since St. James of Spain cut out the imprisoned
princess. The menestrals of Languedoc no doubt gave our early bards many
a poetic lesson; but I can imagine the hopeless stare of the Southern
when the Northern rhymer, in return, would chant him a jolly Friar of
Copmanhurst sort of stave about the "merry greenwood," and the joys of
the "greenwood tree."
As we roll along the dusty highway, intersecting the dusty fields, the
dusty olives, and the dusty vines, I pray the reader to glance to the
right, towards the summit of a chain of jagged, naked hills. These go by
the name of the Black Mountains--a good "Mysteries of Udolpho" sort of
title--and they form part of a range which separates the basin of the
streams which descend to the north, and form the head waters of the
Garonne, and those which descend to the south, and form the head waters
of the Aude. Somewhere about 1670, the scattered shepherds who dwelt in
these hills frequently observed a stranger, richly dressed, attended by
two labouring-looking men, who paid him great reverence. The little
party toiled up and down in the hills, and frequently erected and
gathered round magical-looking instruments. "Holy Mary!" said the
peasants, "they are sorcerers, and they are come to bewitch us all!" For
years and years did the richly dressed man and the two labourers haunt
the Black Mountains, wandering uneasily up and down, climbing ridges,
and plunging into valleys, and always seeming to seek something which
they could not find. At length, upon a glaring hot summer day, they came
suddenly upon a young peasant, who was quenching his thirst at a
fountain.
The cavalier glanced at the spring, and caught the shepherd by his
home-spun jacket. The boy thought he was going to be murdered, and
screamed out; but a Louis-d'or quieted him in a moment. Then the
cavalier, trembling with anxiety, exclaimed: "What fountain is this?"
"The fountain of the Greve," said the boy.
"And it runs both ways along the ridge of the hill?"
"Ay; any fool may see that half of the water goes north, and half goes
south--any fool knows that."
"And I only discovered it now. Thank God!"
We shall see who the cavalier, the discoverer of the fountain of the
Greve, was, when we arrive at Beziers. Meantime the reader may be
astonished that, after the cold frost and snow of the Pyrenees, a week
or two later in the season brought me into a region of dry parched land,
the sky blue and speckless from dawn to twilight--the sun glaringly hot,
and the flying dust penetrating into the very pores of the skin. But we
have left the mist-gathering and rain-attracting mountains, and we have
entered the "austere South," where the sky for months and months is
cloudless as in Arabia--where, at the season I traversed it, the sun
being hot by day does not prevent the frost from being keen at night;
and where the mistral, or north wind, nips your skin as with knives;
while in every sheltered spot the noon-day heat bakes and scorches it.
But such is Languedoc.
As the evening closed in, we saw, duskily crowning a hill before us, a
clustered old city, with grand cathedral towers, and many minor church
steeples, cutting the darkening air. This is Beziers, where took place
the crowning massacre of the Albigenses--the most learned, intellectual,
and philosophic of the early revolters from the Church of Rome, and whom
it is a perfect mistake to consider in the light of mere peasant
fanatics, like the Camisards or the Vaudois. In this ancient city,
beneath the shadow of these dim towers, more than twenty thousand men,
women, and children, were slaughtered by the troops of orthodox France
and Rome, led on and incited to the work by the Bishop of Beziers, one
of the most black-souled bigots who ever deformed God's earth. When the
soldiers could hardly distinguish in the darkness the heretics from the
orthodox--although, indeed, they might have solved the problem by
cutting down every intelligent man they saw--the loving pastor of souls
roared out, "_Coedite omnes, coedite; noverit enim Dominus qui sunt
ejus!_" It is to be fervently hoped, that, for the sake of the Bishop of
Beziers, a certain other personage has long ago proved himself equally
perspicuous and discriminating.
We pulled up at Hotel du Nord, at Beziers, just as the _table-d'hôte_
bell was ringing; and I speedily found myself sitting down in a most
gaily lighted _salon_, to a capital dinner, in the midst of a merry
company. For the last ten miles of the way, I had been amusing myself by
catching glimpses of a distant lighthouse; for I knew that it shone from
a headland jutting into the Mediterranean. And the first glance at the
Mediterranean was now my grand object of interest, as the first glance
at the Pyrenees had been; and as, I remember, long ago, the first glance
of France, of the Rhine, and the Alps, had each their turn. When,
therefore, a dish of soles (stewed in oil, as the Jews cook them
here--and the Jews are the only people in England who can cook soles,)
was placed before me, I asked the waiter where the fish came from?
"_Mais, monsieur_, where should they come from, but from the sea?"
"You mean the Mediterranean?"
"_Mais certainment, monsieur_; there is no sea but the Mediterranean
sea."
An observation which, coinciding with my own mental view for the moment,
I quietly agreed in.
In the market-place of Beziers stands the statue of a thoughtful and
handsome man, dressed in the costume of the early period of Louis
Quatorze, with flowing love-locks and peaked beard. His cloak has fallen
unheeded from his shoulders, as he eagerly gazes on the ground--one hand
holding a compass, the other a pencil. This is the statue of Pierre Paul
Riquet, feudal seigneur of Bonrepos, and the cavalier who discovered the
fountain of the Greve. That fountain solved a mighty problem--the
possibility of connecting, by means of water communication, the
Atlantic and the Mediterranean--the Garonne flowing into the one, with
the Aude flowing into the other; and the formation of the Canal du Midi,
doubled at a stroke the value of the Mediterranean provinces of France.
Francis I., although our James called him a "mere fechting fule," dreamt
of this. Henri and Sully projected the scheme; but it was only under
Louis and Colbert that it was executed; and the bold and resolute
engineer--he lived three quarters of a century before Brindley--was
Pierre Paul Riquet. This man was one of those chivalric enthusiasts for
a scheme--one of those gallant soldiers of an idea--who give up their
lives to the task of making a thought a fact. He had laboured at least a
dozen of weary years ere the court took up the plan. He had demonstrated
the thing again and again to commissioners of notabilities, ere the
first stone of the first loch was laid. The work went on; twelve
thousand "navvies" laboured at the task; Riquet had sunk his entire
fortune in it. In thirteen years, the toil was all but accomplished. In
the coming summer the Canal du Midi would be opened--when Riquet
died--the great cup of his life's ambition brimming untasted at his
lips. Six months thereafter, a gay company of king's commissioners,
gracefully headed by Riquet's two sons, rode through the channel of the
water-courses from Beziers to Toulouse, and returned the next week by
water, leading a jubilant procession of twenty-three great barges,
proceeding from the west with cargoes for the annual fair held on the
Rhone, at Beaucaire. Since Riquet's days, all his plans have been, one
by one, carried out. His canal now runs to Agen, where it joins the
Garonne; while at the other end, it is led through the chain of marshes
and lagoons which extend along the Mediterranean, from Perpignan to the
delta of the Rhone, joining the "swift and arrowy" river at Beaucaire.
I have mentioned the mistral. I had heard a great deal previously about
this wind, and while at Beziers, had the pleasure of making its personal
acquaintance. This mistral is the plague and the curse of the
Mediterranean provinces of France. The ancient historians mention it as
sweeping gravel and stones up into the air. St. Paul talks of the south
wind, which blew softly until there arose against it a fierce wind,
called Euroclydon--certainly the mistral. Madame de Sevigne paints it as
"_le tourbillon, l'ouregan, tous les diables dechainés qui veulent bien
emporter votre chateau_;" and my amazement is, that the hurricane does
not sometimes carry bodily off, if not a chateau, at least the ricketty
villages of the peasants. I had but a taste of this wild, gusty, and
most abominably drying and cutting wind; for the gale which blew for a
couple of days over Beziers formed, I was told, only a very modified
version of the true mistral; but it was quite enough to give a notion of
the wind in the full height of its evil powers. The whole country was
literally one moving cloud of dust. The roads, so to speak, smoked. From
an eminence, you could trace their line for miles by the columns of
white powdered earth driven into the air. As for the paths you actually
traversed, the ground-down gravel was blown from the ruts, leaving the
way scarred, as it were, with ridgy seams, and often worn down to the
level of the subsidiary stratum of rock. The streaky, russet-brown of
the fields was speedily converted into one uniform grey. Never had I
seen anything more intensely or dismally parched up. As for any tree or
vegetable but vines and olives--whose very sustenance and support is
dust and gravel, thriving under the liability to such visitations--the
thing was impossible. Nor was the dust by any means the only evil. The
wind seemed poisonous; it made the eyes--mine, at all events--smart and
water; cracked the lips, as a sudden alternation from heat to cold will
do; caused a little accidentally inflicted scratch to ache and shoot;
and finally, dried, hardened, and roughened the skin, until one felt in
an absolute fever. The cold in the shade, let it be noted, was
intense--a pinching, nipping cold, in noways frosty or kindly; while in
sheltered corners the heat was as unpleasant, the blaze of an unclouded
sun darting right down upon the parched and gleaming earth. All this,
however, I was told, formed but a modified attack of mistral. The true
wind mingles with the flying dust a greyish or yellowish haze, through
which the sun shines hot, yet cheerless. I had, however, a specimen of
the wind, which quite satisfied me, and which certainly enables me to
affirm, that the coldest, harshest, and most rheumatic easterly gale
which ever whistled the fogs from Essex marshes over the dripping and
shivering streets of London, is a genial, balmy, and ambrosial zephyr,
compared with the mistral of the ridiculously bepuffed climate of the
South of France.
Wandering about Beziers, so as to get the features of the olive country
thoroughly into my head, I had a good deal of conversation with the
scattered peasantry--a fierce, wild-looking set of people, dressed in
the common blouse, but a perfectly different race from the quiet, mild,
central and northern agriculturists. Their black, flashing eyes, so
brimful of devilry--their wild, straight, black hair, shooting in
straggling masses over their shoulders, and the fierce vehemence of
gesticulation--the loud, passionate tone of their habitual speech--all
mark the fiery and hot-blooded South. Go into a cabaret, into the high,
darkened room, set round with tables and benches, and you will think the
whole company are in a frantic state of quarrel. Not at all--it is
simply their way of conversing. But if a dispute does break out, they
leap, and scream, and glare into each other's eyes like demons, and the
ready knife is but too often seen gleaming in the air. Here in the South
you will note the change in the style of construction of the farmhouses,
which are clustered in bourgs. Everything is on a great scale, to give
air, the grand object being to let the breeze in, and keep the heat out.
Shade is the universal desideratum. Every auberge has its huge
_remise_--a vast, gloomy shed, into which carts and diligences drive,
where the mangers of the horses stand, and where you will often see the
carriers stretched out asleep. In large, messagerie hotels, these
_remises_, ponderously built of vast blocks of stone, look like enormous
catacombs, or vaults; and the stamping and neighing of the horses, and
the rumbling of entering and departing vehicles, roll along the roof in
thunder.
Near Beziers, I came upon a good specimen of the South of France bourg,
or agricultural village. Seen from a little distance, it had quite an
imposing appearance--the white, commodious-looking mansions gleaming
cheerily out through the dusky olive-grounds. A closer inspection,
however, showed the real nakedness of the land. The high, white mansions
became great clumsy barns--the lower stories occupied as living places,
the windows above bursting with loads of hay and straw. The crooked,
devious streets were paved with filthy heaps of litter and dung.
Dilapidated ploughs and harrows--their wooden teeth worn down to the
stumps--lay hither and thither round the great gaunt, unpainted
doorways. The window-shutters of every occupied room were shut as
closely as port-holes in a gale of wind, and here and there a wandering
pig or donkey, or a slatternly woman sifting corn upon a piece of
sacking stretched before her door, or a purblind old crone knitting in
the sun, formed the only moving objects which gave life to the dreary
picture.
In this village, however, dreary as it was, I found a _café_ and a
billiard-table. Where, indeed, in France will you not? Except in the
merest jumble of hovels, you can hardly traverse a hamlet without seeing
the crossed cues and balls figuring on a gaily painted house. You may
not be able to purchase the most ordinary articles a traveller requires,
but you can always have a game at pool. I have frequently found
billiard-rooms in filthy little hamlets, inhabited entirely by persons
of the rank of English agricultural labourers. At home, we associate the
game with great towns, and, perhaps, with the more dissipated portion
of the life of great towns. Here, even with the thoroughly rustic
portion of the population, the game seems a necessary of life. And there
are, too--contrary to what might have been expected--few or no
make-shift-looking, trumpery tables. The _cafés_ in the Palais Royal, or
in the fashionable Boulevards, contain no pieces of furniture of this
description more massive or more elaborately carved and adorned than
many I have met with in places hardly aspiring to the rank of villages.
It has often struck me, that the billiard-table must have cost at least
as much as the house in which it was erected; but the thing seemed
indispensable, and there it was in busy use all day long. A correct
return of the number of billiard-tables in France would give some very
significant statistics relative to the social customs and lives of our
merry neighbours. It would be an odd indication of the habits of the
people, should there be found to be five times as many billiard-tables
in France as there are mangles; and I for one firmly believe that such
would be the result of an impartial perquisition. Besides the _billard_
and the newspapers--little provincial rags, with which an English grocer
would scorn to wrap up an ounce of pigtail--there are, of course, cards
and dominoes for the frequenters; and they are in as great requisition
all day as the balls and cues. I like--no man likes better--to see the
toilers of the world released from their labours, and enjoying
themselves; but after all there is something, to English ways of
thinking, desperately idle in the scene of a couple of big, burly
working men, sitting in the glare of the sunlight the best part of the
day, wrangling over a greasy pack of cards, or rattling dominoes upon
the little marble tables. I once remarked this to an old French
gentleman.
"True--too true," he replied; "it was Bonaparte did the mischief. He
made--you know how great a proportion of the country youth of
France--soldiers. When they returned--those who did return--they had
garrison tastes and barrack habits; and those tastes and habits it was
which have brought matters to the pass, that you can hardly travel a
league, even in rural France, without hearing the click of the billiard
balls."