FLAT MARSH SCENERY, TREATED BY POETS AND PAINTERS--TAVERN
ALLEGORIES--NISMES--THE AMPHITHEATRE AND THE MAISON
CARRÉE--PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC--THE OLD RELIGIOUS WARS ALIVE
STILL--THE SILK WEAVER OF NISMES AND THE DRAGONNÆDES.
As Launcelot Gobbo had an infection to serve Bassanio, so I somehow took
ill with an infection to walk, instead of ride, back to Lunel. I suppose
that Auguste had innoculated me, in some measure, with his mysterious
love for the boundless swamps and primeval jungles of bulrush around; so
that I felt a sort of pang in leaving them, and would willingly depart
lingeringly and alone. Sending on my small baggage, then, by _roulage_,
I strode forth out of the dead city, and was soon pacing alone the
echoing causeway, like an Arab steering by the sun in the desert. There
is one dead and one living English poet who would have made glorious use
of this fen landscape, so repulsive to many, but which did, after all,
possess a strange, undefinable attraction for me. The dead poet is
Shelley, who had the true eye for sublimity in waste. Take the following
picture-touch:--
"An uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree, and some few stakes,
Broken and unrepaired; and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon."
This is the sort of landscape, too, which, in another department of art,
Collins delighted in representing. But Shelley's picture of the
luxuriant rush and water-plant vegetation would have been magnificent.
Listen how he handles a theme of the kind:
"And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth--
Prickly and pulpous, and blistering and blue,
Livid and starred with a lurid dew;
Spawn-weeds, and filth, and leporous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb;
And at its outlet, flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes."
Tennyson is the living poet who would picture with equal effect the
region of swamp, and rush, and pool. Brought up in a fen district, his
eye and feeling for marsh scenery and vegetation are perfect. Remember
the marish mosses in the rotting fosse which encircled the "Moated
Grange." Musing thus of the Poet Laureate, I would assign to this
landscape embodiment of King Death, I passed the half-way tower, where
three _douaniers_, seated in chairs, were fishing and looking as glum
and silent as their prey, and began to discern the gravelly, shingly
land of vines and olives again before me. The clear air of the South
cheats us northerns like a mirage. You see objects as near you as in
England they would be brought by a very fair spy-glass, and the effect,
before you began to make allowances for the atmospheric spectacles, is
to put you dreadfully out of humour at the length of the way, before you
actually came up with the too distinct goal. So was it strongly with me
in pedestrianising towards Lunel. Lunel seemed retreating back and back,
so that my consolation became that it would be surely stopped by the
Cevennes, even if the worst came to the worst; and go where it would, I
was determined to come up with it somehow. Entering the region of the
vine, the moppy olive, and the dust which was flying about in clouds, I
halted at a roadside auberge to wash the latter article out of my
throat, and reaped my reward in the sight of a splendid cartoon
suspended over the great fireplace, which represented, in a severe
allegory, "The Death of Credit killed by bad Payers." The scene was a
handsome street, with a great open _café_ behind, at the _comptoir_ of
which sat Madam Commerce aghast at the atrocity being committed before
her. In a corner are seen a group of _gardes de commerce_--in the
vernacular, bailiffs--lamenting over their ruined occupation. I came to
know the profession of these gentlemen, from the fact that their style
and titles were legibly imprinted across their waistcoats. In the
foreground, the main catastrophe of the composition was proceeding.
Credit, represented by a fat, good-natured-looking, elderly gentleman in
a blue greatcoat, was stretched supine upon the stones, while his three
murderers brandished their weapons above him. The delineation of the
culprits was anything but flattering to the three classes of society
which I took them to represent. The "first murderer," as they say in
_Macbeth_, was a soldier. His sabre was deep in poor Credit's side. The
second criminal must have been a musician, for he has just hit Credit a
superhuman blow on the head with a fiddle--not a very deadly weapon one
would suppose; while the third assassin, armed with a billiard cue,
seemed to typify the idler portion of the community in general. Between
them, however, there could be no doubt that Credit had been fairly done
to death--the grim intimation was there to stare all topers in the face.
The fact is, indeed, that all over rural France, in the places of public
entertainment, poor M. Credit is in exceedingly bad odour. I have seen
dozens of pictorial hints, conveying with more or less delicacy the
melancholy moral of that just described. Sometimes, however, the
landlord distrusts the pencil, puts no faith in allegory, and stern and
prosaic--with a propensity to political economy--and giving rise to dark
suspicions of a tendency to the Manchester school, writes up in sturdy
letters, grim and hopeless--
"ARGENT COMPTANT."
At other times, cast in a more genial mould, he deviates into what may
be called didactic verse--containing, like the "Penny Magazine"--useful
knowledge for the people, and hints poetically to his customers, the
rule of the establishment--taking care, however, to intimate to their
susceptible feelings that generous social impulses, rather than sombre
commercial necessity, are at the bottom of the regulation. Thus it is
not uncommon to read the following pithy and not particularly rhythmical
distich:--
"Pour mieux conserver ses amis,
Ici on ne fait pas de credit."
At last Lunel was fairly caught, and an hour of the rail brought me to
Nismes and to the Hotel de Luxembourg, running out at the windows with
swarms of _commis voyageurs_, the greater number connected with the silk
trade. One of these worthies beside whom I was placed at dinner, told me
that he intended to go to London to the Exhibition, and that he had a
very snug plan for securing a competent guide, who would poke up all the
lions; this guide to be a "_Marin du port de Londres; car tenez ils sont
des galliards futés, les marins du port de Londres_." I had all the
difficulty in the world in making the intending excursionist aware of
the probable effects of hiring, as a west-end guide, the first sailor or
waterman he picked up at Wapping.
The great features of Nismes are, as every body knows, the features
which the Romans left behind them. Provence and Languedoc were the
regions of Gaul which the great masters of the world liked best,
probably because they were nearest home; and obscure as was the Roman
Nismes--for I believe that Nimauses lays claim to no historic dignity
whatever--it must still have been a populous and important place: the
unmouldering masonry of the Roman builders proves it. I had never seen
any Roman remains to speak of, and, to tell the truth, had never been
able to work up any great enthusiasm about the fragments of the ancient
people which I had come across. I had bathed in all the Roman baths
wherewith London abounds, but found no inspiration in the waters--I had
stood on grassy mounds of earth, believed to have been Roman camps;
traced like the Antiquary, the _Ager_, with its corresponding
_fossa_--marked the _porta sinistra_ and the _porta dextra_--and stood
where some hook-nosed general had reclined in the _Pretorium_; but I
again confess that my imagination did not fly impulsively back, and bury
itself among _patres conscripti_, togas, vestal virgins, lictors,
patricians, equites, and plebeians.
And, in fact, such mere vague traces and memorials as baths, bits of
pavement, and dusty holes, with smouldering brick-basements, which
people call "Roman villas,"--are not at all fitted, whatever would-be
classicists may pretend, to stir up the strong tide of enthusiastic
association. These are but miserable odds and ends of fragments, from
which you can no more leap to the dignity and the grandeur of the
Romans, than you could argue, never having seen a man, from finding a
cast-away tooth-pick, up to the appearance and nature of the invisible
owner. But let us see a great specimen of a great Roman work, and then
we are in the right track. Any builder could have made you a bath--any
sapper and miner could have traced you out a camp--any of the small
architects with whom we are infested could have knocked you up a
villa--but give us a characteristic bit of the great people who are dead
and gone, and then we can, or, at all events, we will try, to take their
measure.
The amphitheatre or arena at Nismes rose on me like a stupendous
spectre, and frowned me down. I was smote with the sight. The size
appalled me: mightiness--vastness--massiveness were there together--a
trinity of stone, rising up, as it were, in the middle of my little
preconceived and pet notions, and shivering and dispersing them, as the
English three-decker in the _Pilot_ came bowling into view, driving away
the fog in wreaths before her and around her. First I walked about the
great stone skeleton; but though the symmetrical glory of the
architecture, its massive regularity, and what I would call soldier-like
precision of uniformity, kept urging my mind to look and admire; still
the impression of vastness was predominant, and all but drove out other
thoughts. And yet it was not until I had entered, that impression
reached its profoundest depth.
[Illustration: AMPHITHEATRE AT NISMES.]
As I emerged from the vaulted and cavern-like corridor, through which a
garrulous old woman led me, into the blaze of keen sunshine, that fell
upon a mighty wilderness of stone; and as instinctively I laid my hand
upon the nearest ponderous block, the full and perfect idea of size and
power closed on me. _Roma!--Antiqua Roma!_--had me in her grasp; and as
I felt, I remembered that Eothen had described a similar sensation, as
produced by the bigness of the stones of the great pyramid. My old woman
having, happily, left me, I was alone within that enormous gulf--that
crater of regularly rising stone. Round and round, in ridges where
Titans might have sat and seen, megatheria combat mastadons, mounted up
the mighty steps of grey, dead stone--sometimes entire for the whole
round--sometimes splintered and riven, but never worn, until your
eye--now stumbling, as it were, over rubbish-heaps--now striding from
stone ledge to stone ledge--rested upon the broken and jagged rim, with
a hoary beard of plants and long dry weeds standing rigidly up between
you and the blue. I turned again to the details of the building--to the
vastness of the blocks of stone, and to the perfect manipulation which
had placed them. If the Romans were great soldiers, they were as great
masons. They conquered the world in all pursuits in which enormous
energy and iron muscularity of mind could conquer. The universe of
earth, and stone, and water was theirs. But they were not cloud
compellers. They had none of the great power over the essences of the
brain. Beauty was too subtle for them; and they only got it,
incidentally, as an element--not a principle. The arena in which I stood
was sternly beautiful; but it was the beauty of a legion drawn up for
battle--iron to the backbone--iron to the teeth--the beauty of that
rigid symmetric inflexibility which sat upon the bronze faces which,
when Hannibal, encamped on Roman ground set up for sale, and grimly and
unmovedly saw bought, at the common market rate, the patch of earth on
which the Carthaginian lay entrenched.
I remained in the amphitheatre for hours--now descending to the arena,
where the men and beasts fought and tore each other--now scrambling to
the highest ridge, and watching, with a calmness which soothed and
lulled the mind, the vast bowl which lay beneath--so massive, so silent,
and so grey. You can still trace the two posts of honour--the royal
boxes, as it were--low down in the ring, and marked out by stone
barriers from the general sweep. Each of them has an exclusive corridor
sunk in the massive stone; and behind each are vaulted cells, which you
will be told were used as guard-houses by the escort of soldiers or
lictors. Tradition assigns one of these boxes to the proconsul--the
other to the vestal virgins; but the latter, if I remember my Roman
antiquities aright, could have no business out of Rome. There were no
subsidiary sacred fire-branch establishments, like provincial banks, to
promulgate the credit of the "central office,"--kindled in the remote
part of the empire. The holy flame burnt only before the mystic
palladium, which answered for the security of Rome. Whoever occupied the
boxes in question, however, were no doubt what one of Captain Marryatt's
characters describes the Smith family to be in London--"quite the
topping people of the place;" and up to them, no doubt, after the
gladiator had received the steel of his antagonist, and the thundering
shout of "Habet!" had died away, the poor Scythian, or Roman, as the
case might be, turned a sadly inquiring eye--intent upon the hands of
the great personages on whom his doom depended--on the upturned or the
downturned thumb. A very interesting portion of the arena is the
labyrinth of corridors, passages, and stairs, which honeycomb its
massive masonry, and into which, in the event of a shower, the whole
body of spectators could at once retreat, leaving the great circles of
stone as deserted as at midnight. So admirable, too, are the
arrangements, that there could have been very little crowding. The
vomitories get wider and wider as they approach the entrance, where the
people would emerge on every side, like the drops of water flung off by
the rotatory motion of a mop. There was an odd resemblance to the
general disposition of the opera corridors and staircases, which struck
me in the arrangement of the lobbies and passages behind. One could
fancy the young Roman men about Nemauses, in their scented tunics,
clasped with glittering stones and their broad purple girdles--the
Tyrian hue, as the poets say--gathering in knots, and discussing a blow
which had split a fellow-creature's head open, as our own opera elegants
might Grisi's celebrated holding-note in _Norma_, or Duprez' famous _ut
du poitrine_. The execution of a _débutant_ with the sword might be
praised, as the execution now-a-days of a _prima donna_. Rumours might
be discussed of a new net-and-trident man picked up in some obscure
arena, as the _cognoscenti_ now whisper the reported merits of a tenor
discovered in Barcelona or Palermo; and the _habitués_ would delight to
inform each other that the spirited and enterprising management had
secured the services of the celebrated Berbix, whose career at Massilia,
for instance, had excited such admiration--the _artiste_ having killed
fifteen antagonists in less than a fortnight. And then, after the
pleasant and critical chat between the acts, the trumpets would again
sound, and all the world would turn out upon the vast stone benches--the
nobles and wealthy nearest the ring, as in the stalls with us, and the
lower and slave population high up on the further benches, like the
humble folks and the footmen in the gallery--and then would recommence
that exhibition of which the Romans could never have enough, and of
which they never tired--the excitement of the shedding of blood.
From the arena I walked slowly on to the Maison Carrée. All the great
Roman remains lie upon the open Boulevard, on the edge of the stacked
and crowded old town, while without the circle rise the spacious streets
of new _quartiers_ for the rich, and many a long straggling suburb,
where, in mean garrets and unwholesome cellars, the poor handloom
weavers produce webs of gorgeous silk which rival the choicest products
of Lyons. Presently, to the left, appeared a horribly clumsy theatre;
and, to the right, the wondrous Maison Carrée. The day of which I am
writing was certainly my day of architectural sensation. First, Rome,
with her hugeness and her symmetric strength, gripped me; and now,
Greece, with her pure and etherial beauty, which is essentially of the
spirit, enthralled me. The Maison Carrée was, no doubt, built by Roman
hands, but entirely after Greek models. It is wholly of Athens: not at
all of Rome--a Corinthian temple of the purest taste and divinest
beauty--small, slight, without an atom of the ponderous majesty of the
arena--reigning by love and smiles, like Venus; not by frowns and
thunder, like Jove. Cardinal Alberoni said that the Maison Carrée was a
gem which ought to be set in gold; and the two great Jupiters of
France--Louis Quatorze and Napoleon--had both of them schemes for
lifting the temple bodily out of the ground and carrying it to Paris.
The building is perfectly simple--merely an oblong square, with a
portico, and fluted Corinthian pillars--yet the loveliness of it is like
enchantment. The essence of its power over the senses appears to me to
consist in an exquisite subtlety of proportion, which amounts to the
very highest grace and the very purest and truest beauty. How many
_quasi_ Grecian buildings had I seen--all porticoed and
caryatided--without a sensation, save that the pile before me was cold
and perhaps correct--a sort of stone formulary. I had begun to fear that
Greek beauty was too subtle for me, or that Greek beauty was cant, when
the Maison Carrée in a moment utterly undeceived me. The puzzle was
solved: I had never seen Grecian architecture before. The things which
our domestic Pecksniffs call Grecian--their St. Martin's porticoes, and
St. Pancras churches--bear about the same relation to the divine
original, as the old statue of George IV. at King's Cross to the Apollo
Belvidere. Of course, these gentry--of whom we assuredly know none whose
powers qualify them to grapple with, a higher task than a
dock-warehouse or a railway tavern--have picked all manner of faults in
the divine proportions of this wondrous edifice. There is some
bricklaying cant about a departure from the proportions of Vitruvius,
which, I presume, are faithfully observed in the National Gallery, and
some modification of them, no doubt, in the Pavilion at Brighton--which
variations are gravely censured in the Maison Carrée; while, in order,
doubtless, to shew our modern superiority, the French hodmen have
erected a theatre just opposite the Corinthian temple, with a
portico--heavens and earth! such a portico--a mass of mathematical
clumsiness, with pillars like the legs of aldermen suffering from
dropsy. Anything more intensely ugly is not to be found in Christendom.
It actually beats the worst monstrosity of London; and this dreadful
caricature of the deathless work of the glorious Greeks is erected right
opposite to, perhaps, the most perfect piece of building and
stone-carving in the world.
I believe that it requires neither art-training nor classic knowledge to
enjoy the unearthly beauty of the Corinthian temple. Give me a
healthy-minded youth, who has never heard of Alcibiades, Themistocles,
Socrates, or Æschylus, but who has the natural appreciation of
beauty--who can admire the droop of a lily, the spring of a deer, the
flight of an eagle--set him opposite the Maison Carrée, and the
sensation of divine, transcendant beauty, will rush into his heart and
brain, as when contemplating the flower, or beast or bird. The big man
in the parish at home will point you out the graces of the new church of
St. Kold Without, designed after the antique manner, by the celebrated
Mr. Jones Smith, and because you hesitate to acknowledge them, will read
you a benignant lecture on the impossibility of making people, with
uneducated taste, fully appreciate what he will be sure to call the
"severity" of Greek architecture; the worthy man himself having been
dinned with the apocryphal loveliness in question until he has come
actually to believe in it. Never mind the grave sermons preached about
educating and training taste. An educated and trained taste will, no
doubt, admire with even more fond appreciation and far higher enjoyment;
but he who cannot, at the first glance, see and feel the perfect grace
of pure Grecian art, must be insensible to the blue of the sky, to the
beauty of running water, to the song of the birds and the silver
radiance of moonlight. I never revisited the amphitheatre while I
remained in Nismes, but I haunted the temple. The grandeur, and the
massiveness of the Roman work, was like the north wind. It rudely
buffeted the wayfarer, but he clung to his cloak. The Grecian trophy
shone out like the gentle sun, and the traveller doffed mantle and cap
to pay it adoration.
Nismes, as most people know, is one of the points of France where
Protestantism and Catholicism still glare upon each other with hostile
and threatening eyes. The old Catholic and Huguenot hatred has descended
lineally from the remote times of the Albigenses, and at this moment
broods as bitterly over the olive city as when Raymond of Toulouse
proclaimed a crusade against the Paulician heretics, and twenty
thousand people were slaughtered under the pastoral care of the Bishop
of Beziers. That the animosity, however, has not died out centuries ago,
we have to thank the pious precautions of Louis XIV., Madame de
Maintenon, and the priest, who waged as bitter war upon the Huguenots of
the Cevennes as ever their fathers of these same mountains had been
exposed to. The dragoonades are still fiercely remembered in the South.
The old-world stories in Scotland of the cruelties of Claverhouse and
his life-guards, have well-nigh ceased to excite anything like personal
bitterness; but in portions of Languedoc, the animosity between
neighbour and neighbour--Catholic and Protestant--is still deepened and
widened by the oft-told legends of those wretched religious wars. Nismes
is the head quarters of the sectarianism--Catholics and Protestants are
drawn up in two compacted hostile bodies, living, for the most part, in
separate _quartiers_; marrying each party within itself; scandalising
each party the other whenever it has a chance; and carrying, indeed, the
party spirit so far as absolutely to have established Protestant _cafés_
and Catholic _cafés_, the _habitués_ of which will no more enter the
rival establishments than they would enter the opposition churches.
The day after my arrival, I had a singular opportunity of becoming
acquainted with the spirit of the place. North from Nismes rises a
species of chaos of steep hills and deep valleys, or rather ravines,
composed almost entirely of shingle and rock, covered over, however,
with olive-groves and vines, and dotted with little white summer-houses,
to which almost the entire middle and working class population retire
upon Sundays to pass the day, partly in cultivating their patches of
land--there is hardly a family without an allotment--and partly to amuse
themselves after the toils of the week. Rambling among these rugged
hills and dales, I chanced to ask my way of a person I met descending
towards Nismes. He was a tall, ungainly, raw-boned man--pallid and worn,
as if with sedentary labour; but he seemed intelligent, and was very
polite--pointing out a number of localities around. Presently, he told
me that he had been up to his _cabane_, or summer-house; that he was a
silkweaver in Nismes; that his wages were so poor, that he had a hard
struggle to live; but that he still managed to give up an hour's work or
so a-day to go and feed his rabbits at the _cabane_. As we talked, he
inquired whether I were not a foreigner--an Englishman--and, with some
hesitation, but with great eagerness--a Protestant? My affirmative
answer to the last interrogatory produced a magical effect. The man's
face actually gleamed. He jumped off the ground, let fall his apronful
of melons and fresh figs, while he clutched both of my hands in his, and
exclaimed, "A Protestant! _Dieu merci! Dieu merci!_ an English
Protestant! Oh, how glad I am to see an English Protestant! Listen,
monsieur. We are here. We of the religion (the old phrase--as old as
Rosny and Coligni), we are here fifteen thousand strong--fifteen
thousand, monsieur. Don't believe those who say only ten. Fifteen
thousand, monsieur--good men and true. All ready--all standing by one
another--all _braves_--all on the _qui vive_--all prepared, if the hour
should come. We know each other--we love each other, and we hate"--a
pause; then, with a significant grin--"_les autres_. You will tell that,
in England, monsieur, to our brothers. Fifteen thousand, monsieur; and
every man, woman, and child, true to the cause and the faith."
The whole tone of the orator did not appear to me to be so much a matter
of religious bitterness, as it marked a hatred of race. The two
contending parties at Nismes were evidently of different blood: their
religious animosities had gradually divided them into two distinct and
hostile peoples.
"See!" said the weaver; "this is the Protestant side of the valley,--all
Protestants here. Not a Catholic _cabane_--no, no! they must go
elsewhere,--we have nothing to do with them,--we shake off the dust of
our feet upon them and theirs. You and I are one, upon our own
ground--Protestant ground--staunch and true;" and he stamped with his
foot upon the pebbles. "Monsieur must absolutely go with me to my
_cabane_, and drink a glass of wine to the good cause; and see my
rabbits--Protestant rabbits."
Who could resist this last attraction? We turned and toiled up the
flinty paths together; my acquaintance informing me, with great pride,
that M. Guizot was a good Protestant of Nismes, as his father, who had
fallen, _dans le terreur_, was before him. He understood that M. Guizot
was then in England, and he was sure that he would be delighted at
seeing such a fine Protestant country, and such a staunch Protestant
people. Stopping at length at an unpainted door, in the rough,
unmortared wall, my friend opened it, and we stepped into a little patch
of garden, planted with olives and straggling vine-bushes. "They are
much better cultivated, and give better oil and better wine," he said,
"than the Catholic grounds;" and I am sure he believed the asseveration.
Having duly inspected the "Protestant rabbits," we entered the _cabane_,
a bare, rough, white-washed room, with a table, a few chairs, and
unglazed lattices. Unless when the mistral blows, the open air is seldom
or never unpleasant; and then wooden shutters are applied to the
windward side of the houses. On this occasion, however, there was not a
breath stirring amid the silvery grey leaves of the olives. The
grasshoppers--fellows of a size which would astound Sir Thomas
Gresham--chirped and leaped in the grass at the foot of the wall; scores
and scores of lithe, yellow lizards, with the blackest of eyes, flashed
up and down over the rough stones, and shot in and out of the crevices;
but, excepting these sights and sounds, all around was hushed and
motionless; and the sun, wintry though it was, flooded all the still,
brown valley with a deluge of pure, hot light.
The weaver filled a very comfortable couple of glasses with a small, but
not ill-tasted, wine. "Here's to----;" he uttered a sentiment not
complimentary to the Catholic Church, and, indeed, consigning it to the
warmest of quarters, and took off his liquor with undeniable unction. I
need not say whether I drunk the toast: anyhow, I drunk the wine.
"And now look there," continued my host, pointing with his empty glass
through the open window, to the north. The bare, blue hills of the
Cevennes lay--a long ridge of mountain scenery, stretching from the
valley of the Rhone as far and farther than the eye could follow
them--towards that of the Garonne.
"There it was," he said, "that were fought the fiercest battles, in
those cruel times, between the people of the religion and the troops of
the king. Can you see a valley or a ravine just over the olive there? My
eyes are too much worn to see it; but we look at it every Sunday--my
wife and my children. That was the valley, monsieur, where my family
lived for ages and ages, weaving the rough cloth that they made in those
days, and tending their flocks upon the hill. Early in the troubles,
their cottage was beset by the dragoons of the king. The mother of the
family was suckling her child. They bound her to the bed-post, and put
the child just beyond her reach, and told her that not a drop more
should pass its lips till she cried _Ave Maria_ and made the sign of the
cross. They took the father and hung him by the feet, head downward,
from the roof-tree, and he died hanging. The children they ranged round
the mother, and tied matches between their fingers; and, when the first
match burned down to the flesh, the mother cried _Ave Maria_ and made
the sign of the cross. Then they released her, and held an orgie in the
cottage all night long, and the widow and the children served them. Next
morning, the woman was mad, and she wandered away into the woods with
her baby at her breast, and no one heard of her more. The children were
scattered over the country; and, whether they lived or died, I know
not; but one of them, monsieur, the eldest girl, whose name was Nicole,
became a famous prophetess. Yes, monsieur, she was inspired, and taught
the people among the rocks and the wild gorges of the hills. First, she
had _l'avertissement_--that is, the warning, or first degree of
inspiration; and then the _souffle_, or the breath of the Lord, came on
her, and she spoke; at last, she was endowed with _la prophetie_, and
told what would come to pass. Yes, monsieur; and many of her prophecies
are yet preserved, and they came true; for, in times like these, God
acts by extraordinary means. The people, monsieur, loved her, and
honoured her, and kept her so well, and hid her so closely, that the
persecutors could never seize her; and she survived the troubles; and I,
monsieur, a poor weaver of Nismes, have the honour to be her
descendant."
That night I walked late along the Boulevards. Protestant _cafés_ and
Catholic _cafés_ were full and busy, and, no doubt, resounding with the
polemics of the warring creeds. Outside all, the by turns straggling and
crowded town lay, bathed in the most glorious flood of moonlight, poured
down, happily, alike upon Papist and Protestant, lighting up the grey
cathedral with its Gothic arches, and the heathen temple with its fluted
columns, and surely preaching by the universal-blessing ray that
sermon--so continuous in its delivery, yet so little heeded by the
congregation of the world--the sermon which enjoins charity and
forbearance, and love and peace, among all men.
CHAPTER THE LAST.
AGRICULTURE IN FRANCE--ITS BACKWARD STATE--CENTRALISING
TENDENCY--SUBDIVISION OF PROPERTY--ITS EFFECTS--FRENCH
"ENCUMBERED ESTATES."
In the foregoing pages I have sketched, with as much regard to a
readable liveliness, and to vivid local colouring as I could command,
the features and incidents of part--the most interesting one--of an
extended journey through France. My primary purpose in undertaking the
latter was, to prepare a view of the social and agricultural condition
of the peasantry, for publication in the columns of the _Morning
Chronicle_; and accordingly a series of letters, devoted to that
important subject, duly appeared. These communications, however, were
necessarily confined to statements of agricultural progress, and the
investigation of solid social subjects, to the exclusion of those
matters of personal incident and artistic, literary, and legendary
significance, which naturally occur in the prosecution of a desultory
and inquiring journey. To this latter field--that of the tourist rather
than the commissioner--then, I have devoted the foregoing chapters; but
I am unwilling to send them forth without appending to them--extracted
from my concluding Letter in the _Morning Chronicle_--a summary of my
impressions of the social condition of the French agricultural
population, and the effects of the system of the infinitesimal division
of the land. These impressions are founded upon a five months' journey
through France, keeping mainly in the country places, being constantly
in communication with the people themselves, and hearing also the
opinions of the priests and men of business engaged in rural affairs, as
well as reading authors upon all sides of the question. My conclusions I
have summed up carefully, and with great deliberation; and I offer them
as an honest, and not ill-founded estimate of the present state and
future prospects of rural France.
The French are undoubtedly at least a century behind us in agricultural
science and skill. This remark applies alike to breeding cattle and to
raising crops. Agriculture in France is rather a handicraft than what it
ought to be--a science. As a general rule, the farmers of France are
about on a level with the ploughmen of England. When I say this, I mean
that the immense majority of the cultivators are unlettered
peasants--hinds--who till the land in the unvarying, mechanical routine
handed down to them from their forefathers. Of agriculture, in any other
sense than the rule-of-thumb practice of ploughing, sowing, reaping, and
threshing, they know literally nothing. Of the _rationale_ of the
management of land--of the reasons why so and so should be done--they
think no more than honest La Balafrè, whose only notion of a final cause
was the command of his superior officer. Thus they are bound down in the
most abject submission to every custom, for no other reason than that it
is a custom: their fathers did so and so, and therefore, and for no
other reason, the sons do the same. I could see no struggling upwards,
no longing for a better condition, no discontent, even with the
vegetable food upon which they lived. All over the land there brooded
one almost unvaried mist of dull, unenlightened, passive content--I do
not mean social--but industrial content.
There are two causes principally chargeable with this. In the first
place, strange as it may seem in a country in which two-thirds of the
population are agriculturists, agriculture is a very unhonoured
occupation. Develop, in the slightest degree, a Frenchman's mental
faculties, and he flies to a town as surely as steel filings fly to a
loadstone. He has no rural tastes--no delight in rural habits. A French
amateur farmer would, indeed, be a sight to see. Again, this national
tendency is directly encouraged by the centralizing system of
government--by the multitude of officials, and by the payment of all
functionaries. From all parts of France, men of great energy and
resource struggle up and fling themselves on the world of Paris. There
they try to become great functionaries. Through every department of the
eighty-four, men of less energy and resource struggle up to the
_chef-lieu_--the provincial capital. There they try to become little
functionaries. Go still lower--deal with a still smaller scale--and the
result will be the same. As is the department to France, so is the
arrondissement to the department, and the commune to the arrondissement.
Nine-tenths of those who have, or think they have, heads on their
shoulders, struggle into towns to fight for office. Nine-tenths of those
who are, or are deemed by themselves or others, too stupid for anything
else, are left at home to till the fields, and breed the cattle, and
prune the vines, as their ancestors did for generations before them.
Thus there is singularly little intelligence left in the country. The
whole energy, and knowledge, and resource of the land are barrelled up
in the towns. You leave one city, and, in many cases, you will not meet
an educated or cultivated individual until you arrive at another--all
between is utter intellectual barrenness. The English country gentleman,
we all know, is not a faultless character, but his useful qualities far
prevail over his defects; and it is only when traversing a land all but
destitute of any such order that the fatal effects of the blank are
fully realized. Were there more country gentlemen in France, there would
be more animal food and more wheaten bread in the country. The very idea
of a great proprietor living upon his estates implies the fact of an
educated person--an individual more or less rubbed and polished and
enlightened by society--taking his place amongst a class who must
naturally look up to him, and whose mass he must necessarily, to a
greater or less degree, leaven. It is easy to joke about English country
gentlemen--about their foibles, and prejudices, and absurd points; but
to the jokers I would seriously say, "Go to France; examine its
agriculture, and the structure and calibre of its rural society, and see
the result of the utter absence of a class of men--certainly not
Solomons, and as certainly not Chesterfields, but, for all that, most
useful personages--individuals with capital, with, at all events, a
certain degree of enlightenment--taking an active interest in
farming--often amateur farmers themselves--the patrons of district
clubs, and ploughing matches, and cattle-shows--and, above all, living
daily among their tenantry, and having an active and direct interest in
that tenantry's prosperity." I do not mean to say that here and there,
all over France, there may not be found active and intelligent resident
landlords, nor that, in the north of France, there may not be discovered
intelligent and clear-headed tenant-farmers; but the rule is as I have
stated. Utterly ignorant boors are allowed to plod on from generation to
generation, wrapped in the most dismal mists of agricultural
superstition; while what in America would be called the "smart" part of
the population, are intriguing, and constructing and undoing _complots_,
in the towns. To all present appearance, a score of dynasties may
succeed each other in France before La Vendée takes its place beside
Norfolk, or before Limousin rivals the Lothians.
A word as to the subdivision of property. I know the extreme
difficulties of the subject, and the moral considerations which, in
connection with it, are often placed in opposition to admitted physical
and economical disadvantages. I shall, therefore, without discussing the
question at any length, mention two or three personally ascertained
facts:--
The tendency of landed properties, under the system in question, is to
continual diminution of seize.
This tendency does _not_ stop with the interests of the parties
concerned--it goes on in spite of them.
And the only practical check is nothing but a new evil. When a man finds
that his patch of land is insufficient to support his family, he borrows
money and buys more land. In nine cases out of ten, the interest to be
paid to the lender is greater than the profit which the borrower can
extract from the land--and bankruptcy, and reduction to the condition of
a day-labourer, is sooner or later the inevitable result.
The infinitesimal patches of land are cultivated in the most rude and
uneconomical fashion. Not a franc of capital, further than that sunk in
the purchase of spades, picks, and hoes, is expended on them. They are
undrained, ill-manured, expensively worked, and they would often produce
no profit whatever, were it not that the proprietor is the labourer, and
that he looks for little or nothing save a recompense for his toil in a
bare subsistence. It is easy to see how the consumer must fare if the
producer possess little or no surplus after his own necessities are
satisfied.
It is not to be supposed from the above remarks, that I conceive that in
no circumstances, and under no conditions, can the soil be
advantageously divided into minute properties. The rule which strikes me
as applying to the matter is this:--where spade-husbandry, can be
legitimately adopted, then the extreme subdivision of land loses much,
if not all, of its evils. The reason is plain: spade-husbandry, while it
pays the proprietor fair wages, also, in certain cases, develops in an
economical manner the resources of the soil. The instance of
market-gardens near a populous town is a case in point. But in a remote
district, removed from markets, ill provided with the means of
locomotion--where cereals, not vegetables, must be raised--spade-labour
is so far mere toil flung away. Near Nismes I found a man digging a
field which ought to have been ploughed. He told me that the spade
produced more than the plough. Then why did not the farmers use
spade-husbandry? "Because, although spade-husbandry was very productive,
it was still more expensive. It paid a small proprietor who could do the
work himself, but not a large proprietor, who had to remunerate his
labourers." Herein, then, lies the fallacy. Truly considered, a mode of
cultivation unprofitable for the great proprietor, must be unprofitable,
in the long run, for the small proprietor also. The former, by
spade-husbandry, loses his profit by paying extravagantly for labour;
the latter must pay for labour as well, but he pays himself, and is
therefore unconscious of the outlay--an outlay which is, nevertheless,
not the less real. If the plough, at an expense of 5_s._, can produce
20_s._ worth of produce--and if the spade, at an expense of 20_s._, can
produce 30_s._ worth of produce--the difference between the
proportionate outlays is so much deducted from the resources of the
country in which the transaction takes place; and this because that
difference of labour, or of money representing labour, if otherwise
applied--as by the agency of the plough it would be free to be
applied--might, profitably to its proprietor, still raise the sum total
of the production to the stated amount of 30_s._
Are small properties, then, in cases in which spade-husbandry cannot be
economically applied, injurious to the social and industrial interests
of the community in which they exist?
The following propositions appear to me to sum up what may be said on
either side of the question:
Small landed holdings undoubtedly tend to produce an industrious
population. A man always works hardest for himself.
Small landed holdings tend to breed a spirit of independence, and
wholesome moral self-appreciation and reliance.
On the other hand--
Small landed holdings, by breeding a poor and ignorant race of
proprietors, keep back agriculture, and injure the whole community of
consumers; and--
Small landed holdings tend to grow smaller than it is the interest of
their owners that they should become. Capital, borrowed at usurious
rates of interest, is then had recourse to for the purpose of enlarging
individual properties--and the result is the production of a race of
involved, mortgaged, and frequently bankrupt proprietors.
At this present moment, I believe the proprietorship of France to be as
bankrupt as that of the south-west of Ireland. The number of "Encumbered
Estates" across the Channel would stagger the stoutest calculator. The
capitalists, notaries, land-agents, and others in the towns, and not the
peasantry, are the real owners of the mortgaged soil. The nominal
proprietors are sinking deeper and deeper at every struggle, and they
see no hope before them--save one--Socialism. French Socialism is simply
the result of French poverty. A ruined labourer has no resource but
casual charity. No law stands between him and starvation. He has no
right to his life unless he can support himself; and as the ponderous
machine of the law gradually grinds down his property to an extent too
small for him to exist on, and as the increasing interest swallows up
the comparatively diminishing products, he sees nothing for it but a
scramble. There is property--there is food--and it will go hard but he
shall have a share of them. Herein is the whole problem of the dreaded
Socialism. I cannot put the matter better than in the words of the old
song--
"Moll in the wad and I fell out,
And this is what it was all about,
She had money, and I had none,
And that was the way the row begun."
Whether a Poor-law, and a change in the law of heritage might not check
the evil, I am not, of course, going to inquire; but the present state
of rural France--all political considerations left aside--appears to me
to point to the possibility, if not the probability, of the world seeing
a greater and bloodier _Jacquerie_ yet than it ever saw before.
THE END.
HENRY VIZETELLY, PRINTER AND ENGRAVER, GOUGH SQUARE,
FLEET STREET, LONDON.