[Illustration]
It was market day at Libourne. We were aware of that from a very early
hour of the morning, as the complaining utterances of every class of
rickety waggon and ungreased wheel were wafted in at the windows of our
hotel, blended with the solid, carpet-like whacking of donkeys’ backs,
and the screams of their drivers, all ladies of advanced age and
leathern lung power. Monsieur and Madame A. called for us at nine, and
before setting forth on the legitimate expedition allotted to the day,
we drove round the market square.
[Illustration: MARKET PLACE, LIBOURNE.]
A helpless depression comes over us at the thought of attempting to
describe a foreign market-place. It has been so often done, and from
such an exhaustive number of points of view, that there seems nothing in
the least original left to be said. I do not suppose that any account of
journeyings in France is really perfect without a semi-humorous
description of an old woman under a great blue or a great red umbrella.
It should be dashed with a pathetic brilliancy, and there should, as a
rule, be something smouldering and suggestive of ancient coquetry about
the eyes of the old woman. We both felt this, and my cousin ran about
feverishly, snapping off Kodak plates in the most extravagant way, but
failing to find quite the old lady we wanted.
Another disappointment was the peasant straw hat upon which she had set
her heart, such a hat as I had bought in Brittany--conical,
broad-brimmed, many-coloured. We shouldered round the sunny, noisy
square, finding everything imaginable for sale except straw hats;
finally we left the open-air merchants, and in a bonnet shop, whose only
claim to romance was its position in the arcades that--like the ‘Rows’
at Chester--surrounded the square, she bought for twenty sous a hat that
might easily have been worn in Bond Street.
We were to be shown St. Emilion this delicious mid-June day,--by the
calendar it was about the
[Illustration: MY COUSIN RAN ABOUT FEVERISHLY, SNAPPING OFF KODAK PLATES
IN THE MOST EXTRAVAGANT WAY.]
8th or 9th of October, but it was evident that there was a mistake
somewhere,--and the drive to that small but remarkable town was one of
most brilliant and fragrant pleasantness. We were mounting up out of the
levels about Libourne, rising higher and higher into the bright morning,
till we could see some of the silver coils of the Dordogne beginning to
reveal themselves, and red-roofed villages broke through the vines on
the slopes below us, giving unexpected suggestions of Arcadia.
Presently above the coachman’s hat a yellow crocketed spire thrust
itself into the blue of the sky; there came crowding after it towers and
roofs, and finally a tall crumbling wall, standing quite alone outside
old fortifications, with nothing but the Gothic window-openings left to
show that it had once been part of a great church. We drove in through a
towered gateway, and over the cobble-stones dear to the writers of
mediæval romance and the makers of carriage springs, and, squeezing our
way along a street narrow enough to allow us to shake hands
simultaneously with the occupants of the houses on both sides, we pulled
up at the opening of a street too steep for a carriage. Down this we
went on foot, reminded a good deal of Clovelly, and yet glad that it was
not Clovelly, but a walled town in the heart of the vineyard country,
with a saint and a shrine, and a history as gorgeous as an illuminated
missal. Level ground was granted at last to our aching knees, a little
plateau where was a shading chestnut tree, a railing, and behind these
the unassuming front of an inn,--the Hôtel Dussaut, if our memories are
correct,--with its doors opening straight in upon a room where a
cleanly-laid table glimmered in the cool obscurity.
As we stood under the chestnut tree a sound as of the beating of eggs
rose to us presently from a flagged yard about fifteen feet below our
plateau, and, looking over the edge, we had an excellent bird’s-eye view
of two young ladies engaged respectively in beating a yellow compound
with a fork, and in shaking some other yellow compound in a frying-pan
over a charcoal fire. One of them wore _pince-nez_, both had early
Florentine shocks of hair, and a general appearance
[Illustration: THE ÆSTHETIC DAUGHTER OF THE HOTEL.]
of such æsthetic culture that we refused at first to believe that they
were preparing our _déjeuner_; and when later we seated ourselves at the
table within the French window, and received from the hands of the
wearer of the _pince-nez_ the delicious omelette that had been cooked in
the open air, we felt embarrassed by a sense of the favour conferred.
Our hostesses must, we fear, have been taken at a slight disadvantage by
us; we felt rather than saw some want of completeness in their attire
during the first stages of _déjeuner_,--a bareness as to neck, a
skimpiness as to skirt; but as the meal progressed, so did the
toilettes. By the time that we had finished our dish of smelts, with
their wonderful wood-sorrel sauce, the wearer of the _pince-nez_ was
glowing in a scarlet smocked silk jersey; and when the roast chicken was
placed on the table, her sister had endued a flowing skirt, and wreathed
her throat with some ten or twelve yards of amber beads. We could not
swear that the _pince-nez_ themselves had been changed, but certainly it
was only when dessert was arrived at that we noticed for the first time
that they were gold-rimmed, and were attached by a slim gold chain to a
brooch of barbaric splendour.
It was a dessert greatly to be remembered that we had at the Hôtel
Dussaut: the monster pears and grapes, the rich velvety wine of the
district, and finally, the _spécialité_ of the town, ordered expressly
for us by Monsieur A., the macaroons made at the convent according to an
ancient recipe known to the nuns. Certainly the ecclesiastical macaroon
transcends the secular variety; these come in warm and palpitating,
still cleaving to the white square of paper on which they had been
baked, looking like lumps of yellow foam at the foot of a waterfall,
melting in the mouth as foam itself might melt, and suggesting the idea
that the conventual life has its alleviations.
A small _salon_ opened out of the little verandah room in which our
lunch was served, a sitting-room replete with photograph frames, crochet
antimacassars, oil paintings, and green velvet furniture, and blocked in
one corner by the altogether astonishing circumstances of a bed, whose
sumptuous draperies suggested the proscenium of a puppet show. The
window looked down into a precipitous street at the back of the hotel,
and, craning out, the pointed arch of an old gateway was visible at the
top of the hill between the crooked lines of houses, the Porte de la
Cadène, so a little old-fashioned guide-book to St. Emilion informed us.
There was a long explanation of the name, from which we gathered that it
had something to say to the bar that once fastened the gate, but what
exactly it was not given to our poor intelligence to discover. Whenever
the guide-book felt that it was becoming unbefittingly lucid, it threw
in a few words of patois, or early French in inverted commas, and went
full speed ahead again, secure from pursuit. The photographs that
thronged the room, like Ruskin’s pine trees elsewhere referred to, ‘on
barren heights and inaccessible ledges, in quiet multitudes,’ proved a
more attractive study than the guide-book, and we travelled slowly round
the collection till we came upon a cabinet-sized head of a young lady
with disordered hair, _pince-nez_, a swan-like length of throat, and an
evening dress of which only a single row of Valenciennes trimming showed
above the lower edge of the photograph. We sat down before it with a
gasp, as we recognised in this ethereal being one of our late cooks, and
at the same instant Madame A. made the discovery of a dwarf easel on the
floor at the foot of the bed, on which a still larger portrait of a
lady, in the dress of a Russian princess, with an inscription to the
effect that she was Madame Dussaut herself, owner of the hotel, and
mother of the two peeresses who had served for us our admirable
_déjeuner_. We retired after this, and said that it would be better to
go away and see the town before we found out that these people were
closely related to the Bourbons, which seemed the next thing to expect.
The streets had the noonday heat and silence about them when we emerged
from beneath the chestnut tree, and went downhill to where a lofty
yellow cliff towered sheer in the hollow of the town, carrying on its
crest the crocketed spire that we had seen lifting its long throat above
its retainers like a serene highness, as we drove through the vineyards
to St. Emilion. Low down on the cliff, below the reach of the swinging
arms of a huge old fig tree that had rooted itself on the verge of the
yellow rock, were carvings like the façade of a church, and finally a
door disclosed itself, through which we plunged after our guides, much
as we had plunged into the private cellar of the Rothschilds. We were in
the famous monolith church, hewn and dug in the living cliff by monks,
headed by the industrious St. Emilion, in the eighth century, and going
down a few steps to the level of the floor, we looked about us in the
extremely moderate light that came through sloping shafts in the
thickness of the cliffs sixty feet above. The fig tree roots had
burrowed through the cliff, and hung in loops and knots from the roof,
intersecting the cold and dusty streaks of light, and the flicker of a
sun-lit green spray at the mouth of one of the shafts gave the solitary
touch of colour to the sombre vault. It was a bare, immense place, with
two rows of square pillars of solid rock supporting the arched roof,
black with age, empty of everything save a stone altar or two, and a few
tombs, dead silent, and abounding in dark hiding-places for rats and
bats. ‘All this makes you experience I know not what sentiment of
religious terror,’ exclaims the guide-book at this juncture, in discreet
rhapsody, having cantered through a page of architectural French, that
had almost resulted in a case of ‘Bellows to mend’ for the owner of that
admirable dictionary.
Our sentiments were far from religious after a tour of that church,
during which we had seen some hundreds of names, addresses, ages,
birthdays, engagements, and other data inscribed in the soft stone by
tourists. Only those who have seen the coronation chair in Westminster
Abbey gashed with vile initials, could believe the ravages of vulgarity
at St. Emilion. The pillars and tombs were fully garnished with these
hall marks of the barbarian. That was only to be expected, as even the
bones in the tombs had been carried away bit by bit as agreeable
souvenirs, but one would have imagined that the altar might have been
spared. It was here, however, and on the old bas-relief above the altar,
that a gentleman called Merritt had achieved his deadliest triumphs; we
tracked him subsequently through the grotto of St. Emilion and the
monastery cloisters, but this was his highest effort, and probably the
one that he recounts with most pride to his envious acquaintances. May
the milkman and butcher’s boy scribble his name upon the imitation
granite of his suburban door-posts, and may it be wiped out from the
will of his father-in-law!
We went on into a sort of _annexe_ of the church, into which they used
to shoot people through _oubliettes_ when they became superfluous, and
thence we scrambled out into the street again, and across to the grotto
of St. Emilion. Apparently the saint had not been able to find anything
above ground that combined privacy with excruciating discomfort, and
accordingly scratched out this rabbit hole a dozen feet below the rest
of the community, and lived there in damp and darkness for twenty or
thirty years. His furniture was limited. The light of a match showed a
bed cut in the wall, with a bolster of the same sympathetic description,
a stone block for a table, another for a chair, and a holy well in an
alcove. The old woman who had charge of the grotto struck another match,
and held it low in the alcove of the sacred well for us to see the dark
gleam of the water. It was more like a shallow pool than a well, and the
water lay still and perfectly transparent upon its yellow bed. Its
ancient nymph scooped up a tumblerful with the assurance that it was the
best in the world, and when we had satisfactorily tasted it, she lowered
her match and said archly, ‘_Et les épingles. Regardez les épingles,
mesdemoiselles._’
We regarded as desired, and saw lying at the bottom of the pool a small
collection of pins, some old and rusty enough to have fastened up St.
Emilion’s gown on wet days, others new and glittering. These, it was
explained by the old lady with many knowing side-glances at our
companions, were a means of fortune-telling peculiar to the sacred well.
Gentlemen and ladies who visited it were accustomed to drop two pins
into it, and if these fell so as to form a cross, then the thrower would
be married before the year was out; this was asseverated with chapter
and verse, and the testimony of brides and bridegrooms who had returned
there on their honeymoons. I searched silently and secretly in my inner
economy for a
[Illustration: ‘ET LES ÉPINGLES, MESDEMOISELLES.’]
pin; so, I perceived, did my cousin, but apparently without better
success than I. The chief props of a declining costume could not be
sacrificed to superstition, and our fortunes remain undivined to this
day.
There was more, much more, to be seen in St. Emilion, and we saw some of
it. We trust it may yet be given to us to stay for a clear three days at
the hotel of the Russian princess, and to dawdle in a trance of idleness
up and down the little streets, unharassed by time, or letter-writing,
or newspapers. As it was, we went slowly and gradually round the
beautiful ruins of a monastery in the upper part of the town, where the
beeches and ashes grew freely in the nave and side aisles, and spread
what shelter they could over the defenceless shafts and columns. The
remembrance of those still cloisters, with their leafy sunlight
flickering year after year on the worn flags and the gentle invasions of
the grass, is pleasant in the mind--a possession chief among many gains
of that very white day at St. Emilion. The bell-foundry working
leisurely in the blackened shell of what had been another monastery was
an episode in perfect keeping with the general religious calm of the
town; so was the Pilgrim’s-Progress kind of landscape that we viewed
from a corner of the fortifications--a delectable land, lying wide and
rich in the hot afternoon haze. Indeed, had it not been that in a quiet
back street we came upon a group of old women who sat knitting at their
vine-hung doors, and discussed with shrill and personal directness the
intentions of one of the party with regard to her will, we might have
thought it was ‘within in in heaven we were,’ as an Irishman said, with
an intensifying wealth of prepositions, in describing a whisky tent.