After this came two or three pictures of quite another
complexion--pictures of which a long green valley, almost in the centre
of France, makes the general setting. The valley itself, indeed, forms
one delightful picture, although the country which surrounds it is by no
means one of the regions that place themselves on exhibition. It is the
old territory of the Gâtinais, which has much history, but no renown of
beauty. It is very quiet, deliciously rural, immitigably French; the
typical, average, "pleasant" France of history, literature, and art--of
art, of landscape-art, perhaps, especially. Wherever I look I seem to
see one of the familiar pictures on a dealer's wall--a Lambinet, a
Troyon, a Daubigny, a Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the majority;
the mood of the landscape usually expresses itself in silvery lights and
vivid greens. The history of this part of France is the history of the
monarchy, and its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic
tongue, but a nearer approach to it than any local patois. The peasants
deliver themselves with rather a drawl, but their French is as
consecutive as that of Ollendorf.
Each side of the long valley is a continuous ridge, which offers it a
high, wooded horizon, and through the middle of it there flows a
charming stream, wandering, winding and doubling, smothered here and
there in rushes, and spreading into lily-coated reaches, beneath the
clear shadow of tall, straight, light-leaved trees. On each side of the
stream the meadows stretch away flat, clean, magnificent, lozenged
across with rows of lateral foliage, under which a cow-maiden sits on
the grass, hooting now and then, nasally, to the large-uddered browsers
in front of her. There are no hedges nor palings nor walls; it is all a
single estate. Occasionally in the meadows there rises a cluster of
red-roofed hovels--each a diminutive village. At other points, at about
half an hour's walk apart, are three charming old houses. The châteaux
are extremely different, but, both as pictures and as dwellings, each
has its points. They are very intimate with each other, so that these
points may be amicably discussed. The points in one case, however, are
remarkably strong. The little old _castel_ I mention stands directly in
the attenuated river, on an island just great enough to hold it, and the
garden-flowers grow upon the farther bank. This, of course, is a most
delightful affair. But I found something very agreeable in the aspect of
one of the others, when I made it the goal of certain of those walks
before breakfast, which of cool mornings, in the late summer, do not
fall into the category of ascetic pleasures. (In France, indeed, if one
did not do a great many things before breakfast, the work of life would
be but meagrely performed.)
The dwelling in question stands on the top of the long ridge which
encloses the comfortable valley to the south, being by its position
quite in the midst of its appurtenant acres. It is not particularly
"kept up," but its quiet rustiness and untrimmedness only help it to be
familiar. A grassy plateau approaches it from the edge of the hill,
bordered on one side by a short avenue of horse-chestnuts, and on the
other by a dusky wood. Beyond the chestnuts are the steep-roofed,
yellow-walled farm-buildings, and under cover of the wood a stretch of
beaten turf, where, on Sundays and holidays, the farm-servants play at
bowls. Directly before the house is a little square garden, enclosed by
a low parapet, which is interrupted by a high gateway of mossy pillars
and iron arabesques, the whole of it muffled in creeping plants. The
house, with its yellow walls and russet roof, is ample and substantial;
it is a very proper _gentilhommière_. In a corner of the garden, at the
angle of the parapet, rises that classic emblem of rural gentility, the
_pigeonnier_, the old stone dovecot. It is a great round tower, as broad
of base as a lighthouse, with its roof shaped like an extinguisher, and
a big hole in its upper portion, in and out of which a dove is always
fluttering.
You see all this from the windows of the drawing-room. Be sure that the
drawing-room is panelled in white and gray, with old rococo mouldings
over the doorways and mantelpiece. The open gateway of the garden, with
its tangled creepers, makes a frame for the picture that lies beyond the
grassy esplanade where the thistles have been suffered to grow round a
disused stone well, placed in odd remoteness from the house (if, indeed,
it be not a relic of an earlier habitation): a picture of a wide green
country, rising beyond the unseen valley and stretching away to a far
horizon in deep blue lines of wood. Behind, through other windows, you
look out on the gardens proper. There are places that take one's fancy
by some accident of expression, some mystery of accident. This one is
high and breezy, both genial and reserved, plain yet picturesque,
extremely cheerful and a little melancholy. It has what in the arts is
called "style," and so I have attempted to commemorate it.
Going to call on the peasants was as charming an affair as a chapter in
one of George Sand's rural tales. I went one Sunday morning with my
hostess, who knew them well and enjoyed their most garrulous confidence.
I don't mean that they told her all their secrets, but they told her a
good many; if the French peasant is a simpleton, he is a very shrewd
simpleton. At any rate, of a Sunday morning in August, when he is
stopping at home from work and has put on his best jacket and trousers,
and is loafing at the door of his neighbour's cabin, he is a very
charming person. The peasantry in the region I speak of had admirably
good manners. The curé gave me a low account of their morals, by which
he meant, on the whole, I suspect, that they were moderate church-goers.
But they have the instinct of civility and a talent for conversation;
they know how to play the host and the entertainer. By "he," just now, I
meant she quite as much; it is rare that, in speaking superlatively of
the French, in any connection, one does not think of the women even more
than of the men. They constantly strike the foreigner as a stronger
expression of the qualities of the race. On the occasion I speak of the
first room in the very humble cabins I successively visited--in some
cases, evidently, it was the only room--had been set into irreproachable
order for the day. It had usually a fine brownness of tone, generated by
the high chimney-place, with its swinging pots, the important bed, in
its dusky niche, with its flowered curtains, the big-bellied earthenware
in the cupboard, the long-legged clock in the corner, the thick, quiet
light of the small, deeply-set window, the mixture, on all things, of
smoke-stain and the polish of horny hands. Into the midst of this "la
Rabillon" or "la mère Léger" brings forward her chairs and begs us to
be seated, and, seating herself, with crossed hands, smiles expressively
and answers abundantly every inquiry about her cow, her husband, her
bees, her eggs, her baby. The men linger half outside and half in, with
their shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every one smiles with
that simple, clear-eyed smile of the gratified peasant; they talk much
more like George Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. And if they
receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed us on our way with
proportionate urbanity. I go to six or eight little hovels, all of them
dirty outside and clean within; I am entertained everywhere with the
bonhomie, the quaintness, the good faces and good manners of their
occupants, and I finish my tour with an esteem for my new acquaintance
which is not diminished by learning that several of them have thirty or
forty thousand francs carefully put away.
And yet, as I say, M. le Curé thinks they are in a bad way, and he
knows something about them. M. le Curé, too, is not a dealer in
scandal; there is something delightfully quaint in the way in which he
deprecates an un-Christian construction of his words. There is more than
one curé in the valley whose charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest
of whom I speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has been
accused, I believe, of pretensions to _illuminisme_; but even in his most
illuminated moments it can never occur to him that he has been
chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet
to say that he is the curé, not of Gy, but of the village nearest to
Gy. I write this sentence half for the pleasure of putting down that
briefest of village-names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may
be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If you wish to be very
specific, you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains--Gy of the Little Nuns. I went
with my hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Curé, who himself
opened his garden door to us (there was a crooked little black cross
perched upon it), and, lifting his rusty _calotte_, stood there a moment
in the sunshine, smiling a greeting more benignant than his words.
A rural _presbytère_ is not a very sumptuous dwelling, and M. le
Curé's little drawing-room reminded me of a Yankee parlour (_minus_ the
subscription-books from Hartford on the centre-table) in some
out-of-the-way corner of New England. But he took us into his very
diminutive garden, and showed us an ornament that would not have
flourished in the shadow of a Yankee parlour--a rude stone image of the
Virgin, which he had become possessed of I know not how, and for which
he was building a sort of niche in the wall. The work was going on
slowly, for he must take the labour as he could get it; but he appealed
to his visitors, with a smile of indulgent irony, for an assurance that
his little structure would not make too bad a figure. One of them told
him that she would send him some white flowers to set out round the
statue; whereupon he clasped his hands together over his snuff-box and
expressed cheerful views of the world we live in. A couple of days
afterward he came to breakfast, and of course arrived early, in his new
cassock and band. I found him in the billiard-room, walking up and down
alone and reading his breviary. The combination of the locality, the
personage and the occupation, made me smile; and I smiled again when,
after breakfast, I found him strolling about the garden, puffing a
cigarette. Of course he had an excellent appetite; but there is
something rather cruel in those alternations of diet to which the French
parish priest is subjected. At home he lives like a peasant--a fact
which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he has
usually--or in many cases--been brought up to that life. But his
fellow-peasants don't breakfast at the château and gaze down the
savoury vistas opened by cutlets à la Soubise. They have not the acute
pain of relapsing into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of
course it is by no means every day, or every week even, that M. le Curé
breakfasts at the château; but there must nevertheless be a certain
uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a labourer, yet
he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him
sometimes to have rather a point of irony. But to the ideal curé, of
course, all characters are equal; he thinks neither too ill of his bad
breakfasts nor too well of his good ones. I won't say that the excellent
man I speak of is the ideal curé, but I suspect he is an approach to
it; he has a grain of the epicurean to an ounce of stoicism. In the
garden-path, beside the moat, while he puffed his cigarette, he told me
how he had held up his head to the Prussians; for, hard as it seemed to
believe it, that pastoral valley had been occupied by ravaging Teutons.
According to this recital, he had spoken his mind civilly, but very
distinctly, to the group of officers who had made themselves at home in
his dwelling--had informed them that it grieved him profoundly that he
was obliged to meet them standing there in his _soutane_, and not out in
the fields with a musket in his hands and a dozen congenial spirits at
his side. The scene must have been dramatic. The first of the officers
got up from table and asked for the privilege of shaking his hand. "M.
le Curé," he said, "j'estime hautement votre caractère."
Six miles away--or nearer, by a charming shaded walk along a canal--was
an ancient town with a legend--a legend which, as a child, I read in my
lesson-book at school, marvelling at the woodcut above it, in which a
ferocious dog was tearing a strange man to pieces, while the king and
his courtiers sat by as if they were at the circus. I allude to it
chiefly in order to mention the name of one of its promenades, which is
the stateliest, beyond all comparison, in the world; the name, I mean,
not the street. The latter is called the Promenade des Belles Manières.
Could anything be finer than that? With what a sweep gentlemen must once
have taken off their hats there; how ladies must once have curtsied,
regardless of gutters, and how people must have turned out their toes as
they walked!
V
My next impressions were gathered on the margin of a southern sea--if
the Bay of Biscay indeed deserve so sympathetic a name. We generally
have a mental image beforehand of a place on which we may intend to
project ourself, and I supposed I had a tolerably vivid prevision of
Biarritz. I don't know why, but I had a singular sense of having been
there; the name always seemed to me expressive. I saw the way it lay
along its gleaming beach; I had taken in imagination long walks toward
Spain over the low cliffs, with the blue sea always to my right and the
blue Pyrenees always before me. My only fear was that my mental picture
had not been brilliant enough; but this could easily be touched up on
the spot. In truth, however, on the spot I was exclusively occupied in
toning it down. Biarritz seemed to be decidedly below its reputation; I
am at a loss to see how its reputation was made. There is a partial
explanation that is obvious enough. There is a low, square, bare brick
mansion seated on the sands, under shelter of a cliff; it is one of the
first objects to attract the attention of an arriving stranger. It is
not picturesque, it is not romantic, and even in the days of its
prosperity it never can have been impressive. It is called the Villa
Eugénie, and it explains in a great measure, as I say, the Biarritz
which the arriving stranger, with some dismay, perceives about him. It
has the aspect of one of the "cottages" of Newport during the winter
season, but is surrounded by a vegetation much less dense than the
prodigies of arborescence now so frequent at Newport. It was what the
newspapers call the "favourite resort" of the ex-Empress of the French,
who might have been seen at her imperial avocations with a good glass,
at any time, from the Casino. The Casino, I hasten to add, has quite the
air of an establishment frequented by gentlemen who look at ladies'
windows with telescopes. There are Casinos and Casinos, and that of
Biarritz is, in the summary French phrase, "impossible." Except for its
view, it is moreover very unattractive. Perched on the top of a cliff
which has just space enough to hold its immense brick foundations, it
has no garden, no promenade, no shade, no place of out-of-door
reunion--the most indispensable feature of a Casino. It turns its back
to the Pyrenees and to Spain, and looks out prettily enough over a blue
ocean to an arm of the low French coast.
Biarritz, for the rest, scrambles over two or three steep hills,
directly above the sea, in a promiscuous, many-coloured, noisy fashion.
It is a watering-place pure and simple; every house has an expensive
little shop in the basement and a still more expensive set of rooms to
let above stairs. The houses are blue and pink and green; they stick to
the hillsides as they can, and being near Spain, you try to fancy they
look Spanish. You succeed, perhaps, even a little, and are rewarded for
your zeal by finding, when you cross the border a few days afterward,
that the houses at San Sebastian look strikingly French. Biarritz is
bright, crowded, irregular, filled with many sounds, and not without a
certain second-rate pictorial quality; but it struck me as common and
cockneyfied, and my vision travelled back to modest little Etretat, by
its northern sea, as to a very much more downy couch. The south-western
coast of France has little of the exquisite charm of the Mediterranean
shore. It has of course a southern expression which in itself is always
delightful. You see a brilliant, yellow sun, with a pink-faced,
red-tiled house staring up at it. You can see here and there a trellis
and an orange-tree, a peasant-woman in a gold necklace, driving a
donkey, a lame beggar adorned with earrings, a glimpse of blue sea
between white garden-walls. But the superabundant detail of the French
Riviera is wanting; the softness, luxuriousness, enchantment.
The most pictorial thing at Biarritz is the Basque population, which
overflows from the adjacent Spanish provinces and swarms in the crooked
streets. It lounges all day in the public places, sprawls upon the
curbstones, clings to the face of the cliffs, and vociferates
continually a shrill, strange tongue, which has no discoverable affinity
with any other. The Basques look like hardier and thriftier Neapolitan
lazzaroni; if the superficial resemblance is striking, the difference is
very much in their favour. Although those specimens which I observed at
Biarritz appeared to enjoy an excess of leisure, they had nothing of a
shiftless or beggarly air, and seemed as little disposed to ask favours
as to confer them. The roads leading into Spain were dotted with them,
and here they were coming and going as if on important business--the
business of the abominable Don Carlos himself. They struck me as a very
handsome race. The men are invariably clean-shaven; smooth chins seem a
positively religious observance. They wear little round maroon-coloured
caps, like those of sailor-boys, dark stuff shirts, and curious white
shoes, made of strips of rope laid together--an article of toilet which
makes them look like honorary members of base-ball clubs. They sling
their jackets cavalier-fashion, over one shoulder, hold their heads very
high, swing their arms very bravely, step out very lightly, and, when
you meet them in the country at eventide, charging down a hillside in
companies of half a dozen, make altogether a most impressive appearance.
With their smooth chins and childish caps, they may be taken, in the
distance, for a lot of very naughty little boys; for they have always a
cigarette in their teeth.
The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for driving over into
Spain. Coming speedily to a consciousness of this fact, I found a charm
in sitting in a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian behind a
coachman in a high glazed hat with long streamers, a jacket of scarlet
and silver and a pair of yellow breeches and jack-boots. If it has been
the desire of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit the land
of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as by a day's excursion from
Biarritz is a matter to encourage visions. Everything helping--the
admirable scenery, the charming day, the operatic coachman, the
smooth-rolling carriage--I am afraid I became more visionary than it is
decent to tell of. You move toward the magnificent undulations of the
Pyrenees, as if you were going to plunge straight into them; but in
reality you travel beneath them and beside them, pass between their
expiring spurs and the sea. It is on proceeding beyond San Sebastian
that you seriously attack them. But they are already extremely
vivid--none the less so that in this region they abound in suggestions
of the recent Carlist war. Their far-away peaks and ridges are crowned
with lonely Spanish watch-towers, and their lower slopes are dotted with
demolished dwellings. It was hereabouts that the fighting was most
constant. But the healing powers of nature are as remarkable as the
destructive powers of man, and the rich September landscape appeared
already to have forgotten the injuries of yesterday. Everything seemed
to me a small foretaste of Spain; I discovered an unreasonable amount of
local colour. I discovered it at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the last French
town, in a great brown church, filled with galleries and boxes, like a
playhouse--the altar and choir, indeed, looked very much like a
proscenium; at Bohébie, on the Bidassoa, the small yellow stream which
divides France from Spain, and which at this point offers to view the
celebrated Isle of Pheasants, a little bushy strip of earth adorned with
a decayed commemorative monument, on which, in the seventeenth century,
the affairs of Louis XIV. and the Iberian monarch were discussed in
ornamental conference; at Fuentarabia (glorious name), a mouldering
relic of Spanish stateliness; at Hendaye, at Irun, at Benteria, and
finally at San Sebastian. At all of these wayside towns the houses show
marks of Alphonsist bullets (the region was strongly Carlist); but to be
riddled and battered seems to carry out the meaning of the pompous old
escutcheons carven above the doorways, some of them covering almost half
the house. It struck me, in fact, that the narrower and shabbier was the
poor little dusky dwelling, the grander and more elaborate was this
noble advertisement. But it represented knightly prowess, and pitiless
time had taken up the challenge. I found it a luxury to ramble through
the narrow single street of Irun and Benteria, between the
strange-coloured houses, the striped awnings, the universal balconies
and the heraldic doorways.
San Sebastian is a lively watering-place, and is set down in the
guide-books as the Biarritz or the Brighton of Spain. It has of course a
new quarter in the provincial-elegant style (fresh stucco cafés,
barber-shops, and apartments to let), looking out upon a planted
promenade and a charming bay, locked in fortified heights, with a narrow
portal to the ocean. I walked about for two or three hours and devoted
most of my attention to the old quarter, the town proper, which has a
great frowning gate upon the harbour, through which you look along a
vista of gaudy house-fronts, balconies, awnings, surmounted by a narrow
strip of sky. Here the local colour was richer, the manners more naïf.
Here too was a church with a flamboyant Jesuit façade and an interior
redolent of Spanish Catholicism. There was a life-sized effigy of the
Virgin perched upon a table beside the great altar (she appeared to have
been walking abroad in a procession), which I looked at with extreme
interest. She seemed to me a heroine, a solid Spanish person, as perfect
a reality as Don Quixote or Saint Theresa. She was dressed in an
extraordinary splendour of laces, brocades and jewels, her coiffure and
complexion were of the finest, and she evidently would answer to her
name if you should speak to her. Mustering up the stateliest title I
could think of, I addressed her as Dona Maria of the Holy Office;
whereupon she looked round the great dusky, perfumed church, to see
whether we were alone, and then she dropped her fringed eyelids and held
out her hand to be kissed. She was the sentiment of Spanish Catholicism;
gloomy, yet bedizened, emotional as a woman and mechanical as a doll.
After a moment I grew afraid of her, and went slinking away. After this
I didn't really recover my spirits until I had the satisfaction of
hearing myself addressed as "Caballero." I was hailed with this epithet
by a ragged infant, with sickly eyes and a cigarette in his lips, who
invited me to cast a copper into the sea, that he might dive for it; and
even with these limitations, the sensation seemed worth the cost of my
excursion. It appeared kinder, to my gratitude, to make the infant dive
upon the pavement.
A few days later I went back to San Sebastian, to be present at a
bull-fight; but I suppose my right to descant upon this entertainment
should be measured less by the gratification it afforded me than by the
question whether there is room in literature for another chapter on this
subject. I incline to think there is not; the national pastime of Spain
is the best-described thing in the world. Besides, there are other
reasons for not describing it. It is extremely disgusting, and one
should not describe disgusting things--except (according to the new
school) in novels, where they have not really occurred, and are invented
on purpose. Description apart, one has taken a certain sort of pleasure
in the bull-fight, and yet how is one to state gracefully that one has
taken pleasure in a disgusting thing? It is a hard case. If you record
your pleasure, you seem to exaggerate it and to calumniate your
delicacy; and if you record nothing but your displeasure, you feel as if
you were wanting in suppleness. Thus much I can say, at any rate, that
as there had been no bull-fights in that part of the country during the
Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man, woman, and child of
them comes under this denomination) returned to their precious pastime
with peculiar zest. The spectacle, therefore, had an unusual splendour.
Under these circumstances it is highly effective. The weather was
beautiful; the near mountains peeped over the top of the vast open
arena, as if they too were curious; weary of disembowelled horses and
posturing _espadas_, the spectator (in the boxes) might turn away and
look through an unglazed window at the empty town and the cloud-shadowed
sea. But few of the native spectators availed themselves of this
privilege. Beside me sat a blooming matron, in a white lace mantilla,
with three very juvenile daughters; and if these ladies sometimes yawned
they never shuddered. For myself, I confess that if I sometimes
shuddered I never yawned. A long list of bulls was sacrificed, each of
whom had pretensions to originality. The _banderillos_, in their silk
stockings and embroidered satin costumes, skipped about with a great
deal of attitude; the _espada_ folded his arms within six inches of the
bull's nose and stared him out of countenance; yet I thought the bull,
in any case, a finer fellow than any of his tormentors, and I thought
his tormentors finer fellows than the spectators. In truth, we were all,
for the time, rather sorry fellows together. A bull-fight will, to a
certain extent, bear looking at, but it will not bear thinking of. There
was a more innocent effect in what I saw afterward, when we all came
away, in the late afternoon, as the shadows were at their longest: the
bright-coloured southern crowd, spreading itself over the grass, and the
women, with mantillas and fans, and the Andalusian gait, strolling up
and down before the mountains and the sea.