The auberge of Bouchet St. Nicolas was among the least pretentious I have
ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey. Indeed,
it was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of two
stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a suite,
so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture of the
plainest, earthern floors, a single bedchamber for travellers, and that
without any convenience but beds. In the kitchen cooking and eating go
forward side by side, and the family sleep at night. Any one who has a
fancy to wash must do so in public at the common table. The food is
sometimes spare; hard fish and omelette have been my portion more than
once; the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to man; and the
visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and rubbing against your
legs, is no impossible accompaniment to dinner.
But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show themselves
friendly and considerate. As soon as you cross the doors you cease to be
a stranger; and although these peasantry are rude and forbidding on the
highway, they show a tincture of kind breeding when you share their
hearth. At Bouchet, for instance, I uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais,
and asked the host to join me. He would take but little.
'I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?' he said, 'and I am capable of
leaving you not enough.'
In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own knife;
unless he ask, no other will be supplied: with a glass, a whang of bread,
and an iron fork, the table is completely laid. My knife was cordially
admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the spring filled him with
wonder.
'I should never have guessed that,' he said. 'I would bet,' he added,
weighing it in his hand, 'that this cost you not less than five francs.'
When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped.
He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly
ignorant. His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how to
read, although I do not suppose she ever did so. She had a share of
brains and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast.
'My man knows nothing,' she said, with an angry nod; 'he is like the
beasts.'
And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head. There was no
contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were accepted
loyally, and no more about the matter.
I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood in
a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got
home. 'Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there
were forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of
the house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that.' And she
interrogated me with a look.
'It is just that,' said I.
'You see,' she added to her husband, 'I understood that.'
They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures.
'In the morning,' said the husband, 'I will make you something better
than your cane. Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is in the
proverb--dur comme un ane; you might beat her insensible with a cudgel,
and yet you would arrive nowhere.'
Something better! I little knew what he was offering.
The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own
I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the
act of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of the
sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray God
it be my last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of the
woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed
by my appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to
me than to the pair. A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the
single gentleman who has to blush. But I could not help attributing my
sentiments to the husband, and sought to conciliate his tolerance with a
cup of brandy from my flask. He told me that he was a cooper of Alais
travelling to St. Etienne in search of work, and that in his spare
moments he followed the fatal calling of a maker of matches. Me he
readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant.
I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my
toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's
wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood
of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty
clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and the
only speck of colour was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern hills,
where the sky still wore the orange of the dawn.
It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I
had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were trooping out to
the labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to
stare upon the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw
them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell.
When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in
the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my
compliments upon its beauty.
'Oh no,' said the mother; 'it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.
Look, it is too fine.'
Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical
circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of the
majority decide the type of beauty.
'And where,' said I, 'is monsieur?'
'The master of the house is upstairs,' she answered, 'making you a goad.'
Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet
St. Nicolas, who introduced me to their use! This plain wand, with an
eighth of an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when he put it in my
hands. Thenceforward Modestine was my slave. A prick, and she passed
the most inviting stable door. A prick, and she broke forth into a
gallant little trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not a remarkable
speed, when all was said; and we took four hours to cover ten miles at
the best of it. But what a heavenly change since yesterday! No more
wielding of the ugly cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more
broadsword exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. And what
although now and then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse-
coloured wedge-like rump? I should have preferred it otherwise, indeed;
but yesterday's exploits had purged my heart of all humanity. The
perverse little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must
even go with pricking.
It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-legged
ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the way
to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident but one. A handsome foal
with a bell about his neck came charging up to us upon a stretch of
common, sniffed the air martially as one about to do great deeds, and
suddenly thinking otherwise in his green young heart, put about and
galloped off as he had come, the bell tinkling in the wind. For a long
while afterwards I saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the
note of his bell; and when I struck the high-road, the song of the
telegraph-wires seemed to continue the same music.
Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by rich
meadows. They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the
neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay. On
the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the
horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of fir-
wood and white roads wandering through the hills. Over all this the
clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing,
exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief
the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one
stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and
all that I beheld lay in another county--wild Gevaudan, mountainous,
uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the wolves.
Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance; and you
may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an
adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the
frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST,
the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten
months at free quarters in Gevaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and
children and 'shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty'; he pursued
armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise
and outrider along the king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing
before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender,
and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was
shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for
that. 'Though I could reach from pole to pole,' sang Alexander Pope; the
Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been as this wolf,
they would have changed the history of man. M. Elie Berthet has made him
the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again.
I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's desire that
I should visit our Lady of Pradelles, 'who performed many miracles,
although she was of wood'; and before three-quarters of an hour I was
goading Modestine down the steep descent that leads to Langogne on the
Allier. On both sides of the road, in big dusty fields, farmers were
preparing for next spring. Every fifty yards a yoke of great-necked
stolid oxen were patiently haling at the plough. I saw one of these mild
formidable servants of the glebe, who took a sudden interest in Modestine
and me. The furrow down which he was journeying lay at an angle to the
road, and his head was solidly fixed to the yoke like those of caryatides
below a ponderous cornice; but he screwed round his big honest eyes and
followed us with a ruminating look, until his master bade him turn the
plough and proceed to reascend the field. From all these furrowing
ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a labourer here and there who
was breaking the dry clods with a hoe, the wind carried away a thin dust
like so much smoke. It was a fine, busy, breathing, rustic landscape;
and as I continued to descend, the highlands of Gevaudan kept mounting in
front of me against the sky.
I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the Allier; so
near are these two confluents in their youth. Just at the bridge of
Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to fall, a lassie of
some seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, 'D'ou'st-ce-
que vous venez?' She did it with so high an air that she set me
laughing; and this cut her to the quick. She was evidently one who
reckoned on respect, and stood looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I
crossed the bridge and entered the county of Gevaudan.