TRAMPING THROUGH FRANCE
The month of August was drawing to a close when I started southward. At
first I had to pass through noisy, dirty villages filled with crying
children and many curs. Beyond, travel was more pleasant, for the
national highways are excellently built. The heaviest rain raises hardly
a layer of mud. But these roads wind and ramble like mountain streams.
They zigzag from village to village even in a level country, and where
hills abound there are villages ten miles apart with twenty miles of
tramping between them.
I passed on into a pleasant rolling country. Beyond Nemours, where I
spent the second night, I came upon two tramps. They were sitting in the
shade of a giant oak, enjoying a breakfast of hard bread which they
dipped, now and then, into a brook at their feet. They invited me to
share their feast, but I explained that I had just had breakfast. After
finishing they went on with me. They were miners on their way to the
great coal-fields of St. Etienne. We were well acquainted in a very
short time. They called me “mon vieux,” which means something like “old
man” in our language, and greeted every foot-traveler they met by the
same title.
There are stern laws in France against wandering from place to place. I
knew that the three of us, traveling together, would be asked to explain
our business. We were still some distance off from the first village
when I saw an officer step from the door of a small building and walk
out into the middle of the road to wait for us.
“Where are you going?” he demanded sternly.
“To St. Etienne.”
“And your papers?”
“Here!” cried the miners, each snatching a worn-looking book from a
pocket under his coat.
The gendarme stuffed one of the books under an arm, and began to look
through the other. Between its greasy covers was a complete history of
its owner. It told when he was born and where; where he was baptized;
when he had been a soldier, and how he had behaved during his three
years in the army; and so on, page after page. Then came pages that told
where he had worked, what his employer thought of him, with wages,
dates, and reasons why he had stopped working at that particular place.
It took the gendarme a long time to look through it.
He finished examining both books at last, and handed them back with a
gruff “Well!”
“Next yours,” he growled.
“Here it is,” I answered, and pulled from my pocket a letter of
introduction written to American consuls and signed by our Secretary of
State.
With a puzzled look, the gendarme unfolded the letter. When he saw the
strange-looking English words he gasped with astonishment.
“What!” he exclaimed. “What is this you have here?”
“My passport,” I answered. “I am an American.”
“Ha! American! Zounds! And that is really a passport? Never before have
I seen one.”
It was not really a passport, although it was as good as one; but as the
gendarme could not read it, he was in no position to dispute my word.
“Very good,” he went on; “but you must have another paper to prove that
you have worked.”
Here was a difficulty. If I told him that I was a traveler and no
workman, he would probably put me in jail. For a moment I did not know
what to do. Then I snatched from my bundle the paper showing that I had
worked on a cattle-boat.
“Bah!” grumbled the officer. “More foreign gibberish. What is this
villain language that the evil one himself could not read?”
“English.”
“_Tiens_, but that is a queer thing!” he said thoughtfully, holding the
paper out at arm’s length, and scratching his head. However, with some
help he finally made out one date on the paper, and, handing it back
with a sigh, allowed us to pass on.
“Wait!” he cried before we had taken three steps. “What country did you
say you came from?”
“America,” I answered.
“L’Amérique! And, being in America, you come to France? Oh, my soul,
what idiocy!” And, waving his arms above his head, he fled to the shade
of his office.
We journeyed along as before, showing our papers at each village, and
once being stopped in the open country by a gendarme on horseback. By
the time we reached Briare in the early afternoon, the miners looked so
lean with hunger that I offered to pay for a meal for three. They needed
no second invitation, and led the way at once to a place that looked to
me like nothing but an empty warehouse. The miners pushed open a door,
and we entered a low room, gloomy and unswept. Around the table to which
we made our way, through a forest of huge wine barrels, were gathered a
dozen or more peasants.
The keeper of the place set out before us a loaf of coarse bread and a
bottle of wine, and then went back to his seat on a barrel. His shop was
really the wine cellar of a restaurant that faced the main street. The
fare would have cost us twice as much there. One of the miners asked me
if he might order two _sous’_ worth of raw salt pork. Having obtained my
consent, he did so, and he and his companion ate it with great relish.
I left my companions behind soon after, for they could not walk the
thirty miles a day that I had planned for myself, and passed on into the
vineyard and forest country. In the fields left bare by the harvesters,
peasant women were gathering with the greatest care every overlooked
straw they could find, and, their aprons full, plodded homeward.
The inhabitants were already lighting their lamps when I entered the
village of La Charité. The bells of a gray church began to ring out the
evening angelus. Squat housewives gossiped at the doors of the stone
cottages that lined the road. From the neighboring fields heavy
ox-carts, the yokes fastened across the horns of the animals, lumbered
homeward. In the dwindling light a blacksmith before his open shop was
fitting with flat iron shoes a spotted ox tied up on its back in a
frame.
I inquired for an inn, and was directed to a ramshackle stone building,
one end of which was a stable. Inside, under a sputtering lamp, huddled
two men, a woman, and a girl, around a table that looked as if it had
held too much wine in its day and was for that reason unsteady on its
legs. The four were so busy eating bread and soup that they did not see
me come in.
Walking forward to attract attention in the dim light, I stepped on the
end of a loose board that supported two legs of the tipsy table, causing
the bowl of soup to slide into the woman’s arms and a loaf to roll to
the earthen floor. That was unlucky but it made them notice me. One of
the men was the proprietor, the other a tramp who spoke very queer
French. All the evening, waving his arms above his head, he talked
excitedly of the misfortunes he had lived through.
At last the girl agreed to show me to a room. She led the way out of
doors, up an outside stairway, to a hole about four feet high over the
stable. Here I spent the night, and at daybreak I resumed my journey.
At that season half the highways of France were lined with hedges heavy
with blackberries. At first I was not sure they were blackberries, and I
was afraid to eat them; for I had noticed that the thrifty French
peasant never touched them, letting them go to waste. But, coming one
morning upon a hedge fairly loaded with large, juicy fruit, I tasted
one, discovered that it was a real blackberry, and fell to picking a
capful. A band of peasants, on their way to the fields, stopped to gaze
at me in astonishment, and burst into loud laughter.
“But, _mon vieux_,” cried a plowman, “what in the world will you do with
those berries there?”
“Eat them, of course,” I answered.
“Eat them!” roared the countrymen. “But those things are not good to
eat.” And they went on, laughing louder than before.