Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of the
Gâtinais, where they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here
and there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun
themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees stand together on a knoll.
The quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into the
distance; the strips blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies forth
open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or
faint church spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in
spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more
solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
it were into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow
smoking behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his
wife in their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain; these
people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as they stoop
over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time against
the golden sky.
These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of present
times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the
peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in Michelet’s
image, like a hare between two furrows. These very people now weeding
their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his wife, it seems
to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is they who have been
their country’s scapegoat for long ages; they who, generation after
generation, have sowed and not reaped, reaped and another has garnered;
and who have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their good things
in their turn. For the days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled and
profited. ‘Le Seigneur,’ says the old formula, ‘enferme ses manants
comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel à la terre. Tout est à lui, forêt
chenue, oiseau dans l’air, poisson dans l’eau, bête an buisson, l’onde
qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule.’ Such was his old state
of sovereignty, a local god rather than a mere king. And now you may ask
yourself where he is, and look round for vestiges of my late lord, and in
all the country-side there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen
mansion. At the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst
of a close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers
and droning bees, the old château lifts its red chimneys and peaked roofs
and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There is a glad spring bustle
in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in flower, and the creepers
green about the broken balustrade: but no spring shall revive the honour
of the place. Old women of the people, little, children of the people,
saunter and gambol in the walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected
moat. Plough-horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables. The
dial-hand on the clock waits for some better hour. Out on the plain,
where hot sweat trickles into men’s eyes, and the spade goes in deep and
comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at his
heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold, which
have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper, while he and
his hollow-eyed children watched through the night with empty bellies and
cold feet. And perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the forest lying
like a coast-line of low hills along the sea-level of the plain, perhaps
forest and château hold no unsimilar place in his affections.
If the château was my lord’s, the forest was my lord the king’s; neither
of them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his meagre way
of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or for a new roof-tree,
he found himself face to face with a whole department, from the Grand
Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a high-born lord, down to the
common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes or a
bandoleer by way of uniform. For the first offence, by the Salic law,
there was a fine of fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than
once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he
might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun,
and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques
might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to market.
And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more hares and
rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to trample it down.
My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven francs in
decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting it with a silken leash to
hang about his shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage to the
shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, or some other
holy intercessor who has made a speciality of the health of hunting-dogs.
In the grey dawn the game was turned and the branch broken by our best
piqueur. A rare day’s hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly flourish,
sound the _bien-aller_ with all your lungs. Jacques must stand by, hat
in hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across his field,
and a year’s sparing and labouring is as though it had not been. If he
can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows but he may fall in
favour with my lord; who knows but his son may become the last and least
among the servants at his lordship’s kennel—one of the two poor varlets
who get no wages and sleep at night among the hounds? {147}
For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming him
with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble, when my
lord of the château, with all his troopers and trumpets, had been beaten
from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in
an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the church
steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of
spears and fluttering pensions drawing nigh across the plain, these good
folk gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, whence,
from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the coming and
going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and church and
cottage go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but an unhomely
refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide all change of
weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. Often there was none left
alive, when they returned, to show the old divisions of field from field.
And yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night into depopulated
Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a company of demons like
himself, even in these caves and thickets there were glad hearts and
grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may have
served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble by
old associations. These woods have rung to the horns of all the kings of
France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They have seen Saint Louis
exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt; Francis I. go a-hunting
with ten thousand horses in his train; and Peter of Russia following his
first stag. And so they are still haunted for the imagination by royal
hunts and progresses, and peopled with the faces of memorable men of
yore. And this distinction is not only in virtue of the pastime of dead
monarchs. Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs
of men, have here left their note, here taken shape in some significant
and dramatic situation. It was hence that Gruise and his leaguers led
Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, booted and spurred, and
with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met the Pope beside a woodland
cross. Here, on his way to Elba not so long after, he kissed the eagle
of the Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate farewell to his soldiers.
And here, after Waterloo, rather than yield its ensign to the new power,
one of his faithful regiments burned that memorial of so much toil and
glory on the Grand Master’s table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a
devout priest consumes the remnants of the Host.