learning, whose acquaintance had already brought me both pleasure and
profit, I sit in the cloisters watching another Father counting the
week's washing, which has just been brought in, and neatly folding up
handkerchiefs and undergarments. He has placed a board across a
wheelbarrow, and the heap of linen is upon this. Seated upon a stool,
he leisurely takes each great coarse handkerchief with blue border,
which, like the rest of the linen, has not been ironed, folds it into
four, lays it upon another board, smooths it with his large, thin
yellow hand, and so goes on with his task without saying a word or
raising his eyes. He is a gaunt, angular, sallow man of about fifty,
with hollow cheeks and long black beard. He has a melancholy air, and
does his work as though he were thinking all the while that it is a
part of the sum of labour he has to get through before reaching that
perfect state of felicity in which there is no more washing to be done
or counted. If there were only monks in the priory, this one would
have very little to do in looking after the linen; but there are many
boys who, although they are being educated with a view to the
religious life, have not yet put off such worldly things as shirts.
Very different from the sombre-looking Franciscan, bent over the
wheelbarrow, is the Père Etienne. He is as cheerful and sprightly as
if he were now convinced that a convent is the pleasantest place on
earth to live in, and that outside of it all is vanity and vexation.
He teaches the boys Latin, Greek, English, and the physical sciences.
Although he has never been out of France and Italy, he can speak
English, and actually make himself understood. He is a botanist, and
he and I have already spent some hours together in his cell before a
table strewn with floras and plants, both dry and fresh. This time we
are joined by a young monk who has been gathering flowers on the banks
of the Tarn, and has placed them between the leaves of a great Latin
Bible.
These meetings, and the library of the priory, with its valuable works
by local historians, strengthened the spell by which Ambialet held me.
The monks whom one occasionally meets in Languedoc are generally men
of better culture than the ordinary rural clergy, most of whom show
plainly enough by their ideas and the vigorous expressions which they
rarely hesitate to use in any company that they are sons of the soil.
As priests, situated as they are, this coarseness of manners and
circumscribed range of ideas, so far from being a disadvantage, forms
a bond of union between them and the people. A man to be deeply pitied
is he who, having a really superior and cultivated mind, is charged
with the cure of souls in some forlorn parish where nobody has the
time or the taste to read. Such a priest must either bring his ideas
down to those of the people around him, or be content to live in
absolute intellectual isolation. He may turn to the companionship of
books, it is true, but his library is very small; and if, as is
probable, his income is not more than £40 a year, he is too poor to
add to it. Such a revenue, when the bare needs of the body have been
met, does not leave much for satisfying a literary appetite.
The priory of Nôtre Dame de l'Oder was founded in the twelfth or
thirteenth century by the Benedictines, but a church already existed
on the spot as early, it is supposed, as the eighth century. The one
now standing, and which became incorporated with the priory, probably
dates from the eleventh. If the interior is cold by the severity of
the lines scarcely broken by ornament, the artistic sense is warmed by
the beauty of the proportions and general disposition. The apse, with
its three little windows, has the perfect charm of grace and
simplicity. A structural peculiarity, to be especially noted as one of
the tentative efforts of Romanesque art, is the use of half-arches for
the vaulting of the two narrow aisles. Unfortunately, the plastering
mania, which has robbed the interior of so many French churches of
their venerable air, has not spared this one. A singularly broad
flight of steps, partly cut in the rock and covered with tiles, leads
up to the portal; but as the building has been closed to the public
since the application of the law dispersing religious communities,
these steps look as if they belonged to the Castle of Indolence, so
overgrown with grass are they and abandoned to the wandering
wild-flowers. Great mulleins have been allowed to spring up from the
gaps between the lichen-spotted tiles.
When there was a regular community of monks here, the ancient
pilgrimage to Nôtre Dame de l'Oder was kept up, and near the top of
the _via crucis_, which forms a long succession of zigzags upon the
bare rock, a dark shrub or small tree allied to box may be seen railed
off with an image of the Virgin against it. According to the legend, a
Crusader returning from the Holy Land made a pilgrimage to the
sanctuary upon these rocks at Ambialet, and planted on the hill the
staff he had brought with him. This grew to a tree, to which the
people of the country gave the name of _oder_. In course of time it
came to be so venerated that Nôtre Dame d'Ambialet was changed to
Nôtre Dame de l'Oder. The existing tree is said to be a descendant of
the original one.
The monks at the priory told me that nearly all the old historical
documents relating to Ambialet had been taken away by the English and
placed in the Tower of London. In various parts of the Quercy, I had
also been told exactly the same with regard to the documents connected
with the early history of the locality. There are people who still
speak of this as a proof of the intention of the English to return.
How the belief became so widespread that the English placed the
documents which they carried away in the Tower of London, I am unable
to explain.
Memory takes me back again to the farmhouse by the Tarn. It is well
that there is plenty of space, for the household is numerous. There
are the farmer, his wife and children, an aged mother whose voice has
become a mere thread of sound, and who thinks over the past in the
chimney-corner, sometimes with a distaff in her hand; two old uncles,
a youth of all work, who has been brought up as one of the family, and
a little bright-eyed, bare-legged servant girl, whose brown feet I
still hear pattering upon the floors. One of the old men is a
white-bearded priest of eighty-five, who has spent most of his life in
Algeria, and has himself come to look like the patriarchal Arab in all
but the costume. He has no longer any sacerdotal work, but he has
other occupation. His special duty is to look after a great
flesh-coloured pig, and many a time have I seen him under the orchard
trees following close at the heels of the grunting beast while reading
his office. His old breviary, like his _soutane_, is very much the
worse for wear, the leaves having been thumbed nearly to the colour of
chocolate; but if he had a new one now, he would find it hard to
believe that it had the same virtue as the other. Notwithstanding his
years, he can do harder work than watching a pig. I have seen him
haymaking and reaping, and always the merriest of the party. Before
taking the fork or the sickle in hand, he would hitch up his
_soutane_, and reveal a pair of still active sacerdotal legs in white
linen drawers. The sight of the old man bending his back while
reaping, his white beard brushing the golden corn, was pathetic or
comic as the humour might seize the beholder. As gay as any of the
cicadas that keep the summer's jubilee in the sunny tree-tops, he
sings songs that have nothing in common with psalms, and he needs
little provocation to dance. French has become an awkward language to
him, but his tongue is nimble enough both in Languedocian and Latin.
When he hears that the evening soup is ready, he hurries the pig home,
flourishes his stick above his head in imitation of the Arabs, and
shouts in his cheeriest voice, 'Oportet manducare!'
The other uncle's chief business is to look after a couple of cows,
and as the farm has no pasturage but the orchard, he is away with them
the greater part of the day along the banks of the Tarn. One evening I
met him by the river, and he stopped me to quote a passage from the
Georgics which he had recalled to mind. His face beamed with
satisfaction. I knew that he had not been brought up to cow-tending,
but was, nevertheless, taken aback when the unfortunate old bachelor
wished me to share the pleasure he felt in having brought to mind a
long-forgotten passage of Virgil. The surprises of real life never
cease to be startling. Speaking to me afterwards of the growing
extravagance of all classes, he said:
'When I was young there were only two _cafés_ in Albi, and none but
the rich ever entered them. Now every man goes to his _café_. I
remember when, in middle-class families in easy circumstances, coffee
was only drunk two or three times a year, on festive occasions.' Very
different is the state of things now in France.
The figure of the old man bending upon his stick glides away by the
dark willow-fringe of the Tarn, and I am standing alone in the solemn
splendour of the luminous dusk--the clear-obscure of the quickly
passing twilight, beside the bearded corn, whose gold is blended with
the faint rosiness that spreads through the air of the valley, and
lets free the fragrance of those flowers which keep all their
sweetness for the evening. There is still a gleam of the lost sun upon
the priory walls, and over the dark rocks and wooded hollows floats a
purple haze. The dusk gathers apace, and the poplars that rise far
above the willows along the river, their outlines shaded away into the
black forest behind them, stand motionless like phantom trees, for not
a leaf stirs; but the corn seems to grow more luminous, as if it had
drunk something of the fire as well as the colour of the sun, while
the horns of the sinking moon gleam silver-bright just over the
topmost trees, painted in sepia upon a cobalt sky. How weird,
phantasmal, enigmatic the forms of those trees now appear! Some like
hell-hags, with wild hair flying, are rushing through the air; others,
majestic, solitary, wrapped about with dark horror, are the trees of
Fate; some have their arms raised in the frenzy of a torturing
passion; others look like emblems of Care when hope and passion are
alike dead: each touches the spring of a sombre thought or a fantastic
fancy.
On the road to Villefranche, about half a mile from Ambialet, is a
mine which has been abandoned from time immemorial, and which the
inhabitants say was worked by the English for gold. I have noticed,
however, throughout this part of France, that nearly everything that
was done in a remote age, whether good or evil, is attributed by the
people to the English, and that they not infrequently make a curious
confusion between Britons and Romans. As for the Visigoths,
Ostrogoths, and Arabs, all traditions respecting them appear to have
passed out of the popular mind. In the side of a stony hill on which
scarcely a plant grows, a narrow passage, a few feet wide, has been
quarried, and air shafts have been cut down into it through the solid
rock with prodigious labour. I followed this passage until a falling
in of the roof prevented me from going any farther. I could perceive
no trace of a metallic vein, so thoroughly had it been worked out, but
scattered over the hillside with schist, talcose slate, and fragments
of quartz, was a great deal of scoriae, showing that metal of some
kind had been excavated, and that the smelting had been done on the
spot. That the mine was worked for gold seems quite probable, inasmuch
as a lump of mineral containing a considerable quantity of the
precious metal was picked up near the entrance some years ago. Besides
the scoriae, I found upon the hillside much broken pottery, and from
the shape of several fragments it was easy to restore the form of
earthenware pots which were probably used for smelting purposes. There
is no record to show who the people were who were so busy upon these
rocks glittering with mica and talc. They may have belonged to any one
of the races who passed over the land from the time of the Romans.
One morning, still in the month of July, I broke away from the charms
of Ambialet, and shouldering again my old knapsack--which, by
travelling hundreds of miles in all weathers, had become disgracefully
shabby, but which was a friend too well stitched together to be thrown
aside on account of ill-looks--I continued my journey up the valley of
the Tarn. I had agreed to walk with the parish priest as far as the
village of Villeneuve, and having found him at the presbytery, we
passed through the churchyard on the edge of the rock. Here there is a
remarkable cross, with the figure of Christ on one side and that of
the Virgin on the other, not carved in relief, but in that early
mediaeval style which consisted of hollowing out the stone around the
image. The cure frankly declared that, if anyone offered him a large
new cross in the place of this little one, he would be glad to make
the exchange. It is unfortunate that so many rural priests place but
little value upon religious antiquities other than images and relics
which have a legend. Their appreciation of ecclesiastical art is too
often regulated by the practical and utilitarian order of ideas. To
dazzle the eye of the peasant may, and does, become the single aim of
church ornamentation. Hence the brassy, vulgar altars, and those
coloured plaster images of modern manufacture that one sees with
regret in so many of the country churches of France.
I soon took my last look at Ambialet, its rocks and ruins on which the
wild pinks nodded, and its stone-covered roofs overgrown with white
sedum. I was struck by the number of prickly plants on the sandy banks
of the Tarn. Those which now made the best show of bloom were the
star-thistle centaurea and _ononis repens_. The appearance of this
last was very curious, for in addition to its pink pea-blossoms it
seemed to be sprinkled over with little flowers the colour of
forget-me-nots. These, however, were not flowers at all, but small
flying beetles painted the brilliant blue of myosotis. Another plant
that showed a strong liking for these banks was the horned poppy
(_glaucium luteum_), which I had only found elsewhere near the
sea-coast. Brown stalks of broomrape were still standing, and I
lighted upon a lingering bee-ophrys, a plant which by its amazing
mimicry makes one look at it with awe as if it were something
supernatural.
It was an invitation to lunch at a presbytery that was the reason for
my companion taking a walk of about eight miles. Passing through a
small village on the way he called for the _curé_ there, who was also
an expected guest. This priest had obtained a reputation throughout
the district for his humour, his eccentricity, and contempt for
appearances. He had passed most of his life alone, cooking his food,
making his bed, and probably mending his clothes, without the help of
any woman. Being now over eighty years of age, he had realized the
necessity of changing his ways, and a woman not much younger than
himself had succeeded in obtaining a firm footing in his paved
kitchen, which was also the dining-room and _salon_. His presbytery in
the steep and rocky village street was no better built or more
luxuriously furnished than the dwellings of his peasant parishioners.
Here we found the old white-haired man, gay and hospitable, anxious to
offer everything he had in the house to the visitor, but only able to
think of two things which might be acceptable--snuff and sausage. '_Un
peu de saucisson?_' he said to me, with a winning smile after handing
me his snuff-box. I assured him I could eat nothing then. '_Tè!_ and
so you are really English, monsieur?--_Un peu de saucisson?_'
The _curé_ had been shut up in this village so many years, speaking
nothing but Languedocian to his parishioners, even when preaching to
them, that his French had become rather difficult to understand. I was
keenly alive to the exceptional study of human nature presented by
this fine specimen of an old rustic priest, who was not the less to be
respected because he took a great deal of snuff, hated shaving, wore
hob-nailed shoes of the roughest make, and a threadbare, soup-spotted
_soutane_ with frayed edges. He was not a bit ascetic, and although he
had lived so many years by himself, his good-humour and gaiety
continually overflowed. It may be that a housekeeper tends to sour a
priest's temper more than anything else, and this one knew it. The
sacerdotal domestic help must be fifty years old when she enters the
presbytery. Spinster or widow, she has that inherent purpose of every
woman to be, if she can, the mistress of the house in which she lives.
If she encounters no other woman in the field, against whom if she
tried conclusions she would be broken like the earthen pot in the
fable, she generally succeeds in achieving her ambition, although she
may be in name a servant. There are such phenomena as hen-pecked
priests, and those who peck them have no right whatever to do it. It
is a state of things brought about by too much submission, for the
sake of peace, to a mind determined to be uppermost while pretending
to be humble.
When we left again for Villeneuve, we were three in number, and the
old _curé_ trudged along over the rocky or sandy paths as nimbly as
either of his companions. He pointed out to me a spot in the Tarn
where he said was a gulf the bottom of which had never been sounded.
There are many such holes in the bed of this river, which receives
much of its water from underground tributaries.
I was looking at the mournful vine-terraces, now mostly abandoned and
grass-grown. 'Ah!' said the octogenarian, shaking his head, and for
once wearing a melancholy expression, 'the best wine of the South used
to be grown there.' Near a village a very tall pole, probably a young
poplar that had been barked, had been raised in a garden, and painted
with stripes of red, white, and blue. It was described to me as a
'tree of liberty,' and I was told that the garden in which it was
placed belonged to the mayor for the current year. Every fresh mayor
had a fresh tree.
At the village of Villeneuve I parted from my companions, who went to
lunch with the _curé_, together with several other ecclesiastics.
These occasional meetings and junketings at one another's houses are
the chief mundane consolation of the rural priests, who are as weak as
other mortals in the presence of a savoury dish, and, when they can
afford to do so, they enter into the pleasures of hospitality with
Horatian zest. Poor as they often are, they generally know the faggot
that conceals a drop of old wine to place before the guest. The people
in the South believe that the bounty of the Creator was intended to be
made the most of, and the type of priest that one meets most
frequently there in the richer parishes thinks that the next good
thing to a clear conscience is a good table.
I lunched at the auberge, and I had for my companion a ruby-faced
cattle-dealer of about fifty. He spent his life chiefly in a trap,
followed by an old cattle-dog of formidable build and determined
expression of mouth. This animal was now lying down near the table, so
tired and footsore from almost perpetual running that he thought it
too much trouble to get up and eat. I read in his eye that he was in
the habit of breathing every day of his life a canine curse on the
business of cattle-dealing. His master seemed a good-natured man, but
he had a fixed idea that was unfortunate for the dog. He considered
that the beast ought to be able to run from thirty-five to forty miles
a day, and that if he got sore paws it was his own fault.
'And do you never give him a lift?'
'Never!' roared the cattle-dealer, laughing like an ogre.
The dog being now ten years old, I was not surprised to hear that he
sometimes tried to lose himself just before his master was starting
upon a long round. Considering his age, and all the running he had
done in return for board and lodging, I thought his diplomacy
excusable; but the cattle-dealer used strong language to express his
loathing of such depravity and ingratitude in a dog old enough to be
serious, and on which so much kindness had been lavished.
This man had a very bad opinion of the inhabitants of that part of the
Rouergue which I was about to cross, and he strove to convince me that
it was very imprudent of me to think of travelling on foot and alone
through such a wild country. Had I told him that I carried no other
arm but my oak stick with iron spike, he would have been still more
vehement. Frenchmen like the companionship of a revolver. I do not. In
the first place, it makes me imagine there is an assassin lurking in
every thicket; secondly, I do not know where to carry it conveniently
so that it would be of use in time of need. I place confidence in my
stick, and take my chance. To tell the plain truth, I did not believe
what my table companion said about the dangerous character of the
inhabitants. The reason he gave for their exceptional wickedness was
that they were very poor, but this view was contrary to my experience
of humanity.
While we were talking over our coffee, there was a rising uproar in
the village street. Looking out of the window, we saw two men fighting
in the midst of a crowd.
'Ah!' exclaimed the cattle-dealer, with a sonorous chuckle, 'that
ought to give you an idea of the capacities of the inhabitants.' Then,
entering into the spirit of the battle, he shouted: 'Leave them
alone--leave them alone! It is not men who are fighting; it is the
juice of the grape!'
Both combatants soon had enough of it, and very little damage was done
on either side. The scene was more ludicrous than tragic. After all,
it was well, perhaps, that these men had not learnt how to use their
fists, and that with them pushing, slapping, and rolling upon one
another satisfied honour.
The hostess of this inn, while cooking the inevitable fowl for lunch,
basted it after the Languedocian fashion, of which I had taken note
elsewhere. Very different is it from what is commonly understood by
basting. A curious implement is used for the purpose. This is an iron
rod, with a piece of metal at one end twisted into the form of an
extinguisher, but with a small opening left at the pointed extremity.
The extinguisher, if it may be so termed, is made red-hot, or nearly
so, and then a piece of fat bacon is put into it, which bursts into
flame. A little stream of blazing fat passes through the small
opening, and this is made to trickle over the fowl, which is turned
upon, the spit by clockwork in front of the wood fire. The fowl or
joint thus treated tastes of burnt bacon; but the Southerners like
strong flavours, and revel in grease as well as garlic.
Fat bacon is the basis of all cookery in Guyenne and Upper Languedoc,
where the winters are too cold for the olive to flourish, and where
butter is rarely seen. The _cuisine_ is substantial, but not refined.
A little beyond Villeneuve I found Trébas, a pleasant river-side
village, with a ferruginous spring that has obtained for the place a
local reputation for healing. Here I left the Tarn again, and followed
its tributary, the Ranee, for the sake of change. This stream ran at
the bottom of a deep gorge, the sides of which were chiefly clothed
with woods, but here and there was a patch of yellow corn-field and
green vineyard. Reapers, men and women, were busy with their sickles,
singing, as they worked, their Languedocian songs that troubadours may
have been the first to sing; but nature was quiet with that repose
which so quickly follows the great festival of flowers. Already the
falling corn was whispering of the final feast of colour. All the
earlier flowers of the summer were now casting or ripening their seed.
I passed a little village on the opposite side of the gorge. The
houses, built of dark stone, even to the roofs, looked scarcely
different from their background of bare rock. Weedy vine-terraces
without vines told the oft-repeated story of privation and
long-lasting bitterness of heart in many a little home that once was
happy. I found the grandeur of solitude, without any suggestion of
human life, where huge rocks of gneiss and schist, having broken away
from the sides of the gorge, lay along the margins and in the channel
of the stream. Here I lingered, listening to the drowsy music of the
flowing water, and the murmuring of the bees amongst the purple
marjoram and the yellow agrimony, until the sunshine moving up the
rocks reminded me of the fleet-winged hours.