alarming noise broke the silence and became rapidly louder. I looked
up the steep cliff, and saw to my consternation a great stone bounding
down the rocks and crashing through the vines. As I seemed to be in
the line of it I hastened on. I had only gone about ten yards when it
bounded into the air and, passing sheer over the path and bank,
plunged into the Tarn with a mighty splash. I reckoned that had I
remained where I was it would have just cleared my head. It was a
fragment of rock which, from its size, might well have been two
hundredweight. The same thing happened earlier in the day, but that
time I was not so unpleasantly near. The heavy rain of the previous
night, coming after a long period of drought, was probably the cause
of these already-loosened stones starting upon their downward career.
All these calcareous rocks are breaking up. The process of
disintegration and decomposition is slow, but it is sure. Every frost
does something to split them, and every shower of rain entering the
crevices does something to rot them; so that even they cannot last.
The Tarn is carrying them back to the sea, to be deposited again, but
somewhere else.
I was at Sainte-Enimie before sunset, and there I found the air laden
with the scent of lavender. True, all the hills round about were
covered with a blue-gray mantle; but I had never known the plant when
undisturbed give out such an aroma before. Looking down from the
little bridge to the waterside, my wonder ceased. There in a line,
with wood-fires blazing under them, were several stills, and behind
these, upon the bank, were heaps of lavender stalks and flowers such
as I had never seen even in imagination. There were enough to fill
several bullock-waggons. The fragrance in the air, however, did not
come so much from these mounds as from the distilled essence. It was
evident that Sainte-Enimie had a considerable trade in lavender-water.
I spent an unhappy evening, for the inn where I stopped--it called
itself a hotel--had been made uninteresting by enterprise; and a
couple of tourists from the South, with whom it was my lot to dine,
caused me unspeakable misery by talking of nothing else but of a
bridge which they had lately seen; If I should ever be near it, I
think the recollection of that evening will make me avoid it. It may
be a miracle in iron, but none the less shall I owe it an everlasting
grudge. These gentlemen from Carcassonne were typical sons of the
South in this, that the sound of their own voices acted upon their
imagination like the strongest coffee blended with the oldest cognac.
They would have been amusing, nevertheless, but for the horrible
intensity of their resolve to make me see that nightmare of a bridge.
If one had taken breath while the other spoke, or rather shouted, I
should have suffered less; but they both shouted together, and their
struggle to get the better of one another by force of lung,
gesticulation, and frenzied rolling of the eyes became a duel, whereby
the solitary witness was the only person harmed. What a relief to me
if they had gone down to the river bank and fought it out there! No
such luck, however. Had there been no listener, they, too, might have
wished the bridge in the depths of Tartarus.
If I passed an unhappy evening at Sainte-Enimie, I spent a worse
morning. There was a change of weather in the night, and when the day
came again, it was a blear-eyed, weeping day, with that uniform gray
sky with steam-like clouds hiding half the hills which, when seen in a
mountainous region by a person bent on movement, is enough to give him
'goose flesh.' I now felt a longing to leave the Cevennes and to
return to the lower country, but there seemed no chance of escape. The
rain continued hour after hour--and such rain! It was enough to turn a
frog against water. As the people of the inn seemed incapable of
showing sympathy, I went out to look at the town under a borrowed
umbrella. It was certainly not much to look at, especially under
circumstances of such acute depression. I walked or waded through a
number of miry little streets where all manner of refuse was in a
saturated or deliquescent state--cabbage-stumps and dead rats floating
in the gutters, potato-peelings and bean-pods sticking to the
mediaeval pitching--everything slippery, nasty, and abominable. There
were old houses, as a matter of course; but who can appreciate
antiquities when his legs are wet about the knees and his boots are
squirting water? Nevertheless, I tried to notice a few things besides
the vileness underfoot. One was a rudely-carved image of the Virgin in
a niche covered by a grating. This was in such a dark little street
that it seemed as if the sun had given up all hope of ever shining
there again. I struggled through the slush to the church, built, with
the town, on the side of a hill rising from the Tarn. I found a
Romanesque edifice--old, but rough, and offering no striking feature,
save the arched recesses in the exterior surface of the wall. A little
higher upon the hill was the convent founded by St. Enimie; but the
original building disappeared centuries ago.
On returning to the inn I passed the Fontaine de Burlats, where St.
Enimie was cured of her leprosy in the Merovingian age. It was a
change to see something that really seemed to enjoy the incessant
downpour and to enter into the spirit of it. The fountain would be
remarkable in another region by the volume of water that gushes in all
seasons like a little river out of the earth; but there are so many
such between the Dordogne and the Tarn, wherever the calcareous
formation has lent itself to the honeycombing action of water, that
this copious outflow loses thereby much of its claim to distinction.
The legend of St. Enimie is fully set forth in a Provençal poem of the
thirteenth century by the troubadour Bertrand de Marseilles, who
received his information from his friend the Prior of the monastery at
Sainte-Enimie, which in the Middle Ages was the most important
religious house in the Gévaudan. The MS. is preserved in the library
of the Arsenal, Paris. It was at the express recommendation of St.
Ilère that Enimie sought the fountain of Burla (now Burlats), and
bathed her afflicted body in its pure waters. The passage of the poem
containing this injunction is as follows:
'Enimia verges de Dyeu,
Messatges fizels ti suy yeu.
Per me ti manda Dieus de pla
Que t'en anes en Gavalda,[*]
Car, lay trobaras una fon
Que redra ton cors bel e mon
Si te laves en l'aygua clara.
* * * *
A nom Burla; vay l'en lay
Non ho mudar per negun play.'
[*] Gévaudan.
The relics of the saint were destroyed or lost at the time of the
Revolution; but high upon the side of a neighbouring hill a chapel has
been raised to her, and it is a place of pilgrimage.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE LOT.
The rambler in the highlands of the North knows so well what the
wretchedness of being shut up by bad weather in a mountain inn means,
that he may have grown reconciled to it, and have learnt how to spend
a day under such circumstances pleasantly. But to me, a sun-lover, to
whom the charm of the South has been irresistible, such a trial is one
that taxes to the utmost all the powers of endurance. Hence it is
that, when I think of Sainte-Enimie, I can recall nothing but
impressions of dismal wetness. This may seem shocking to those who
have seen, under a different aspect, the little town on the Upper
Tarn, named after the Merovingian saint. Be it remembered, however,
that I was shut up hour after hour in an inn crowded with peasants in
damp blouses, shouting _patois_ at each other, and clutching great
cotton umbrellas, whose fragrance under the influence of moisture, was
not idyllic; In that abominable little auberge, that styled itself a
hotel, I decided to go no farther up the Tarn, but, as soon as the
weather would set me free, to cross the _causse_ that separated me
from the Lot, and to descend the valley of this river towards the
warmer and dryer region of the plains.
Not until the afternoon were there any signs of improvement in the
weather; and then, as soon as the clouds grew lighter, I started
without waiting for the rain to stop. It was Sunday, and outside the
old church was a crowd of men and boys, who had come for vespers. The
women did not join them, but passed through the door as they arrived.
Throughout rural France, wherever religion keeps a firm hold on the
peasant, it is the custom of the men to gather for gossip in front of
the church some time before the service, and, just as the bell stops;
to make a rush at the doorway, and struggle through the opening like
sheep into a fold when there is a dog at their heels. While looking at
these men, I was again struck by the prevailing tendency of the
peasants of the Lozère to develop long, sharp noses--a feature that
often gives them a very weasel-like expression.
Having passed the ruins of the monastery, whose high loopholed walls
and strong tower showed that it had once been a fortress as well as a
religious house, I was soon rising far above the valley of the Tarn.
The winding road led me up the flanks of stony hills, terraced
everywhere for almond-trees; but after two or three hours of ascent
the almonds dwindled away, and the country became an absolute desert
of brashy hills, showing little asperity of outline, but mournful and
solemn by their wastefulness and abandonment to a degree that makes
the traveller ask himself if he is really in Europe, or has been
transported by magic to the most arid steppes of Asia. But there is a
plant that thrives in this desert, that loves it so much as to give to
it a tinge of dusty blue as far as the eye can reach on every side.
Needless to say that this is the lavender. It was in all its flowering
beauty as I crossed the treeless waste, and it gave to the breath of
the desert what seemed to be the mystical fragrance of peace.
Leaving the highway to Mende, I took a rough road on the left, which,
according to the map, led directly to Chanac by the Lot. I should
recommend no one else to take it unless he have more hours of daylight
before him than I had. Again I ran a near risk of passing the night in
the open air. The road became little better than a track; then it
crossed others, and it was a very pretty puzzle to tell which was the
one for me and which was not. It is true that I could have made
straight towards the Lot by the compass, but the descent of the
precipitous cliffs into the deep gorge, unless one knows the paths, is
only a task to be undertaken at nightfall with a light heart by those
who have had no experience of this savage district. When my perplexity
was at its worst I saw a shepherd, whose form, wrapped in the long
brown homespun cloak called a _limousine_, stood solemnly against the
evening sky. I made towards him, thinking that he would help me out of
my difficulty; but no: either he did not understand a word I said, or
did not choose to give any information. Perhaps he thought me an
escaped madman, or a dangerous tramp, with whom it was better to hold
no conversation. The sun was setting when I reached a wood of
scattered firs--a more melancholy spot at that hour than the bare
_causse_. The weather had been fine for some hours, but now a storm
that had been gathering broke. As the wind blew the rain in slanting
lines, the level sun shone through the vapour and the streaming
atmosphere. Looking above me, as I sheltered myself behind a wailing
fir, I saw that the dreary world was spanned by two glorious rainbows.
But although the scene was so wildly beautiful, the spirit of
desolation was upon me, and I felt like a homeless wanderer. I was
roaming among the firs in the dusk, when I met a shepherd boy, who put
me on a path that joined the main road to Chanac. Then began the
descent into the valley of the Lot. It was very long; the winding road
passed through a black forest of firs, and the dark night fell when I
was still far from the little town. The walk was gloomy, but in all
gloom there is something that is grand and elevating--something that
gives a sense of expansion to the soul. The cries of the unseen
night-birds, the solemn mystery of the enigmatic trees wrapped in
darkness, make us feel the supernatural that surrounds us, and is a
part of us, more than the visible movement of life in the light of the
sun.
At length the oil-lamps of Chanac flashed brightly in the hollow
below, and not long afterwards I was sitting at a table in an upper
room of a comfortable old inn, the lower part of which was filled with
roisterers, for it was Sunday night. I dined with a Government
functionary--an inland revenue _contrôleur_, who happened to be a
Frenchman of the reserved and solemn sort that cultivates dignity. By
dint of being looked up to by others he had acquired the fixed habit
of looking up to himself. All the time that I was in his company I
felt that, had he been an angel dining with a modern Tobias, he could
scarcely have shown greater anxiety not to sit upon his wings. Moved
by the genial spirit of the grape, or not wishing, perhaps, to crush
me altogether with the weight of his official importance, his ice
began to melt a little at about the second or third course. Forgetting
discretion, he actually smiled. The meal, which had been prepared in
anticipation of his coming, was a much more splendid entertainment
than would have been got up for me had I been alone. The cook's
masterpiece was a very cunningly contrived pasty--a work of local
genius that I was quite unprepared for. Even M. le contrôleur, had he
not checked himself in time, would have beamed at this achievement;
but he would never have forgiven himself such an admission of weakness
common to mortals not in the service of the Government. Just before
the dessert a superb trout that had been drawn out of the sparkling
Lot was brought in, and it had been mercifully spared the disgrace of
being sprinkled with chopped garlic.
While we were dining the wassailers in the great kitchen and general
room downstairs became more and more uproarious. Dancing had
commenced, and it was the _bourrée_, the delightful _bourrée_ of
Auvergne (the Upper Lot here runs not very far from the Cantal) that
was being danced. It is a measure that has no local colour unless it
is accompanied by violent stamping. The _contrôleur_ looked very
scandalized, and said it was abominable that the house should be given
up to such tumult and disorder. I observed, however, that as the
joyousness of the party downstairs increased my companion's face
became animated by an expression that was not one of genuine anger,
and as soon as he had drunk his coffee he remarked in a tone of
indifference that, as the evening had to be spent somehow, it might be
less disagreeable to see what was going on below than simply to hear
it. I soon followed him, and found that he was enjoying himself
thoroughly, although discreetly, in a quiet corner. The kitchen was
filled with young fellows in blouses, some sitting at tables drinking
and smoking, others standing; all were shouting, whistling or raising
peals of laughter that might have brought the house about their ears
had it been built by a modern contractor. In the centre of the room
the bare-armed kitchenmaid, who had left the platters, and a young
peasant in a blouse were dancing, their backs turned to each other,
moving their arms up and down like puppets in a barrel-organ, and
banging the floor with their sabots, with the full conviction that the
greater the noise the greater the fun. And this was the opinion of all
except the stout hostess, who looked on at the scene with a distressed
countenance from behind a mighty pile of dirty plates. The musicians
were spectators who whistled in a band the air of the _bourrée_, which
is enough to make the most sedate Canon who ever sat in a stall dance,
or at least to remember with charity the promptings of his
adolescence.
When the kitchenmaid went back to her plates--to the great relief of
her mistress, who would have sternly condemned her tripping if
thoughts of business had not beset her practical mind--two young men
stood up and danced another _bourrée_. With the exception of the
scullion and household drudge there was no chance of getting a female
partner. In these villages and small towns the girls are kept out of
harm's way. They go to bed at eight or nine, and are hard at work
either in the fields or in the house, or washing by the stream, all
through the hours of daylight. The priests, wherever they have
influence--and in the South they have a great deal--set their faces
strongly against dancing by the two sexes, except under very
exceptional circumstances. They are right; they have peculiar
facilities for knowing the variety of human nature with which they
have to deal. Humanity is fundamentally the same everywhere, but what
is fundamental is modified by race and climate. Temperament, fashioned
by causes innate and local, exercises an immense influence upon
practical morality.
And so the revel went on. As the glasses were refilled the noise grew
louder and the smoke denser. I soon had enough of it, and taking a
candle I climbed to my bedroom, leaving the _contrôleur_ in his
corner. Before going to bed I did a little sewing, having borrowed a
threaded needle from the landlady with this object in view. The
wayfarer should be ready to help himself as far as he can, and
although sewing is not, perhaps, the most manly of accomplishments, no
tourist should be incapable of sewing on a button or closing up a rent
that makes the village children laugh.
My walk across the _causse_ separating two rivers had tired me, but I
might as well have remained downstairs for all the sleep that I
enticed. As the hours wore on the uproar, instead of subsiding, became
more terrific. These Southerners have voices of such rock-splitting
power that, when twenty or thirty of them, inspired by Bacchus, or
excited by discussion, shout together, one asks if it would be
possible for devils on the rampage to raise a more hideous tumult. The
house trembled as from a succession of thunderclaps. Midnight struck,
and the uproar was unabated. At one it had entered upon the
quarrelsome phase, and at two there was a fight. Chairs or tables were
overthrown, there was a smashing of glass, a rapid scuffling of feet,
and the screaming and howling as of a menagerie on fire. Above the
fiendish din rang out the shrill voice of the hostess, who was
evidently trying to separate the combatants, and who seemed to be
successful, for the hurricane suddenly lulled.
This hostess was a woman of words, but the landlady of an inn near
Rodez, which I entered one summer evening, showed herself under
similar circumstances to be a woman of action. Two young men who were
sitting at a table, after a very brief difference of opinion, stared
fixedly and fiercely into each other's face, and then sprang at one
another like a couple of tom-cats. Presently the stronger took the
other up in his arms, carried him out through the door, and, having
pitched him considerately upon the manure-heap in the yard, returned
to his place with the expression of the victorious cat. But he
reckoned without his hostess. She was not tall, but her cubic capacity
took up more place in the world than that of two or three ordinary
mortals. With her great bare arms folded across her ample person she
waddled towards the triumphant young man, and there was a look in her
eye that made him wriggle uneasily upon his chair. I think he was
tempted to run away, but shame nailed him to his seat. As soon as the
pair were at close quarters, one of the folded bolster-like arms made
a sudden movement, and the back of the strong rough hand, hardened by
forty years or more of toil, covered for an instant the youth's nose
and mouth. That single movement of a female arm, the muscular
development of which a pugilist might have envied, shed more blood
than all the clawing, tugging, and butting of the male combatants had
caused to flow. 'That is to teach you,' said the strong woman, 'not to
fight in my house again!'
But I am forgetting that I am now at Chanac. When I went down into the
kitchen at about seven o'clock, after two or three hours' sleep, the
landlady and the other women of the inn looked very tired and
sheepish. They were prepared to hear some strong criticism of the
night's proceedings, such as they would be sure to get when the
_contrôleur_ came down.
'You seem to have had some good amusement last night, and to have kept
it up well,' said I.
'Oh, monsieur,' exclaimed the hostess, shaking her head dolefully,
'what a night it was!'
And she went on shaking her head, while the kitchen-maid--the one who
danced the _bourrée_, and was now listlessly rinsing glasses
innumerable--giggled behind her mistress's back. She evidently thought
that it was a good sort of night. In making up the bill I think that
the regretful aubergiste, who felt, that the reputation of her house
had received a cruel blow, and that all the mothers in the place were
reviling her for encouraging their sons in dissipation, must have left
the bed out of the reckoning, considering that she could not honestly
charge me for a night's rest which I did not get. At any rate, the
bill was ridiculously small.
[Illustration: CIGALA, THE SHOEBLACK.]
Now, with the help of daylight, I can see what the little town is
like. The houses--many of which have late Gothic doorways--are
clustered about the sides of an isolated hill or mamelon in the valley
of the Lot, beyond which rise the high cliffs covered with dark woods.
The town is still dominated by the tall rectangular tower that helped
to protect it in the Middle Ages, and near to this is the church,
which is both Romanesque and Gothic, and is rich in curious details.
The sanctuary is separated from the rest of the choir by the graceful
arcade of numerous little arches supported by tall and slender
columns, which is one of the most charming and characteristic features
of the Auvergnat style. The carving of the capitals exhibits in a
delightful manner the hardihood and florid fancy of this singularly
interesting development of Byzantine-Romanesque taste. Upon one of the
piers of the sanctuary are a pair of symbolical doves dipping their
beaks into the chalice that separates them, and upon another are two
grotesque and fantastic beasts facing one another with frightful jaws
wide open.
The walk from Chanac down the valley through the rest of the
department of the Lozère I did not do fairly. The sun was so hot and
the way so tedious that I at length yielded to the temptation of the
railway that I met here, and rode some fifteen or twenty miles. It was
not until the next morning at St. Laurent d'Olt that I braced myself
up to the task of faring on foot by the river through the department
of the Aveyron. Here in the upper country the stream retains its
ancient name, the Olt, which is merely an abbreviation of Oltis,
unless it be the Celtic origin of the Latin word. It is easy to see
how in rapid speech L'Olt became changed to Lot. The _t_ is still
pronounced.
The valley down which I now took my way from St. Laurent was broad and
green, but the high rocky cliffs which shut it off from the outer
world drew nearer as I went on. An old tramp who had a bag slung over
his back stopped me and said that he was 'dans la misère.' Doubtless
he guessed that I was not quite so deep in it as himself, and that I
might be able to spare him something. As I always look upon the tramp
with a fraternal interest, however disreputable he may appear, because
my own wayfaring has helped to teach me contempt for appearances, I
stopped to talk with the aged wanderer while hunting for some stray
sous. His matted gray beard and sunken cheeks gave him the air of a
Job of the studios; but no such luck had probably ever befallen him as
to be asked to pose for thirty sous the hour. Such a sum would be more
than he could gather in a day, even after selling the surplus of his
begged crusts. He talked to me of 'the picturesque,' which proved that
he had not grown gray and half doubled up without learning something
of the world's wisdom. I learnt from him that between the spot where
we met and St. Geniez there was only a hamlet, but that I should be
able to find a house there where I could get a meal.
The old man went hobbling away, wondering, perhaps, when he would meet
another foreign imbecile on the tramp, and I was soon alone upon the
margin of the river's broad bed of sand, strewn with pebbles like the
seashore. The stream was still fresh from the mountains, and it had
the joyousness and bounding movements of young life. It was very
narrow now, and many plants had grown up since the spring upon its
far-shelving banks of mica-glittering sand and many-coloured pebbles;
but often its swollen waters had rolled through this smiling valley, a
raging and uncontrollable force, spreading terror and destruction.