DAME RIQUELLE AND THE REPUBLIC OF 1848
The winter of 1847-1848 began happily enough. The people settled down
quietly again to their business of making a tolerably good harvest, and
the hateful subject of politics was dropped, thank God. In our country
of Maillane we even started, for our amusement, some representations of
popular tragedies and comedies, into which I threw myself with all the
fervour of my seventeen years. Then in the month of February, suddenly
the Revolution burst upon us, and good-bye to all the gentle arts of
blessed peace-time.
At the entrance of the village, in a small vine-clad cottage, there
dwelt at this time a worthy old body named Riquelle. She wore the
Arlesian dress of bygone days, her large white coife surmounted by a
broad-brimmed black felt hat, while a white band, passing under the
chin, framed her cheeks. By her distaff and the produce of her small
plot of ground she supported herself, but one saw from the care she took
of her person, as well as by her speech, that she had known better
days.
My first recollection of Riquelle dated back to when, at about seven
years old, I was in the habit of passing her door on my way to school.
Seated on the little bench at her threshold, her fingers busy knitting,
she would call to me:
“Have you not some fine tomatoes on your farm, my little lad? Bring me
one next time you come along.”
Time after time she asked me this, and I, boy-like, invariably forgot
all about it, till one day I mentioned to my father that old Riquelle
never saw me without asking for tomatoes.
“The accursed old dame,” growled my father angrily; “tell her they are
not ripe, do you hear, neither have they ripened for many a long year.”
The next time I saw Riquelle I gave her this message, and she dropped
the subject.
Many years later, the day after the Proclamation of the Revolution of
1848, coming to the village to inquire the latest news, the first person
I saw was Dame Riquelle standing there in her doorway, all alert and
animated, with a great topaz ring blazing on her finger.
“Hé, but the tomatoes have ripened this year,” she cried out to me.
“They are going to plant the ‘trees of liberty,’[5] and we shall all eat
of those good apples of Paradise.... Oh, Sainte-Marianne, I never
thought to live to see it again! Frédéric, my boy, become a Republican.”
I remarked on the fine ring she wore.
“Ha, yes, it is a fine ring,” she rejoined. “Fancy--I have not worn it
since the day Bonaparte quitted this country for the island of Elba! A
friend gave me this ring in the days--ah, what days those were--when we
all danced the ‘Carmagnole.’”
So saying she raised her skirt, and, making a step or two of the old
dance, entered her cottage chuckling softly at the recollection of those
bygone days.
But when I recounted the incident to my father his recollections were of
a graver kind.
“I also saw the Republic,” he said, “and it is to be hoped the atrocious
things which took place then will never be repeated. They killed the
King Louis XVI., and the beautiful Queen, his wife, besides princesses,
priests, and numberless good people of all sorts. Then foreign kings
combined and made war upon France. In order to defend the Republic,
there was a general conscription. All were called out, the lame, the
blind, the halt--not a man but had to enlist. I remember how we met a
regiment of Allobrogians on their way to Toulon. One of them seized my
young brother, and placing his naked sword across the boy’s neck--he
was but twelve years old--commanded him to cry out ‘Long live the
Republic,’ or he would finish him off. The boy did as he was told, but
the fright killed him. The nobles and the good priests, all were
suspected, and those who could emigrate did so, in order to escape the
guillotine. The Abbé Riousset, disguised as a shepherd, made his way to
Piedmont with the flocks of Monsieur de Lubières. We managed to save
Monsieur Victorin Cartier, whose lands we farmed. For three months we
hid him in a cave we dug out under the wine-casks, and whenever the
municipal officers or the police of the district came down upon us to
count the lambs we had in the fold, and the loaves of bread in the pans,
in accordance with the law, my poor mother would hasten to fry a big
omelette at the stove.
“When once they had eaten and drunk their fill, they would forget, or
pretend to do so, to take further perquisites, and off they would go,
carrying great branches of laurel with which to greet the victorious
armies of the Republic. The châteaux were pillaged, the very dove-cotes
demolished, the bells melted down, and the crosses broken. In the
churches they piled up great mounds of earth on which they planted
pine-trees, oaks and junipers. The church at Maillane was turned into a
club, and if you refused to go to their meetings you were at once
denounced and notified as ‘suspect.’ Our priest, who happened
unfortunately to be a coward and a traitor, announced one day from the
pulpit that all he had hitherto preached was a lie. He roused such
indignation that, had not every man lived in fear of his neighbour, they
would have stoned him. It was this same priest who another time wound up
his discourse with the injunction that any one who knew of or aided in
hiding a ‘suspect,’ would be held guilty of mortal sin unless he
denounced such a one at once to the Commune. Finally, they ended by
abolishing all observance of Sundays and feast-days, and instead, every
tenth day, in great pomp they adored the Goddess of Reason--and would
you know who was the goddess at Maillane? Why, none other than the old
dame Riquelle!”
We all exclaimed in surprise.
“Riquelle,” continued my father, “was at that time eighteen years old. A
handsome, well-grown girl, one of the most admired in all the country. I
was about the same age. Her father was Mayor of Maillane and by trade a
shoemaker--he made me a pair of shoes I remember wearing when I joined
the army. Well, imagine it--I saw this same Riquelle in the garments, or
rather the lack of garments, of a heathen goddess, a red cap on her
head, seated on the altar of the church.”
All this my father recounted at supper one evening about the year 1848.
Some eleven years after, I, finding myself in Paris just after the
publication of _Mireille_, was dining at the house of the hospitable
banker Milland, he who delighted to assemble every week at his board a
gathering of artists, savants, and men of letters. We were about fifty,
and I had the honour of sitting on one side of our charming hostess,
while Méry was on the other. Towards the end of dinner an old man very
simply attired addressed me in Provençal from the further end of the
table, inquiring if I came from Maillane. It was the father of my host,
and I rose and sat down beside him.
“Do you happen to know the daughter of the once famous Mayor of
Maillane, Jacques Riquelle?” he inquired.
“Riquelle the goddess? Aye, indeed,” I answered; “we are right good
friends.”
“Well, fifty years ago,” said the old man, “when I went to Maillane to
sell horses and mules----”
“You gave her a topaz ring!” I cried with a sudden inspiration.
The old fellow shook his sides with laughter and answered, delighted:
“What, she told you about that? Ah, my dear sir----”
But at this moment we were interrupted by the banker, who, in accordance
with his custom, after every meal came to pay his respects to his worthy
father, whereupon the latter, placing his hands patriarchal fashion on
his son’s head, bestowed on him his benediction.
But to return to my own story. In spite of the views held by my family,
this outburst of liberty and enterprise, which breaks down the old
fences when a revolution is rife, had found me already aflame and eager
to follow the onrush. At the first proclamation signed with the
illustrious name of Lamartine my muse awoke and burst forth into fiery
song, which the local papers of Arles and Avignon hastened to publish:
Réveillez-vous enfants de la Gironde,
Et tressaillez dans vos sepulcres froids;
La liberté va rajeunir le monde ...
Guerre éternelle entre nous et les rois.
A mad enthusiasm seized me for all humanitarian and liberal ideas; and
my Republicanism, while it scandalised the Royalists of Maillane, who
regarded me as a turncoat, delighted the Republicans, who, being in the
minority, were enchanted at getting me to join them in shouting the
“Marseillaise.”
And here, in Provence, as elsewhere, all this brought in its train
broils and internal divisions. The Reds proclaimed their sentiments by
wearing a belt and scarf of scarlet, while the Whites wore green. The
former carried a buttonhole of thyme, emblem of the mountain, and the
latter a sprig of the royal lily. The Republicans planted the “trees of
liberty” at every corner, and by night the Royalists kicked them down.
Thereupon followed riots and knife-thrusts; till before long this good
people, these Provenceaux of the same race, who a month before had been
living in brotherly love and good fellowship, were all ready to make
mincemeat of one another for a party wrangle that led to nothing.
All students of the same year took sides and split into rival parties,
neither of which ever lost an opportunity of a skirmish. Every evening
we Reds, after washing down our omelettes with plenty of good wine,
issued from the inn according to the correct village fashion, in shirt
sleeves, with a napkin round our necks. Down the street we went to the
sound of the tambour, dancing the “Carmagnole” and singing at the pitch
of our voices the latest song in vogue.
We finished the evening usually by keeping high carnival, and yelling
“Long live Marianne,”[6] as we waved high our red belts.
One fine day, as I appeared in the morning, none too early, after an
evening of this kind, I found my father awaiting me. “Come this way,
Frédéric,” he said in his most serious and impressive manner, “I wish to
speak to you.”
“You are in for it this time, Frédéric,” thought I to myself; “now all
the fat is in the fire!” Following him in silence, he led the way to a
quiet spot at the back of the farm, where he made me sit down on the
bank by his side.
“What is this they tell me?” he began. “That you, my son, have joined
these young scamps who go about yelling ‘Long live Marianne’--that you
dance the ‘Carmagnole,’ waving your red sash? Ah, Frédéric, you are
young--know you it was with that dance and those same cries the
Revolutionists set up the scaffold? Not content with having published in
all the papers a song in which you pour contempt on all kings---- But
what harm have they done you, may I ask, these unfortunate kings?”
I must confess I found this question somewhat difficult to answer, and
my sire continued:
“Monsieur Durand-Maillane, a learned man, since he it was who presided
at the famous Convention, and wise as he was learned, refused to sign
the death warrant of the King, and speaking one day to his nephew
Pélissier, also member of the Convention, he warned him: ‘Pélissier,’
said he, ‘thou art young and thou wilt surely see the day when the
people will have to pay with many thousands of heads for this death of
their King.’ A prophecy which was verified only too fully by twenty
years of ruthless war.”
“But,” I protested, “this Republic desires harm to no man. They have
just abolished capital punishment for political offenders. Some of the
first names in France figure in the provisionary Government--the
astronomer Arago, the great poet Lamartine; our ‘trees of liberty’[7]
are blessed by the priests themselves. And, let me ask you, my father,”
I insisted, “is it not a fact that before 1789 the aristocrats oppressed
the people somewhat beyond endurance?”
“Well,” conceded my worthy sire, “I will not deny there were abuses,
great abuses--I can cite you an example. One day--I must have been
about fourteen years old--I was coming from Saint-Rémy with a waggon of
straw trusses. The mistral blew with such force I failed to hear a voice
behind calling to me to make way for a carriage to pass. The owner, who
was a priest of the nobility, Monsieur de Verclos, managed at last to
pass me, and as he did so gave me a lash with his whip across the face,
which covered me with blood. There were some peasants pasturing close
by, and their indignation was such at this action that they fell upon
the man of God, in spite of his Order being at that time held sacred,
and beat him without mercy. Ah, undoubtedly,” reflected my father,
“there were some bad specimens among them, and the Revolution just at
first attracted a good many of us. But gradually everything went wrong
and as usual the good paid for the bad.”
* * * * *
And so with the Revolution of 1848; all at first appeared to be on good
and straight lines. We Provenceaux were represented in the National
Assembly by such first-class men as Berryer, Lamartine, Lamennais,
Béranger, Lacordaire, Garnier-Pagès, Marie, and a poet of the people
named Astouin. But the party-spirited reactionaries soon poisoned
everything; the butcheries and massacres of June horrified the nation.
The moderates grew cold, the extremists became venomous, and all my
fair young visions of a platonic Republic were overcast with gloomy
doubt. Happily light from another quarter shed its beams on my soul.
Nature, revealing herself in the grand order, space and peace of the
rustic life, opened her arms to me; it was the triumph of Ceres.
In the present day, when machinery has almost obliterated agriculture,
the cultivation of the soil is losing more and more the noble aspect of
that sacred art and of its idyllic character. Now at harvest time the
plains are covered with a kind of monster spider and gigantic crab,
which scratch up the ground with their claws, and cut down the grain
with cutlasses, and bind the sheaves with wire; then follow other
monsters snorting steam, a sort of Tarascon dragon who seizes on the
fallen wheat, cuts the straw, sifts the grain, and shakes out the ears
of corn. All this is done in latest American style, a dull matter of
business, with never a song to make toil a gladness, amid a whirl of
noise, dust, and hideous smoke, and the constant dread, if you are not
constantly on the watch, that the monster will snap off one of your
limbs. This is Progress, the fatal Reaper, against whom it is useless to
contend, bitter result of science, that tree of knowledge whose fruit
is both good and evil.
But at the time of which I write, the old methods were still in use,
with all the picturesque apparatus of classic times.
So soon as the corn took on a shade of apricot, throughout the Commune
of Arles, a messenger went the round of the mountain villages blowing
his horn and crying: “This is to give notice that the corn in Arles is
ripening.”
Thereupon the mountaineers, in groups of threes and fours, with their
wives and daughters, their donkeys and mules, made ready to descend to
the plains for harvesting. A couple of harvesters, together with a boy
or young girl to stack the sheaves, made up a _solque_, and the men
hired themselves out in gangs of so many _solques_, who undertook the
field by contract. At the head of the group walked the chief, making a
pathway through the corn, while another, called the bailiff, organised
and directed the work.
As in the days of Cincinnatus, Cato and Virgil, we reaped with the
sickle, the fingers of the right hand protected by a shield of twisted
reeds or rushes.
At Arles, about the time of Saint John’s Day, thousands of these harvest
labourers might be seen assembled in the Place des Hommes, their
scythes slung on their backs, standing and lying about while waiting to
be hired.
In the mountain districts a man who had never done his harvesting in the
plains of Arles found it hard, so they said, to get any girl to marry
him, and it was on this custom Félix Gras founded the story of his epic
poem “Les Charbonniers.”
On our own farm we hired from seven to eight of these groups every year
at harvest-time. It was a fine upset throughout the house when these
folk arrived. All sorts of special utensils were unearthed for the
occasion, barrels made of willow wood, enormous earthenware pans, big
pots and jugs for wine, a whole battery of the rough pottery made at
Apt. It was a time of constant feasting and gaiety, above all when we
lit the bonfires on Saint John’s Day and danced round them singing the
harvest songs.
Every day at dawn the reapers ranged themselves in line, and so soon as
the chief had opened out a pathway through the cornfield all glistening
with morning dew, they swung their blades, and as they slowly advanced
down fell the golden corn. The sheaf-binders, most of whom were young
girls in the freshness of their youthful bloom, followed after, bending
low over the fallen grain, laughing and jesting with a gaiety it
rejoiced one’s heart to see. Then as the sun appeared bathing the sky
all rosy red and sending forth a glory of golden rays, the chief,
raising high in the air his scythe, would cry, “Hail to the new day,”
and all the scythes would follow suit. Having thus saluted the newly
risen sun, again they fell to work, the cornfield bowing down as they
advanced with rhythmic harmonious movement of their bare arms. From time
to time the bailiff cried out, mustering his troop for another turn. At
last, after four hours’ vigorous work, the chief would give the word for
all to rest. Whereupon, after washing the handles of their scythes in
the nearest stream, they would sit down on the sheaves in the middle of
the stubble, and take their first repast.
It was my work, with the aid of Babache, our old mule, to take round the
provisions in rope baskets.
The harvesters had five meals a day, beginning with the breakfast at
seven o’clock, which consisted of anchovies spread on bread steeped in
oil and vinegar, together with raw onions, an invariable accompaniment.
At ten o’clock they had the “big drink,” as it was called, with
hard-boiled eggs and cheese; at one o’clock dinner, soup and vegetables;
at four a large salad, with which were eaten crusts rubbed with garlic;
and finally the supper, consisting either of pork or mutton and
sometimes an omelette strongly flavoured with onion, a favourite
harvesting dish. In the field they drank by turns from a barrel taken
round by the chief and swung on a pole, which he balanced on the
shoulder of the one drinking. For their meals in the field they had one
plate between three, each one helping himself with a big wooden spoon.
When the reapers’ work was done, came the gleaners to gather the stray
ears left among the stubble. Troops of these women went the rounds of
the farms, sleeping at night under small tents, which served to protect
them from the mosquito. A third of their gleanings, according to the
usage in the country of Arles, went always to the hospital.
Such were the people, fine children of the soil, who were not only my
models but my teachers in the art of poetry. It was in this company, the
grand sun of Provence streaming down on me as I lay full length beneath
a willow-tree, that I learnt to pipe and sing such songs as “Les
Moissons” and others in “Les Iles d’Or.”