Two Summers in Guyenne Part 15

'Where is it?'

'On the river. I have left it at the mill just below here. We have come from St. Apre.'

'St. Apre! And where are you going?'

'To Coutras, I hope.'

By this time several persons who had collected in the pa.s.sage and the kitchen were grinning from ear to ear. I felt that all eyes were fixed upon my red feet, and not liking the situation, I resolved to end it.

'As you are afraid, I will give you my card.' So saying, I pushed my way into the _salle a manger_, and pulled out a card, which, marvellous to say, I had managed to keep dry. Now, the card itself conveyed nothing of importance to anybody. It was the manner of saying, 'I will give you my card,' together with the movement that meant, 'I am here, and I intend to stop,' that broke down the resolution of the two women to turn us from their door.

Their confidence gradually came, and they gave us a very good dinner, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. We had comfortable beds, too, and the next morning we got our feet into our boots. We bought our provisions for the day at the inn, and to avoid the curiosity of the natives, we escaped by a back way, and hobbled down to the boat through a rocky field.

The stream was strong for a few miles below the mill at La Roche. The canoe went down by itself fast enough, but the water had to be watched carefully, for the bed was strewn with rocks. Sometimes we shot over blocks of limestone that were only three or four inches below the surface. We could not be sure from one minute to another that our rapid flight would not meet with a sudden check. In this excitement of uncertainty there was true pleasure. We chose our first spot for bathing where the current was strong, and had our second swim in a wide and beautiful pool, where the table-like rocks, smooth and polished, could be seen ten or twelve feet below the surface. Then having spread out our provisions once more on the river bank in a nook that seemed to be far from village, or even homestead, we had an unpleasant surprise. About a dozen boys, on their way home from some hidden school, suddenly appeared round a wooded corner, and after being brought to a momentary standstill by their own astonishment, made straight towards us. Having examined the canoe with much curiosity, they sat down in a half-circle just behind us, with minds evidently made up to wait and see us off. They watched us through our meal with much interest, and made jokes in patois at our expense. They were not, however, so boldly bad as many boys, and there was no sufficient reason to drive them away. Moreover, they may have had a better right to be there than we. The field may have belonged to the father of one of them. I suggested to them that their mothers might be anxious, if not angry, on account of their loitering; but they were not to be moved by any such reminders. They had made up their minds to see us off, and this they did, to their great delight and entertainment.

The river was charming, with its myriads of white water-lilies and forests of reeds. Once it spread out into a lake, in which was a little island covered with tall bulrushes and purple loosestrife. But although there was so much pleasure for the eye, the afternoon was one of suffering. We were blistering from the heat of the sun, and our bottles being emptied, we were tormented with thirst. It was true that there was plenty of water always within reach; but it had already run past a good many villages and small towns, and, moreover, it was tepid. After leaving La Roche Chalais the river had on its left bank the department of the Dordogne, and on its right the Charente Inferieure. Rather late in the afternoon we entered the Gironde, and soon afterwards heard the familiar sound of women beating linen with their _battoirs_ by the side of the water. We came upon a crowd of them, and learnt from them that the village of Les eglisottes was close by. Having obtained here both water and white wine, we were able to continue the voyage in better spirits.

This fifth and last day on the Dronne was the most trying of all. The distance may not have been more than twenty-five miles, but we were very jaded. There were few weirs, but some of them were not easy to pa.s.s. Then the boat from time to time had to be dragged a long way through reeds, where there was not enough water to float it. For eight or nine hours the sun raged above us; but the cool evening came at length--about the time that we pa.s.sed the last mill. The river was broad and deep, and I thought that we could not be far from Coutras; but long reaches succeeded one another, and the great forests of the Double on the left seemed as if they would never end.

The river is now running--or, rather, creeping, for it has lost its current--under densely-wooded hills, and the water is deeply dyed with interflowing tints of green and gold. These fade, and in the gathering darkness without a moon the silent Dronne grows very sombre. The boat must have received an exceptionally hard knock at the last weir, for we feel the water rising about our feet. The wonder is that our frail craft has taken its five days' b.u.mping over stumps and stones so well. It would be very annoying if it were to sink with us now that we are so near the end of our voyage. But is the end so near? We scan the distance in front of us in search of twinkling lights, but the only twinkle comes from a brightening star. We see the long wan line of water, marked with awful shadows near the banks, from which, too, half-submerged trees, long since dead, lift strange arms or stretch out long necks and goblin heads that seem to mock and jibe at us in this fas.h.i.+on: 'Ha! ha! you are going down! We'll drag you under!'

And the interminable black forest stretches away, away, always in front, until it is lost in the dusky sky.

Ah, there is a sound at length to break the monotonous dip, dip of the paddles, and it is a sweet sound too. It is the angelus; there is no mistaking it. It is very faint, but it puts fresh strength into our arms, and revives the hope that this river will lead us somewhere.

It led us to Coutras. There at about nine o'clock we beached the half water-logged canoe not far above the spot to which the tide rises from the broad Atlantic. We felt that we had had quite enough waterfaring to satisfy us for the present. We had voyaged about eighty miles, and pa.s.sed about forty weirs.

BY THE LOWER DORDOGNE

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STREET AT ST. eMILION.]

The nooks and corners where great men of the past spent their lives quietly and thoughtfully often lie far enough from the beaten ways to provide the romantic tramp with a motive that he may need to excuse his singularity in faring on foot over a tract of country which lacks the kind of picturesqueness that would mark it out as a territory to be annexed by the tourist sooner or later. Having found myself, almost unexpectedly, in the district of Michel de Montaigne, after crossing the Double, I reckoned that less than a day's quiet walking would bring me to the village of St. Michel-Bonnefare--better known in the region as St. Michel-Montaigne (p.r.o.nounced there Montagne, as the name was originally spelt), close to the castle or manor-house where the contemplative Perigourdin gentleman was born, and where he wrote his 'Essays' in a tower, of which he has left a detailed description. Then there was another lure: the battle-field of Castillon, a few miles farther south, where the heroic Talbot was slain, and where the cannon that fired the fatal stone announced the end of the feudal ages. We may travel over the whole world of literature without going beyond our house and garden. Even the blind may read, and thus bring back to themselves the life of the past; but how the indolent mind is helped when spurred by the eye's impressions! The eye awakens ideas that might otherwise sleep on for ever, by looking at scenes filled with the living interest of a Montaigne or a Talbot.

I might have got to within four miles or thereabouts of the Castle of Montaigne, by using the railroad that runs up the valley of the Lower Dordogne, but I preferred to start on foot from Montpont. This manner of travelling is very old-fas.h.i.+oned, but it will always possess a certain charm for two cla.s.ses of people: habitual vagabonds who beg and are freely accused of stealing, and the literary, artistic, antiquarian, or scientific vagabonds who take to tramping by fits and starts. The latter cla.s.s, being quite incomprehensible to the rustic mind in Guyenne, are regarded by it with almost as much suspicion as the other.

I started at the hour of seven in the morning, which the French--earlier risers than the English--think a late one for beginning the work of a summer day in the provinces. I will not say that the plain on which I now tramped for some miles was uninteresting, because all nature is interesting if we are only in the right mood to observe and be instructed; but to me it was dull, for I had been spoilt by much rambling in up and down country full of strong contrasts. Here I saw on each side of me wide expanses of field, with scarcely a hedge or tree, all dotted with grazing cattle. Not a few of the animals were in the charge of muscular, aggressive dogs, that interpreted their duty too largely, and made themselves a nuisance. At intervals were patches of maize or pumpkins, or a bit of vineyard with a house hard by facing the road--a low ground-floor house solidly built, but its plainness unrelieved by the grace of a vine-trellis or a climbing flower. By-and-by the land became somewhat hilly, and the pasturage changed gradually to open wood and heath, where the gorse was already gilding its summer green, and the bracken stood palm-like in purple deserts of heather.

Then the ideas began to warm in the sunny silence, and I fear that I rejoiced in the sterility of the soil which had preserved the charm of free and untormented nature.

When I reached the village-like town of Villefranche, I perceived a movement of men and women like that of bees around a hive. I chanced to arrive on the day of the local fair, when everybody expects to make some money, from the peasant proprietor or the _metayer_ who brings in his corn or cattle, to the small shopkeeper who lives upon the agriculturist. I felt disposed to lunch at the grandest hotel in Villefranche, and a good woman whom I consulted on the subject led me through throngs of bartering peasants and cattle-dealers, forests of horns, and by the upturned jaws of braying a.s.ses, until she stopped before an inn. There all was bustle and commotion. A swarm of women had been called in to help in antic.i.p.ation of the crush, and they got in one another's way, walked upon the cats' tails, and raised the tumult of a boxing-booth with the rattle of their tongues.

All this was in the kitchen; but there was a side-room in which a long table had been laid for the guests. I took a place at this rustic _table-d'hote_, and I had on each side of me and in front of me men in blouses who talked in patois or in French, as the mood suited them. I had already perceived that, as I drew nearer to Bordeaux, the Southern dialect became more and more a jargon, in which there were not only many French words, but French phrases. These men in blouses were rough sons of the soil, but I soon gathered that some of them were very well off. In provincial France dress counts for very little as a sign of fortune's favour. There were men at the table whose burly forms and full-coloured faces were just what one would expect to see at a market dinner in an English country town; but their epicurean style of dealing lightly with each dish, so that the charm of variety might not be spoilt by a too hasty satisfaction of hunger, and the unanimity with which they asked for coffee at the close, marked a strong difference in habits and manners. Their politeness to me was almost excessive. As soon as the most jovial member of the company--who had undertaken the carving had cut up a piece of meat or a fowl, the dish was invariably pa.s.sed from his end of the table to mine, where I sat alone.

Before leaving Villefranche, a low, square tower enticed me to the parish church. The building was originally Romanesque, but the pointed style must have been grafted upon the other so long ago as the English period. Outside the walls, some steps led me into a little chapel half underground. It was a barrel-vaulted crypt, sternly simple, and lighted only by one very narrow Romanesque window in the apse, just above a rough stone altar of ancient pattern, with a statue of the dead Christ on the ground beneath the slab.

In the semi-darkness, the flame of a solitary candle shone without smoke or motion, as if it had been there for centuries, and like all the rest had grown very old.

I had climbed to the ruined Castle of Gurcons, where sloes and blackberries were waiting for the birds in the feudal court strewn with stones. I had left the village of Montpeyroux, with the sound of flails weakening on the wind, and late in the afternoon was drawing near to the Castle of Montaigne, when a small wayside auberge tempted me from the hot road. The woman who waited upon me had a fat body and a hard, firmly inquisitive face--a combination to be distrusted. Having settled down again to her knitting, she inquired of me where I was going, and when I told her that I was on my way to the Chateau de Montaigne, she asked me if I had any work to do there. I evaded this question, not knowing, or not wis.h.i.+ng to know, exactly what she meant. She reflected a few minutes, then, looking at me over her knitting-needles, she said:

'Are you a tiler or a plasterer?'

Now, this was a question that I was quite unprepared for. I had often been set down as a pedlar. I had been suspected of being a travelling musician, and also a colporteur for the Salvation Army; in fact, of being almost everything but a tiler or plasterer. But this shrewd woman had evidently come to the conclusion that, if I did not work upon the housetops, I must perforce be an artist of the trowel. I a.s.sured her that I was as incapable of fixing a tile as of making a ceiling; whereupon she said:

'I beg your pardon. I thought you were a workman.'

As I left, I saw by the vivacity with which she scratched the back of her head with a knitting-needle that she was writhing mentally with the torture of unsatisfied curiosity; and I took a malignant pleasure in her suffering.

The white flannel that I was wearing was the most agreeable reason I could think of for being a.s.sociated with plaster, but my resemblance to a tiler continued to perplex me as I trudged along the road.

I now left the broad highway, and took a narrower road that went for some distance through woods up the side of a long hill. The shadows were gathering under the trees, and I was beginning to fear that I should reach the castle too late to carry out my pilgrimage that night, when I saw above me, upon a knoll resting upon rocky b.u.t.tresses, a modern mansion against a background of trees. This was the very pleasant country residence built by M. Magne, Minister of Finance under the Second Empire, upon the site of the castle of Montaigne, which the author of the 'Essays,' with a better sense of certain distinctions than that which is observed nowadays, preferred to speak of as his _manoir_. This manor-house still preserved its fifteenth and sixteenth century character, when a fire breaking out destroyed everything but the walls, and gave M. Magne a plausible excuse for the demolition. A part that was spared by the fire, and was therefore suffered to remain intact, was the almost isolated tower, to which Montaigne withdrew for the sake of quiet and meditation, and which is so well known to all readers of his 'Essays.' Had this also disappeared, I should have had no motive for wandering down the long avenue at nearly the end of the day.

I met with a courteous reception at the mansion, and obtained immediate permission to visit the retreat of the sixteenth-century moralist who looked with such clear eyes upon human life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHaTEAU DE MONTAIGNE AFTER THE FIRE.]

The tower and its gateway belong to the period when feudalism had lost its vitality, and life was troubled by the vague perception of new motives and principles. Montaigne tells us that his family had occupied the manor a hundred years when he entered into possession, and the style of the fragment that is left bears out this statement: it appears to belong to the middle part of the fifteenth century. Already manorial houses, crenated and often moated, but, like this one at Montaigne, defensive rather for show than the reality, were scattered over France. Speaking generally, they belonged to the small n.o.bility who fell under the category of the _arriere-ban_ in time of war. In this tower Montaigne had his chapel, his bedroom--to which he retired when the yearning for solitude was strong--and his library. The chapel is on the ground-floor, and is very much what it was in Montaigne's time. It is small, but there was room enough to accommodate his household, which was never a large one. Its little cupola connects it with the local style of architecture, to which the high-swelling name of Byzantino-Perigourdin has been given. A small stone altar occupies the apsidal end, and here, as in two or three other places, the arms of Montaigne will be noted with interest by those who have read in the essays: '_Je porte d'azur seme de trefles d'or, a une patte de lyon de mesme armee de gueules, mise en face_.'

A man is often a sceptic on the surface and a believer underneath. Pascal has called Montaigne '_un pur pyrrhonien_'; but Pascal himself has been accused of scepticism. Living in an age when the crimes daily committed in the name of religion might so easily have inspired a hater of violence like Montaigne with a horror of creeds, he was no philosopher of the G.o.d-denying sort. Moreover, notwithstanding his doubting moods and his fondness of the words '_Que sais-je?_' he upheld the practice of religion in his own home, and died a Christian.

He shared, however, the eccentricity of Louis XI. in keeping himself out of sight when he attended the religious services in his chapel. In the vaulting near the entrance is a small opening communicating with a narrow pa.s.sage, by means of which Montaigne could leave his bedroom and hear ma.s.s without showing himself; but in order to do so he had to grope along his rabbit's burrow almost on hands and knees. To reach his bedroom from the ground, he climbed up the spiral staircase as the visitor does today. The steps are much worn in places, and the boots of the essayist must have had something to do with this, for he probably used the tower more than any other man. The room, nearly circular in shape, with brick floor and small windows, looks to modern eyes more like a prison than a bed-chamber befitting a n.o.bleman. But independently of the great difference in the ideas of home comfort which prevailed in the upper ranks of sixteenth-century society, compared to those of the same cla.s.s to-day, Montaigne, like all men with large minds, loved simplicity. His father, who rode the hobby-horse of frugal and severe training to an extent that might have proved disastrous to his son Michel, had not the boy been singularly well endowed by nature to correspond to his parent's wishes, had nurtured him in the scorn of luxury by methods which would be considered very crotchety nowadays. But this could not have been 'my chamber' in which King Henry of Navarre slept, in 1584, when he paid a visit to Montaigne at his fortified house. There was a better one in that part of the building which has disappeared. Montaigne tells, with his quaint humour, that he was in the habit of retiring to his bedroom in the tower so that he might rule there undisturbed, and have a corner apart from what he curiously terms the 'conjugal, filial, and civil community.' And he expresses pity for the man who is not able to 'hide himself' in the same way when the humour leads him to do so.

It was in the room above, however, where he enjoyed to the full the pleasures of contemplation and quietude. Here, he tells us, he had installed his library, in what had previously been regarded as the most useless part of his mansion. The position had certain advantages. 'I can see beneath me my garden and my poultry-yard, and can look into the princ.i.p.al parts of my house.' It appears from this that he was so much 'in the clouds,' that he did not occasionally find satisfaction from peeping through windows to see what others were doing. It is in this way that the old writers reveal themselves, and they keep themselves in sympathy with mankind by not affecting to be above the little weaknesses common to humanity. Here Montaigne spent the greater part of his time, except in winter, when he often found the library too draughty to be comfortable. It was in this room that he wrote his essays, and chiefly thought them out while pacing up and down the floor, which even then was so uneven that the only flat bit was where he had placed his table and chair. In common with some other celebrated writers, he found that his thoughts went to sleep when he sat down. 'My. mind does not work unless the legs make it move.

Those who study without a book are all in the same state.'

Montaigne was no despiser of books; on the contrary, he was a great reader, and one of the most scholarly men of his age; but he had his fits of reading like other people, and the intervals between them were sometimes long. Without a doubt, these intervals were the most productive periods.

The educational system to which he was subjected as a child was enough to disgust him with books, and to separate him for ever from them as soon as he had obtained his freedom. He was crammed with Latin, as a goose that has to be fattened is crammed with maize in his own Perigord. He was not allowed to speak even to his mother in French or in Perigourdin. Such was the will of his father, who must have been a rather difficult man to live with, and one whom a woman of spirit in this century would kill or cure with curtain lectures if his interference with her in the nursery should outrage the instincts of maternity. The very small boy was handed over to tutors, whose instructions were to make Latin his first language, and even his mother and servants were compelled to pick up enough Latin words to carry on some sort of conversation with him.

In the printers' preface to one of the earliest editions of the 'Essays,'

it is said: '_Somme, ils se_ _latiniserent tant qu'il en regorgea jusque a leurs villages tout autour, ou ont pris pied par usage plusieurs appellations latines d'artisans et d'outils.'_ It is just possible that some of these Latin terms may have lingered in the district to the present day; but it would need a great deal of patience to find them, and to distinguish them from the patois of the people. Montaigne was more than six years old before he was allowed to say a word in French or in the dialect of Perigord--that of Arnaud and Bertrand de Born. He finished his austere education at the then celebrated College of Guyenne, at Bordeaux, where, according to local authorities, he had among his teachers the Scotch poet, George Buchanan.

'When young,' writes Montaigne, 'I studied for show; afterwards to grow wiser; now I study for diversion.' He liked to have his books around him even when he did not read them. Numerous reading-desks were distributed over the brick floor of this circular room, and upon them he placed his favourite volumes. He therefore read standing, according to the very general custom of his time, which was doubtless better than our own, of making our backs crooked by sitting and bending over our books. According to his own admission, he had a bad memory, therefore he must have been in frequent need of referring to his tomes for the quotations from ancient authors which he was so fond of bringing into his text, and which make a writer at this end of the nineteenth century smile at the thought of how all the quills would rise upon that fretful and pampered porcupine, the reading public of to-day, if Latin and Greek were ladled out to it after Montaigne's fas.h.i.+on.

The room is bare, with the exception of the wreck of an armchair of uncertain history; but upon the forty-seven beams crossing the ceiling are fifty-four inscriptions in Latin and Greek, written, or rather painted, with a brush by Montaigne. Their interest has suffered a little from the restoration which some of them have undergone; but there they are, the crystals of thought picked up by the hermit of the tower in his wanderings along the highways and byways of ancient literature, and which he fastened, as it were, to the beams over his head, just where the peasants to-day hang their dry sausages, their bacon, and strings of garlic. Many persons copy sentences out of their favourite books, with the intention of tasting their savour again and again; but if they do not lose them, they are generally too busy or too indolent afterwards to look for them. Montaigne, however, had his favourite texts always before his eyes.

The curious visitor intent upon a discovery will be sure to find in these the philosophical scaffolding of the 'Essays;' but I, who examine such things somewhat superficially, would rather believe that Montaigne inscribed them upon the rough wood because they expressed in a few words much that he had already thought or felt. By the extracts that a man makes for his private satisfaction from the authors who please him, the bent of his intellect and cast of character can be very accurately judged. If other testimony were wanting, these sentences would prove the gravely philosophical temper of Montaigne's mind, notwithstanding the flippant confessions of frailty which he mingles sometimes so incongruously with the reflections of a sage. Most of the extracts are from Latin and Greek authors, but not a few are from the Books of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Epistles of St. Paul. Here one sees written by the hand of the sixteenth century thinker the n.o.ble words of Terence:

'h.o.m.o sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto.'

Then one catches sight of this line by the sagacious Horace:

'Quid aeternis minorem consiliis animum fatigas?'

Looking at another piece of timber, one slowly spells out the words:

'O miseras hominum mentes! O pectora caeca!'

And so one follows the track of Montaigne's mind from rafter to rafter.

Had I been left alone here while the evening shadows gathered in the tower, I might soon have seen the figure of a man in trunk-hose, doublet, and ruff, with pointed beard and pensive eyes, moving noiselessly between rows of spectral desks covered by spectral books; but, as it was, even in the most shadowy corner I could not detect the faintest outline of a ghost.

n.o.body knows what has become of all the volumes which were here, and which were said to have numbered a thousand. They were given by Montaigne's only surviving child, his daughter Leonore, to the Abbe de Roquefort, but what became of them afterwards is a mystery. There is a small room adjoining the library, the one that Montaigne mentions as having a fireplace. The hearth where he sat and warmed himself has scarcely changed. Here on the walls may be seen traces of paintings. They are supposed to be the work of a travelling artist, to whom Montaigne gave food and shelter in exchange for his labour. It would appear from this that he was careful not to ruin himself by the encouragement of art. Montaigne, however, had a good nature, although he may not have cared to spend money on bad pictures. He has told us of his efforts to reclaim little beggars, and to make them respectable members of society. Before the present chateau was built, the old kitchen could be seen where he warmed and fed the young mendicants, who, having been refreshed and comforted, returned to their old ways, '_les gueux ayant leurs magnificences et leurs voluptes comme les riches_.'