enlarge-imageA Woman of NormandyA Woman of Normandy
A Woman of Normandy
The Norman is always serious and always practical. Some call him an evil-doer, but he is hardly that. He is, however, exceedingly economical. He deplores exaggeration of all sorts; is seldom or ever gay with that abandonone sees in the Midi or even in Touraine; he adores the sentiments of the old régime, even though it may have been his grandfather who lived under them; and he never ceases to struggle to defend the reputation of his country in all things. To-day he lives in a political hatred of change, something akin to the spirit which feared not Richelieu when provincial liberties were in danger.
“Est ce le loyer attenduPour avoir si bien défenduLa couronne des rois de France,Et pour avoir par tant de foisRemis et lys en assuranceContre l’Espagnole et l’Anglais?”
“Est ce le loyer attenduPour avoir si bien défenduLa couronne des rois de France,Et pour avoir par tant de foisRemis et lys en assuranceContre l’Espagnole et l’Anglais?”
With the Revolution it was much the same. Whatever may have been Norman sympathies, she demanded less of those responsible for the overthrow than any other of the old provinces of France.
All that Normandy stood for in the past, liberty and equal rights, were offered; but the province remained faithful in spirit during the sombre days of the Terror—and to-day the native will emphasize the fact by recalling to your memory the heroism of the young girl of Caen who stabbed Marat.
“The Normans,” it has been said,—by a Parisian, of course,—“are tolerant; the Bretons fanatical;” and in a way this describes the two peoples very well.
Most geographies, and many guide-books and histories, omit all mention of the etymology of place-names. This is greatly to be regretted; from the former and the latter they ought never to be omitted, and they should be included in the guide-books as well.
In a work like the present it is interesting to know something of the early nomenclature of a place whose present name bears at least some resemblance to its former appellation. Not always has such information been included, from lack of space. But it might well be made a part of every work which attempts to purvey topographical or historical information.
Every one knows, or may be supposed to know, that the Breton is from Brittany, and the Gascon from Gascony; but how many among the untravelled can put their finger on that spot on the map of France where live the Cevenoles, the Tricastins, or Cauchois; or, for that matter, can locate with exactness the country of the Comminges, the Caux, or the Cotentin?
With France, more perhaps than any othernation on the globe, names of places have a great romantic and patriotic significance. Little by little geography and history have given circulation to some which perhaps are indissolubly impressed upon the mind; but the foreigner—meaning, of course, those who are not of France—never, until he has delved below the surface, knows a tithe of the meaning of the well-nigh sacred devotion which the native has for these glorious titles which have become so identified with the national and life history of the people of France.
With the Frenchman it is something more than local pride and patriotism. It is the country first, his town or place of birth next, then his present domicile, and, lastly, his own person.
As with the topographical aspect, so with the inhabitants themselves. Great diversity obtains; and, in “these little lands of strangers,” as it has been delicately and suggestively put, the Frenchman of one locality is, except for a general likeness of speech and manner, almost as much of a stranger as the foreigner in race.
The Norman has little or nothing in common with the Provençal; the native of French Flanders still less with the men of the Midi;and those of the north not much of the feeling and spirit which actuates the life of those in the south.
This is, perhaps, unique among modern nations; and, while to-day this diversity does not exist on such lines of stringent demarcation as formerly, the difference is still there in a lesser degree.
Even though all are Frenchmen, they still pride themselves in proudly asserting their right to be called a Norman, a Gascon, a Bourguignon, or a Languedocian; without confounding, at the same time, their love of France, the great mother country.
It is interesting to note that it is perhaps a survival, rather than a modern interpolation, which accounts for most peculiar local customs met with in a journey across the country. Normandy has two neighbours which in former warlike times loved her but little, the Parisian and the Breton. To-day the Parisian no longer fears that Rouen may become the capital of France, but the Breton still feels some of the old rancour of contempt for him he calls the “wicked Norman.” Furthermore, the peoples of the two neighbouring provinces of Normandy and Brittany resemble eachother not at all; nor ever will so long as old customs and traditions endure.
Normandy was divided into Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy. There were formerly many separate districts, and are still, for tradition has by no means wholly left these parts.
The country of Caux, between Rouen and Dieppe, which took its name from its first inhabitants, is the chief. The etymology of the word is considerably mixed. Caex, Cauex, and the Celtic Kalet all come to the fore. The earliest inhabitants were known as Caletes, which in later times became Cauchois. To-day one mostly sees the Cauchoises in their quaint cloaks and head-dresses on the quays at Caudebec, or in the markets at Yvetot or Duclair.
A physiological memorandum is found in the fact that the Cauchoises of eighteen years, when they open their mouths, show very bad teeth; which in all other lands is an indication of decrepitude.
Here in Caux, however, it is supposed to come from the abundant indulgence incidre, which, by its corrosive properties, attacks the enamel of the teeth.
France has never been considered a prolific country, but here in this corner of Normandythe contrary seems to be the case. A Rouen daily journal published recently a notice of a matter which was just then attracting the attention of the Society for the Protection of Children. It seems among eight mothers of Yvetot, whom in recent years it had helped, there were forty-nine children. When interviewed, one fond mother made the following statement:
“Yes, monsieur, I have eleven children all brought up by myself and all living. I expect a twelfth! As you see, they are all blonds. Here is my eldest. Eighteen in the month of May. Is it not fine? She works with me in the fields. The three boys work at the forge with their father. There is another an apprentice to a saddle-maker, and there are six at school.”
The society makes a gift of forty francs upon each birth. Surely a patriotic encouragement.
The chief of the separate districts of Lower Normandy is the peninsula of the Cotentin.
The Cotentin was the ancientpagus Constantinus. Its capital was Constancia, which by process of evolution readily became Coutances. It is celebrated for its rich pasturage and thefine cattle which it breeds. The inhabitants are known as Cotentins or Cotentines.
“The Cotentin race with regard for all reason is the typelaitier par excellence,” wrote Arthur Young in 1789, who was mostly taken with the milk-giving qualities of the Cotentin cow, but who was an astute observer of many things, nevertheless.
The Avranchin is another district of Lower Normandy, known anciently as thepagus Abrincatinus. Its inhabitants are known as Avranchais. They were further qualified by the sobriquets of Bouiderots and Bouilieux, probably because they were employed for the most part in the salt-works built on the shores of the bay of Avranches, where they boiled the salt water dry of its moisture and recovered the salt from great cauldrons of copper.
There is an old proverb which says: “Let the Auvergnats return to their pastures, the Normans to their fishing, the soldiers to their warfare, and the children to their games.”
Bocage is a separate district in the Departments of the Orne and Calvados. Its capital was Vire. Bocage took its name in a roundabout way from the German wordBusch, which in Norman French isbosc, which comes frombois, meaning, in this case, a forest, from whichin turn becomesbosquet(sort of arbour),bûcheron(a wood-chopper), and finallyBocage.
From a French source one learns that Bocage is the least productive part of all Normandy, and its workmen and peasants, known as Bocains, are the most laborious.
There is a charming little tale of the Bocage, by Anatole France, called “The Curé’s Mignonette,” which tells the story of a dove who came to a curé and brought untold blessings upon his parish. It is but a slight tale, but quite worth looking up for its charming sentiment.
Of the women of this part of Normandy the following remark by Arthur Young, the agriculturist, who wrote a century and a quarter ago, is pertinent. Writing from Caen, he says:
“I could not but remark an uncommon number of pretty women. Is there no antiquarian that deduces English beauty from the mixture of Norman blood?” He was a profound agriculturist, Arthur Young, and he wrote mostly of cabbages, departing occasionally into the realms of kings, but pretty women seem to have pursued him, or he them, for a bit farther on in his delightful “Travels in France,” he says:
“Supped at the Marquis d’Ecougal’s at hischâteau La Frenaye” (Calvados). “If that French marquis cannot show me as good crops of corn and turnips as I would wish, there is a noble one of something else—of beautiful and elegant daughters, the charming copies of agreeable mothers.”
Robert Wace, the Norman poet (1120-80), put the following words into the mouth of William the Conqueror as he lay on his death-bed. They characterize the Norman of those times as faithfully as do the romances of Flaubert and thecontesof Maupassant to-day.
“En Normandie è gent moult fière,Je ne sai gent de tel manièreNormant ne sunt proz saint justiseFoler et plaisier lor convient;Se reis soz piez toz tems les tient,E ki bien les defalt et poigne,D’els parra fare sa besoigne.Orgueillos sunt Normant é fierEvantéor é bombancier;Toz tems les devreit l’en piaisierKar mult sunt fort a justisier.”
“En Normandie è gent moult fière,Je ne sai gent de tel manièreNormant ne sunt proz saint justiseFoler et plaisier lor convient;Se reis soz piez toz tems les tient,E ki bien les defalt et poigne,D’els parra fare sa besoigne.Orgueillos sunt Normant é fierEvantéor é bombancier;Toz tems les devreit l’en piaisierKar mult sunt fort a justisier.”
Thegent moult fièreof Normandy proved his ancient strength eight hundred years later at Bernay, when three hundred of the National Guard stopped the advance-guard of the Prussian army under General Bredow three leaguesfrom the town. It was a daring thing to have done, since the Prussians were in overwhelming numbers, and the town was mulcted to the tune of a hundred thousand francs for the valour of its citizens, as a contribution of war.
The French coast is ever a source of joy and pride to the Frenchman; and no part in all its twenty-nine hundred kilometres is more frequented by summer dwellers by the sea than the strip along the Channel and the Strait of Calais from Dunkerque to Brest.
Picardy, Normandy, and Brittany all have their partisans; but the shores of Normandy and Brittany are the ideal spots wherein the Frenchman loves to while away a summer’s day.
No country of Europe, unless it be Greece, has its coast-line more deeply serrated than France. Brittany is rocky, Normandy high with its chalk cliffs, and Picardy populous with wind-swept dunes of sand and shingle. Each presents a distinct variety of attractions.
The downs of the north are the real lower country; but all this changes as one comes up with the Norman border. Then come great chalk cliffs, grass-crowned, and at their feet a pebbly strand. Occasionally granite ledges crop out, as they do in Brittany, until onereaches the Bay of Mont St. Michel, where the real Breton coast-line begins.
Cap de la Hève, which shelters Havre on the northeast, is one of those freaks of nature which have a great interest for the geologist and the geographers. It is the same great chalky cliff that we find on the south coast of England, and eastward toward Etretat, where are those wonderfully carved picture-rocks, so loved of painters of a former day.
Here on the northern edge of the ancient district of Caux, the vociferous waves and currents of the British Channel eat up the coast-line at the rate of a couple of metres a year, sometimes in one place and sometimes in another.
These great, chalky cliffs continue westward to the Cotentin peninsula; or would continue did not the Seine estuary rend them in twain with its mighty flow.
At Trouville advantage has been taken of the formation, and a modern roadway built which, in its way, quite rivals the celebrated arch of the Riviera. At present it serves merely the purpose of the gay life of Trouville, and automobiles, omnibuses, and motor-cycles rush around its death-dealing curves and sharp descents,to their great risk, and causing an occasional death.
There is a flaring red danger-board, a guide-post and telephonic communication with a red cross hospital plainly set out in view, but even this does not check the recklessness of the road-users in these parts.
Just beyond Trouville is Dives, from whence departed the fleet of the Conqueror in his descent upon England. To-day, the port is choked by the débris thrown into it by the sea.
Gradually the chalk cliffs give way to sand-dunes or high-rolling greensward, until Granville is reached on the other side of the peninsula.
Throughout all this extent the coast-line is dotted here and there with long stretches of sand and pebbles, which once and again have been turned into popular resorts, where inland France comes to enjoy the sea-breezes.
How many French affect this sort of a holiday it is impossible to say; but they seem to have a decided preference for the northern shore, and are quite as great devotees to the seaside—as it is known to Americans, and watering-places, as the English call it—as those of other nationalities.
Trouville and Deauville, with perhaps Cobourg,are the most brilliant and fashionable of these resorts in Normandy, though there are many others of lesser repute and decidedly quieter.
The western coast of the Cotentin peninsula has for its chief centre the picturesque old and new towns of Granville, which face the great islands of Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark, the Channel Isles of the English, and theIles Normandesof the French.
This western shore-line of the peninsula marks the boundary between Normandy and Brittany at Pontorson, the gateway to Mont St. Michel; of blessed memory to tourists for its old fortress-abbey—and Madame Poulard’s chickens and omelets.
“The granite isles of La Manche,” as the French geologists call them, comprise the Channel Islands, which belong to Great Britain, and the Iles Chausey, a hideously terrible formation of jagged toothlike rocks which would prove a veritable ocean graveyard, were they but in a line of direct travel. A few miserable fishermen’s huts are the sole habitations on this bleak, wind-swept island; but the picturesque desolation of it all will quite make up for the lack of other features, if one is venturesome enough to make the journey by sailboatfrom Granville, and is prepared to rough it in the same manner as do the Cotentin fishermen themselves.
The Rocher des Moines and the Roches du Rhinocéros are quaint and gaunt indeed, but one wonders—as usual with regard to such fantastically named topographical features—where the resemblance comes in.
The coast-line of Normandy is generally high, cut once and again into canyon-like valleys, the chief of which are those of the Ault, Bresle, Arques, St. Valery-en-Caux, Fécamp, and Etretat.
Tréport lies at the mouth of the Bresle, and Dieppe at the mouth of the Arques.
To-day the commerce of other days on this coast is threatened. Dieppe has held its own as a fishing port, perhaps, and in a way, so has Tréport; but there is no deep-sea traffic now of any size between Havre and Boulogne, save the cross-channel passenger traffic between Dieppe and New Haven, and the Terre Neuve fisheries of Fécamp.
There have been rumours from time to time of the establishing of a deep-sea canal between Dieppe and Paris, but the project is too visionary for serious consideration, and the great waterway of the Seine is certainly all-sufficient.
From the Cape of the Hève to Cape Barfleur extends the delta of the Seine, or the Bay of Calvados as it is sometimes known,—the vast delta of the Seine.
The Bresle is a lively little river which purls away the seventy kilometres of its length between the hills of Picardy and Normandy, and passes Aumale and Eu, to finish its course in the Channel at Tréport.
The Arques flows gently down fifty kilometres of one of the richest valleys of Normandy, and enters the sea at the busy cross-channel port of Dieppe. Its confluence is made up of the streams of the Varenne, Bethune, and Eaulne. Between the mouth of the Seine and Cape of the Hague is the Touques, which comes down by Lisieux and Pont l’Evêque, for a hundred kilometres, and finishes at Trouville; the Dives, with a waterway of a hundred kilometres also ending on the coast at Dives; the Orne, which comes to the sea at Caen, after 150 kilometres through rich pasture-lands; the Seulles and the Drome, two tiny rivers of Calvados, and the Vire, of 130 kilometres; the Douves; the Taute; the Divette; and the Sée and the Sélune of the Cotentin.
From St. Malo, eastward to the north of the Somme, is a particularly vulnerable coast-line,which, in times past, was frequently attacked by the cross-channel brethren of the Normans. To-day, however, with strong defences at Cherbourg and the forts at Hogue and Havre, and others at Dieppe, there is little likelihood of its being again invaded without warning, though the memories of Gisors (1119), Crécy, (1346), and Agincourt (1415) die hard.
The gateways to the rich Norman country-side are both numerous and ample, however; and it may be depended upon that the distribution of the French army is such that ample protection is afforded to such important entrances as Granville, Caen, the little rivers Dives and Touques, and the galaxy of towns and cities lying above and below the cliffs at the mouth of the Seine, to say nothing of Dieppe and Fécamp, and the cities of the Seine valley itself.
NORMANDYis still a land fertile and rich, as well by nature and the product of the soil, as by the industry of her people.
The following charming lines by Frédéric Berat are appreciative.
“J’ai vu les champs de l’Helvétie,Et ses chalets et ses glaciers;J’ai vu le ciel de l’ItalieEt Venise et ses gondoliers!En saluant chaque patrieJe me disais: aucun séjourN’est plus beau que ma NormandC’est le pays qui m’a donné le jour.”
“J’ai vu les champs de l’Helvétie,Et ses chalets et ses glaciers;J’ai vu le ciel de l’ItalieEt Venise et ses gondoliers!En saluant chaque patrieJe me disais: aucun séjourN’est plus beau que ma NormandC’est le pays qui m’a donné le jour.”
Not alone from this does one infer the prominence which the province holds, and has held in industrial and economic affairs since the time when Henry II. really broke the power of the Norman barons; but there are self-evident intimations at every turn of one’s footsteps, whether by the highroads or by the by-roads.
It is difficult to imagine what France would have been to-day had it not been for the disaster of the Franco-Prussian war, the rebuff of Fashoda, and the unrest attendant upon the Dreyfus affair.
France has held her own remarkably, when one considers the depression which periodically falls upon other European nations.
Still, there is a great influx of foreign influences to France which, in all but individual manners and customs, is making itself felt.
The English who have settled here in the great woollen industries in Normandy, at Louviers, Elbeuf, and in the neighbourhood of Rouen, are a notable indication of outside influence; but still more so is the recent advent of things American, to say nothing of the forty thousand persons who form the permanent American population of Paris.
American farming machinery is seen everywhere, and if the American automobile has found no place in France, American machine tools are greatly in use in the manufacture of the horseless carriages of France. The French are to-day wearing and copying the fashions in American boots and shoes almost exclusively, and are imitating the Americans in their habits and customs of travel.
A universal English innovation one sees everywhere is tea; but it is not the afternoon variety, except in the case of the “five o’clocks” of the Paris boulevards. Your Frenchman drinks his tea—and likes it very much, apparently—after his dinner. Other folk have the idea that this tends to sleeplessness, but not so the French.
In a recent number of a French journal devoted to travel an admiring and appreciative Frenchman says:
“The English and Americans come in great numbers to our land, and travel hither and thither over our great railway lines. They spend their money liberally, and to them we owe the opportunity of doing all that we can to facilitate not only their travel, but to make pleasant their stay amongst us. We should reconstruct the sanitary arrangements of our hotels, and encourage the circulation of information with regard to places of interest.”
And all this the French are doing, and if it is coming but slowly, so far as the country-side is concerned, it is most surely coming, and to-day no more delightful travel-ground is to be found in all the world than France, and Normandy and Brittany and Touraine in particular.
This, then, is one of the industries that is an important one in France, and the coming of the automobile and the revival of travel by road will do much for the increased prosperity of the genuine market-town inns of Normandy.
In the Seine valley, in the heart of Normandy, has sprung up a cotton and woollen manufacturing industry of immense proportions. Much of the wool is a local product, but large quantities of it in the raw state are brought from the river Plata; while at the wharves of Rouen are vast warehouses filled with cotton from the Southern States of America, ready to be worked into cloth by the busy looms of France.
The woollen mills of Elbeuf and Louviers are now turning out worsteds and cloth for men and women’s clothing of a quality and quantity quite rivalling that of Bradford, in England, in the olden times.
As far back as 1780-90 Arthur Young wrote of a visit to a great woollen manufacturer of Louviers, where he saw “a fabric unquestionably the first woollen in the world, if success, beauty of fabric, and an inexhaustible invention to supply with taste all the cravings of fancy can give the merit of such superiority. Perfection goes no farther than the Vigoniacloths of M. Decretot.” This, from an Englishman born and bred in the Midlands, is praise indeed.
enlarge-imageHarvest-time in NormandyHarvest-time in Normandy
Harvest-time in Normandy
The country to the west of Evreux forms the very heart of Normandy. It is a region of rich farms, great prairies, and apple orchards, in which apple-trees are set out twenty-five or thirty to the acre. Nowhere more than in the Plain of St. André and the country district of Neubourg, which immediately environs Evreux, is there to be found anything more characteristically Norman.
Little by little great pasture-lands have been made into tilled fields, to the prosperity of the individual and the nation as well. Were the English farming peasants able and willing to work small holdings in England in the same way, who knows but what prosperity might come to the small farmer there?
Through these rich lands of the Departments of the Eure, Orne, and Calvados flow the Eure, the Iton, the Risle, the Touques, the Dives, and the Orne, which nourish them abundantly, and give a thriving aspect to the towns and country-side alike. That Normandy is so plentifully watered, accounts for its bountiful pasture-lands and prairies; which, by a process known to all the world, produces most abundantsupplies of butter and cheese, to say nothing of such by-products as the cattle themselves. It is doubtful if the cattle-raising industry of itself has a tithe of the economic value and importance of the trade in milk products, which in some parts of Normandy is of tremendous proportions.
The butter of Gournay (Lower Seine), of St. Lô, and Isigny is famous throughout England and France, while the savoury cheeses—above all the Camembert and the Pont l’Evêque—are exported to all ends of the earth. A good cow in the Pont l’Evêque country produces cheese to the value of 350 francs a year; and at Lisieux, the centre of the Camembert industry, as much as five hundred francs worth in value.
Agricultural machinery is coming fast into use, and increased crops are the result. In 1862 there were but 10,850 reaping-machines in France, but their number is now more than quadrupled. In a country where nearly fifty per cent. of its inhabitants follow agricultural pursuits, this may be considered as of some significance.
enlarge-imageNorman HorsesNorman Horses
Norman Horses
The Cotentin cow gives as much as twenty-five litres of milk per day. With the cows of the Cotentin and the horses of La Perche lies the chief glory of the product of Normandyto-day. The industry of horse-raising in Normandy is most prosperous in the valley and Department of the Orne. Northwestern France produces three races of horses, the Percheron, the Merlerault, and the Breton. The Percheron is mostly raised in La Perche, the Merlerault is a crossing of the Norman with English stock; and the Breton is a hardy little animal, not at all beautiful to look at, but, nevertheless, a most useful and economical animal to own, which is saying a good deal in its favour. The chief horse-trading centres in Normandy are Alençon, Vernon, Bernay, and Mortagne.
In general, the cattle of Normandy are famous for the quality and richness of their flesh none the less than for their products, and the Norman beef and mutton are much in demand in the markets of Paris.
The market-towns of Normandy are very numerous and important, but they are by no means so picturesque as are those of the south of France, or even of the cities and towns along the Loire, or in Brittany. Market-day is more of a matter-of-fact, hard-headed commerce, with the Norman peasant, than it is an opportunity for a day in town.
To the market the Norman peasant and his wife come to sell and to buy, in a tilt-cart,usually attached to an ancient-looking, though not decrepit, white horse, who is used to only moderately long journeys. As a matter of business the peasant leaves his home by nine in the morning—the height of the market usually being just before midday. By nine, then, all is ready,—the eggs in the pannier, the chickens in their baskets, and the cheeses and butter between crisp, cool leaves of beet-root or cabbage. Crossing the courtyard, a door is opened, disclosing the old harness hung on its iron nail. Soon it is on the back of the old white horse, and he is marched forth to be attached to the shafts of the great, high, two-wheeled tilt-cart, which seems very unsteady. When the baskets are all finally disposed, and the peasant and his wife are seated, it seems even more so; but as no one has ever seen it overturned, the Norman peasant’s cart must be a most satisfactory vehicle.
There is one event which comes off periodically in Normandy, which has never had much prominence given to it from the outside, and that is the fair at Guibray,—a suburb of Falaise, the birthplace of the Conqueror. Next to the great fair at Beaucaire, of which Dumas writes in “Monte Cristo,” the fair at Guibray is the greatest in all France; and is of the popularorder of the trading-fair at Nijni-Novgorod in Russia.
At Guibray the event has been held for many, many years, though of late its importance has fallen somewhat away. A hundred years ago merchandise was sold to the value of 100,000,000 francs, while at Beaucaire the sales sometimes totalled 500,000,000.
Besides this, Normandy has the great horse-fair of Bernay, held at theFête des Rameaux(Palm Sunday), the most famous and largest of its kind in France.
These great fairs of Normandy are one of the most interesting of all the attractions to the stranger.
No one should expect to find a town at its normal aspect on one of these occasions, and sightseeing of the conventional order is out of the question at such times; but, on the other hand, one’s gain is great, if he is a lover of such assemblages. Oftentimes the whole town will be found to be given over to the great local event, with the churches and musées closed, and the tables d’hôtes overcrowded.
Artists and lovers of new sensations, especially, will not mind this, for these local fairs and holidays will furnish much amusement and edification that would otherwise be missed.Colour and noise and life is everywhere. Everything smacks of gaiety and good nature, and for the most part it is distinctly local. Parisian costumes and manners have no place here, and one must be prepared to take things as he finds them.
The almanacs and local journals will give particulars of these events, and one can avoid them or not as is his mood. One cannot, however, claim to have really seen Normandy unless he has attended at least one fair.
Normandy is one of the greatest wheat-growing sections of France. Every plain, valley, and hillside is literally covered with it.
In the midst of all this agrarian industry are set many towns and villages alive with an industry of another sort. On the Avre, at Nonancourt, are the great spinning mills of M. Waddington, whose name and fame as a naturalized Frenchman are world-wide. At Evreux are great establishments which manufacture linen, cotton-stuffs, hosiery, and kindred products in vast quantities; while at Bayeux, Alençon, Argenton, and Caen lace is manufactured on a large scale. Again, cotton and woollen stuffs are produced at Elbeuf, Louviers, and Rouen; leather at Pont Audemer and Evreux; yarn and thread at Bernay, Alençon, Mortagne,Lisieux, and Vire, and pins and needles at Rugles and Laigle.
In addition, the fisheries and oyster cultures of Normandy are very great; likewise the coastwise shipping, to say nothing of the trans-atlantic traffic of the great liners from the ports of Havre and Cherbourg.
enlarge-imageRaising the Sugar-beetRaising the Sugar-beet
Raising the Sugar-beet
Out of Fécamp go many deep-sea fishermen bound for the Newfoundland banks; and Tréport, Yport, Dieppe, and Granville are important home ports for the mackerel and herring fleets of the North Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean.
There is a great and still growing interest in France, and indeed in many other parts of Continental Europe, in the sugar-beet industry.
In Normandy it is very considerable, and “potato spirit” and “beet sugar” are two products of the soil which of late have added much to its prosperity.
WHEREASEngland is a country whose land is owned by a comparative few, France is owned by the many. Of its population of forty odd millions there are nearly six million land-owners, almost, it would seem, one to each family.
The plots are small, not more than ten acres, perhaps, on an average, for the peasant landholder; but the degree of cultivation which they have attained is remarkable to one who comes from the far West of America, where only farming on a gigantic scale is pursued.
For a long time the Norman farmer held out against any ideas of progress with regard to machinery. He did not exactly plough with the proverbial crooked limb of Biblical times, but the implement with which he laid out his astonishingly straight furrows was, until recently, an antiquated piece of iron, which he handled in a most laborious manner.
To-day American sowing and reaping machines, or Continental imitations of them, are everywhere making their way, and the laborious, patient work of a former day is now being accomplished much more handily.
The French are great lovers of their land, the Normans in particular. They do not emigrate like the Germans or the Italians, and they are not great travellers, out of their own bailiwick.
The dwellers of the country-side of France are about the richest per capita of any nation on the earth. The enormous Franco-German war debt was promptly paid, and, stowed away in small parcels, there are doubtless hundreds of millions of francs which are never put into circulation.
French farming is carried on most assiduously, and a single plot of land becomes wonderfully productive under the hands of its devoted peasant proprietor.
One is wont to commiserate with the European peasant, who is supposed to be taxed to death, but, as a matter of fact, the French peasant is taxed very little. The recent tax exemptions of French farmers have caused a decrease in the revenue of 25,000,000 francs, and this sum has been saved to the very smallestof taxpayers. Nevertheless, some taxes exist, though they are almost infinitesimal. There are more than 8,000,000 persons who each pay a land tax ranging from ten to twenty sous only; more than 3,000,000 who pay from five to fifteen francs; and more than 2,000,000 land-holders who each pay from twenty to thirty francs per annum. If a farmer pays a rent of 250 francs or under he is untaxed; if he pays eight hundred francs, he is taxed only on a part, but if he pays more than eight hundred francs, he is taxed nine per cent, on the whole sum.
Almost all taxes here are based on incomes or rents. Business property is taxed eight per cent, of the amount for which it is rent, and if it is idle it is not taxed at all. If a store or house burns down the tax on the land stops from that moment, and if a factory stops work its tax stops. Every loom in the silk, cotton, and woollen mills of Normandy—where they are very numerous—pays a tax while it is working; but if it is broken or becomes idle, the tax officials are notified, and the tax is not collectible.
There is money in trees in France; and in Normandy, quite as much as in any other part, one sees those long, regimental rows ofpoplars which make walled alleys of the great national highways and the banks of rivers as well.
The French appreciate the commercial value of their forests. There are vast woodlands belonging to the government, and private holdings in which the trees are as well cared for as in a city park.
Only matured trees are ever cut in a national forest, and every piece of fallen wood is saved.
Normandy has one of the finest and most celebrated of these great national forests in the forest domain of Lyons, a few miles southeast of Rouen, just north of the ancient district of Vexin.
Some of the trees are a hundred feet high and bare of branches, with only a tassel left on the top. Others are full-limbed, and others are just sprouting new growth on all sides. Poplars are grown for their branches, and are finally cut down for wood or furniture. The branches grow rapidly. They are cut off year after year, put into bundles, and sold to the bakers, to make the hot fires necessary for the crisp crust on the French bread. There is such a demand for them that raising them is one of the chief industries of France. The poplars are planted in places which are good fornothing else; and after five years each will annually produce at least twenty sous in value in mere trimmings. Later on, the trees are thinned out and cut down and sold. Willows are grown in the same way, their sprouts being used for baskets, and the basket-maker is a familiar figure in nearly every town and village in the river valleys of Normandy.
Market-gardening in France is no inconsiderable industry. Not only does it supply the markets at Paris, but a vast product is sent across Channel to help nourish old England; potatoes and onions from Brittany, and cauliflowers, lettuce, radishes, etc., from Normandy, to say nothing of cheese, eggs, and butter, which are usually a product of the same farmyard.
The French have one million acres devoted to gardens and fruits; and, throughout the country, one sees fields of hotbeds and glass frames propped over plants outside the beds. In many places glass bells are used to cover the individual plants, and there are some sections which raise early potatoes under glass for export to London. Apparently, about the only vegetable or fruit crop which Normandy does not export is the cider-apple.
The French study the soil and the sun, and they coax both to work. They feed the cropsrather than the land, and in places get three crops a year through intensive cultivation. Near Cherbourg, cabbage is raised early in February. After it is taken off a crop of potatoes is planted, and a third crop comes on in the autumn, and this is on land that has been used for generations without becoming impoverished.
The farming peasant of the Seine valley is in every way a kindly person. He will pose for the artist, does not object to being snap-shotted while at work by the amateur photographer, and will courteously help the automobilist who is in trouble to set himself to rights.
For all this, he wants and expects nothing, save that perhaps he will take a glass of wine or cigar at the nearest public house if there happens to be one near by. An inquiring stranger is notpersona non grata, and the Norman peasant-farmer is more than glad to stop and discuss the good or bad times, or the state of the crops and the cattle market; hisquid pro quoseeming usually to be your opinion about the state of things in the adjoining competing community which may send its products to the same market as he does himself.
Certainly a close-mouthed, ill-natured Norman farmer is a rare thing in the Seine valley,or indeed in any other part of the province. Not so in some other lands, where every civil advance of the stranger is met with a taciturn reply or a miserable whine against a presupposed unjust fate which permits a landholder to expect the tenant to pay rent.
Normandy, where it borders upon the Seine, comes very near being the artists’ ideal sketching-ground. It has all the attributes of the open country, as well as great industrial centres with picturesque chimney-stacks, and possesses a part of the most charming seacoast of France. Etretat and Honfleur are famous, Caudebec-en-Caux, in a way, is one of the reputed paradises for artists, while Les Andelys, Giverny, and La Roche-Guyon are—well, spots which as soon as they shall become popular with tourists will lose much of their charm, which is to-day natural, simple, and characteristically local. Throughout the open country in the Seine valley one may contemplate a succession of farmyards, orchards, and great brown and green patches of cultivated land which will make him envious of the genius of a Daubigny or a Millet.
The great walled farms of Normandy are ever a source of surprise to the stranger and of pride to the occupant, who, like enough, isthe fifth of his line; for the peasant-proprietor is a power in the land to-day, as he has been since before the Revolution.
Usually, however, the peasant-proprietor, in Normandy at least, is not of the ambitious order that aspires to more than a small area to work as his own, compared with his apparently more opulent neighbour, who, perhaps, farms his land on shares with the actual land-owner, a practice known throughout France asmétayage. Besides the two smaller classes of farmers, those who hire or work on shares, or those who own small tracts, there are the large landed proprietors who farm their own land on a scale known as high farming. The three together have made possible the prosperity of the greater part of the France of to-day; and in no other country can such a forcible economic lesson be learned of the power of a country to be self-sustaining.
Before now it has been said that Normandy is monotonous, but this is not true. Writers have compared its angularities, so to speak, with the nicely roundedcontoursof the South Downs of England; and its sturdy, soil-grown villages with the undeniably picturesque hamlets of Surrey and Sussex. One is characteristic of France and the other of England; butwherein is one more monotonous than the other?
Really, Normandy is one of the most diversified sections in all France, and while quite different, in almost every way, from Brittany, Maine, and Anjou, its neighbours, it forms with them a region where one learns more of the varying conditions which go to make up the life of the nation than in any other parts of France as it is known to-day; for Burgundy and its people are still Burgundian, Provence, Provençal, and the Midi, Spanish—or something very akin to it.
The Normandy of to-day, its people, and their manners and customs, however, breathes the very spirit of history of feudal and even more ancient times, from the days of Rollon, the Dane, down through Norman William and Richard Cœur de Lion, to the times when Normandy finally became attached to the Crown.
“High farming,” as the working of the great estates is called, is, of course, a very different thing from the working of small farms or vegetable gardens. Two and a half acres of land within a half a dozen miles of a city like Havre or Rouen, or even a town like Louviers or Vernon, will support a family of five, if the wife carries the produce to marketherself, which she generally does, leaving the men-folks to gossip in a café and to hitch up the mare and the family cart when the day’s trading is finished.
It is only as one reaches the great plain of La Beauce, just across the southern border of Normandy, that one comes upon grain culture on a large scale, though, to be sure, the farm product of Normandy is by no means limited to vegetables. One must not forget the cider-apple and its product, the true wine of the country.
Olivier Basselin, who died in 1419, wrote in old Norman French an “Apologie du Cidre,” which as near as may be is translated as follows:
“Though Frenchmen at our drink may laugh,And think their taste is wondrous fine,The Norman cider, which we quaff,Is quite the equal of his wine,When down, down, down, it freely goesAnd charms the palate as it flows.”
“Though Frenchmen at our drink may laugh,And think their taste is wondrous fine,The Norman cider, which we quaff,Is quite the equal of his wine,When down, down, down, it freely goesAnd charms the palate as it flows.”
Mere diffusion of property is no indication of the wealth of a nation, but a general prosperity is; and if we except a few departments where the shepherding and grazing of flocks is the principal occupation, there are very few parts of France where one notices any lack of actual necessities.
France was poorest as a nation, and her working classes most prosperous, under Charles-le-Sage. France was richest, and her poor the most miserable, under Louis XIV.
Erasmus in his “Adages” has said: “Open your purse and pay, for you enter a port; pay, for you cross a bridge; pay, for you use a ferry;” and in general and with much elaboration there is still something more than a vestige of feudalism left in the life of to-day. What it was in former times, in France, is no more, but the single-taxer and the socialist—and some strangers from a supposedly freer land—will complain at the octroi, and the tax on matches and tobacco, as if a revenue from some source were not necessary for the conduct of the state. Whatever may first appear to the contrary, France is not overtaxed to-day, and no evidences of oppressive taxation are actually to be seen in the lives of the peasants of the rich hillsides, or the workers of the busy towns of Normandy.
Normandy must always have been a wealthy province; for, in Leopold Delisle’s “Study of the Condition of Agriculture in Normandy in the Middle Ages,” is made the astounding—and authenticated—statement that “the monks of Montdaie fed their pigs on meat.”
Up to within the last half-century, if we are to believe the chroniclers, a Norman peasant might visit any parish in the province and note but little change from the aspect it bore in mediæval times.
In our day this would hardly prove to be the case: what with cream-separators, throbbing, mechanical sowers and reapers, traction-engines, and light-railways, all but the face of nature itself is changed—and in many parts not a little of that.
In some of the depths of Brittany, the heart of the Cantal, or the wastes of Lozère, this may be true. There indeed one might find little changed the wooden-pronged plough and rough flails, and hand labour throughout still continues its round of pastoral life as of yore; but in Normandy and the more prosperous north things have changed greatly, and always for the better.
A bird’s-eye view of the history of the provinces of France furnishes many surprises, as many, if not more, than would a résumé of the affairs of the capital, which has always reflected much more the sentiments of the country-side than has the capital of any other world power.
In spite of the more or less vulgar show ofthe wealth of the cities, it is in the country that the great prosperity of France lies, and in Normandy this aspect is very much to the fore.
The peasant-proprietor has always been a factor in the life and history of France. True enough, he was often suppressed and doubtless quite miserable at times; but from Martin’s history we learn that the land transfers of the time of even the Crusades were notable for their magnitude.
Between the seigneur and the serf were two classes, known astenanciersandmainmortables. The former could bequeath their lands to their children, while the latter “lived a freeman, but died a serf,” as the saying goes, his heirs being compelled to purchase their right to inherit the land.
Just previous to the Revolution, curious as it may seem, one-third of French territory, according to Arthur Young, belonged to the peasant-proprietor.
In 1789 four millions of French subjects were land-owners, but to-day there are over eight millions, quite a fifth of the population.
Fénélon and La Bruyère drew sombre pictures of the French peasant of a former day; but they must have had in mind individualcases, or at least examples far from representative, taking into consideration the figures above given and the following statements. Foville cites the Commune of Paroz in the Department of the Seine et Marne as showing in 1768, and again more than fifty years later, that the land-holdings corresponded precisely, both in number and extent. In an article in theContemporary Review(May, 1886) M. Baudrillart gives many more examples in a similar vein. Even during the reign of Louis XIV., when the monarchy and aristocracy were at their height, the farming peasant, in his own right, had begun to prosper.
Bois Guillebert wrote in 1709: “It would be impossible to find here a square foot of ground which does not produce all that it is capable of producing. No man is so poor that he is not decently clothed and who has not plenty of bread and drink.” (Meaning wine or drink made of fruit juices, as, for instance, the cider of Normandy—and, sometimes, an imitation of it known as “Boisson Normand.”)
In 1738 the Abbé St. Pierre wrote: “Almost all day-labourers possess a garden or a plot of ground.”
A half-century later Arthur Young, in turn pessimistic and optimistic, tells of a generalprevailing prosperity of all that part of France through which he travelled. He goes particularly into details with regard to Normandy with credit to that province; while with Brittany his estimate is almost the reverse.
Balzac, that great delineator of French character, sets forth, in “Les Paysans,” the somewhat equivocal statement that the time would come, owing to the steady progress of the French peasant, when France would have neither horses nor cattle. In those days it is hardly likely that he anticipated the automobile, so we may infer that he had in mind that every peasant would be his own producer, and would accordingly not need the horse as a beast of burden to carry him and his produce to market.
The population of Normandy is in general of a full-blooded, blond type, with blue eyes, and of a good height. Misery and poverty are quite the exception throughout the farming communities, and the long blue blouse and the black bonnet, which one sees so frequently on the fair days, usually covers a wealth that at first glance is quite undiscernible.
Enter any of the ordinary farmhouses, which you may come across in a day’s travelby road, and you will see preserved many of the usages of olden times.
Your Norman of the old régime will not discard an ancient custom for another merely because it is new—sometimes he won’t even think of it in favour of a better one.
It is the hour for the repast; in the kitchen one sees a long, narrow table covered only with a simple napkin, more often none at all, but scrubbed to such a degree of whiteness as only old oak can attain.
The farmer and his household seat themselves about the table, frequently on a long bench, and the conversation is simply that of the country-side, tempered with occasional rallies as to the state of crops or the weather. There is never a word of outside interest; for as likely as not the old peasant-farmer has never left his native village, giving to his sons or his daughters’ husbands the burden of whatever intercourse may be necessary with the outside world.