THE COMMANDERIE AT BALLAN
found, still solid, still fresh and clear, the ancient beams and roof-trees of a distant century, painted with the coat-of-arms of the Knights of Malta.
It is in autumn that you should visit the Commanderie. The house, still relatively small, is picturesque, a long irregular priory or manor-house, with lancet chapel-windows at one end, and in the centre a jutting pseudo-gothic turret that masks the staircase. With its mullioned windows and grey walls hung with crimson creeper, it looks at first sight rather Scotch or English than French. The lawn that spreads in front confirms the impression. Our grass plots in France are generally left to grow for hay, and stand tall with flowers and seeding-grasses, save for a band clean shaven near the house. But my friend here is of Lord Bacon’s thinking: “That nothing is more Pleasant to the Eye thanGreene Grassekept finely shorn.” A velvet lawn stretches between the infrequent lovely beds heaped so high, where the tall cannas outflame the red and orange touches on the woods, where pale-blue plumbagos, yellow canariensis, and violet clematis, twining over hop-poles, fall in loose garlands and festoons like coloured fountains of flowers. So the green expanse sweeps up the slope till it meets a glade of browner oak-trees, starred thickly underfoot with crimson cyclamen. Beyond a wandering path the oak-wood rustles, and crowns the height.
So much for the view from the front; east and west, the park stretches, occupying a combe between the wooded slopes. Turning east, you cross the moat, inseparable from every ancient manor-house in France, you pass the orangery with its terrace, where the trees stand out in pots all summer,and so you arrive at a series of large walled gardens orpotagers. You enter by arosariumwhere, well to the south, sheltered by stone walls draped with peaches in espalier, the roses grow profusely, not trained over balls or arches, nor cut into standards, but somewhat wild and bushy, just as Nature made them. Invisible at their feet, flat beds of mignonette, verbena, violet and heliotrope give odour; for the rose is a fast flower of its smell, as Lord Bacon noticed (when writing of gardens one may surely quote him twice): “And you may walk by a whole row of them and find nothing of their sweetness.” From the rose-garden starts a long rectangle of three walledpotagersin a suite, opening into each other like a set of state rooms. The walls of all alike are trained and pleached with fruit-trees, and more especially, in this first one, with vines: trellises of grapes, purple and white, and that small golden sort called Chasselas, whose flavour is perhaps unrivalled. The three gardens communicate by means of arched gateways, through which—right through from end to end—runs a broad gravelled walk, set on either side with deep, high banks of common flowers for cutting, such as roses, chrysanthemums, zinnias, asters, phlox, dahlias, and cannas, tall Paris daisies, freesias, and autumn lilies. Behind this varied screen stretch the beds of fruit and vegetables, strawberries and raspberries, which ripen on into latest autumn, melons and asparagus, artichokes and cardoons, green peas, French beans and scarlet-runners—such, in fact, as make some decorative show; for this first garden is a favourite place for sheltered walking. To the second garden are relegated the salads of different sorts: lettuce andromaine, spinach and sorrel, scarole, celery and chicory, capucin’s beard andbetteand endive; while in the third grow the cabbages, carrots, turnips, parsnips, Japanese crosnes, Jerusalem artichokes, Brussels sprouts, onions, leeks, potatoes,and their kind. Above the suite of gardens, which occupy the lower slope of a gentle rise, runs a natural fringe of copse-wood; below, the upper road from Tours to Ballan divides them from a considerable vineyard, which bears, on a little holm, a fourth walled garden, orclos, filled with orchard trees of a finer sort than those planted everywhere about the fields. This is especially sacred to those golden plums for which the country round Tours is celebrated.
The small estate of the Commanderie comprises some two hundred and forty acres (96 hectares), of which fifty-five are laid out in park or woods, forty in pasture, thirty-five in vineyards, eighty in arable land for corn, about thirty in orchards and gardens. It has amused me to compare this distribution with that of Ausonius’herediolus, or small family estate, which, though it seemed a very little property in Roman Gaul, was more than twice as large as the Commanderie. The fourth-century poet, who takes us into his confidence on all occasions, does not forget to lay before us the plan of his ancestral inheritance near Bordeaux. He had some fifty acres of pasture, one hundred acres of vineyard, two hundred acres of corn-land, and about as much forest as cultivated land. But to return to modern times and the Commanderie. The vineyards, with their five and thirty acres, cover far less space than formerly, for in October, 1885, the dreaded phylloxera made its appearance in Touraine, surely and gradually spreading desolation. All the vineyards of the estate before us have been replanted in the last eight years with American roots, which are invulnerable to the trans-atlantic pest, and chiefly withRupestrisandRiparia, especially the vine of the latter sort calledGloire de Touraine. On these are grafted the native vines—the expense of the whole process of uprooting, ploughing, planting and grafting costing not less than sixty pounds sterling for the hectare—that is to say, for two and a half English acres. After four or five years the new plants begin to yield abundantly, especially if they are budded with the prolific vines of the country, the purpleGros lotor whiteFolle Blanche, either of which produces an excellentvin ordinaire. At the Commanderie, where the grafts are all of the finer sort, the yield, in the best years, does not exceed some forty hectolitres to the hectare. Twice as much is frequent in the fruitful South.
Some twenty years ago this little town of Ballan was a place of great prosperity. Every sunny slope all round was planted with the vine. The grapes of the country, besides filling the local vats, command a good price at Saumur, a neighbouring town wherein is manufactured much so-called champagne, which divine beverage, outside its natural borders, is best made from the light heady wines of these parts. Without any disguise or taking of names in vain, theCoteauxof the Loire produce many a famous vintage, such as the golden effervescing Vouvray, and the excellent claret of Chinon and Joué. But, alas! since 1890, too often the prosperous vineyard has become a wilderness, or is planted at best with garden-stuff or corn. The peasant-farmers no longer make a fortune each September; they barely grow for their own use some acre or so of vines. Ballan still keeps its air of solid comfort, its handsome cottages of white stone roofed with slate, its teeming vat in every cellar, its orchards laden with fruit. But, alas! money is no longer so flush in every pocket, for no crop replaces the prosperity given by the grape. You know a wine-growing village when you enter it by an air of universal well-being; and also by the industrious habits of the dwellers therein; for the vine demands unremitting care and attention, especially during the months of January, April, June, September, and October. Suppose a farmer to grow, besidehis vineyard, a field or two of corn, an acre or so of hay and some potatoes and turnips (and what farmer can grow less?). You will see, if you count the times of sowing and reaping, that he can have but little time to play the John-o’-Dreams.
Close to the kitchen gardens of the Commanderie lies the farmyard, a picturesque and pleasant place where I love to loiter of an afternoon. In the middle stands a squat round tower of considerable girth. Whatever it was of old (gateway, tower, or colombarium), to-day it is a dairy, chosen for this office on account of the mighty thickness of its walls and consequent evenness of the temperature within. The vaulted roof of the ground floor is lined, like the walls, with bright enamelled tiles, blue and green; the flags are laid with such evenness that not a speck of dust can shelter there in any cranny; tables of lava support the spotless vessels for the milk; the churns and separators are as neat and dainty as if they stood there not for use, but for ornament. How different from the rough and (truth to tell) the grimy floors, the squalid deal bench, the primitive churns and cheese-wrings of our wind-beaten mountainburonsin Auvergne!
True that down here in the plains there is less milk to care for. The excellent Norman cows of the Commanderie give, in favourable circumstances, as much as twenty litres of milk a day, whereas our hard-worked, curly-coated, red Cantal kine seldom yield more than eight; but then Madame Langeac has more than fourscore heads of cattle in her rude granges at Olmet, and the herd is larger still at Comblat, across the valley; while the handsome gothic cow-house of the Commanderie counts but one and twenty beasts, luxuriouslyhoused, ten on either side the central gallery or platform. And this is a largevacheriefor Touraine. A farm of fifty acres here possesses barely half a dozen cows; for while in Auvergne the cattle are the mainstay of an estate devoted to pasture, here, in this land of corn and wine, they are just the purveyors of the household dairy. Neither cheese nor butter is a great source of profit, and the cows never work in the fields.
Next to the cow-house stands a building of great importance—the wine-press, with its cellar for the vats. The cylinders merely caress their ripest loads of grapes; broken by the mass of their own weight, they yield the sweetest of their juice for themère-goutte, mother of wines of choice. But thevin-de-presse, or usual red wine—which is tonic, and (when new) a little harsh—is crushed from the fruit by great rollers, which bruise the pulp, break the skins, shatter the pips, and extract the secret tannin. Themère-goutteis all perfume and aroma; thevin-de-presseis stronger and has more body. A wise hand often delicately doses a mixture of the two, endowed with the qualities of either; one-fourth of the sharper wine added to themère-goutteensures its keeping.
I always used to think that red wine was made from purple grapes, and white wine from white ones; so it was, no doubt, until, in 1688, Dom Pérignon, abbot of Haut Villiers, in Champagne, invented our modern wine of champagne, which is made from black grapes. The differences lies in the treatment, not in the colour of the skin: the white wine is drawn off the solid residue before it enters into fermentation; the red wine stands on the aromatic detritus from which it has been crushed, and absorbs its qualities: red wine must evidently be more impregnate with tannin. After the juice has been decanted, whether white or red, a great body ofpulp remains, still flush and full of alcohol, rich in perfume and savour. Supposing you add a little water to this mass, having well broken it up; if on the morrow you pour on a little more, and do so day by day, until you reach about one-sixth the volume of the juice drawn off; if then you let the liquor stand for ten days or so to ferment, and finally decant the renovated must into barrels, which you keep hermetically sealed; in this way, you may obtain an excellent light drink, calledpiquette, or sometimes merelyla boisson, much used by farmers and labourers in France. It contains from five to eight per cent. of alcohol, and is the equivalent of our English beer. But often (though not at the Commanderie) in countries like Touraine, where the alcoholic value of the grape is generally low, we sacrifice the good and innocent piquette to what is called the second wine, orvin de sucre, orvin de marc—a liquid obtained by the fermentation of sugared water added to the pulp. I fear that men of science—especially Chaptal and Parmentier—are responsible for this practice, which is a tampering with Bacchus. It has, however, the practical result of raising by some three per cent. the amount of alcohol, so as to make a second wine which simulates the natural juice. Again, in cold and rainy seasons, when the fruit ripens ill, even the first loads of grapes are often powdered with sugar which, while it counteracts their acidity, increases the strength of the liquid, and is said to augment its resistance to the malady ofla graisse, that scourge of weak white wines. When in the last resort the wine is drawn off, the pulp which remains is frequently made into food for the beasts. This latter is an excellent practice. A great chemist of my acquaintance (in point of fact, my husband, Emile Duclaux) asserts that alcohol should form a part of the usual dietary of cattle, being, in fact, when economically dosed by the scientific hand, an unrivalled and easily digestedaliment. As for the wine, it sells at any price, from twenty or thirty francs a hectolitre for the coarse rustic kinds, to sixty francs for the same amount of a choicer sort, such as is made at the Commanderie.
Beyond the press, the far end of the farmyard is formed by a row of light neat sheds for carts and tools, and a wooden barn—far smaller than our Cantal granges. Opposite the cow-house stand the duck-pond and the fowl-pen—loud with the cries of geese, turkeys, ducks, fowls, and pigeons. All told, the fowl-yard counts some five hundred birds. Some of them are absent. The ducks swim on the moat; the turkeys occupy, on a green slope of the park, one of those folds wherein some fifty years ago the antelopes used to arch their lovely necks. As we pass it, a brooding turkey-hen hurries her nestlings swiftly under her wings. For see! there aloft, poised in the blue, so high, so high overhead, that blot of steady black is the watching buzzard. For a mile round you may hear the wail of its strange mournful cry, so melancholy that one might suppose the striking of its prey less a sport than a heart-breaking necessity.
Let us leave the farm and the farmyard, and pass through the gardens to the house, where it sleeps in the sunlight in its coat of many colours—ivy, virginia creeper, wistaria, and rose; then let us turn down the green valley of the park towards the village or small town of Ballan. The topmost edges of the combe are covered on either hand with copse-woods of oak. Great Spanish chestnuts, hollow and discrowned, stand about the first green slopes of the turf, especially on the northern side of the tiny invisible streamletwhich, in the patient course of untold centuries, has scooped out this sheltered bottom. Below the chestnuts stand a group or two of stately Atlas cedars, which even in broad daylight seem to keep a perpetual moonbeam glinting on their silvered branches. The grass lies plain in the bottom, where the son of the house has planned a tennis-court; beyond runs the yard-wide brook, whose banks are planted with deciduous cypresses from Louisiana, magnificently hectic in the flush of their decay. There is no better tree for containing a wandering stream on its course through a valley, for the strong roots run together in a natural dyke on either side the bed; green as a pine in summertime, few trees are so beautiful between September and All Saints, when the bald cypress (as it is misnamed) rivals in splendour with the maple or the cherry. I wonder it is not more usually planted in the milder regions of the south of England, whose warm moist climate would permit its growth. The Louisiana cypress fears a heavy frost, a rigorous winter; but it would prosper in Dorset, in Devon or in Cornwall as it prospers in Touraine, and is not only a magnificent ornament, but an unexampled drainer of a marshy region.
A mile through the park and half a mile through woods and fields brings us to the pleasant little place of Ballan—a “gros bourg,” as they say in France, something between a village and a little country town. How charming are thegros bourgsof Touraine—Vouvray and Montrichard, Savonnières or Ballan—with their neat white houses, built of freestone topped with slate, a raised flight of stone steps leading to the door, and large ornamented windows, one or two on either side the entrance; there is a trellised vine up the front, there are flowers in the garden, fruit-trees everywhere! These villages have brought prosperity to the very brink of poetry. Once I spent five weeks at Chenonceau, living at the villageinn, a humble place enough,—the “Bon Laboureur.” The rooms were rough and homely, with tiled floors, straw-bottomed chairs, and old-fashioned furniture of waxed walnut; but seldom have I dined better than in that rustic parlour. It is true that I was young then, and very happy. The tenderest fowls, the most melting and juicy of melons and green peas, the freshest eggs for boiling or for breaking in an omelette, the most savouryrillettes, the lightest white bread with fresh yellow butter, the tastiest ham, the richest abundance of peaches, grapes, plums and pears, composed our rustic diet. We thought Chenonceau a little paradise. To know a country-side one must know every class in it; therefore, not content with my five weeks in a village inn, or with some twelve summers’ experience of life in a manor, I have written to a friend of mine (for before her marriage she lived five years in my service), who is the daughter of a small farmer in Touraine, asking her to send me the daily bill of fare in a cottage. She replies: “The peasants live uncommonly well in Touraine. Two or three times a day, according to the season, they have an excellent meal consisting of soup—generally cabbage-soup—followed by a dish of beans and bacon, or a ragout of mutton, or a piece of braised beef, or maybe a fricassee of veal or a civet of rabbit, but meat of some sort, and very seldom merely bacon; for dessert, they have goats’-milk cheese, for every farm has its goats, with fruit, and plenty of common red wine, for every cottage has its acre or so of vineyard.”
In fact, by force of circumstance, every dweller in Touraine becomes, for the time being, more or less of an epicure. To arrive there in October from our Cantal mountains is a startling change of scene. On our summits, perhaps, already the snow has shed its first fresh whiteness; a few pears and apples ripen reluctant in the orchards; and if the gardenyield us carrots and cabbage, we scarcely dream of more. In Touraine the very hillsides run down with bunches of ripe grapes; the fruit-trees by the road bow beneath a weight of pears and plums. The peaches hang against the garden walls; the raspberry-canes are rosy still with fruit. It seems an Eden of plenty and mellow fruitfulness. And there would be a blank ingratitude in taking no delight in these rich offerings of Mother Earth. It is natural here that one’s fancy should play about the preparation of a future meal; we feed the turkeys with walnuts all October to ensure a feast for Martinmas; we walk in thepotagerand criticize the matting of the handsomecardons; we see to the banking of the celery. So near to such an ample Nature, a sort of poetry invades these homely details, and the daily meal becomes, not just a dinner, but a pious banquet offered up in praise of Ceres.
My friend of the Commanderie has kindly obtained from themairieof Ballan a list of the different estates and properties which compose the commune: a total computed at some 6,500 acres. There are eighteen estates of more than 30 hectares (75 acres); there are seventy-five farms between 10 and 30 hectares; there are one hundred and thirty-two small cottage farms between 1 and 10 hectares (from 2½ to 25 acres)—which is as much as to say, that there are in all two hundred and twenty-five landlords in a commune which counts only four hundred and fifty voters. Every second man is a person of property! The population of farm-labourers and servants is therefore small, and exclusively employed on the few large estates. My second informant(the peasant farmer’s daughter) writes: “To work a small farm to profit, the family of the farmer must suffice. Even in a largish property—25 hectares (about 63 acres)—you can manage with two men, two women, and two horses. (Admire the progression!) The cows here do no field work, and are kept for milk and meat. On a farm of this size, you should have six good Normandy cows, two or three goats, two pigs, plenty of rabbits and fowls. The heifers arrive at a profitable age when they are from two to three years old; they should then bear a calf each spring; when the calf is from six to eight weeks old, you should sell it to the butcher for from 30 to 50 francs, if the animal turn the scale alive at 50 kilos. The mother will now give milk for another five months. The goats also are useful; a she-goat gives at least three litres of milk a day. The little round flat cream-cheeses made from goats’ milk are sold at 1½d.each in summer, 3d.a piece in winter, and are a considerable source of profit. As for the land, we sow it in a rotation of crops: firstly, we sow wheat in the autumn, on which we sow in March a crop of clover to follow the harvest, then in late autumn we sow barley; after the barley is reaped, in the following summer, you should let the land rest a year before you sow with wheat again in October. (This fallacy of fallow lands still obtains among the lower class in France, though the agricultural schools have taught the well-to-do farmer to exact a harvest every year from land enriched with chemical manures, or refreshed by an occasional crop of clover, vetch or buckwheat, ploughed into the soil while green, between harvest and autumn seed-time. But, to resume.) The clover is for the cows. Here they do not live in the fields as in Auvergne, but chiefly in the stables. In the summer we feed them three times a day with beet-root or turnip-tops, cabbage, and clover; in the winter we make a good soup of wheat-chaff,bran, beetroots, and a sort of oil-cake made from the crushed pulp of the walnuts left in the oil-press; boiling water is poured on this, it is left to ferment for two hours; and then, just slightly warm, it is given to the cows in the stable. They have this soup twice a day, and the rest of the time we give them something every two hours or so, generally a mangerful of dried clover, cabbage-leaves and chopped straw.” There is no hay, you observe, in this substantial diet. Nor does she speak of the large yellow pumpkins which, in the greater part of Touraine, are so useful a food both for man and beast. At the Commanderie, the cattle graze the pastures in summer; in winter they are fed on hay, chopped straw, beetroot soup, or potatoes, boiled Jerusalem artichokes, mangel-wurzel and swedes, made into a warm pottage. How our neighbours at Olmet would stare if I suggested apuréeof vegetables for the cows!
A large family is a source of wealth to the farmer, who has to pay five pounds a year to his herdboy or goose-girl, ten or twelve pounds a year to the maid who helps his wife, and sixteen pounds a year to every labourer and ploughman, in addition to their keep. So when the farmer reallyisa farmer and cultivates his neighbour’s land, his quiver is well plenished, as in Auvergne. But in Touraine the peasant works on his own land; and the dread of having to divide that treasured morsel, dearer than wife or child, sorely limits his descendants. A law permitting a greater freedom in the making of wills would certainly be followed by an immediate increase in the rural population. The French as a nation are lovers of children and hoarders of money. Who would not multiply the curly heads around the bowl of cabbage-soup, and save by the same stroke the money spent in wages?
A labourer living and eating in his own cottage earns in Touraine, as a rule, some two and thirty pounds a year, oris paid for piecework at a rate of threepence an hour. Or if he hire himself out by the day, he earns two francs in winter, finding his own food; three francs from haymaking to harvest; and five francs for the few golden weeks that pay the rent. The rate of wages is to me a mystery. A long course of mediæval studies has left no doubt in my mind that in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and down to the middle of the sixteenth century, the rural class of the population was better paid and wealthier, in relation to the rest of society, than is the case to-day. Never perhaps have the poor been poorer than in the last three or four hundred years—the era of polite civilization. And yet the peasant of Touraine is not a Socialist. Patient, thrifty, humorous, deliberate, and practical, he takes things as they are, and finds them, on the whole, not amiss.
Positive and superstitious, slow and sure, subtle, cautious, and independent, the labourer of Touraine is a character apart; so different from our rough and genial farmers of the Cantal, that it seems strange to think that one and the other are just peasants of Central France. He is fond of pleasure; and though a good worker, a lover of his ease. No man knows better how to hang a garland round the Altar of Duty—a rare art. “Molles Turones,” said Cæsar; and Tasso thought the peasant here was like his land, which is “molle, lieta e dilettosa.” But this softness, this measure which knows nor haste nor passion, are enforced by a patient continuity. Look at the countryman as he saunters along his fields, dressed in a dark-blue blouse, open over a decent woollen suit. He appears the happiest of mortals, nonchalant, easy-going, humorous and delicate. His women are worthy of him. The elder women of Touraine are dignified and lovely to behold in their long circular cloaks of black cloth, and the fine and costly conch of embroidered
TOURS
muslin that discreetly veils the dark hair. One charming young girl, born to this decorous and dainty costume, used to sport on Sundays (when I knew her) a singular erection of chip, ostrich feathers out of curl, and pink muslin convolvulus. One day I regretted the earlier head-dress. She replied: “Never again, madame, never again! The first day I went into Tours settled that question. Those idle people on the Rue Royale looked at me with a sort of pity (or, perhaps, as you say, ma’am, it was admiration, but I found it very wounding), as if I existed for their entertainment, rather than on my own account.” The little speech, with its fierce independence, was quite as good a piece of local colour as the cap. Jeannette was a person of a refined and delicate temperament, not uncommon in Touraine, and full of quaint niceties of thought, feeling, and expression; but, for all that, she had some vulgar failings of her class: she was fond of money and superstitious. She was quite aware of the first defect, and was sensitive enough to appreciate the beauty of disinterestedness; sometimes she would say, as if she complained of some hereditary malady: “It grieves me to be so avaricious! But something inside me pushes me that way.” She never, I think, discovered that she was superstitious, deeming rather the people of Paris a foolhardy race for not taking certain obvious precautions.... Jeannette, for instance, would not have married into a family of which any member was afflicted even with auburn hair, and when I admired the shade we politely call Venetian, she would exclaim: “Every one knows the meaning of red hair. There’s a sorcerer in that family!” In Touraine, the sorcerer—thejeteux de sorts—has often more authority in a village than the priest; and many a sensible farmer wears in secret some article of clothing wrong side out as a means of diverting the witch’s cruel spell. Once, when I changed house, I found my good Jeannette hadloosed her purse-strings to buy a young cockerel; she sacrificed it in my new bedroom, letting at least one spot of the blood fall on the fresh planks: “For the house is new,” she said, “and some one must die in it before the year’s out; better it should be the bird than madame!” She used to tell me all her dreams, and would come to me weeping in a morning if she had dreamed of pearls, a marriage, or I think it was cornflowers—some unlucky blossom. She had two books in her possession. One (a sort of mumbo-jumbo, treasured from pure devotedness) was myLife of Renan. The other, much thumbed and tattered from long use, wasLa Clef des Songes.
I suppose such devotion to fetishes must exhaust the religious faculty, for like many superstitious persons—especially in Touraine—Jeannette was not pious. She had in her something stiffly, Puritanically, virtuous. She was loyal, honest, upright, quarrelsome, affectionate, precise. While she delicately dawdled through her work, doing it in perfection, her mind was not idle; she had that thoughtful inward habit, combined with a faculty of sharp observation, which I have often noticed in the peasant class. She had a great love of justice; but especially as it affected herself. It was hard for her to see that other people are just as real and as important. Having been at one moment exposed to a baseless calumny, when it was at last cleared up, she burst into tears and exclaimed: “Ce pauv’ Dreyfus!” Suddenly she understood our emotion, and what was the injustice which had caused such a to-do.
If I have drawn her portrait here, it is because Jeannette is just a specimen of the peasant of Touraine. I recognized in her the moral features of her race:—measure and tact, delicacy of sentiment, love of ease, lack of enthusiasm, a fidelity tempered by criticism. Also she made me understandand touch, as it were, certain features of her local class. For instance, that passionate love of amusement which shows itself in summer dances on the green (the heaviest old Tourangeau farmer can dance like any sylph). In winter time, the same bent appears in the endless repartee and story-telling, round a neighbour’s hearth of evenings, when the peasants gather forla veillée. “At least we are not dull in Touraine,” Jeannette used to say, “and we are well-housed, in our nice little stone houses, with the roof stuffed full of hay and grain above us. You must sleep on a sixth floor in Paris, if you would really understand the heat of summer or the winter’s cold.”
The city of Tours stands on a fertile plain of chalk some three hundred feet above sea level—a plain which is diversified by the frequent valleys of considerable rivers. There are the huge and turbid Loire, the winding Indre, the clear green Cher, so wide, and yet at ease in its pebbly bed; a little further off the Creuse and the Vienne. All are great bodies of water, which elsewhere give their names to whole departments. Most of these rivers are accompanied, on one side at least, some little way inland, by a steep rocky ridge of friable white tufa, whose natural caverns are frequently inhabited, enlarged, and made into comfortable dwellings by modern troglodytes. So easy to manipulate is the soft chalky stone! Therein dwell the thrifty peasants, as cosy as a weevil in a cheese. These earthycoteaux, or long level lines of low-banked hills, are peculiar, I think, to France, and common in every part of it: if they lie to the north, they are generally covered by a natural copsewood; if they slope to the south,well set to the sun, they form a perfect nursery for the vine. Near Ballan, thecoteauxof the Cher grow an excellent red wine; the banks of the Loire produce the sparkling golden Vouvray; at Chinon, on the Indre, the vines give a claret celebrated in the south of France; Chinon, indeed, which lies a little south of Ballan, is the richest part of all the plain. It is the ample garden of France, beloved of Rabelais, and a land of rich dessert: wine and walnuts, grapes and almonds, plums and pears. If you pass in September, the orchards present a busy scene; the yellow Catherine plums are then in their perfection of mellow ripeness; they are gathered by hand with dainty care, laid to dry in the sun on wicker trays or hurdles, and baked several times in a baker’s oven before they issue thence in the shape of dried fruit for the table in winter: the famous “Pruneaux de Tours.” Not only the Catherine plum, chiefly grown for drying, but the delicious Reine Claude, golden hued and splashed with carmine, the Agen plum that’s red and blue, and the Golden Drop, abound in these orchards; for the hardy plum-tree, that will grow anywhere, demands for its perfection a land of wide airy valleys and low-lying southern slopes. The plum is made for Touraine, and Touraine for the plum; ’tis a happy marriage. In autumn, when the orchards drop with fruit; when the slopes are covered with the turning vine; when the laden pear-trees stand round the fields, which are high with maize and clover sown for fodder after early harvest; when every farmyard, in the angle of its wall, shows a huge heap of those great ribbed and golden gourds, large enough to contain the fairy coach of Cinderella, which feed man and beast with pumpkin-soup all winter; then the plain of Touraine, under its customary sky of sunny grey, has a beauty of its own, drawn from its great wide rivers, its rocky, cavernous cliffs, its smiling valleys, its pretty hills all clothed with oats, theirround heads delicately outlined against the soft horizon, its great forests of Loches and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between two rows of pollard willows, its great, straight, white high-roads that the aspen flecks with shadow, and above all from that indescribable grace in the lie of the land which satisfies the eye with scant diversity. Arthur Young may declare it “a dead, flat, unpleasant country—a level of burnt russet meadow,” and affirm the landscape to be “more uninteresting than I could have thought it possible for the vicinity of a great river to be.” We will dare to differ. With Montaigne, we will cry shame on the Highlander, whose eye, too accustomed to his lochs and heather, fails to appreciate the melting beauty of Touraine. With Gilbert White, we’ll declare that the rounded forms of a chalk country make it seem more alive and breathing, as it were, than any other. For one season of the year at least, Touraine is beautiful!
The kings of France always thought so. Their castles lie all round. Lovely Amboise, on the Loire, still belongs to the family of Bourbon-Orleans; but the Republic holds what time has left of Loches, so lordly throned above the Indre, with Blois, and the remains of Plessis. Beautiful Chenonceaux, built across the Cher, has lately been sold to a millionnaire from Cuba. Other foreigners last year settled at Azay-le-Rideau, the fairest, to my thinking, of all the so-called castles of the Loire; for there the Indre seems to eddy round the deserted palace of the Sleeping Beauty. The huge feudal pile which dominates the Loire at Langeais belongs to a Protestant banker from the Havre. Villandry, Moncontour,have been purchased by wealthy families whose coat-of-arms was unknown a hundred years ago. Luynes alone still belongs to the ancient ducal house which bears its name.
All of these castles, and a hundred smaller ones, down to our small Commanderie, or the toy-castle of La Carte, near Ballan, have a grace and a dignity of their own, untouched by their change of fortunes. Fallen from their antique state, they appear to own the power of ennobling their possessors. And as the sea-shell models to its form the wandering fish that dwells in it by choice, so these old houses, representing an ideal annihilated by frequent revolutions, have silently refashioned the sort of aristocracy for which they were created. Their ancient walls can find no great change between the present and the past. To make the resemblance all the closer, there has arisen during the last few years in France, especially since the Dreyfus trial, a semblance of civil strife, and, as it were, a shadow of those wars of religion with which these old stones are so familiar. And if as yet no Huguenot gentlemen dangle anew from the iron balconies of Amboise, it is perhaps from no want of a will to string them there on the part of their orthodox neighbours.
Life in any of these chateaux, on either side of the abyss, is much the same; indeed, much the same life has been led in rural France by the upper classes since the very days of the Roman Empire. The letters of Ausonius, written in the fourth century; or the Victorial of Don Pero Niño, a Spanish knight who visited a castle in Normandy some thousand years later; each alike present a picture which varies in no essential point from that which we behold in any important country house to-day.
The letters of Ausonius introduce us to the brilliant villas that adorned in Gallo-Roman times the banks of the Garonne—villas that were ratherpalazzi, as they say in Italy to-day,with their picture-galleries, libraries, bath-rooms, and loggias adorned with statues. Round them extended noble gardens, like the gardens of Versailles or St. Cloud, with artificial lakes and canals, clipped yews in figures, rows of marble busts, and some little sunproof grove of ilex, where Pan for ever plays a flute grown green with moss. Just as in our days, the farm adjoined the villa, with its rick-yards and sheepfolds, its barns, stables, and winepress. But if the outer form of things was little different, still more striking is the social resemblance. Then, as now, the men of the household rose early for a morning’s hunting before the mid-day meal; visitors called after lunch, partook of a light refreshment, strolled with their hosts about the park and gardens. After their departure, then, as now, guests and hosts alike retired to write their letters. Not every day of old came and went the post, and the missives it brought and took were more studied and wittier than our hasty messages to-day. Then, as now, the upper class in France was passionately fond of music; and that, too, was a resource—the instruments indeed were a little different, being “lyres as big as carts,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, and hydraulic organs. But the pleasure and the habit were the same. On most afternoons, some of the guests of a large party were busy with music, or perhaps with the preparations for private theatricals, which then, as now, were a frequent entertainment in a country house: Paulus, of Saintes, brought with him to Lucaniacus a farce of his own composition for the delectation of Ausonius and his guests. While these were occupied in music or reciting, others were driving, or playing at tennis (Paulinus, of Pella, sent to Rome for his tennis-balls), and others, again, were planning some mighty race of cars. To-day they are motor-cars,—and there is all the difference.
After dinner, reading and conversation were the order ofthe day. Then, as now, the women were well to the fore. The wife of Ausonius wrote poetry, his daughter attended a course of university lectures, his aunt was a lady doctor. Depend upon it, in any age these clever French women could always hold their own! While some of the hosts of Lucaniacus sat talking round the lamp, others looked through the last new books; more often, some one read aloud to a circle of ladies busy with their needlework: just as to-night! In a quiet corner, dice and trictrac claimed their devotees. Ausonius does not speak of bridge or boston.
Life in the upper class has little changed in Gallia! We find, indeed, a greater difference if we compare our modern round of days and works with the picture offered in the Victorial. In 1406 (as we shall see in a later chapter), the chateau of Sérifontaine was no less hospitable than Lucaniacus, “and as well mounted,” says the chronicler, “as any mansion in Paris;” the pleasures of hunting and shooting, the extreme love and exquisite practice of music, the light and almost constant art of conversation were alike in the one as in the other. There is the same delightful courtesy, the same universal amiability of temper. But in the mediæval picture there is, perhaps (with a wilding grace and fantasy, which are not now in fashion), a lack of that sober, solid culture, that fund of judgment and good sense so oddly mixed with triviality, which in the days of Ausonius, as in our own, seem to me distinctive of society in France.
In all the comfortablebourgeoishouses that I visit, as in the manor of Touraine, life runs as easy, as regular, as if on wheels of clockwork. This same ease and elasticity struck the excellent Don Pedro Niño, of whom more anon. “Could it last for ever,” said he, “such as it is, a man would not desire another Paradise.” Every one seems pleased andhappy, and I have long since come to the conclusion that the real art, the real wealth of France, are just this universal amiability of temper. Nothing happens, yet every one seems busy and amused. The young people shoot and play tennis of mornings (they still play tennis in France), or ride their bicycles (an evident progress on Lucaniacus!), or mount their horses; the elders write letters, read the papers, stroll in the grounds, eat grapes from the trellis for a morning “cure;” the ladies smile and sit about arrayed in wonderful morning gowns, embroidering strips of mysterious and beautiful needlework. A great capacity for sitting about and smiling, an ability to embroider anything, from a shoe-bag to a set of curtains, is part of the equipment of every well-bred Frenchwoman. Lunch reunites the scattered elements and is rich in animated conversation: gossip, news, discussion, gibes, laughing protests, enthusiasticenvolées, learned disquisitions, sparkling or ironic repartee, valuable information; for conversation in all its branches is the national game in France, played on all occasions by both sexes (especially together), and they are as clever here, and as easily first, as we in the cricket-field. After lunch the time runs, with scarce a variation, as it ran at Lucaniacus, or at Sérifontaine, save that in the last few years the general adoption of the motor-car has vastly increased the circle of possible visits and excursions. The letters to write, the game of tennis, the stroll in the grounds, the hour of music, remain unchanged. Frenchwomen, as a rule, are far superior at the piano to English-women or Italians; every little circle possesses its musician of considerable merit, and in almost every country house we may be sure of finding at least one lady, reading her music as lightly as her novel, and possessing a vast repertory of symphonies and sonatas which she plays with a just and fine understanding. Howmany an enchanted hour will she while away with Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, César Franck, greatest of modern masters, or, perhaps, the idol of the hour, Claude Debussy!
Even as the dice-tables and trictrac stood ready of old for the guests of Lucaniacus, so in every French country house to-day there is an orgy of innocent card-playing—such mysteries of Chinese bézique, boston, bridge (played any time these dozen years or more in France), or immense and complicated patiences which take five packs of cards. Meanwhile, I sit in a corner, very quiet, lost in a volume of Balzac, and a sweet agèd voice calls to me: “Quelle triste vieillesse vous vous préparez, mon enfant!” Ah, sweet agèd voice that I shall never hear again, your echo rings still for me in all the rooms of the Commanderie!
In every French country house of this early twentieth century we shall find, however, one great and noble preoccupation which took but little of the time or expenditure of those earlier societies with which I have compared our contemporaries. The sense of Charity, of social service, of solidarity or fraternity—call it what you will—the intimate feeling of our duty to our neighbour in all his troubles and trials, is a strong moral feature in the life of France to-day. On either side of the political and moral gulf which divides society, the same sentiment exists, with different applications. On the Catholic and royalist side, the most noble sacrifices will be made to support the Sisters in their work of education and nursing, great sums will be given to the Brotherhood of Christian Doctrine or to the Little Sisters of the Poor. The organization of the Catholic Church isbeyond all praise—every charitable impulse of the human heart can find therein its channel, and work the maximum of effect without let or hindrance. On the other side, onourside, the canalization is not so perfect. People have to dig their trench and lay their pipes before they can turn on their supplies. A great deal is left to individual effort. Schools,crèches, nursing homes, popular colleges, are founded and supported with a passion, a constant sacrifice, which has in it, with the dignity of charity, all the enthusiasm of a noble sport. How happy were the world if well-doing should become the pastime and the passion of the future!
My friends of the Commanderie have founded and endowed a cottage hospital, a perfect model of cheerfulness and hygiene. With its wide windows, its inner gallery for walking, its charming white bedrooms, its cane armchairs and sofas set about in the garden, whence the woods and vines are always fair to see, with its friendly Sisters in their whitecornettes, and its mild fresh air, theHospitalitéof Ballan appears, less a place to be ill in, than most evidently a place to get well in. There is an operating theatre (as bright and speckless as the rest) with a private bedroom for paying guests: and this is by no means the least service rendered, for the farmers of Touraine, well off and independent, are wholly without provision in their homes for the weeks which follow, for instance, the necessary infliction of any large flesh wound: too often in their homes the microbe finds out that open door. In the winter and spring, when pneumonia and influenza work their will, the little hospital can contain some ten or eleven invalids. It is emptied in the warm summer months, and serves, when there are no sick in Ballan, as a convalescent home for many a worn-out shop-girl or dressmaker’s apprentice from Paris.
Sometimes, in that little hospital, I see a vision of social peace which still seems too far removed from this lovely, humane, courteous, beneficent, and yet, in so far as politics are concerned (and here religion is a branch of politics), this most choleric and disputatious land of France. Built and endowed by a Jewess, visited and approved by the Archbishop of Tours, its white dormitories show the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Socialist doctor standing hand-in-hand round the bedside of the sick. “Ah me!” say I, “might I live to see the day when the whole of France should imitate this manor in Touraine!” But history tells me that (in France, at least) the lion will never lie down with the lamb—for at heart the lion is afraid lest its neighbour take advantage of the situation.
THE first time we meet him, to my knowledge, is just about the end of the twelfth century. Who can forget the sombre figure that strides across the dainty scene ofAucassin et Nicolette? Aucassin, on his courser, dreamy and lost in thought, goes riding towards the greenwood to find his true love, Nicolette. At the edge of the forest he passes the little herdboys, sitting on their mantles on the grass, as they break bread at nones by the fountain’s edge. These are mere children. It is far later, when the sun is sinking, while the tears course down the callow cheeks of Aucassin at the thought of his poor strayed love still unfound, it is deep in the forest glades that he meets the real French peasant.
“Right down an old green path rode Aucassin. He looked before him and saw such a varlet as this. Tall was he and wondrous foul of feature; he had a great shock of coal-black hair; his eyes were a full palm’s breadth apart. Large was his jowl, flat his great nose, with a broad nostril, and his thick lips were redder than roast meat; yellow and unsightly were the teeth of him. Shod was he with hose and shoon of oxhide, gartered a little lower than the knee with swathes of lime bark; and he was wrapped in a great coarse cloak that seemed to have two wrong sides to it.He stood there, leaning on a club; and he was sore afraid when he marked Aucassin riding towards him.
“‘Now God be with you, fair brother,’ said Aucassin.
“‘God bless you,’ replied the peasant hind.
“‘And what do you here, for the love of God?’ said Aucassin.
“‘What’s that to you?’ said the other.
“‘Nothing,’ said Aucassin. ‘I spoke out of courtesy.’
“‘But you,’ said the peasant—‘why do you weep and go so sad and sorry? Were I as rich a man as you, naught in this world should make me shed a tear!’
“‘Bah! Do you know who I am?’ said Aucassin.
“‘Yes. You are Aucassin, the count’s son. And look here, an’ you’ll tell why you go thus a-weeping, I’ll tell you this business of mine.’
“‘Certes,’ said Aucassin; ‘gladly will I tell you. This morning I went a-hunting in the forest, having with me a certain white greyhound, the loveliest thing alive. I have lost it; so I go weeping.’
“‘Oho!’ cried the other. ‘By the heart in the Lord’s bosom, you go crying for a stinking hound! Bad scan to me if I think any the better of you for that! Fie, there’s not so rich a man in this land, but if your father besought him for a gift of ten, or fifteen, or twenty greyhounds, he would send them you right gladly. ButImay weep, and have a cause for weeping.’
“‘Why, brother?’
“‘Sire; I will tell you. I was hired out to a rich peasant, and drove his plough with four oxen. And three days ago I had the misfortune to lose the best of my oxen, Roget, the pride of all my team, which still I go a-seeking. These four days past, neither bite nor sup has crossed my lips, for I dare not go near the town lest they put me in gaol.