VIEW FROM LA MONTAGNE DE LA VERBERIE
we should walk on the ramparts and meet our neighbours, talk of the crops and pull the Government to pieces (it stands a great deal of pulling!). We should shake our heads over the Conseil Municipal, but forgive the individual councillors, who are invariably amiable in private life. The terrible M. Dupont would give me a cutting of Malmaison pink for my garden, andthatbreach would be healed.... Stop carriage! let us begin at once, that peaceful imaginary comedy of old age. But, ah, the little white house is already out of sight. We are in front of the shattered round towers of the thirteenth-century palace, all fringed with brown wallflowers against an azure sky. We climb higher still, for see—here is the high, sunny, little square where the tall cathedral stands.
Senlis cathedral is a fine ogival building, its great porches arched around with sculptured saints and prophets. There are two towers, one of them topped by a surprising steeple, a hundred feet in height, which is a landmark for all the country round. The deep porches rich in shadow, the slender lofty towers, compose an exterior altogether simple, noble, and religious. To my thinking, Senlis, like all Gothic churches, is best seen from without. Within, that bare unending height of pillar, that cold frigid solemnity, that perfume of dreary Sabbath, is less touching than the grand yet homely massiveness of Romanesque, or even than the serene placidity of the classic revival. Who, unabashed, could say his prayers in these chill Gothic houses of the Lord, built apparently for the worship of giraffes or pelicans? Oh for the little, low-roofed chapels of St. Mark’s, the unpretending grandeur of San Zenone or Sant’ Ambrogio, or even the simple, pious beauty of such a Norman village church as St. Georges de Boscherville, near Rouen! Think of the quaint, sombre poetry of Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Ferrand, of SaintJulien at Brioude, or Saint Trophime at Arles; or even remember the elegant and holy grace of the Parisian St. Etienne du Mont—these be churches in which to say one’s prayers. Whereas your Northern Gothic is a marvellous poem from without; but how frigid is the chill interior of those august and noble monuments! Duty divorced from charity is not more cold; and I can easier imagine a filial and happy spirit of worship in the humblest square-towered parish church.
As it happened, we did not see the interior of Senlis at its best. The spring cleaning was in full force; the straw chairs were heaped in an immense barricade by the font. In the middle of the cathedral—and really in the middle, dangling in mid-air like Socrates in his basket—an energetic char-man was brushing the cobwebs from the sculptured capitals with a huge besom made of the dried but leafy boughs of trees. He had been hauled up there in a sort of crate by some ingenious system of ropes and pulleys. The one solitary figure in that vast cleanly interior was not unpicturesque; it was like a caricature of any picture of Mr. Orchardson’s.
Senlis was the capital of our friends the Sylvanectes. Hence stretched on either hand the vast forests which even to-day are still considerable in a score of relics—the woods of Chantilly, Lys, Coye, Ermenonville, Hallatte, Compiègne, Villers-Cotterets, etc., but which in Gallo-Roman times were still one vast united breadth of forest. To-day, all round Senlis the lands are cleared, and the nearest woods, north or south, are some six miles away. We rumbledregretfully down the hill, out towards the windy plains of Valois, windiest plains that ever were; bleak champaigns where the sough and rushing of the wind sounds louder than at sea. The forests of this northern plain are beautiful. O woods of Chantilly! O birchen glades of Coye! O deep and solemn vales of Compiègne, spinnies of Hallatte, and wavy pine-knolls of Villers-Cotterets, are ye not as a collar of green emeralds upon the breast of Mother Earth? But we must admit that, shorn of their trees, the plains of Oise have not the grandeur, the ample solemn roll, of the plains of Seine-et-Marne. ’Tis a lean, chill, flat, and as it were an angular sort of beauty; like some thin thirteenth-century saint, divinely graceful in her robes of verdure; more graceful beneath those plenteous folds than her better nourished sisters. But never choose her for your model of Venus Anadyomene. Leave her that imperial cloak of woods and forests.
We pass by fields of sun-smitten, withered pasture; by stretches of sad precocious corn, already in ear on its scanty span-high stems of green; by quarries and hamlets, into the deep wood of Hallatte; then forth again by more fields, ever bleaker, ever higher, till somehow suddenly we find ourselves on the steep brow of a down (they call it a mountain here, la Montagne de la Verberie), with below us, half seen through the poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side, a lovely blue expanse of country with the Oise lying across it like a scimitar of silver. Far away beyond the bridge, beyond the village in its meadows, depths of forest, blue and ever bluer, make an azure background that reaches out to Compiègne.
We dash down the hill and clatter along the sleepy pebbly village street, past the inn full of blouses and billiards, till the trees press thicker and thicker among the lengthening shadows. The forest is full of the peculiar soft beauty thatforeruns the summer dusk. These outskirts are fragrant with thorn-trees and acacia-trees. O white-flowering delicate mock-acacias, were I the king of France, I would multiply ye by all my high roads—for none is more beautiful to the eye and none is more majestic or more bountiful than you. Throughout that parched spring of 1893, when the hay stood withered a span high from the ground, your long green leaves served as fodder for our cattle, most succulent and sweet. And what shall I say of your blossom—delicious to every sense—an exquisite rain of white pearls, dropping fragrant perfumes on the tree, which, plucked and delicately fried in batter, make abeignetworthy of Lucullus? I love your black and gnarled thorny trunk, so dark in its veil of lacy green and white; and it always seems to me that the nightingale sings sweeter than elsewhere from your high and twisted branches.
Here we are still on the rim of the forest. The white may-trees, still in flower, grow in rounds and rings together on the broken ground studded with silver birch. They stand in the dusky summer stillness, very fair and sweet, their muslin skirt spread white under the gleam of the rising moon. The lanky sentimental young silver birches bend their heads above them, and sigh in the breeze. We pass—and as soon as we have passed, no doubt, they clasp their fragrant partners to their glittering breasts and whirl away in some mystic, pastoral May-dance to celebrate the spring.
But we go on, still on. The trees press closer and closer. They are now great forest-trees. The wind soughs among them in utter melancholy. Far away, here and there, a thin spectre of moonlight glides between their branches. Have you ever felt at night in some deep glade the holy horror of the forest? If not, you have no Druid and no Dryad among your ancestry. You have never known with a shudderjust how they sacrificed the victim on yonder smooth grey slab, by moonlight, to the Forest God! Think, on this very spot, the moonlight fell, even as it falls to-night, among the gleaming beeches, ere ever the Romans entered Gaul. Man has never sown or reaped his harvest on this sacred soil: it is still consecrate to the God of Forests. The beech-boughs rustle immemorial secrets; the oaks shoot up their mast-like columns to support the temple roof. And there is Something in the temple, Something vast and nameless. Something that sighs and laments and chills, super-human or anti-human, Something which has no place in any of our creeds. What is it, this obscure, religious dread, this freezing of the blood and tension of the spirit, that locks us in a holy awe amid the shades of the nocturnal forest? Who knows? Perhaps a dim unconscious memory of the rites of our ancestors, Celts or Germans; a drop of the heart’s blood of the Druid or the Alruna-woman, still alive in us after two thousand years. They say that children fear the dark because they are still haunted by the dread of prowling beasts; our babies long obscurely for the blazing camp-fires which kept the wolves and bears at bay; an old anxious forest-fear survives in them and forbids them to sleep without that bright protection. Brr!... I wish we could see the friendly glow to-night in the wood of Compiègne!
At last, far off, there is in truth a glow as of a human beacon. ’Tis a blacksmith’s forge, and then some straggling houses. Again a space of scantier wood, and we clatter up the streets of the outlying faubourg. The streets grow steeper, the houses taller, our pace quicker and more exhilarating. And at last we draw up with a clack of the whip before the famous friendly Hôtel de la Cloche at Compiègne.
The market is in full swing when we throw our shutters open in the morning, and the gay wide square is full of booths and country-people, clustered round the bronze statue of Joan of Arc. (It was here, you know, we took her—worse luck to us!—at the gate of Compiègne. But it was at Rouen she made her entry, and that exit for which, alas! we stand ashamed throughout history.) Nothing could look cheerfuller than the market-place this morning. It tempts us out; and then we find that we could not see the best of it from the windows. For cheek by jowl with our hotel stands the fine Hôtel de Ville, with its fretted, Flemish-looking front and its tall belfry for the chimes. It was finished in 1510, when Louis XII. was king. There he rides, on the large arcade on the first story, every inch a king; but the statue is modern.
Gay, bright, with charming environs, Compiègne is a pleasant county town; but it has not that look of age, of historic continuity, which are the charm of smaller places, such as Crépy and Senlis. No sign is left of the great palace of the Merovingian kings, no relic of that stalwart fortress whence are dated so many of the acts of Charles the Wise; that castle of Compiègne where, says Eustache Deschamps, “Tel froid y fait en yver que c’est raige,” built against the river bridge—
“Le Chastel que se lanceDessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige.”
“Le Chastel que se lanceDessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige.”
“Le Chastel que se lanceDessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige.”
Bit by bit one discovers, lost in the modern prosperity of the place, here and there a souvenir of the more illustrious past. Here and there, on the limits of the town, a towered wall rises in some private garden, and we recognize a fragment
VIEUX MOULIN
of the fortifications raised under Joan of Arc. Certain roads in the forest were planned and laid out by Francis the First. Then there is the city gate, built by Philibert Delorme in 1552, with the initials of Henry and Diana interlaced. A few old houses still remain from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and among them that “Hôtel des Rats” where Henri IV. lived with Gabrielle d’Estrées in 1591. There are one or two old churches, too much restored. And then, of course, there is the great uninteresting palace, the very twin of the Palais Royal, which Gabriel built for Louis XV., and which we remember for the sake of the two Napoleons.
The charm, the attraction, of Compiègne is elsewhere. The forest here is beautiful as Fontainebleau. True, here are none of the wild romantic deserts, the piled crags hoary with juniper, the narrow gorges, and sudden summer vistas of Fontainebleau. The trees themselves have a different character. We find few of those great gnarled and hollow giants whose twisted arms make such uncanny shadows towards sunset in the Bas-Bréau. Here the oaks shoot up to an inconceivable height erect and branchless until they meet at last in a roof of verdure just tinged with April rose and gold. If Fontainebleau reminds us of a comedy of Shakespeare’s, Compiègne has the noble and ordered beauty, the heroic sentiment of Racine. What solemn arches and avenues of beeches; what depths of forest widening into unexpected valleys, rippling in meadow-grass, where the hamlet clusters round its ruined abbey; what magical lakes and waters interchained, where the wooded hills shine bright in doubled beauty! Ah! Fontainebleau, after all, is a blind poet: the forest is ignorant of lake and river. But Compiègne has the Oise and the Aisne and the Automne. Compiègne has its lakes and tarns, and pools innumerable, its seven and twenty limpid brooks, its wells and ripples inevery valley-bottom. The loose soil, rich with this continual irrigation, teems with flowers. The seal of Solomon waves above the hosts of lily of the valley. The wood-strawberry and wild anemone enamel the grass with their pale stars. Here and there on the sandier slopes a deep carpet of bluebells, or at the water’s edge a brilliant embroidery of kingcups, give point to the sweet monotony of white and green, which vibrates from the flowers in the grass to the flowering may-bushes, to the acacias only half in blossom, and thence more faintly to the lady birch and beech with gleaming trunks and delicate foliage. White and green appear again in the wide sheets of water amid the shimmering woods. So I shall always think of the wood of Compiègne as of some paradise, too perfect for violent hue and passionate colour—some Eden haunted only by the souls of virgins, sweet with all fresh pure scents, white with white flowers, and green with the delicate trembling green of April leaves.
Where shall we go to-day? There are many lovely drives in the forest. Champlieu has its Roman camp, its antique theatre and temple; Morienval its abbey church with the three Norman towers, St. Nicolas its priory, St. Pierre its ruins, St. Jean its marvellous old trees, and Ste. Perrine its lakes where the deer come to die. Shall I confess that we know these beauties still by rumour only? For we went first of all by the foot of Mont St. Mard to the hamlet of the old mill, and round the lakes of La Rouillie to Pierrefonds. And on the morrow, when we set out for Champlieu or St. Jean, after the first mile, we would cry to the driver, “Goback, and take us the same drive as yesterday.” And so three times we drove past the Vieux Moulin.
This is a sad confession. But, reader, if ever you visit Compiègne, golastto Pierrefonds, round by the Vieux Moulin, or, however long you stay, you will never see the rest.
Let us set out again for the Vieux Moulin! We are soon deep in woods of oak and beech. We pass the stately avenues of the Beaux Monts; a steeper height towers above us. See, how wonderful is this deep-green glen, where the oaks rise sheer a hundred feet and more from the sheet of lily of the valley at their feet! The picturesque declivity of the dell, the beautiful growth of the trees, the whiteness and sweetness and profusion of the flowers, the something delicate, lofty, and serious about this landscape, makes a rare impression amid the opulence of April. Our glade slopes downward from the base of Mont St. Mard; at its further extremity begins the valley of the Vieux Moulin.
It is a valley of meadow land beside a stream which, a thousand years ago, must have cut the shallow gorge in which it lies. On either side rises a line of hills, not high, but steep and wooded. There is just room in the valley for the small Alpine-looking hamlet and its hay-meadows. They are full of flowers; marsh-flowers down by the stream, with higher up, sheets of blue sage and yellow cowslip, and here and there a taller meadow-orchid. Somewhere among the flowers, out of sight, but never out of hearing, runs the stream that feeds the mill, the Ru de Berne.
The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end—perhaps ahundred dark little houses, irregularly grouped round an odd little church with a wide hospitable verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint balconied spire. The houses are gay with climbing roses—out in flower, to my astonishment, on this 28th of April; and in their little gardens the peonies are pink and crimson. It has quite the look of a Swiss hamlet; and, if you choose, there is an “ascension” to be made! True, the Mont St. Mard can be climbed in some three-quarters of an hour; but none the less its summit boasts a matchless view. See, all the forest at our feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes and rivers, out to the blue plains streaked with woods, where Noyon and Soissons emerge like jewels circled in an azure setting. The view is quite as beautiful if we keep to the valley. The meadows grow lusher and sedgier, and the kingcup gives place to the bulrush, and the bulrush to the water-lily, till, behold, our meadows have changed into a lake, a chain of winding waters, in which the wooded hills are brightly mirrored. The road winds on between the wood and the water till we reach a long, slow, mild ascent, and at the top of it we find ourselves upon the outskirts of a little town. A sudden turn of the road reveals the picturesque village, scattered over several roundly swelling hills, but clustered thickliest round an abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than the others, and surmounted by a huge mediæval fortress, one frown of battlements, turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous walls. Below the castle and the rock, and in the depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite round, girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime. Far away, beyond the hills, on every side, the deep-blue forest hems us in. Except Clisson in Vendée, I can think of no little town so picturesque, so almost theatric in the perfection of itsmise en scène. And see, the castle is quite perfect, withouta scar, without a ruin! Was the wood, after all, an enchanted wood, as it seemed? Have we driven back five hundred years, into the Valois of the fourteenth century?
Pierrefonds! It was here that a sad ne’er-do-weel (for whom I have a liking none the less) built himself this famous castle in 1391. It was the wonder of the age, too strong and too near Paris for the safety of the Crown. It was dismantled in 1617; and all that remains of the fourteenth-century fortress is, with the foundations, one side of the keep and part of the outer wall. Its restoration, begun in 1858, was the triumph of Viollet-le-Duc. Before the decoration was finished, before the last moats were dry, or the palisade laid out, the Second Empire fell; the munificent patron became an invalid in exile, and Pierrefonds was dubbed a national monument, kept from ruin, but no longer an occasion for expense. I own that I should like to have seen it before it was restored—to have seen the real, time-stained, historical document. Yet, after all, the world has a goodly harvest of ruins, of documents; and there is only one such magnificent historical novel as the Castle of Pierrefonds.
The decoration is often poor and gaudy; but architecturally Pierrefonds is a work of genius. To walk through it is to see the Middle Ages alive, and as they were: a hundred phrases of mediæval novels or poems throng our memory. See, there is the great Justice Hall, built separate from the keep, above the Salle des Gardes; and there, connecting it with the outer defences, are the galleries orloggie, where the knights and ladies used to meet and watch the Palm Play in the court below. Here is the keep, afortress within a fortress, with its postern on the open country. From its watch-towers, or its double row of battlements, we can study the whole system of mediæval defence. Ah, this would be the place to read some particularly exciting book of Froissart’s—“The Campaign in Brittany,” for instance, or one of those great Gascon sieges, full of histories of mining and counter-mining, of sudden sallies from the postern gate, of great engines built like towers, launching stones and Greek fire, which the enemy wheels by night against the castle wall. I am deep in mediæval strategy when a timid common-sensible voice interrupts—
“Mais comment cela se peut-il que le château soit si ancien, p’isque vous me dites qu’il fut construit sous le Second Empire?”
’Tis our fellow-sightseer, apparently some local tradesman, bent on holiday, tramping the forest with his wife, their dinner in a basket, and bunches ofmuguetsdangling from their wrists. He is a shrewd little fellow. In his one phrase, he has summed up the sovereign objection to Pierrefonds—
“How can the castle be so ancient if, as you say, ’twas built under Napoleon III.?”
Decidedly Pierrefonds is too well restored!
The castle is the chief interest at Pierrefonds, but not the only one; for, down by the lake, on the overgrown and weedy promenade, there stands theÉtablissement des Bains. Here tepid sulphur springs are captured and turned to healing uses. Happy sick people, who are sent to get well in this enchanting village! How they must gossip in the lime-walk and fish in the lake, read on the castle terraces,
THE LAKES OF LA ROUILLIE
and wander in the forest! Happy sick people; for, alas! (unless one stand in need of sulphur baths) Pierrefonds, in its lovely valley, is not, they say, a very healthy place. So, at least, from Compiègne, proclaims the trump of Envy; or perhaps the imparadised Pierrefondois, eager to keep their lovely home safe from the jerry-builder, have started these vague rumours of influenza, of languor, of rheumatisms. ’Tis a wise ruse, a weapon of defence against the Parisian—a sort of sepia shot forth to protect the natural beauty of the woods against the fate of Asnières.
There are three courses open to the visitor to Pierrefonds. He may stay there, and that would certainly be the pleasantest course. Or he may take the train, and after little more than half an hour arrive at Villers-Cotterets, where he will sleep, reserving for the morrow the lovely drive through the forest to Vaumoise, and the visit to the quaint old high-lying town of Crépy en Valois, whence the train will take him on to Paris. Crépy is a dear old town. No one would think that such a dull disastrous treaty once was signed there. The road that slopes down from Crépy to the plain is full of a romantic, almost an Umbrian picturesqueness. We drove there once, years ago, and visited the knolly forest full of moss and pines. But we have never seen Villers-Cotterets; for when we were at Pierrefonds we followed the third and worst course open to us: we drove back to Compiègne, and thence we took the train direct to Paris.
Neveragain have I visited Pierrefonds or the woods of Compiègne. They lie an hour or so from Paris by the rail, but still to me they seem as inaccessible as fairyland. Sometimes, on a fine morning at Eastertide, a longing goes through me to start for those tall glades of oak, with the road that runs right through them to the lovely Vieux Moulin. But, to tell the truth, I have not dared; I doubt not, at the back of my heart, that village, forest, hill, and lake, have long since crumbled into ashes.
Years later, it was my fate, however, to return to Chantilly. The time was midwinter; January wrapped the earth in a shroud of snow and ice. But even in midwinter there still beats in copse and wold a heart of life too deep and sound for any frost to touch it. Not a flower, not a leaf, enlivened the forest; but how large and frequent seemed the forest-birds relieved against that dazzling steppe! The green woodpeckers, hopping about, two or three of them together, appeared (although, in fact, not more than fourteen inches long) as large and bright as parrots. This fine bird, thepivertof France where it is common, ever excites my admiration, so graceful is its shape, from the long bill to the slender somewhat drooping tail, so bright is its colouring—a mantle of moss green, a breast of greenish yellow, some yellow feathers in a tail of chequered brown and white, and a coif like a jewel, ruby-red, blood-red, drawn close over head and neck. In England I have never seen him, though I believe the bird exists with us; nor, though I sometimes find him in my Cantal orchards, have I ever seen thepivertso much to his advantage as during that cold week in January, relieved against a vast expanse of snow. The winter that year was unusually hard. The pools of Commelle were all fast bound in ice; the snow lay heaped beneath the lacy boughs of the beech roots twisted on their banks. Silent and deserted stood the castle of Queen Blanche. On every twig and branch of the woods glittered a spray of diamond dewdrops frozen hard. Brilliant, still, and white, the great forest stretched all round us, like an enchanted place where no one lived but we, until, as we reached the third pool of the chain, we suddenly found that we were not alone: a company of wild ducks had alighted on the ice, still disposed, as when they fly, in a long straggling V, and stood shuffling incessantly their webbed feet as if to warm them on that bitter floor.
One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer; a thaw had set in; a light white mist enveloped everything. We walked on the common as in a world of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a pack of hounds, in full cry, broke out of the moist damp mist; we saw them for a yard or two, and then the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of thepiqueurs, in a vision of horses, kept appearing and disappearing. It was the Duke of Chartres’ meet. Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter. The Orleans princes, the Barons de Rothschild, with a bevy of local nobility and gentry, are bent on the pleasures of the chase. It is a land of races, too. In many a corner of the woods you may come upon a set of training stables with, hard by, aqueer little sham-Gothic villa, which looks as if it came from Leamington, emblazoned with its English name—Rose Cottage or Ivy Lodge. In every lane you come across the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their thoroughbreds. More than once as they rode by, I saw the stalwart peasants in their blouses glance up with a jest from their work at the saw-mill or the woodpile, half contemptuous of the jockeys’ wizened youth, half content that their money should enrich the country-side. And I thought of that long-forgotten France where, for so many decades, the English lads rode by, slim and haughty, and the French peasants chuckled “Levez votre queue, levez!” being persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys, in those sad old times of the Hundred Years’ War.
On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We walked in thetailliswhere the wood-cutters were hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is almost all planted intaillis composéwith hornbeam, elm, and oak—three species which, however often you may fell them, will rise again from the roots, apparently immortal. Each tree in the coppice as it reaches thirty years is marked for the axe, with the exception of a reserve, drawn from the finest subjects, which is permitted to fulfil its natural growth, and affords a permanent covert for the rest. Such is ataillis composéortaillis sous futaie—perhaps the most profitable crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or too light for the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The hornbeam and the beech are the best of all woods for burning; the oak is their rival, and commands several markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetmaker’s oak, props for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves, too, are a source of profit; for dead leaves in France serve almost all the purposes of straw, and stuff a mattress, or litter a stable, or manure the kitchen garden.
I love these feathery woods and coppices of France. A long, low, cliff-like hill, with a landslip at the foot; a pasture sloping to the river; a spinny ortaillisin the middle distance:—there is a landscape which you may see on any day in any part of France; and I ever find it full of a delicate yet homely grace. But, for beauty and wonder, thehaute futaieis incomparably finer than the copse. In thefutaiethe trees are left to grow to their natural shape, the axe serving only to weed out the misshapen trunks, or to eliminate the intrusive birch and poplar which push unbidden among the better sort. Here, at least, the oak and beech, adult, with a century and a half behind them, fall only in their prime, the rich prize of the woodman’s axe, which still respects the elect reserve. Compiègne, Fontainebleau, St. Germain, have all theirfutaies; but few private owners can afford to wait a hundred and fifty years for their reward (which, indeed, is princely when it comes due), or have so vast a property that, during more than a century, some part of it may fall every winter to the axe in due rotation. For who can boast a hundred and fifty groves, duly planted and tended year after year? Perhaps the State alone. A third system, much used in parks and woods round houses, as combining use and ornament, is that ofjardinage. Here, as in an earthly paradise, trees of all ages grow together, and every year the axe takes its toll of young and old alike: yon great fir may boast two centuries, and here is yesterday’s sapling at its feet. The fir and the beech are generally grownen jardinage.
Hark, the sharp tang of the axe! Let us go and see. There is an art in wood-cutting, especially in felling ataillis; for if the wound be not clear and sharp, if the least uneven crevice or hollow let the rain sojourn and sodden in the stump, the root will lose its virtue. But the woodman knowshis trade. He was born in our woods, most likely; if not, ten to one he comes from the Belgian Ardennes, perhaps from Bavaria: be sure he is a sylvan; mixed with his blood is the sap of the forest. There, under that spreading oak, he has built his hut of tree-trunks: long perches of young oaks covered by sods of earth, with the grass turned inwards. Let us peep in. A pile of dead bracken occupies one corner. Three stout poles, planted in the beaten earth which forms the floor, are tied together at the top, and support a great iron soup-pot, swinging over a fire of braise, under the hole in the roof. There is no window, hardly a door. Evidently our woodman is a bachelor.
For in the forest of St. Germains I know another hut which is the very pride and pink of neatness. The woodman’s wife used to sit there, on a deep bench of turf built against her rustic house, mending the week’s wash, while her children played at her feet. The hut itself, though built, as usual, of trunks and sods, was pleasant to look at, with a neat white-curtained window in a frame of deal set in the wall of logs; a door of the same pattern swung on a pole passed through a double set of iron loops. Door and window were evidently portable, and had been used on many a clearing. Within, a folding table, a stool or two, and even some canvas folding chairs such as are used in gardens, gave the rough place a look of comfort. A wide truckle-bed supported a mattress of sacking, stuffed, no doubt, with forest leaves; a red blanket covered the whole. A stock-pot simmered above a portable iron stove. Sometimes the good woman would do her cooking, as she always did her week’s washing, out-of-doors, and then—ye sylvan deities!—what savoury fumes would rise from that hugemarmite! It was, no doubt (for so she said), a jay or so, perhaps a squirrel (the peasants here account them dainty eating), which so tickled our
PIERREFONDS
appetite in passing. And yet I could have sworn to the aroma of a hare, a pheasant, some piece of good wild game. Since no trade is warranted to breed perfection, let me admit that my friends the woodmen are nearly always past-masters in the noble art of poaching. How should it be otherwise? Only on Sundays can they tramp to the nearest village to buy, with their scanty pence, their flitch of bacon and their bag of meal. The cow, which their children lead to pasture in the glades, affords them milk, but that is all. And meanwhile the woodland teems with life. So poor, remote from all society, cognizant of the ways of bird and beast, shall they mark unmoved the traces of the hare, note with a disinterested eye the break a fawn has made in yonder brushwood, or that thick splash of mud on the ridgy pine-trunks, where the wild boar last night stopped to scratch his miry flanks, on his road to the nearest turnip-field? Meanwhile the man hungers, and the children need their daily bread.
Who does not remember a charming page of Gustave Droz, which tells how a young couple, surprised by a thunderstorm in the forest, took shelter in the charcoal-burner’s hut, and shared their savoury mess? Such luck has never been mine. It was one of the things for which I envied my revered and admirable friend, M. Taine, whose childhood, spent on the edge of a great forest, made him familiar with every sylvan thing.
“In these old forests,” he writes, in an essay on the Ardennes, “there lingers a race of men still half savage; they are the woodcutters. They scarcely know the taste of bread; a side of bacon, some potatoes, a little milk, compose their daily fare. I have spent the night with them in huts without a window. The large, low, open chimney let in the daylight and let out the smoke. There the meat was hung to dry. The children spoke scarce a word ofFrench, expressing themselves in a rudepatois; wild as young colts, they roamed the forest all day long; when they reached their twelfth year, their father put an axe in their hands, and they chopped the branches of the fallen trees; a few years later, they felled an oak like him. A mute animal life, full of legends and strange beliefs, was theirs.”
But all this was sixty years ago. Nowadays the children are supposed to go, at least sometimes and when convenient, to the nearest village school (for education is compulsory in France); the young men inevitably serve their time at the regiment; the girls enter domestic service. And so difficult is it to find recruits for the woodman’s free but rough and lonely life, that the lack of woodcutters is becoming a grave question among foresters in France.
When March is well out, and the trees are felled, when the wood is piled in stacks, the woodman consults the sky, and, on the first soft mild and sappy morning, he begins to bark his oaks, or at least such of them as are devoted to that tragic end. It is a nice and delicate business, which must be undertaken before the leaves are green. For, while the sap is springing, the bark and the wood are separated by a layer of viscuous vegetable tissue, the cambium, but so soon as the foliage is full-formed, this cambium turns hard and welds the two together. Yet the weather must be warm; a blast of cold wind, the shadow of too black a cloud, by suddenly lowering the temperature, may at any moment interrupt the operation: the bark will not strip from the oak. The woodman (who knows nothing of this capricious cambium, worse than a woman for yielding only at its pleasure) swears that a herd of sheep must have passed to his windward, and throws down his axe, well aware, despite his false premises, that no more stripping will be done that day. He must wait on sun and zephyr. The nextwarm day he returns, cuts a sharp ring round the foot of the tree, another at his right arm’s topmost reach, and rips the bark in long ribbons, which he lays in the sun to dry, face downward, for a day and a night, ere he stack them for the tanner. That is the prime bark, flayed from the living trunk; having taken this, he fells the oak, and strips as best he can the upper branches.
Woodcutter, bark-stripper, he turns planter next, and, where the natural fruit of the trees has not sufficiently renewed the glade, he hoes the earth, relieves it from the stifling moss and turf, digs a deep hole, and plants a sapling. By early autumn he must change his trade anew; in September the woodman becomes a charcoal-burner. The suns of August have dried last winter’s logs; they are ready for the next metamorphosis. The woodcutter, who knows by heart each glade and clearing and coppice of the forest, selects some open space, far from the century-old revered Reserve, and cuts the turf from a chosen circle. Having beaten hard the ground, he plants in the middle three or four stout stakes and swathes them together; round these he sets some light inflammable brushwood; beyond this centre—which will serve as a chimney—he places his logs in close rings, standing straight on end in the middle, then slantwise more and more, till they are almost flat at the edge. And now the stack takes on the shape of a great flattish cake or pie. Thereon he packs a layer of dead leaves, four inches thick, and over that again a layer of sand and sods, till, save for a small open space in the middle, the whole is tightly roofed. At last he casts a flaming brand into the brushwood at the core, and waits: in an instant the faggots crackle, the smoke rises up thick and yellow, the sand and earth of the crust begin to ooze and “sweat,” as they say, from the sap and moisture of the buried logs. Now let the woodmanlook to the wind, lest too strong a blast cause the pile to burn too quickly, ruin the charcoal, and endanger the forest. If a sudden gale should rise, he will build a screen of branches and break the force of its impact; and all this while the fire burns steadily, smoking and sweating, until—on the third day, as a rule—a faint wreath alone of bluish vapour curls lightly from the exhausted pile. After a few days more the mound may be unpacked; if all be well, the charcoal is ready for sale. The sylvan year has run its course. Our woodman is a woodcutter again.
Forestry in France is not only an art, a science, an industry, and a passion. Several generations of savants such as M. Bouquet de la Grye—to whom, with all who love the woods, I owe a debt, here gladly acknowledged—have reduced the rule of forestry to a method. Thanks to them, the returns are as sure, the cultivation as regular, as in any other branch of agriculture. If I had been a man, I would, I think, have been a forester; not a woodman, but an inspector of woods and waters, like Jean de la Fontaine, riding all day long under the green and musical covert, among the fresh scents of herb and leaf and resin, sleeping at night in the forest-warden’s lodge, deciding the destinies of oak and beech and pine. At Nancy there is anEcole Forestière, which forms to this kindly calling the pupils of the Agronomic Institute. Thence sometimes, or else from Stuttgard, we used to draw our foresters for the vast woods of India, until, in 1884, a School of Forestry was established at Cooper’s Hill.
The last years of the nineteenth century, the first of this, have brought the youth of France back, with a sort of passion, to the land. In Shakespeare’s time, as we know,
“Young gentlemen in FranceWere wont to sigh and look as black as nightFrom very wantonness.”
“Young gentlemen in FranceWere wont to sigh and look as black as nightFrom very wantonness.”
“Young gentlemen in FranceWere wont to sigh and look as black as nightFrom very wantonness.”
I am glad to think that in our days they are at once more cheerful and more practical. Cheesemaking, cattle-farming, wine-growing, farming, forestry, are all enterprises which a young gentleman may pursue with credit, and even with enthusiasm. And forestry, at least, is cultivated as it never was before. Until the last hundred years, more or less, a forest was just a wood-mine, to be worked until the vein should be exhausted. But now we sow and tend even more than we destroy. We are like provident children who seek to repair the ruin wrought by a generation of prodigals. I have before my eyes the statistics for the expense which the forests of France have cost the State between 1882 and 1902: they average some three and a half million of francs per annum. The foresters of France find such a sum the miserable pension of a miser, and men of science bid us plough, and plant, and fence in our hillsides, unless we be prepared to see their rocky flanks ravined by headlong torrents, and the plains at their feet alternately a quagmire and a Sahara. The course of rivers, the distribution of rains, the maintenance of mountains in their magnificent integrity, all depend upon the deep-draining roots, the rain-absorbing foliage of our woods. The French Revolution, in order to supply the peasants with a great expanse of arable land, set the axe in the forests of France. Liancourt wrote in 1802, on his return from exile, that, all round his estates, the great woods which covered that portion of the Oise had been cut down or rooted up—an excess of deforestation which had already produced disastrous effects upon the climate. He preached in the desert; content with their new fields of corn and beet (astonishingly productive, like all virgin soil), the peasants of the Oise would not hear of replanting; where the woods had been merely felled and not uprooted, the shepherds drove their flocks of sheep and goats, fatteningthem on the young shoots which should have renewed the forest. But to-day we are wiser: we plant. Sandy moors and heaths, desolate stretches of barren chalk, are planted with the hardy sylvan pine, and shortly become things of use and beauty in themselves, no less than happy influences on the local climate. The pine gives deal and resin, and grows in any soil. Clays too stiff and damp for corn or turnip will rear the glorious and profitable oak; the steepest flanks and scaurs of the fell-side are sufficient for the beech; the elm and the ash spring in small spinnies on almost any sterile field, and their leaves afford a delicious food for cattle, a crop as regular and as nourishing as hay. Any wood, treated with care and method through a space of years, will yield a good return for careful husbandry.
And this, I think, is the special beauty of France—her great and increasing stretches of woodland. Be they the merest coppices of scrub oak and horn-beam, yet are they haunted by the birds, starred in spring with primroses and dog-violets, oxlips and white wood-strawberries. And what tongue shall declare the majesty of the forest? I love the great freedom of the wild high mountain-pastures, I admire the rich harvest of the lowland plain; but something deeper and more secret—dating from the days before our ancestors were nomad shepherds or farmers on a forest-clearing—a thrill primæval, is awakened in me by the rustle of the woods.
OUR first impression of Provence struck us just beyond Mondragon. For some miles we had traversed the romantic valley of the Rhone, which at this point might almost be the valley of the Rhine. The river is hedged in by tall cliffs covered with ruins as steep and as uninhabitable as the granite which supports them. Every mountain bears its castle and tells of feudal rule, of brigand oppression, with all the violence and picturesqueness of a mediæval tale by Sir Walter Scott. The train carried us through a narrow gully, with barely room in it, above the strangled river, for the ledge on which the rails are laid. Suddenly, at the other end of the gorge, the climate changes: the air is milder, the plain more fertile, the country widens into a great amphitheatre enclosed between the Alps of Dauphiné and the rounder hills of the Cévennes. And here, with the suddenness of magic, the first olives begin—no stripling trees, but gnarled and branching orchards, sunning their ancient limbs on every southern slope. In the twinkling of an eye we have come into the kingdom of the South. With a deep breath of the sharp-scented sunny air, we inhale the beauty of it, andunderstand—how intimately!—that horror of high mountains which has distinguished every race capable of appreciating beauty. Our recollection of the black gorge, the barren peaks, the swirling torrent, renders still keener our feeling for the fertile plain where the blood-red boughs of the Judas-tree make their deep southern blots of colour against the blue of the delicate, serrated hills behind. Among the fields the pollard mulberries gleam like baskets of golden filigree, in the splendour of their early April leaf. The tall pastures are white with starry jonquils, bending all one way in the wind. The hedges are sweet with hawthorn, great southern bloom, almost as big and plump as apple-blossom. And the same delicious contrast of delicacy and abundance which strikes us in the plain, surrounded by its peaks and barren hills, is repeated in the difference between this riot of blossom and the austerity of the foliage, much less green than in the north. The ilex spreads its cool grey shadow at the homestead door. Every little red-tiled farm, every vineyard, is screened by its tall hedge of cypress, a sheer wall of blackish green, planted invariably north-west of the building. For through those narrow gorges of Mondragon, where there seemed scarcely room for the train and the river, the Mistral also passes, like a blast from a giant’s bellows—the Mistral, the terrible north-western wind, that devastates these plains of Paradise.
Our first halting-place is Orange, a white and charming little town, filling up its ancient girdle with many an ample space of green garden and lush meadow. Few towns appear more provincial than this charming Orange, which gaveWilliam the Silent to the cause of the Reform, a dynasty to Holland, and a king to England. There were princes in Orange long before the Nassau: there was the House of Baux, with its pretensions to the Empire of the East; there was the House of Adhémar, which brought forth the noble Guillaume d’Orange, the peer of Charlemagne. Of all their glory naught remains save one meagre wall, one tumbling buttress surmounting the hill above the city. Compared with the beautiful amphitheatre beneath, still important and majestic as in the days of the Roman occupation, these remains of chivalry appear little more venerable than the ruins of the jerry-built villas of some demolished London suburb. Yet as we look at them an emotion awakes in our heart and a mist comes before our eyes that Roman antiquity does not evoke. For the monuments of the Middle Ages are other than of stone.
And we remember how, in the beautiful old romance ofGuillaume d’Orange, the unhappy hero comes home to his castle wounded, after Roncesvalles, the only living knight of all his host, and sounds the horn that hangs before the castle gate. But the porter will not admit him: none may enter in the absence of the master, and no man of all his garrison recognizes the hero in this poor man, suddenly aged and pinched and grey, seated on a varlet’s nag, with nothing martial in his mien. Their discussion brings the Countess on to the battlements: “That—my husband! My husband is young and valiant. My husband would come a conqueror, leading tribes of captives, covered with glory and honour.” Then, seated still on his poor nag, outside his inaccessible castle, the Count of Orange tells the story of Roncesvalles, and how he alone escaped the carnage of that day. “Less than ever my husband!” cries the Countess. “My husband would not have lived when allthose heroes died.” But at last he persuades her that he is in very truth himself, and she consents to take him and tend his wounds on his promise that, so soon as he can ride to battle, he will set forth again, to avenge the death of all his comrades.
“Le monde est vide depuis les Romains,” said St. Just. Beneath the ruins of that castle on the hill there stands, erect, eternal, built into the very frame-work of the cliff, the immense theatre of the Romans, still fit for service, resonant to every tone. Frequently, of late years, many thousands of people have gathered in the Amphitheatre, which serves on all great municipal occasions. But I prefer it as we saw it yesterday—its sweep of steps graciously mantled in long grass growing for hay, and full of innumerable flowers; its stage tenanted by bushes of red roses and white guelder roses; the blue empty circles of its wall-space outlined serenely against the flame-blue sky. Never have I seen the huge strength of Roman antiquity appear more sweetly venerable, more assimilable to the unshaken granite structure of the globe itself, than thus, decked and garlanded with the transitory blossoms of its eighteen-hundredth spring.
The front wall of the theatre is about one hundred feet in height, thirteen feet thick, and more than three hundred feet in length. The colony of Arausio was an important colony, remembered only now by the monuments of its pleasures and its triumph. When we shall have disappeared for near two thousand years, what will remain to tell our story? Our Gothic churches are immense and beautiful, but already, in their infancy of nine or seven centuries, they are falling into ruin. Our castles will go the way of the Castle of Orange; and of our pleasure-houses the oldest that I remember is the little flimsy seventeenth-century theatre of Parma, already quite a miracle of cardboard antiquity. Wehave built too high, or too thin, or too delicately. We have read too long in our prayer-books that here we have no abiding city. Our souls have no capacity to imitate that great solid souvenir of civic use, of pleasure, of triumph, which the Romans have left behind them in all their provinces. About ten minutes’ walk from the theatre, on the other side of Orange, stands the Roman Arch of Triumph, the most beautiful in Gaul. It is perfect in its great perspective, as it rises from the meadow-grass at the end of a shadowy avenue. On its sculptured sides the trophies of ancient battle are still clear, and on its frieze the violent struggle of men in battle—