V

“Lou mosut, coumo un golitchiouQuilhat omoun, rougi e pitchiou,Ol mièt dèl cieu blus, dins lo glorio.”

However we may call it, aburonexpresses a little lonely habitation on the mountain, almost a hut, where the neatherds sleep in summer, and where the cheese is made, day after day, from the end of May till mid-October. It is a long climb from Olmet to the plateau whereon these little cheese-farms multiply and prosper. The road, in steep zigzags, mounts the hill; we leave the pasture behind us, and the fields of flowering buckwheat, and even the high heathery ridge of thePas du Luc; we enter the hanging beechwoods and crawl up the wall of the cliff, until lo! we emerge on a great sea of undulating pasture-land, apparently illimited,save here and there by a grey mountain peak. The foreground is studded with tiny red-roofedburons, each shaded by its group of centenary limes.

“L’erbo[1]que pousso eici, pès puèts è sus plotèuN’es pas coumo en obal, e pus rudo e pus sono,E sent bon; li troubai l’ourgulhouso cinsono,Que despleguo soi flours jiaunos coumo un dropéu.”

Do you understand?

“The grass that grows up here, on the puys and the plateau,Is not like that below, it is rougher and more wholesome:It smells good; there you find the proud gentianWho displays her yellow flowers like a banner.”

It was after four when we at last reached theburon. The cows had come in from the moor to the fold. The milkmen had donned their blouses of grey hemp-linen, which hung in stiff hieratic folds. Each had, tied to his loins, a queer stumpy stool, like some odd sort of bustle. Now they call: “Frijado! Morgorido! Marquise!” Amid a silvery tinkle of cow-bells the beautiful red beasts approach. As each takes her stand, a cow-herd brings up to her a curly red calf. But the poor beastie has scarce pulled a throatful or so of its mother’s milk (its mother or its foster-mother, for at theburoneach calf has a mother and a nurse) when a strong arm pulls it away and holds it tightly until the pail is full, when it may resume its supper, while the cow caresses it with a loving maternal tongue. All round the fold the beasts are being milked, the calves are bleating or sucking, the herdsmen are busy. Only in the middle, impassible and haughty, sits the bull, with a look that seems to say: “All this has nothing to do with me. Let them settle it among themselves.”

Now the cattle will remain all night in the fold, unsheltered. Every morning three sides of the palisade are displaced, so that the cows never sleep twice in the same bed; and in this primitive fashion, at the end of the summer, the whole pasture has been manured: it is called thefumado. After the milking time at dawn the cattle are set free, and all day long they pasture in theaigado, or marshy moor, where the gentian, the pink, the meadowsweet and larkspur grow among the rush and the broom, the bilberry and heather. Here the grass is scantier, but sweet and aromatic. To the quantity of wild thyme and savoury herbs in theaigado, the peasants attribute the wholesome flavour of the Cantal cheese.

A mountain farm often boasts in summer some three score to a hundred head of cattle, besides the pigs to fatten, and the goats, from whose milk is made a delicate little round cream-cheese, thecabecou. The herd is under the care of a responsible dairyman, aided by two or threebouviers, or cowboys, and at least one little cowherd. It is wonderful to see how mere a hut suffices to house them all. The cattle sleep in the open, save the youngest calves, who have a little byre all to themselves. The men sleep in a rough attic under the sloping roof of the hut, whose one downstair room serves to make the cheese. Cheese-making is the great trade of our parts, for here the cheese is the gentleman who pays the rent (le fromage paie le fermage), say our farmers. Push open the door under the lime-trees. You enter a moderate-sized room which occupies the whole ground floor, paved with rough volcanic stone, dark grey, and slopped with whey. In one corner stands a primitive open fireplace, with a pan or two and a cauldron for the herdsmen’s soup; close to it are placed a rough table and a bench. The rest of the space is devoted to cheese-making,

THE CÈRE AT VIC

and is filled with narrow, man-high wooden measures, orgerles, each containing a hundred litres of milk or so, with cheese-moulds, and cheese-wrings, with tubs in which the whey ferments, producing at the end of three days a pale fat cream of which the herdsmen make their butter, and finally with the churn—the whole indescribably sordid and dirty. A tiny garden surrounds this primitive dwelling, and furnishes a few rough roots for the soup; turnips come well there; it is often too bleak and high for cabbage. But the wealth of theburonis stored in a cellar under the hill-top, opening to the north. There are laid, on a rough trellis of wood, the huge golden cheeses, each a hundred pounds in weight (fifty kilos). They look like so many full moons, laid under the earth to keep fresh till they are wanted in Heaven.... These cellars generally join the hut; but, as their coolness and depth is of vast importance, sometimes a cavern is hewn in a favourable spot on a solitary mountain side. Few things are more startling to the traveller unaccustomed to our parts than, while admiring the vast and melancholy landscape, so wild, so green, so unutterably lonely, to find himself suddenly assailed by an unmistakable stench of Cantal or Roquefort cheese.

Summer at theburonis without a change in its season from the blossoming of the limes till the flowering of the gentian. There rose and lily, strawberry and peach, green peas and melon, are words of a dead language. Day succeeds day, with the milking at dawn and the milking at even, the cheese-making of a morning, and, after the mid-day siesta (for the cowboys rise at three), the turning of the heavy cheeses in the cellar. Thevacheron the mountain-top is as lonely and as frugal as the sailor on the sea. Few incidents mark the progress of the summer. In July the farmer comes and takes away the bulls; at theend of August the yellow gentian has finished flowering, and the herdsmen make a brief but lucrative harvest of its plants. The days grow shorter, the nights cold and sharp, the pasture rarer onfumadoandaigado. Yet, such is the sense of freedom, such the exhilaration of the mountain air, that never have I heard our herdsmen lament the length or dull remoteness of theirestivade.

Sometimes we hire a carriage and drive far and wide, with half a dozen huge flagoons under the driver’s seat, in search of fountain-water for my husband to analyze. Last year, on one of these expeditions, he left me in the phaeton while he, with his great glass bottles, went down a hill to the springs of Badalhac. It was Sunday. The peasants of that cheerful mountain-eyrie were standing about, picturesque enough in their white shirts, with short black boleros or sleeved waistcoats, and large sombreros. (In autumn they add a voluminous mantle to this outfit.) One of them came up to the carriage, and, after a few words to the coachman, began to address me in patois. I caught the words “Proubenço, Piémont.” “He says,” explained the coachman, “that if you cannot speak our patois, he can understand you almost as well in the dialect of Provence or Piémont.” Never have I felt so ignorant! Here were three modern languages, in none of which was I able to say good morning to a friendly fellow-traveller.

The Félibres came in time to give a new lease of life to the fast-decaying patois of Auvergne. Under their auspices there is published at Aurillac a local paper,Lo Cobreto(The Bagpipes); for the bagpipes, as befits a Celtic country, is ournational instrument, and we dance a stately sort of reel, more like a minuet,la bourrée.Lo Cobreto, of course, is written in patois, not by peasants, but, as in Provence, by middle-class men of letters who have made the dialect their hobby. If Mistral next summer should visit Aurillac as he proposes, they would give him a great banquet, as they did some years ago for Felix Gras; and the peasants and small shopkeepers would turn out to stare at and do homage to the Laureate of Languedoc. Our cousin Vermenouze would recite him an ode in patois, for Vermenouze is the local genius andcopiscol, or chief of the school of Auvergne. Fancy Don Quixote turned poet and sportsman, pious and chivalrous as ever, with a cross stuck in his cravat, a blessed medal at his watch-chain, a gun in his hand, a fishing-rod under his arm, and a volume of Mistral or Virgil in his pocket. As like as not he has also a pipe in his mouth; and on his feet, perhaps, a pair of sabots.

“Jéu pouorte pas toutchiour, quond tourne de lo casso,Lèbre, perdigal ou becasso,Mès, se trobe plus res, pes puets ou pes trobèrsLi culisse ou min fouorço bèrs,O plenoi mos e per doutchino,Deis bèrs de brousso que sentou lo soubotchino”

(“I do not always bring home, when I return from shooting, a hare, a partridge, or a snipe. But if I find nothing else on the peaks and on the fells, at least I gather plenty of verses, by handfuls and by dozens; verses, made of heather, verses with a wilding scent”)—no description could be better than the poet’s own. Such is thecopiscol; an old bachelor, devoted to family, kinsmen, country; no poet has sung less of love or more sincerely of home and Nature. The moors round St. Paul-des-Landes, where the wild duck and snipe troop by in March, where the partridge rustles in autumn,and the startled hare bounds from the tussocked grass; theburonon the mountain, the life of the farm in the village, the great distant Puys on the horizon; such are the subjects of his muse. Last year, I grieved that such a poet should write for men who seldom read. But my little Auvergnate housemaid tells me that his poems are recited in the market-place at Aurillac on holiday afternoons. What poet could wish for more?

Our patois has a Spanish or a Gascon sound, rough but sonorous, pleasant to the ear, with numerouso’sand rollingou’sandaü’s. You pronounce thevalmost likeb(Bitfor Vic,bedelfor veau).Achanges too, as inContau, Cantal;Morgorido, Marguerite.Ochanges toou—Obeiroun, Aveyron;Louzéro, Lozère. Frenchau, pronounced as ô, changes toau, pronounced as â-oo (Nautres, nous-aûtres;Contau, Cantal;Naut-Miétchour, Haut-midi), except when it changes toou, pronouncedoo, as inOurlhat, Aurillac;Oubergno, Auvergne. Like all the idioms of France, the patois of our Highlands is a corruption of the Low Latin, or rustic Lingua Romana, spoken generally in Gaul at the time of the barbarian invasion and for some centuries after. Most of the frequent words of every day are still very close to their Romance origin:Copt, caput, head;aigo, aqua, water;fau, fagus, beech;compono, campana, church-bell;semen, semen, seed;lün, lumen, lamp;camps, campus, a field overgrown with heather, or a moor;baco, vacca, cow;bedel, vitellus, calf;òussell, ucellus, bird;fromentau, fromentalia, corn-land;gal, gallus, cock;nèu, neve, snow;sor, soror, a sister;fenno, femina, woman;hibernar, hibernare, andestivar, æstivare, spend the winter or pass the summer. Other later words and expressions are a vulgar corruption of the French:tchiobal, cheval;bilatchi, village;biatchi, voyage;Toutchion(All Saints), Toussaint. At once antique and popular, thespeech of our mountains is doubtless destined to disappear, but not without a struggle, and not, if our Félibres can help it, without having made its mark in literature.

“Nautres que son lou Naut-Mietjiour,Contau, Obeiroun, o Louzèro,Porlons tobe lo lengo fiéroDe los onticos Cours d’Omour.”

“We others, of the High-South: Cantal, Aveyron, Lozère, we also speak the proud language of the antique Courts of Love,” says Vermenouze, mindful that his dialect is a branch of that vast and ancient Langue d’Oc which includes the Provençal and the Catalan, so recently honoured and preserved by a Mistral and a Verdaguer.

Life and Nature are here my friends and great delight—the round of the harvests, the flowers in their courses, the ways of beast and bird; and I can say with the great emperor, “Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature.” From earliest June till mid-July or later, before the hay is cut, our fields are as full of flowers as any Paradise of Fra Angelico’s. Nowhere have I seen plants so robust and brilliant, blossom of all sorts so abundant. In the water-meadows, the forget-me-not grows in high bright patches among the ox-eye daisies; the meadow-sweet is tall along the runnel’s edge among the flowering mint and willowherb; the loose-strife springs crimson in the hollows; the columbine stands high and blue in every hedge; on the heights the fox-glove hangs its blood-red bells from every rock or bank; at the base of the beech-woods grows a smaller, more delicate sort, of afaint lemon-yellow with glossy leaves, and the look of a hothouse plant. The hedges are smothered with wild roses all July, and with honeysuckle all the summer long; the banks are full of Ragged-Robin. Now the various campanulas appear—the thyrsis-campanula, with its dark, deep buds set close against an upright stem, one would say a bunch of violets tied to a staff; and paler Canterbury bells, swinging from every hedge-side, and harebell—our English Fare-thee-well Summer!—on all the moors. The bright rose-pink blooms of the mallow, larger and more abundant than elsewhere, flourish on the fallow fields. The moors, in June, are one field of cloth of gold when the broom is out in flower; later the scabious and the exquisite soft blue tufts of the mountain jasione dapple many a sunburned hillside with azure and fawn. The red and white silene, the yellow impatiens with its balsam-like blossoms, the wild geraniums, sedum of every sort and saxifrage, and all the Alpine epilobes, the pink saponaria, which looks like a large rose-coloured single phlox, with all kinds of woodruff, asperule, and lady’s bed-staw, cover hill and field with a dazzling perfumed carpet. In the woods and hedges of Clavière the wine-coloured Japanese-looking Martagon lilies spring in companies, tall and slender. But the glory of our summers are the mountain pinks; sometimes small deep eyes of an intensest crimson, and sometimes large pale-patterned feathery picotees; they grow in beds about the lava-rocks and spring in thousands among the budding heather. On the higher mountains, at the Lioran for instance, and on our tablelands at Les Huttes, the gentian grows, beautiful deep-blue cups close set to the earth, or free-flowering yellow blossoms arranged in tiers round a tallish stalk. Here, too, may you find the anemone, larkspur, grass of parnassus, monk’shood, orchid, martagon lily, and a huge sort of Solomon’s seal which branches likea bracken. In every cranny of the loose stone walls abound the most delicate ferns. Every bank is bright with the wood-strawberry; the gooseberry grows in the hedge; the tall wild cherry, so frequent in Auvergne, drops its dark sweet fruit in your lap as you sit under the trees; but you must climb the woods to find the thick growing raspberry-canes, rose-red with fruit, and the myrtle-like bilberry close set with round blue berries. In autumn, on every moor and height, the heather comes out among the second blossom of the broom. Here is the place for mushrooms, for the large-domedChevalierorcoucorlo, spotted like the breast of a missel-thrush; among the beech-woods grow the huge deliciouscèpes, grotesque in form and colour; on the higher pastures we find the pink-fleshed English sort, the best of all. We string them like beads on filaments of broom, knotted together, and tie them round our necks in chains and necklaces, in order to carry them safe home for dinner.

At last the blackberries shine in the hedges, the whortleberry on the hills. Now comes the last flower of all, the paleveilleuse, or lilac colchicum, springing in myriads in the aftermath and orchard-grass, although, on the heights, a few stunted scabious, wild pinks, and gentians may linger until Martinmas. Chill October is at hand. Already, a fortnight ago, one stormy afternoon, I watched the swallows gather in the clouds. The time of flowers is over.

To us, the beautiful blossoms are a mere delight. To the mountain shepherds, the gentian gathering is a fruitful, unsown harvest. In the first days of September, when the plants are out of flower, a great massacre of the innocents takes place upon the mountain-tops. The victim is the tall yellow gentian, much in request among druggists and manufacturers of liqueurs. Already, on the last day in August, we met an old mountain farmer, much elate. Hehad just sold his bundles of gentian—twenty-three quintals at twenty-seven francs a quintal (a quintal is a hundred pounds—fifty kilos)—that is to say, about a large cartful which brought him in some twenty guineas, at no expense save the pay of the pickers. The herdsmen can earn at this play of flower-picking, or rather root-pulling, as much as six francs a day. No wonder the gentian is popular in Auvergne, and that we celebrate in prose and verse ourourgulhouso cinsono! Did any one ever turn so pretty a penny out of Irish shamrock or Scotch thistle? The profit of it is considerable enough to have furnished endless troubles and quibbles between landlord and tenant, each asserting the gentian his perquisite, until at last the law courts of Aurillac settled the matter in favour of the farmer.

L’amère gentiane et la douce réglissehave each their partisans; but the liquorice is less abundant. Still, in autumn, you may see the mountain shepherds dig holes upon the hill-tops and carefully disentangle the fine red filaments leading to the blonde, supple, horse-radishlike root which furnishes the Spanish juice. This they tear from the ground, and carefully treasure in pouch or shirtfront; for this, too, commands its price.

When my friend Vernon Lee affords us the pleasure of a visit, we turn to other interests, such as fall in with the picturesque and archæological turn of her imagination. Our hills are studded everywhere with ancient castles, mountain manors, and country houses, some of them very small, mere cottages, scarce larger than our tiny Olmet which does not boast a dozen rooms all told. Such are

THE OLD HOUSE AT OLMET

Cols, buried in woods under the toppling mountain-crags; and beautiful Trémoulet, perched on the peak of a rock suddenly reared in the wild gorge of the Cère. Others are solid feudal keeps, to which has been added, some two hundred years ago, a steep-roofed comfortable dwelling-house, with charming unsymmetrical windows, an air of open grace, and a complete indifference to the old fortress it has married. Comblat-le-Château is of this sort. Just opposite our windows, on the other side the valley, it stands amid its lawns and gardens, at the foot of the mountain, on a low mound, overlooking the road to Vic. Though seldom inhabited, it looks the most cheerful and habitable of our châteaux, of which the most picturesque (after Trémoulet) are Pestels and Vixouge. Pestels, alas! restored last year, but still magnificent, by virtue of the immense proportions of its six-storied battlemented keep, and its romantic position—Pestels is seated on a steep ledge or platform some way up the mountain, surrounded by precipices which, on three sides, drop to the valley, and, on the fourth, into a wooded ravine or glen. Vixouge stands halfway up the opposite hill, built on a knoll or holm, with the pastures falling gently from it. The walls and gateway are of the fourteenth century, the latter fortified by two small round towers. But now the gate stands open on a shady lane, opposite a circular stone fountain, with a drinking-trough for cattle. It leads to a dark abandoned garden, all overgrown, and a tall seventeenth-century manor, steep-roofed, with corbelled turrets at the corners, and a peculiar, inexpressible air of poetic melancholy. Just so must have looked the moated grange of Mariana. The owls must love to hoot here, and at night, no doubt, the ravens flap about the lonely house, which might have taken life from a dream of Robida or Gustave Doré. From themanor-wall, the eye drops sheer to a glittering lozenge of water in the fields below—a reservoir, with beside it, half in ruins, a Louis Seize Chinese pagoda, the bathhouse of some eighteenth-century ancestress; its bright red dilapidated roof and damp-stained walls tell of a century’s neglect. All round the mountains lie in heaps. Below Vixouge, right and left, stretches the Pas du Luc, a long-backed ridge of moor, where landslip after landslip has loosed the great blocks of andesitic breccia, which lie heaped up among the bracken and heather. It is a place to dream in, hour after hour.

Vic itself has its château—the Consular House of the Prince of Monaco, who was the old hereditary Consul of Vic-en-Carladés. Behind, the grey houses climb the hill, some of them fine old turreted structures standing in their orchards and walled gardens, ancient town residences of the local gentry, while others are the merest village shops, with wooden balconies and gabled roofs. They lead to the church, not unpicturesque, with a Romanesque choir. Above the mountain rises, clad in beech-woods, with great organ-flutings and overhanging blocks of reddish stone, any one of which, one would think, might fall at any moment and crush into nothingness the little town below.

Michaelmas! This year the woods are still unchanged, although the frosts have turned to golden sequins the leaves of the aspens by the river. At twilight, Venus glitters in a frosty sky above the faded summits of the mountain. The wild cherries in the hedge are as pink in their foliage as the maples on a Japanese fan. The weather is of thatintense autumn blueness and brilliance which Madame de Sévigné once called “un temps d’or et de cristal.” There is a sharp, pleasant quality in the air. Our walks on the mountain are longer and taken at a brisker pace, and so the other day we came upon the prettiest sight: a knoll upon the hillside crowned by a tall group of mountain thistles of more than a woman’s stature; the fluff of the thistledown, the delicate tracery of the leaves profiled against the sunset sky. The sound of our steps aroused from the heart of it some thirty or forty tiny goldfinches who had been feeding there,—in that immense landscape they looked scarce larger than humming-birds, as they rose up, poising, quivering, fluttering, soaring, like a living fountain of golden downy wings.

The birds here are a great delight. The blackbird, the finches, the blackcap, the chaffinch, sing in all the fields. I seldom hear the lark, save on the sunny uplands, and never the nightingale; but the blackbird pipes his flute in every bush. The larger sort of birds especially love the mountain: the great buzzard with his brown eagle-wings and wailing melancholy cry, the crow, the rook, flocks of friendly magpies, and in every spinny the bright blue flash of the jay. How I love the jay! Its harsh gay laughter seems to me an integral part of spring—as much so as the sunny winds of March. No bird is so handsome. I have a friendship for its fierce, bold eye, its short, proud head of a winy grey, its breast and pinions so blue, spotted with black, with penfeathers of black and dazzling white. No creature seems more wild, and none, in fact, is easier to tame. This very summer I tried to rear a nestling which a wanton shepherd took. I fed it hour by hour, and the little creature warmed itself in my hands. I watched it develop with a religious sense of the mystery of life. The first day I hadit, the nestling was blind, naked, motionless, half stunned from hunger and exposure; yet even then, mere lump of jelly as it was, the creature had instincts of decency, and never would defile its nest of snow-white wadding. The second day, it gave voice to a cry, and afterwards it knew me, screaming for food when I passed; on the third, its wings and half its breast were covered with the first blue feathers; on the fourth, it could rear on its legs, and began to buck and jump in the quaintest fashion. On the fifth day, alas! it fell from a table and died. My cousin had better luck, and reared a jay who lived to haunt the woods about her country house, and often fluttered to her shoulder. When, in November, she drove home to Aurillac, a matter of eleven miles, the jay, flitting from tree to tree, accompanied her carriage all the way!

While we enjoy the autumn in dreamy dilettante fashion, the peasants seldom know an idle hour, for harvest follows harvest from St. John’s Day to All Saints. In October, while still the leaves are green, a ladder is set against the ash-trees in the hedge, and all the branches are clipped, except the lead; every third year each tree is thus mulcted of her spreading branches, and now you see why the ash-trees of Auvergne look slender, tall, and frail as a poplar. Sometimes, thus thwarted in their growth, they twist from side to side as they spring upwards, and look, in their round slim greenness, like great serpents in an allegory, reared aloft. They furnish, in fact, a final crop of hay, which is carefully stored in the dryest corner of the barn. Ash-leaves, green or dry, are a favourite food with cattle, sheep or goats, and vary their winter’s fare at small expense. In the rare, dreaded years when the hay-crops fail, then lime and elm and oak and hazel and false-acacia are pressed into service, and the cows live scantily all winter on chopped straw andthe fodder of the hedges. The failure of the hay is a disaster in French agriculture, of terrible importance, so that even dead leaves are a crop in Auvergne, and not to be neglected. At Martinmas, the women and the children, carrying sacks, go to the brown woods and gather the fallen leaves, which give out so strange and melancholy a smell. The oak-leaves, heaped up and watered, rot and enrich the soil of the kitchen garden, where they protect the young autumn-sown plants against the severities of an Auvergnat winter. Dried leaves, in France, in garden, stable, or farmyard, serve almost all the purposes of straw.

For my part, I love to sit on a rock in the tranquil woods some sunny afternoon in mid-November, my dog at my feet as silent as myself, so silent that we scarce disquiet our neighbour the jay, caught in yonder bramble, who eyes us, his neck swelling, as he disentangles his great wings. There he goes, screaming, and the silence reigns anew. At last there stirs some breath of wind, too soft for us to feel it under cover of the trees, and the last leaves fall down in great packets with a soft, dull, mysterious thud and shiver: plop!—which frightens my dog Sylvester half out of his wits.

Down in the field below, the women are busy. Every man within a range of many miles is absent to-day at Aurillac for the Martinmas Fair; and, as the ploughs for once are left at home, the women, free from field work for one afternoon, have decided to restuff their mattresses. Soon after dawn they came and gathered the beech-leaves beneath the trees, raking them in heaps, piling them in sacks, and finally strewing them to dry and air, like hay, in the sunny fields at the base of the woods. And now, this afternoon, here they come with their mattress-sacks of white canvas, fresh washed and speckless, into which they cramtheir harvest of beech-leaves. The weather has been fine for some weeks, so we trust their bedding may not be too damp. Now that the leaves are gathered, but only now, they will drive the pigs into the woods to feed on the acorns, while the children collect the beech-mast, “the olive of the North,” carefully treasured for the winter’s oil.

That last is an important consideration. Oil for burning o’ nights in the long winter evenings; oil for frying and cooking in a land where butter is scanty and poor, for our milk (so rich in caseum) has very little cream. The nut-harvest follows the gathering of the leaves; and the walnut, of course, affords the richest crop. Every farm has its walnut orchard, and while the men knock the fruit from the trees with long poles and perches, the maidservants shell the nuts and prepare them for the mill. Thence will return the salad-oil; while the beech-mast, hazel, and hemp-grain will furnish the three-beaked brasslün, or Roman lamp, all winter. At Olmet, the fisherman (who, from his little farm down by the river, ensnares and nets all summer such trout as the otter leaves him to make an honest penny by) turns miller in winter, and crushes the walnut harvest, in a great cellar, between two millstones of black basalt; an ass is harnessed to the upper millstone, and turns laboriously round and round in the dim place, while the oil streams from the crushed kernels. The pulp left apparently dry, but still impregnate with oil and aroma, is an excellent food for fatting beasts, and not despised by the young of the human race. This is the perquisite of the miller. Would I could make you see him—a tall, lean peasant, full of a rough poetry as he curses his foe, the otter, who eats the speckled trout at dawn in the fisher’s nets!

If there is a harvest of nuts, there is also a harvest of feathers. The nights are getting cold, it is time to look tothe bedding. Every farm keeps its tribe of geese, whose down (plucked from the living bird six times a year, at new moon) is now sufficient in quantity to make or refresh ourédredons. The poultry yards afford material for the feather-beds; the flocks of brown sheep give their fleece for the mattress, and for the warm Auvergnat quilts of wool, sewn fast between two sheets of flowered cotton print. All these must be made over or renewed. Our dark and somewhat dingy farms have soft, clean, and ample beds piled high in their kitchens, wherein to brave the shudders of snowy winter nights.

These are play-harvests; but the gathering and preparing of the hemp is a thing of time and patience. Every farm in the Cantal has, in some sunny corner of a field, a little three-cornered walled space,l’ort de lo combi(the hemp-garden). Here the handsome sturdy plants are grown, and hence, in July, the male stems are torn, to make more room for the seeding of the female plant. A little after Michaelmas these are ripe. They are torn up by the roots, and left to ferment in upright heaps well covered. Eight days later their martyrdom begins; they are shaken till the seed falls from the pod; they are stretched in a water-meadow to rot; they are dried in the oven; they are rubbed, beaten, crushed, pounded, combed with iron combs, till nothing is left of their sturdy green grace and rustic beauty, no likeness of the poor handsome female plant, only a mass of loose tow and formless fibre. And from this the grey thread is spun, on autumn afternoons and evenings, as the women follow their flocks along the lanes, or sit round the fire, cracking jokes with the grandfather on his comfortable settle in the inglenook. Every village has its weaver. When the thread is spun he puts it on his loom, and weaves the strong hand-made hemp-linen from which ourfarms are furnished with sheets, table-cloths, napkins, white shirts for the men and underwear for the women. It comes home in dreary lengths of grey, and must be bleached in the morning dew, before the capable hands, which have planted and prepared the hemp and spun the thread, can fashion and sew the tissue. Open the linen-cupboard in any farm kitchen, and you will be amazed at the wealth of its heaps of rustic creamy white.

Our weavers do not weave, our women do not spin, only hemp-thread and linen. Every man on the countryside, of the peasant class, is clad in the stoutrase(thick rough cloth), or frieze, which his brown flocks wore first of all, his own hands sheared, his wife’s clever fingers spun, and which was woven on the village loom. Never have I seen so stout, so thick a fabric. One glance at the heavy cloth, striped brown and black from the undyed wool of our sheep, makes one understand the nipping cold of winter on our hills.

Meanwhile, the buckwheat has been harvested and garnered; on sunny afternoons the old wives winnow the grain in sieves on every threshold. The poorer sort goes to feed the fowls and fatten the calves for the Martinmas fair; while the perfect grain is set aside for the dailybourriols. The apples now are ripe. They should be gathered, save the later sorts, and laid on straw in the fruitery, before the little cowherds come down from the mountains. The chestnuts must be brought from the lower valleys—a dozen miles away, where the conjunction of a milder climate with a granite soil lets them grow in abundance; the potatoes must be uprooted from the fields. With buckwheat-meal, potatoes, chestnuts in store, the farm can affront the winter. And now, in this year’s potato-field, the plough is put; and the sower, with a noble gesture, scatters far and wide the grain of the rye. Two women follow him

TRÉMOULET

and gather in a basket any stray potatoes now upturned. And close after the plough hop some half-dozen ash-grey buntings, neat and slender, pecking the worms and seeds from the new-turned clods.

The oxen scarcely quit the yoke, for the winter crops must all be sown by Martinmas, and the compassionate farmer throws a pint of oats into their every feed. But, busy as we are, to-day is holiday. It is the 15th of October, and the herds return from the mountain. A great music of cowbells awoke us at five in the morning; one hears a tramp of feet, and the loud greetings of the herdsmen, whom the whole village turns out to welcome; the cows utter long “moos” of excitement and delight; in their midst we see a rustic cart or chariot piled high with great cheeses—each cow of the herd should have produced at least three of these huge moons during the five months of itsEstivade. Without a word from the herdsman, the beasts stop at Langeac’s farm and turn into the pastures they left in May, lowing and frolicking for joy despite the fatigue of the night-long march. Happier still are the herdsmen. The master-vachertosses his baby in the air; the littlepâtrehas found his mother; the herdsmen are talking eagerly to a knot of relatives and friends. What joy to see the valley, and the last bright asters in the gardens, and the apples red and gold in the orchard trees! How they eye that bright one out of reach on the topmost bough! (And again a verse of Sappho rings in my mind:—

ᾪς γλυκύμαλου ἐρευθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ’ ὄσδῳ.

What a pleasure to breakfast by the hearth at home on abowl of new milk, in which they crush the first toasted chestnuts of the autumn! How large and cheerful the greystone houses look after the windshakenburonon the mountain-top! Not to-night (for all of them will sleep), but for many a night after, towards midnight, a whisper may be heard in Langeac’s orchard. A group of shadowy forms moves under the apple-branches. One might suppose a sudden wind in the trees, for plop! plop! fall the ripe fruit on the soft grass beneath. But the wary farmer knows what to expect; a shutter screams on its hinges, a window opens, and there in the yellow light of the candle is Farmer Langeac in his shirt-sleeves. The herd boys scurry away, swiftly and silently, with bulging pockets. For my part, out of compassion, I leave them one tree, not the best—but they prefer them hard as iron.

All Saints is at hand! The winds turn sharp and keen. Sometimes at this season we have, in the Cantal, an exquisite St. Martin’s summer, with sunny days reaching up till mid-November, as mild as Michaelmas. Now the wood-cutters set to work and replenish the store of beech-trunks in the shed; now the carts come down from the moors, piled with an aromatic load of broom-twigs neatly tied in faggots; now the heather is cut; now the leaves are piled in sacks, to furnish fodder all the winter long. The first-sown corn is already green above the sod, and still, day after day, the plough is in the field, while on the steeper hills the oxen draw a mere curved tooth of wood—the Romanaratro, ouraraire. The cattle still browse the meadows; all night the hillsides are melodious with their chiming bells. Theorchard trees are pruned and cut back; their branches are carefully stored for lighting the oven on baking days. The sunny noontide is still as busy as in summer, and scarcely less pleasant, but over these last golden hours hangs a sword of Damocles—the Winter, which may arrive in full array to-morrow. For if, in the Cantal, we reckon to some extent on a fine spell early in November, still we taste fearfully the uncertain, unsecure delight; any night the snow may fall and end the labours of the farm until it first begins to melt in March.

“Como jious lo cenre uno cato,Per Toutchion, mai des couots pus lèu.Nostro bièlho Oubergno s’ocatoJious uno flessado de nèu”

(“Like a cat in the warm ashes of the hearth, at All Saints and sometimes sooner still, our old Auvergne snuggles down in a soft quilt of snow”). Adieu, lark and swallow! Poor cicada, perish in thy frozen hole! No more flowers, no more birds, save the great croaking crows that flap across the milk-white fields. Winter is here!

The daily round has narrowed its circle. A path is cut from the door to the gate, another to stable and drinking-trough, where the unfrozen ever-flowing fountain plashes over a fringe of icicles. The walls of snow glitter and melt not in the sunniest noon. The farm-kitchen is now the centre of all works and days. The huge hearth-place is a cavern of warmth and glow. Soon after three the hill-top intercepts the sun; a little later, the beasts having been milked and fed, masters and men assemble round the fire. From the ceiling hangs the three-beaked Roman lamp, but the flames, leaping from the beech-root on the fire-dogs, give a brighter light. Rare are the farms as yet where a petroleum lamp enlivens the gloom. The farm-hands,cutting a bough of cherry or beech, renew the handles of their scythes, mend their tools, or knock a fresh set of nails into their sabots. The women twirl their distaffs and spinning-wheels or sew their seam; on a corner of the table, Urbain, the elder son, who has been to the Regiment, reads last week’s local paper; Touènou, the littlepâtre, sprawls in the blaze and pulls the tail of the cat; comfortably ensconced on the cushioned settle, the old gaffer of eighty tells many a story of local tradition, or repeats for the hundredth time his famous account of a journey to Limoges in 1840, or makes the shadows creepier with tales about the Drac. A little after six the supper is spread: a porringer of soup, followed by the bacon and the cabbage which gave it flavour, and a nugget of cheese. By seven, a neighbour or so has strolled in to share theveillée.

Theveilléeis, and ever has been, the one recreation of our village winter; with All Saints’ Eve their reign sets in and endures till Lent begins. In a hamlet like Olmet, where there are several farms of some importance, each has its circle of clients; and after supper every night the humbler neighbours throng to the warm farm-kitchen, where the women knit or spin, while the men weave baskets or mend their tools. If there be a pretty girl in the household, be sure the youth of the countryside will throng from all the hamlets near. While the farmers talk of beasts and crops, while the women lead the wit and the gossip, lasses and lads have their own affairs at heart. There will be marriages at Easter. For in the country, men, like birds and cattle, have their season for pairing, and the leisurely, laughter-filled evenings that divide All Saints from Ash Wednesday are the courting-tide.

Time flies. The farmer throws a handful or two of chestnuts to roast in the embers, and sets, mayhap, on thetable a bottle of red wine. And the stories and the gossip begin again till the log, burned through, falls with a crash from the fire-dogs and sends up a fountain of sparks. The cricket sings shrill, but hark! without the snow-blast sings more shrilly yet. The clock strikes nine. Master and men arise and bid each other good night. The neighbours light their lanterns and don a sort of Inverness cloak—theirlimousines; the cowherd goes to seek his warm bed in the cow-stable. And the door, opened an instant for their egress, reveals the gusty moon-shot night and the vast expanse, dazzling, and yet dim, of endless snow—a polar landscape, inhospitable and sad.

AN old irregular house, a long grey line in the hollow, founded by the Templars some eight hundred years ago and finished yesterday. In 1189, Henry II. of England lay there for a night, very sick, on his way to die at Chinon. The house was then a Commanderie of the Knights-Templar: we know how they perished! In all ages, I think, patriotism in France has shown two sides—two faces, if you will; the one aristocratic, desiring the advancement of the nation by means of anélite, a chosen few, to whose perfection the common sort was to be sacrificed; the other, essentially popular, full of dreams and visions, plotting a general happiness and justice made absolute on earth. The Templars were of the former party. Early in the fourteenth century, a democratic king made a clean sweep of them, confiscated their wealth, and left our Commanderie to bear an empty name. Doubtless, at the moment, King Philip was full of virtuous schemes. A volume of documents, edited by Renan, shows the wise uses to which the French Government intended to put this lucky potful of treasure: thereis a plan for popular education, elaborated by a certain Pierre Du Bois, which we might read to-day, with colleges for women, scholarships for lady doctors, an Order of Nursing Sisters to be sent to the colonies—all strangely modern for 1306. High schools for boys and girls, with special facilities for studying the natural and moral sciences, were to be established in the existing Commanderies. But nothing came of it, of course; and no one knows exactly what hole in fourteenth-century finance was stopped by the nuggets of the unfortunate Knights-Templar.

Our Commanderie remained a Commanderie. It was handed over to the Knights of Malta. So much and no more do we know of its fate from the time of Philip the Fair till the French Revolution. For five hundred years a mist envelops it. The nineteenth century was to raise its fortunes.

One of Napoloen’s marshals had a son—himself a prince and a soldier—unhappily married to a lady of unattractive virtue. A nervous, artistic, irascible man, he went about still seeking his ideal,circuit rudens, quærens quem devoret. He found it, unfortunately for her, in the maiden daughter of one of his old friends. Often have I heard of a certain dinner-party given by the girl’s father—an old general—in honour of the prince, and how the guests waited in the stiff yellow Empiresalon, where the clock on the chimney-piece struck, first the half-hour, then the hour; and yet the prince never appeared; and still the young hostess lingered in her pressing-room. At last the dreadful truth burst upon the hungry and anxious company—they had eloped together!

Save for this one great slip in conduct, the lady was a saint—a mute inglorious George Eliot. She reclaimed her lover, whose courses up to that time had been of the most devious, and showed him the sweetness of a calm, domestic life. She even reconciled him with his virtuous spouse, andif, as I fear, she broke her father’s heart, she lived to be blessed by the family she had outraged. Society in France still bore traces of the recent upheaval of the Revolution; the rule of morals was relaxed, and passion was held a great excuse. The lady’s character and her lover’s rank and fidelity combined to attenuate their fault: people ended by thinking of her as a sort of morganatic wife. She would say sometimes to her partner in shame: “My dear, you must not neglect the good princess. Remember she has always the first claim on your attention.” If, thus despatched to his duties, he stayed too long at home, the prince’s lawful helpmeet would remark one day: “Mon ami, it is a long time since you looked after your plantations at the Commanderie.” There is a beautiful old romance by Marie de France calledEliduc, or, The Man with Two Wives. With no less gracious a courtesy, no less delicate a sense of a rival’s due and a lover’s duty, did these two nineteenth-century ladies grace a difficult, an impossible, position.

The prince had bought our ancient manor-house to hide therein his unespousèd saint. He rebuilt the tumbling walls, restored roof and ceilings; it was he, no doubt, who drained the fishpond which used to stand so close to the front door. He made the place a little paradise. He was rich; he sent all over both worlds, old and new, for rare trees to plant the hilly park which rises about the small grey priory, gently swelling to a rim of oakwoods all around. The park is, as it were, a brief and shallow valley from which the river has long disappeared, leaving only a tiny, almost invisible streamlet which trickles through the softest lawns, planted now with groups of silvery Atlas cedars; with old hollow chestnuts, which—they, at least—must date back some two hundred years, so far have they gone in the sere and yellow leaf; with Californian cypresses, which flame all autumn until theirfiery needles rust and fall; with strange pines that grow in a pyramid; with deodoras and monkey-trees from India; with copper beech and silvery maple. He stocked the place with antelopes, guanacos, and llamas, quaint, shy creatures, housed in folds under the spreading trees, that would come to the palings and feed, tame and timid, from their lady’s hand. And here, as quiet and lonely as Adam and Eve in their garden, lived these unlawful lovers, eternally sequestered. He, indeed, had his excursions and forthcomings, incidental to the existence of a man with two wives, but she, poor soul, wrapt in a veil of tender shame, dared not show her face beyond the unfenced boundaries of her woods, and did by stealth her very deeds of mercy.

Some fifty years ago, both prince and lady died. The house and lands then came by purchase into the hands of some friends of mine, who have considerably extended the lands of their domain. The younger brother married an exquisite youngsociétaireof the Comédie Française—a young lady, pure as pearl, good as gold, of a sort rare, though not impossible, upon the stage, in France. To this paradise of the Commanderie he brought his young wife; but—alas for our terrestrial Edens!—she died there before the year was out. When the widower followed her, he left the house to his elder brother, a soldier of some note, who turned his sword into a ploughshare, and devoted himself to his vineyards and cornfields. His daughter is mistress of the manor-house to-day.

As it stood when it came into her hands, the Commanderie was a fit pavilion for a pair of lovers, but scarcely the hospitable home of a numerous family. Much of it had to be rebuilt and much restored. A story was added. One day, when the masons were taking down an ugly plaster ceiling from a small room in the tower, there underneath they

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