AZAY-LE-RIDEAU
When the Bourbons returned to France after Waterloo they had, as the phrase runs, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The nobles took possession of the remains of their estates, and thought to restore the habits and privileges of their forefathers, or at least to adapt to modern manners the principles of theancien régime. But they found in the peasant a sleepless suspicion, a silent energy and cunning, which thwarted all their efforts, and which, if they persisted, would often turn to violence, maintaining the rights of the people by the horrors of aJacquerie. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed more than one peasants’ revolt. And if some plot of the reactionaries should one day place again upon the throne of France a son of the House of Orleans, or a Bonaparte Pretender, be sure thecroquantsof the South, theJacquesof the North, would defend their liberties again as violently to-morrow.
Two fine novels, each a masterpiece, treat, from different points of view, this resistance of the peasant class, and the consequent disintegration of the great feudal domains.Jacquou le Croquant, by an almost unknown novelist, Eugène Le Roy, is the work of a man over sixty, a native of Périgord, working on the traditions of his native place and the tales of his grandfathers. Published in the last years of the nineteenth century, it gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of rural Southern France, as the author may have seen it in his earliest childhood, before 1848. The book is written from the peasants’ point of view, and full of enthusiastic Republican sentiment. Balzac’sLes Paysanshold a brief for the other side. One of Napoleon’s generals, the Comte de Montcornet, purchases in 1815 a feudal estateon the borders of Burgundy and the Morvan, and attempts to dwell there in the due state and pomp of a great noble. He preserves game, vows vengeance on poachers, protects his forest trees against the customary thefts of the village, and, like the farmer in Wordsworth’s ballad, forbids the old women to filch his faggots. And naturally he attracts the hatred and suspicion of the peasant. Even his own agent sides with them against him:—
“On veut vous forcer à vendre les Aigues. Sachez le: depuis Conches jusqu’à la Ville-aux-Fayes, il n’est pas de paysan, de petit bourgeois, de fermier, de cabaretier, qui n’ait son argent prêt pour le jour de la curée.”
And the book ends with the triumph of the peasants and the parcelling of the domain.
“Le pays n’était plus reconnaissable. Les bois mystérieux, les avenues du parc, tout avait été défriché; la campagne ressemblait à la carte d’échantillons d’un tailleur. Le paysan avait pris possession de la terre en vainqueur et en conquérant. Elle était déjà divisée en plus de mille lots et la population avait triplé entre Conches et Blangy.”
“Such is progress!” exclaims Emile Blondet, on an impulse of passionate irony.
It is not picturesque certainly. And yet I remember a magnificent picture of Sisley’s, representing just such a scene: small fields of cabbage, and strips of rye, with one bouquet of poplars, basking in the hot blue of a July noonday; and I know no finer landscape. Still, we will admit with Emile Blondet that the mysterious forest glades were infinitely lovelier. On one side, the utmost beauty and luxury reserved for one man; on the other, a thousand fields, and a tripled population living in tripled comfort. On which side is progress? On which side is the price too dear to pay? That is the question.
An old French lady, who could recall theancien régime, was wont to say, when invited on a country visit: “No, I never go into the provinces, since they have turned all the castles into farms.” She had a prophetic eye. If the castles are to survive, they must be turned, more or less, into farms, and their owners are becoming increasingly aware of the fact.
Among the young gentlemen of France to-day there is a spirit of return to the land. The Institut Agronomique instructs every year a bevy of eager agriculturists, many of them belonging to the upper classes and possessing landed estates of their own. These young men at five and twenty are content to leave Paris and cultivate their acres in Normandy or Languedoc. For myself, I think them wise. I would be, if I could, a large farmer in a grass country, raising cattle and cheese (a crop less chancy than corn), with plenty of children, all employed on the estate, and a handsome wife, ever the first to rise and the last a-bed. Only the life of an inspector of forests (no one has ever said all that the Fables of La Fontaine owe to his employment as a Master of Waters and Forests), or that of a university don (which latter existence, indeed, much resembles my own), appear to me quite as pleasant as this. I know one or two such farmers, and think them aware of their good fortune; their neighbours eye them with envy, for such men are rare, since few of the farming class possess hereditary acres, while few can afford to pay the rent of a farm large enough to prosper—some £400 a year, for instance, such as my neighbour, Farmer Langeac, pays for Olmet. It is true that less land is needed to make a large income from cereal land or vineyards; but, when we come to crops, if the rent is less, the expenses of farming are much greater. The accounts of a farm in the isle ofBouin are lying on my writing-table: I find that when his rent is paid to the utmost farthing, the farmer must still reckon on spending some four guineas an acre on such necessary processes as ploughing, sowing, manuring, reaping, carrying, threshing, etc. Doubtless he may reap a considerable profit, for the polders of Vendée are among the most fertile fields of France. But only a man of substance can make so large a stake, or may afford to renew it annually, to tide over a bad season, keep his barns and machines in repair, and pay every week no paltry sum in wages.
More frequent and less ample is the lot of the peasant owner. No fields are so prosperous as his, for no fields are tilled and dug with such untiring devotion: spade-culture forms the staple of his art on the tiny strips of land he is so proud to call his own. If, at the Revolution, one-fourth of the soil was in the hands of the peasant, the proportion to-day is certainly far greater; but the farms are smaller. In the plains of Beauce, round Orleans, the peasant freeholds compose more than three-fourths of the land, but the constant division of property by equal inheritance has reduced every little farm by multiplying its owners. The soil of this thickly populated district is so fertile that a farm in Beauce, however tiny, may be supposed sufficient to support a family; and in all rich and teeming countrysides, such as abound in France, the excessive division of property, consequent on the application of the Code Napoléon, has perhaps, up to the last twenty years or so, done more good than harm. An acre of strawberry gardensat Plougastel, of vegetables at Roscoff, of carnations at St. Remy de Provence, is still a valuable piece of property, an exceeding artistry and skill in cultivation compensating here the narrow limits of the field. But in such a case the soil, the climate, the economic conditions must all work for the farmer and conspire to crown his efforts. In ordinary pasture, in light soils too poor for wheat, too chilly for the vine, the peasant owner needs a larger glebe. Three acres and a cow are not sufficient to maintain a family in constant well-being, unless the circumstances be exceptionally favourable.
A small Socialist review, unusually well written and well informed,Pages Libres, has recently published a series of rural studies, each the monography of some small village in the provinces of France. In this way, the hamlet of Voulangis-en-Brie, the fertile polders of the Isle of Bouin, the villages of the Bourbonnais, so dear to the shades of Sterne and Arthur Young, each and all become known to us almost as if we had passed a summer there, for the schoolmaster, the large farmer, the local poet and archæologist, have each had a hand in these humble but not unimportant annals, and faithfully reproduce the various world before their eyes.
Voulangis, a village in Brie, counts five hundred inhabitants, almost all of them living on the land as farmers or agricultural labourers; the commune comprises 958 hectares. For clearer comprehension, let us say that it contains about 2700 English acres, of which a quarter are forest and woodland. Subtract again some three-score acres occupied by roads and lanes, and there remain 1750 acres devoted to practical agriculture. The odd thing is that these 1750 acres are divided into no less than 10,600 lots of land!
Few indeed are the peasant owners who have their scanty acres, so to speak, in a ring fence. No, with a strip here and a paddock there, according to the hazard of heritage or purchase, their tiny possessions are generally scattered over an area of several miles, thus greatly enhancing the fatigue and expense of the farmer. More than mere chance has presided at this minute dispersion. In all classes in France (and not only since the Revolution, but by a very ancient law and custom which dates back to the early Middle Ages), all the children inherit equally. Even in noble families, the law of primogeniture, as we understand it in England, has never obtained in France. In some rare cases, amajoratfavoured the elder son; but as a rule he had nothing beyond the very modest privilege which awarded him the family chateau and the land immediately adjacent—thevol du chapon—the surroundings “as far as a cock can flutter.” As for the farming class, and even the class of country gentry, from time immemorial their lands have been divided between all their progeny alike. Suppose that a peasant farmer in Brie has so many acres of meadow, so many acres of forest, so many acres of rich arable land and a good-sized vineyard; do you imagine that on his death one son will take the pastures, another the cornland, and so forth? Not a bit of it! Each child will claim a slice of each sort of soil; and their children again will subdivide, till the strips of meadow, rye, cabbage, or vine, are not fields at all, but merely gardens. During the first seventy years or so of the nineteenth century, this morselling of the land suited well enough with the habits of agriculture in rural France. The plots of land were tilled with the tiny one-prongedaraire, or Roman plough, just a tooth of wood tearing the fertile earth; more often they were not tilled at all, but merely worked with spade and hoe and pitchfork.Comparatively few peasant-farmers owned a horse—some weather-beaten patient ass or cow carried in panniers the wood from the forest, the manure from the stable, and the corn to the mill. The women and the children fed the beasts—there were but one or two of them in the byre—with handfuls of long grass, or leaves of trees, plucked by the roadsides or in the forest glades, and rolled to a bundle in their apron—even as Arthur Young remarked them of old, and thought it a great sign of poverty. No need, however, to grow much clover, or maize, or vetch or mangel-wurzel, for the cows in those days. These cows, fed on weeds and grass, these tiny plots turned over with spade and fork, afforded a considerable profit in times when the small farmer, owing to the difficulty of transport, had not to reckon with the products of the model-farm in a distant district. But railways and machines have changed all that. The plough, and especially the steam-plough, the thrashing-machine, the reaping-machine, are useless in these garden-grounds, while the expense of manual labour increases every year. A peasant-farmer now can only prosper where his holding is so small that he can cultivate iten famille. At Voulangis, for instance, a haymaker earns from 5 to 6 francs a day, a harvester from 7 to 10, while the thrashers, even in winter time, average 4 francs of daily wage. These prices are beyond the reach of small owners. And no less beyond their reach are the machines which do the same work so rapidly and cheaply. Yet they must sell their grain at the price set by the large farms where corn is sown, reaped, thrashed, and carried by steam labour. Moreover, the agricultural colleges and model-farms have raised the public standard, and buyers are no longer satisfied with the produce which contented an earlier generation; while transport is so easy that an establishment of repute candiffuse its fruits, milk, or butter, far and wide. At Olmet, for instance, I do not eat the butter of the farm, ill-churned and made from clotted cream, but that supplied by the Etablissement Agricole de Roche-sur-Loue, hundreds of miles away in Franche Comté.
Save for the middleman, who absorbs too large a proportion of the profits, the peasant owner might still make a living out of his orchard, his vegetable garden, and his poultry-yard. Was it not Gladstone who said to the English farmer: “If corn don’t pay, grow roses”? The flowers, eggs, and fruit of France are a source of incalculable riches, and are consumed not only at home, but sent in large quantities to England. Unfortunately, the peasant is, as a rule, intellectually idle, incapable of combination, suspicious, and impatient of new-fangled ideas; he finds it simpler to sell his goods to the buyer from Paris as his father did before him, than to combine with his neighbours in an agricultural syndicate or trade’s union. Let him once see, however, that his advantage lies in a peasants’ union, and he will soon find out the way. The principle of solidarity has scarcely penetrated as yet into rustic parts, but the need of resisting the low prices imposed by the large farms using machine labour will certainly, in time, teach the peasant many things. Let his mind once grasp the idea of a common prosperity—where Tom’s good luck is not ensured by the misfortunes of Dick and Harry, but where all are implicated in the well-being of each—let him forget to suspect and learn to combine; from that day forth his social future and well-being are assured. There are fewer middlemen in France than there were fifty years ago, and, oddly enough, this is a signal disadvantage to the peasant. Fifty years ago the crowd of buyers who thronged the markets every week in Brie, in Beauce, in allthe fertile “home” provinces of the centre, bid one against the other for cheese, butter, fruit, and fodder, so that competition brought about a reasonable offer. To-day the railway has brought the farthest province within reach of the Paris market; and, in the capital, that market is directed, no longer by a number of shopkeepers, but by a few trusts or commission-merchants who dispose of every opening. These few middlemen, all acquainted, form a ring, and keep prices so low that the small farmer often makes little, sometimesnoprofit, on his bargain.
In the spring of 1902, the National schoolmaster of Voulangis-en-Brie, a certain M. Vaillant, felt his heart burn within him to see the buyers grow so rich and the peasants remain so poor. He resolved to found a Farmers’ Association for the sale of fruit to the Paris market; he started with seven or eight peasant proprietors and a buyer in Paris. The first stone fruit of the season is the damson, grown almost entirely for the English market. The syndicate made a “boom” on damsons and early pears, which are hard fruit, easy to pack and little injured by travel; owing to their inexperience in packing, they suffered some loss on their greengages; yet at the end of the autumn, so great were their profits, compared to those of their neighbours, that they determined to extend the scope of their operations. In place of selling fruit to Paris and London, they bought chemical manures from the factories and sold them to the farmers of Brie. Here, again, they scored a success; out of the profits they purchased an automatic seed-sifter. They hope in a few years to possess a complete set of sowing, thrashing, reaping, and carrying machines, steam-ploughs, and harrows, etc., which will remain at the disposal of the peasant-farmers who form the association.
If a small farmer fails and cannot pay his rent, he takes what remains of his stock and tools, when his debts are paid, and lets out these and his powers of labour inmétayageto some landlord, who supplies the land and the seed for his part of the bargain. In many places, indeed, the landlord supplies stock and land and seed; but even sométayageis, as a rule, chiefly profitable to the landlord, who may make as much as from 12 to 15 per cent. on his capital. The tenant has generally no capital behind him, and in bad seasons is compelled to borrow at usurious interest, for no one will lend to amétayer, whose only stake lies in his arms, stock, and tools. These latter wear out, are broken, die, have to be renewed; if the cart-horse break his neck, or the cow die of anthrax, on the top of a bad harvest, his plight is scarce better than that of the poor hind whom Aucassin encountered in the greenwood; for, whichever party supply them, the landlord has a right to exact that stock and tools shall always correspond with the inventory drawn up when the tenant entered into possession. Thus, if a run of bad luck may soon bring a farmer’s noble to ninepence and transform him into amétayer, still more easy is the descent from the farmerà mi-fruitsto the condition of farm servant or agricultural labourer. This is the lowest rung on the rural ladder.
Fifty years ago no class of labour was worse paid than that of farm servants. A small maid on a farm earned some four and twenty shillings a year—thirty francs!—her board, her clothes, her washing, and lodging. Nowadays, even children of twelve earn from four to six pounds a year—in addition to their keep and certain perquisites—while, after sixteen, their wages rise to three hundred francs (£12); and a full-grown man, besides his keep and perquisites, earns, as a rule, some twenty pounds a year.
Far rougher is the life of the labouring man, generally married, and living in a small cottage which, in most places, costs him as much as four pounds (100 francs) a year, though at Olmet, where I live, a very decent one-roomed cottage, with a loft, cellar, and garden-plot, may be rented for less than two pounds—forty-five francs. He has perhaps a little garden of his own, with a pig, some fowls, and a goat which his wife takes to feed in the lanes. Often he has no settled place, but labours first with this farmer, and then with that, always overworked; for an odd man is only called in at time of stress—hoeing time, or hay time, or for the harvest, or the thrashing, or hedging-and-ditching. But at least, in such seasons, in the sweat of his brow he earns his bread. All summer long he can count on two to four francs a day, rising to five or even seven at haymaking and harvest. It is not till November, when the thrashing is mainly finished, that his real troubles begin. If there be walls or roofs to repair, or a road to be set in order, here is a job for him, in case the neighbouring farmers be well enough off to unloose their purse-strings; or, again, he can serve in the quarries, when the farmer has to supply the stones for mending the high roads by a “prestation en nature:” a quarryman earns about fifteen pence a day, which is better than nothing in winter, when you have a family to feed. Often, too, the labourer turns wood-cutter or charcoal-burner at this season, walking many miles morning and evening, to and from his work, with a little osier basket hanging from his arm, which contains a cannikin of vegetable-soup, with a hunch of bread and cheese, and perhaps an onion.
In a little pamphlet, “En Bourbonnais,” published at the office ofPages Libres, a local novelist of the Allier district, M. Guillaumin, has added up the yearly receipts of a day labourer in good work, turn by turn haymaker and harvester, thrasher, wood-cutter, and so on. His annual earnings amount, in English coin, to twenty-one pounds twelve shillings. During the summer months, though he be fed abundantly at the farms where he works, his family must live, and he must feed himself all winter time. A quartern loaf a day is the least we can allow the little household, for bread will be the staple of their diet; bread and cabbage-soup, potato-soup and bread, will vary the menu, with an occasional stew of a little veal or bacon with carrots and onions. And bread is dear in France. A policy of protection has raised the price of the loaf, which is doubtless an excellent thing for the large farmer. But, out of his twenty-one pounds a year, Jacques Bonhomme, the day labourer, must pay no less than sixteen pounds for bread alone. No one would profit more than the French peasant by a cheapening of the price of corn. The cottage will cost another four pounds; and there remains one pound twelve shillings for school expenses, shoes, clothing, fuel, doctoring, and such indulgences as wine and tobacco. One pound twelve shillings for all the luxuries of life! Supplemented, no doubt, by the sale of the pig, and the kids, and the poultry; for the labourer of the Allier is too poor, as a rule, to put a fowl in his pot on Sundays, or to enjoy a rasher of his own bacon by his own fireside. True, in many parts of the country, the labourers, like the farm hands, pretend to certain perquisites. Here, in Olmet, for instance, the principal labourer on a farm receives seventeen pounds a year in money, with a sack of potatoes, a sack of chestnuts,and a sack of meal. Yet I cannot be as optimistic as Mrs. Tammas Glencairn in Mr. Barrie’s story. “My man,” says she, “has a good wage, and he’s weel worthy o’t. He gets three and twenty pound in the year, half a score o’ yowes, a coo’s grass, a bow o’ meal, a bow o’ pitatas, and as mony peats as he likes to cast and win and cairt.” The French peasant is much in the same case; but he doubts sometimes if all be for the best in the best possible world.
Military service has shown him that people live otherwise in the towns. The spread of machines has lessened the necessary work of the fields; once out of work, the labourer, instead of seeking a fresh place on a farm, sets off on the road to Paris in quest of better days.
The rural exodus has become of late years a serious problem, affecting the very source of wealth and well-being in country districts. I think the village schools have been in some measure to blame for this.
Although the first Bill on rural education was passed as early as 1833, nothing was done, in fact, to instruct the mass of village children in France until the advent of the Second Empire, and very little indeed before 1871, when the matter was seriously taken in hand. In myLife of Renan, I have spoken of the general impulse towards a moral and intellectual reform which followed in France so closely on the disasters of the Franco-Prussian war. The Prussian schoolmaster, even more than the Prussian generals, was supposed to have directed the victorious armies of the enemy; and, in education, no less than in arms, theconquered country began to prepare herrevanche, by raising for this purpose a generation of avengers.
The villages in 1871 were, in fact, almost as squalid, as narrow, as ignorant as before the revolution. The schoolmasters went to their posts in the spirit of missionaries prepared to civilize a tribe of savages, ignoring the ideal of the people among whom they dwelt, looking down on them with lofty benevolence, intending to concede nothing, but to convert, to quicken, and to change the heart. The first generation educated in the Primary Schools was treated even as a brand snatched from the burning. The children had learned from their masters to despise the animal ignorance, the brutish tastes, the sordid avarice that too often disfigured the habits of the village. And what they had learned to admire was something of which the village gave no conception.
For meanwhile in the towns the Socialist siren sang, “Come here, come here, and I will give you prosperity and peace.” And to the towns went the village youth. Wages were higher there; the standard of comfort suited better with a newly acquired ideal of refinement; above all, the smoky air was full of ideas. Ideas are a passion with the French, but with no class so absolutely as with the humbler ranks of Socialism. There reigned in those regions an instant hope in the approaching advent of a better world—a millennium, in fact, as living, as real as that which animated the first era of the Christian Church. The Socialist working man was somewhat in the position of the Christian convert of one of those great towns of ancient Asia Minor or Italy—a man with the secret of a New Hope—while the villages, Pagan now as then, slumbered in their contented ignorance. To go back would have been to apostatize, to renounce, not only the life-in-life
LUYNES
of an ideal, but also the means of education, the schools, the newspapers, the working-man’s club informally united round the zinc counter of theMarchand-de-vin, the Boulevards, the museums, thefêtes, the sense of beauty, the sense of politics, of science, of social solidarity. And if these parvenus in the moral and intellectual sphere were often crude, fanatical, harsh, intolerant, at least they were (what their rural fathers had not been) the heirs of all the ages. Every year the schools sent more and more young rustics to Paris,frotteursand sellers of wood and coal from Auvergne, masons from the Creuse, old clo’ men from the Lozère, chimney-sweepers from Savoy. In Paris they found a clan of compatriots ready to welcome them, to show them how to earn their bread, and how, according to the newest gospel, to save their souls alive.
And still the drain continues. But trade of late years has not been so good in Paris. In many branches of industry there has been overproduction—mechanical engineers, for instance, and masons have less to do. And often the agricultural labourer, having tramped to town, may find no work ready to his hands. I read in the reports of the Société Nationale d’Agriculture of a certain farm in Brie, which has been bought by the Assistance Publique, in order to give work to those unhappy labouring men who have fallen into beggary among the unfriendly streets. Here, on the fields and furrows of La Chalmelle, they touch their mother earth again, like Antæus; thence they repair, sadder and wiser men, to such glebes or vineyards as are short of hire. In its humble capacity, the farm of La Chalmelle attempts to react against the mighty current ever streaming from the country to Paris, establishing a tiny counter-stream from Paris to the land. This rural exodus is a grave question. Indeed, all thoughtful persons must pauseand fear when they come—as they may come, alas!—on a deserted village. For the fields are the source of our food and the fundamental riches of a nation. To forsake them for any cause, is to forsake the substance for the shadow. Therefore Reactionaries, such as the successors of Le Play, and Socialists, such as M. Vandervelde, are at one in attempting to stem the ominous tide. The State patronizes cattle-shows and subsidizes technical colleges; successful farmers are decorated no less than military heroes, and few orders are more esteemed than theMérite Agricole. Here and there, manufacturers attempt, by using the water-power of a cascade or river, to give the rural workman employment, without drawing him from home. And it is probable that isolated factories employing the youth of country districts will become more and more frequent in the future, and increase the well-being of the landed labourer rather by lessening the hours of employment and leaving him his harvest than by raising the rate of wage. But all this is little enough, unless we have also that inner force which sways a period, a generation, and which sometimes inclines us more and more to Nature, reviving in our hearts the desire of the land. Still, it is a good sign that the very schoolmasters are nowadays less exclusively urban and literary in their standards. Science, indeed, is beginning to dethrone literature even in the National school, and what is Science but an Aspect of Nature? Science leads back to Nature, as more important than the classics.
Among the posthumous notes of that noble apostle of national education, M. Felix Pécaut, in the little book called “Quinze Ans d’Education,” which saw the light at the close of 1902, I find the following noteworthy passage:—
“They say that the National schools favour the village exodus. They say that, after six years of book-learning, theyoung rustic dreads the coarse habits, the hard work, the soil, the sweat, inseparable from the life of a farm-labourer.
“What is the remedy? First of all, teach the children to take an interest, not only in books, but in the life of the fields. Teach them gardening, and how to keep bees, the making of cheese and the management of a dairy. Show them the reason of these things, their cause, and the possible improvements. Above all, in educating your little rustics, do not impose an ideal from without; work your reform from within. Make your scheme of education deliberately rural; be sober, just; teach them courage, and the contempt of mere ease and well-being; give them a wholesome, ample way of looking at things; instil the taste for an active life, the delight in physical energy. Try and turn out, not a mandarin, but a man of the fields.”
A generation corresponding to this ideal would yet need one or two reforms in the law of the land before the French peasant could reach his perfect development. First of all, let us admit that the nation has outgrown the Code Napoléon, which is a system of excessive centralization. As usual, the people are in advance of the law of the land; here as elsewhere, a fossilized system cramps and hinders the expansion of life. Even at some sacrifice of order, France would be more fortunate if she were decentralized, with more importance accorded to the country towns and rural districts. Have we not seen how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this same vice of over-centralization was fatal to the country-sides of France, even as, in the closing years of the Roman Empire, it was fatal to the country-sides ofGaul? In this lovely land of France, over-centralization is a sort of endemic disease which we may combat, but scarcely, perhaps, eradicate. Let us do our best. It were well should the law, even if it continue the principle of equal inheritance, at least permit some laxity in practice (as an insertion of the thin edge of the wedge), allowing the estate, for instance, to remain intact in the hands of the son who farms it, though a proportion of the revenue be divided yearly among his brothers and sisters. Let us take from the Old Order what was best in it. Nothing was more frequent under theancien régimethan for a family to enjoy in common their paternal acres. To take a case in point:—when the great-grandfather of Ernest Renan died in 1732, his sons continued to dwell together in their old grey farm by the estuary of Ledano, without separating their shares of the estate. Gilles farmed the land; Alain, François, and Olivier manned the joint fishing-smack and salted their pilchards in common. This system of joint possession was usual in France, and suits the sociable French character. Even to-day, in some such way, the extremest results of the sub-division of property might be avoided. Thirdly, we would have every schoolmaster in France teach his children, instead of the names of the Merovingian kings, such elementary notions of physics and chemistry as explain or at least suggest the life of natural things: why the sea is salt; how the dew condenses; how the seed germinates in the earth; why such and such a soil best serves to produce such and such a crop, etc. When we see with what extraordinary swiftness the rural population of France has adopted the theories of Pasteur and their consequences, we feel that in this direction, at any rate, the rustic is not stupid. Let the peasants learn the meaning of the world in which they live; they will find it more interesting. A child who has learned to observe andreflect has the beginnings of a liberal education, and one that will not necessarily draw him from the land.
And, again, we would teach our peasants the benefits of union. There is a great future for agricultural syndicates, buying and selling on co-operative terms, and distributing among their members the proper complement of agricultural machines; by their aid the small landowner of a few acres may be enabled to sustain the competition of the large model-farms; and perhaps, under new conditions, the agriculture of the rural districts may revive, surpassing those golden years between 1830 and 1880. But the season of adversity has not been barren. Even the farmer cannot live by bread alone; and the lean years that end the nineteenth century have witnessed the moral and mental regeneration of the French peasant. Whatever be his destiny, he is now that “man of independent mind” whom Burns proclaimed the equal of any man in any class.
“THE prettiest April still wears a wreath of frost.” So runs an old French proverb, which is not always true. At least, in that bygone year of 1893 by the end of April the heat was as parched as at midsummer; roses and strawberries were hawked through the streets of Paris; the dust was a moving sepulchre, and the sunshine a burden. We longed for a plunge into the great forests of the north. Oh for the cool grass and the deep glades of woods that have been woods for these two thousand years! ’Tis something to feel one’s self in a Gaulish forest—though I can remember older trees in Warwickshire. But, in the forests of the Oise, from father to son, the succession is imposing, and the delicate silver birches of Chantilly spring from ancestors who may have shadowed Pharamond.
At Chantilly the train put us down on the edge of the forest. I always wish that we had stayed there, in the little station inn, where the air is still sweet with may and lilies. But we drove on to the town, with its neat, expensive hotels, its rows of training-stables, and parched, oblong racecourse.Chantilly is a true French village, with its one endless winding street, pearl-grey, with a castle at the end of it. From almost any point of it you see, beyond the houses, a glint of waters and hear a rustle of woods. There is an indescribable airy lightness about the place, about the fresh fine air, the loose sand of the soil, the thin green boughs of silver birch and hornbeam, the smooth-trunked beechen glades that are never allowed to grow into great forest trees. It was with an effort of the imagination that we realized the ancient stock of this slim nestling underwood where nothing looks older than Louis Philippe. The Sylvanectes, the Gaulish foresters, have so entirely disappeared.
In 1893, Chantilly was still the game-preserve of a hunter-prince, and everything about it was ordered for the chase. Those wide-open grassy glades, studded with birch or oak-scrub, were haunted by the deer; and in those thickets of golden broom the heavy does prepared their nurseries. Great, floundering, russet pheasants came flying by; at every step a hare or a white-tailed rabbit started up out of the grass. Far at the further end of the forest there were deep, unsightly thickets of mud and thorn, left darkling amid the trim order of the place, for the wild boar delights in them. As we walked or drove down the neat-clipt avenues of the forest, the roads appeared impassable to the traveller, and we wondered at the contrast between their shoals of sand and the careful forestry that pares and cuts every wilding branch of the over-arching hornbeam roof. But the roads are bad on purpose; every spring they are ploughed afresh, lest they lose the lightness beloved of the horseman.
SENLIS
Every May, a beautiful fault frustrates this skilful venery, for, thick as grass, thick and sweet, the lily of the valley springs in all the brakes and shady places. The scent of the game will not lie across these miles of blossom. The hunters are in despair, and the deer, still deafened with the winter’s yelp of the hounds—the deer, who sets his back against the sturdiest oak, and butts at the pack with his antlers, who swims the lakes, and from his island refuge sells his life as hard as he can—the deer, accustomed to be always vanquished, beholds himself at last befriended by an ally more invincible than water or forest oak, by the sweet innumerable white lily, innocent as himself, that every May-time sends the huntsmen home.
The lily that saves the deer is the consolation of poor women. Every morning during the brief season of its blossom, they are up before the dawn. Holding their children by the hand, they are off to the innermost dells of its forest; and before our breakfast-time they are back at the railway stations at Chantilly or Creil, laden with bunches of lilies, which they sell to the dusty passengers bound by the morning mails for London or for Brussels. Sweet flowers with the dew upon them, fragrant posies, who would not give a five-penny-piece for so much beauty? “What would you buy with your roses that is worth your roses?” sings the Persian poet. These tired country-women of the Oise would know what to reply: new sabots for the good man, a white communion veil for the second girl, a shawl for the old grandam, and a galette for the children’s dinner! The lilies are a harvest to them, like any other—a sweet, voluntary, unplanted harvest that comes three months before the corn is yellow.
The lilies were all out when we drove through the woods at Chantilly. I had never seen such a sight, for we had not yet visited Compiègne, where they are still more profuse and,I think, of a larger growth. In the Hay-woods in Warwickshire they grow sparsely, in timid clumps; and how proud of them we were! But nowhere have I seen such a sheet of coy flowers as these. Anemones and tulips of Florence, tall jonquils of Orange, ye have a plenteous rival in the north! The whole way to Commelle the glades were sweet with lilies.
Every traveller between Calais and Paris has marked unwitting the beauty of Commelle. You remember the view that precedes or follows (according to your direction) the little station of Orry-Coye? The rails are laid on the summit of a hill; the train rushes through a delicate forest of birch. Suddenly we come upon a clearing, and on the one hand we see, in a wide blue vista, the slow declining valley of the Thérain, placid and royal amid its mantling woods; while, on the other side, the hill breaks in a sort of precipice, and shows, deep below, a chain of lakelets asleep amid the trees; a turreted white castle rises out of a sedgy island, and appears the very palace of theBelle au Bois dormant. These are the Pools of Commelle—pools or lakes? Pool is too small and lake too large for the good French wordétang. They are considerable lakelets, some miles round, four in a row, connected each with each. They lie in a sheltered valley, almost a ravine, whose romantic character contrasts with the rest of the forest. Here the clipped and slender trees of Chantilly give place to an older and more stately vegetation. The gnarled roots of the beeches grip the sides of the hills with an amazing cordage, spreading as far over the sandy cliff as their boughs expand above. In the bottom of the combe, one after another, lie the four sister pools. The road winds by their side through meadows of cowslips, past the bulrushes where the swan sits on her nest, and past the clear spaces of open water, where her mate swims double onthe wave. The brink is brilliant with kingcup on a film of ladysmock. At the end of the last pool the ground rises towards the forest. There are some ruins; an old grey mill rises by the weir. The swell of the land, the grace and peace of the lake, the sedgy foreground, are exquisitely tranquil.
We return along the other track to the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle—le Château de la Reine Blanche, as the people prefer to call it. It is no castle at all, in fact, but a small hunting-lodge belonging to the Prince de Joinville. A tradition runs that, in 1227, the mother of St. Louis had a chateau here. Six hundred years later, the last of the Condés built the chateau of to-day, with its four white turrets, the exaggerated ogives of its windows, and its steep grey roof. ’Tis the romantic Gothic of Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, the Gothic of 1830, more poetic than antiquarian. For all its lack of science, there is a homely grace about this ideal of our grandfathers, a scent, as it were, of dried rose-leaves, and a haunting, as of an old tune—“Ma Normandie,” perhaps, or “Combien j’ai Douce Souvenance.” The mill-race rushes loud under the Gothic arches. A blue lilac flowers near the hall-door. It is very silent, very peaceful, very deserted. The Castle of St. Louis would not have seemed so old-world as this.
We must make a long road home by theTable Ronde, or we shall not have seen the best of the Forest of Chantilly. There is still the village to visit, and the castle, and the charming country that stretches on either side of the long village street. I remember one walk we went. A row of steps leads steeply down the market-place to the banks of the Nonette, which runs demurely, as befits its name, between an overspanning arch of lofty poplars. They quite meet at the top above the narrow river. But the river is richer than it looks, and as sometimes we see a meek-faced, slender littlewoman mother of some amazing Hebe of a beauty, so the small Nonette supplies the sources of yon great oblong sheet of artificial water, more than two miles long and eighty metres wide! A stone’s-throw beyond the poplar walk, it glitters, it shines, it dazzles in the valley, visible from the windows of the castle on the hill. A bridge crosses the bright expanse, and leads to a beautiful meadow caught in between the water and the forest, which rises steeply here into a long low hill. There we found a score of white-bloused, bareheaded workmen, lying on the grass, dreaming away their dinner hour. Chantilly is not picturesque, but at every turn the place is full of pictures.
Before we leave, we must stroll round by the castle, with its fine old gardens planted by Le Nôtre, its vast stables, imposing as a church, its sheets of water, out of which rises, elegantly turreted, the brand-new chateau of 1880, so reminiscent of the older castles of Touraine. For once there was an older castle here, built by Jean Bullant for Anne of Montmorency. The great constable left the splendid palace to his son, and in 1632 Chantilly, as it stood among the waters and the gardens of Le Nôtre, was a thing to wonder at and envy. Here Henri, Duke of Montmorency, kept his court and filled his galleries with famous pictures. He was a great patron of the arts. His wife, theSilvieof the poets of her time, has left her name still, like a perfume, among the avenues and parks of Chantilly. It was a princely life; but the duke was discontented in his castle; private wealth could not console him for public woes, and he joined in the revolt of Gaston d’Orléans. He was defeated at the head of his troops, taken prisoner, and beheaded at Toulouse, by order of Cardinal Richelieu. “On the scaffold,” says St. Simon, “he bequeathed one of his best pictures to Richelieu, and another to my father.”
The duke was a near kinsman of the Prince of Condé. Until the last,Silviehad believed that this cousin, powerful and in the king’s good graces, would intervene, and save her husband’s life. To her surprise, Condé held his peace. The axe fell—andSilvieunderstood, when the king awarded the confiscated glories of Chantilly to Condé.
For a hundred and fifty years, Chantilly continued to be the almost Royal pleasure-house, the Versailles of the Princes of Condé. Then the great Revolution rased the castle to the ground. It was not here, but some miles away—at St. Leu-Taverny—that the last Condé died, in 1830. Chantilly, which had come into the family by a violent death, left it also in a sombre and mysterious fashion. The last Prince of Condé was found one morning hanged to the handle of his casement-window. The castle of Chantilly passed to the Duc d’Aumale. In 1840 he began the labour of restoring it; but the Revolution of 1848 sent him into exile, and only in 1872 was Chantilly restored to its rightful proprietor. Then, like a phœnix, the new castle began to rise swiftly from its nest of ash and ruin. It is as like the castle of the Renaissance, from which it descends, as a young child is like its illustrious ancestor. ’Tis a princely and elegant palace, and we find no fault with it beyond its youth. It stands with a swanlike grace amid its waters; it holds, as in the days of Montmorency, a rare treasure of old pictures and priceless manuscripts; and so far as eye can reach from its terraces, the lands and forests are subject to its lord. Chantilly is, in truth, a great possession. The Duc d’Aumale, as we know, had no sons. He died in 1897, and, choosing the most gifted men of his country for his children, he bequeathed his palace and estate of Chantilly to the Institute of France.
If the day be cold or windy, drive through the forest of Hallatte to Creil, and thence take the train to Compiègne, for there blows a stiffish breeze across the plateau of the Oise. But if mild air and sun attend you, hire a light victoria, choose a good driver (you can get one to do the thing for five and twenty francs or so), and set out by Senlis and Verberie for Compiègne. ’Tis a matter of five and forty kilomètres; and to make the drive a success, you must stretch it a little further still, and go through the forest of Chantilly, round by St. Léonard, to Senlis.
Senlis is a charming little town, perched on a hill in true mediæval fashion, and grouped in a cluster round its fine cathedral and the ruins of the castle of St Louis (a real mediæval castle, this one, at least so much as is left of it). Halfway up the hill the antique bulwarks, turned into a raised and shady walk, wear their elms and limes and beeches like flowers amid a mural crown. From this green garland the streets rise ever steeper, darker, more irregular; yet not so narrow but that here and there we spy some white half-modern house, with pots of pinks in the windows, and a garden full of flowers, which looks the natural home for some provincial heroine in a novel of Balzac’s. I should like to end my days, I think, in just such a little town, to sit in my garden and receive my fair visitors under the green roof of the lime-tree walk. The notary, the sous-préfet (is there a sous-préfet?), the curé perhaps, and some of the country neighbours would come once a week to play écarté, tric-trac, and boston with each other, and chat with us in a polished little parlour, with squares of carpet in front of all the chairs. Once a week, on the afternoon consecrated by local fashion,