Part 9 (1/2)

On reaching the highest ground the crests of the bare Cevennes were seen against the cloudless sky to the south. A little to the east, beyond the valley of the Cernon, which I intended to cross, were high hills or cliffs, treeless and sterile, with hard-cut angular sides, terminating upwards in vertical walls of naked stone. These were the b.u.t.tresses of the Causse de Larzac. The lower sides of some of the hills were blue with lias marl, and wherever they were steep not a blade of gra.s.s grew.

Having descended to the valley, I was soon climbing towards Roquefort by the flanks of those melancholy hills which seemed to express the hopelessness of nature after ages of effort to overcome some evil power. And yet the tinkling of innumerable sheep-bells told that even here men had found a way of earning their bread. I saw the flocks moving high above me where all was wastefulness and rockiness, and heard the voices of the shepherds. There were the Roquefort sheep whose milk, converted into cheese of the first quality, is sent into distant countries whose people little imagine that its const.i.tuents are drawn from a desert where there is little else but stones.

I came in view of the village, clinging as it seemed to the steep at the base of a huge bastion of stark jura.s.sic rock. Facing it was another barren hill, and in the valley beneath were mamelons of dark clay and stones partly conquered by the great broom and burning with its flame of gold. When I reached the village I felt that I had earned a rest.

Cheese, which has been the fortune of Roquefort, has destroyed its picturesqueness. It has brought speculators there who have raised great ugly square buildings of dazzling whiteness, in harsh contrast with the character and sombre tone of the old houses. Although the place is so small that it consists of only one street and a few alleys, the more ancient dwellings are remarkable for their height. It is surprising to see in a village lost among the sterile hills houses three stories high. The fact that there is only a ledge on which to build must be the explanation. What is most curious in the place is the cellars. Before the cheese became an important article of commerce these were natural caverns, such as are everywhere to be found in this calcareous formation, but now they are really cellars which have been excavated to such a depth in the rock that they are to be seen in as many as five stages, where long rows of cheeses are stacked one over the other. The virtue of these cellars from the cheese-making point of view is their dryness and their scarcely varying temperature of about 8 Centigrade summer and winter. But the demand for Roquefort cheese has become so great that trickery now plays a part in the ripening process. The peasants have learnt that 'time is money,' and they have found that bread-crumbs mixed with the curd cause those green streaks of mouldiness, which denote that the cheese is fit for the market, to appear much more readily than was formerly the case when it was left to do the best it could for itself with the aid of a subterranean atmosphere. This is not exactly cheating; it is commercial enterprise, the result of compet.i.tion and other circ.u.mstances too strong for poor human nature. In cheese-making, breadcrumbs are found to be a cheap subst.i.tute for time, and it is said that those who have taken to beer-brewing in this region have found that box, which here is the commonest of shrubs, is a cheap subst.i.tute for hops. The notion that bra.s.s pins are stuck into Roquefort cheese to make it turn green is founded on fiction.

Having remained at Roquefort long enough to see all that was needful, to lunch and to be overcharged--commercial enterprise is very infectious--I turned my back upon it and scrambled down a stony path to the bottom of the valley where the Cernon--now a mere thread of a stream--curled and sparkled in the middle of its wide channel, the yellow flowers and pale-green leaves of the horned poppy basking upon the rocky banks. Following it down to the Tarn, I came to the village of St. Rome de Cernon, where the houses of dark-gray stone, built on a hillside, are overtopped by the round tower of a small mediaeval fortress which has been patched up and put to some modern use. I thought the people very ill-favoured by nature here, but perhaps they are not more so than others in the district. The harshness of nature is strongly reflected in all faces. Having pa.s.sed a man on the bank of the stream was.h.i.+ng his linen--presumably his own--with bare arms, sinewy and hairy like a gorilla's, I was again in the open country; but instead of following donkey-paths and sheep-tracks I was upon the dusty highroad. Well, even a, _route nationale_, however hot and dusty, so that it be not too straight, has its advantages, which are felt after you have been walking an uncertain number of miles over a very rough country, trusting to luck to lead you where you wished to go. The feeling that you may at length step out freely and not worry yourself with a map and compa.s.s is a kind of pleasure which, like all others, is only so by the force of contrast and the charm of variety.

I knew that I could now tramp along this road without troubling myself about anything, and that I should reach Millau sooner or later. It was really very hot--ideal sunstroke weather, verging on 90 in the shade; but I had become hardened to it, and was as dry as a smoked herring.

For miles I saw no human being and heard no sound of life except the shrilling of gra.s.shoppers and the more strident song of the cicadas in the trees. By-and-by houses showed themselves, and I came to the village of St. Georges beside the bright little Cernon, but surrounded by wasteful, desolate hills, one of which, shaped like a cone, reared its yellow rocky summit far towards the blue solitude of the dazzling sky. I pa.s.sed by little gardens where great hollyhocks flamed in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, then I met the Tarn again and reached Millau, a weary and dusty wayfarer.

I stopped in Millau (sometimes spelt Milhau) more than a day, in order to rest and to ramble--moderately. Although the town, with its 16,000 inhabitants, is the most populous in the department of the Aveyron, it is so remote from all large centres and currents of human movement that very little French is spoken there. And this French is about on a par with the English of the Sheffield grinders. In the better-cla.s.s families an effort now is made to keep _patois_ out-of-doors for the sake of the children; but there is scarcely a middle-aged native to whom it is not the mother-tongue. The common dialect is not quite the same throughout Guyenne and Languedoc; but the local variations are much less marked than one would expect, considering that the _langue d'oc_ has been virtually abandoned as a literary vehicle for centuries. The word _oc_ (yes), which was once the most convenient sound to distinguish the dialect from that of the northern half of France, is not easy to recognise nowadays in the conversation of the people. The _c_ in the word is not p.r.o.nounced--perhaps it never was--and the _o_ is usually joined to _be_, which has the same meaning as _bien_ in the French language. Thus we have the forms _obe_, _ope_, and _ape_ according to the district, and all equivalent to 'yes.' All these people can understand Spanish when spoken slowly. Many can catch your meaning when you speak to them in French, but reply in _patois_.

I had grown accustomed, although not reconciled, to this manner of conversing with peasants; but I was surprised to find on entering a shop at Millau that neither the man nor his wife there could reply to me in French.

This town lies in the bottom of a basin; some of the high hills, especially those on the east, showing savage escarpments with towering ma.s.ses of yellow or reddish rock at the summits. The climate of the valley is delightful in winter, but sultry and enervating in summer.

It is so protected from the winds that the mulberry flourishes there, and countless almond-trees rise above the vines on the burning hillsides.

Millau presents a good deal of interest to the archaeologist. Very noteworthy is the ancient market-place, where the first and upper stories project far over the paving and are supported by a colonnade.

Some of the columns, with elaborately carved Romanesque capitals, date from the twelfth century, and look ready to fall into fragments. At one end of the square is an immense modern crucifix--a sure sign that the civic authorities do not yet share the views of the munic.i.p.al councillors of Paris in regard to religious emblems. Protestants, however, are numerous at Millau as well as at St. Affrique, both towns having been important centres of Calvinism at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; and after the forced emigration many of the inhabitants must have strongly sympathized with their persecuted neighbours, the Camisards. Nevertheless, the department of the Aveyron, taken in its entirety, is now one of the most fervently Catholic in France.

The church is Romanesque, with a marked Byzantine tendency. It has an elegant apse, decorated in good taste; but the edifice having received various patchings and decorations at the time of the Renaissance, the uniformity of style has been spoilt. The most striking architectural feature of the town is a high Gothic belfry of octagonal form, with a ma.s.sive square tower for its base.

In the Middle Ages the government of this town was vested in six consuls, who received twenty gold florins a year as salary, and also a new robe of red and black cloth with a hood. In 1341 they furnished forty men-at-arms for the war against the English, but the place was given up to Chandos in 1362. The rising of 1369 delivered the burghers again from the British power, but for twenty-two years they were continually fighting with the English companies.

The evening before I left Millau I strolled into the little square where the great crucifix stands. I found it densely crowded. Three or four hundred men were there, each wearing a blouse and carrying a sickle with a bit of osier laid upon the sharp edge of the blade along its whole length, and firmly tied. All these harvesters were waiting to be hired for the following week. They belonged to a cla.s.s much less numerous in France than in England--the agricultural labourers who have no direct interest in the soil that they help to cultivate and the crops that they help to gather in. I have often met them on the dusty roads, frequently walking with bare feet, carrying the implements of their husbandry and a little bundle of clothes. It must be very hard to ask for work from farm to farm. I can enter fully into the attachment of the French peasant to his bit of land, which, although it may yield him little more than his black bread, cannot be taken from him so long as he can manage to live by the sweat of his brow. Many of these peasant proprietors can barely keep body and soul together; but when they lie down upon their wretched beds at night, they feel thankful that the roof that covers them and the soil that supports them are their own. The wind may howl about the eaves, and the snow may drift against the wall, but they know that the one will calm down, and that the other will melt, and that life will go on as before--hard, back-breaking, grudging even the dark bread, but secure and independent. Waiting to be hired by another man, almost like a beast of burden--what a trial is here for pride! Happily for the human race, pride, although it springs naturally in the breast of man, only becomes luxuriant with cultivation. The poor labourer does not feel it unless his instinctive sense of justice has been outraged.

THE BLACK CAUSSE.

One cannot be sure of the weather even in the South of France, where the skies are supposed, by those who do not know them, to be perpetually blue. The 'South of France' itself is a very deceptive term. The climate on one side of a range of mountains or high hills may be altogether different from that on the other. In Upper Languedoc and Guyenne the climate is regulated by three princ.i.p.al factors: the elevation of the soil, the influence of the Mediterranean, and the influence of the Atlantic. On the northern side of the Cevennes, the currents from the ocean, together with the alt.i.tude, do much to keep the air moist and comparatively cool in summer; whereas on the other side of the chain, where the Mediterranean influence--in a large measure African--is paramount, the climate is dry and torrid during the hot months. A liability to sudden changes goes with the advantages of the more favoured region. This was enforced upon me at Millau.

At seven o'clock the sky, lately of such a fiery blue, was of a most mournful smokiness, and the rain fell in a drenching spray. It was mountain weather, and I blamed the Cevennes for it. But I was in the South, and at a season when bad weather is seldom in earnest, so I did not despair of a change when the sun rose higher. It came, in fact, at about eight o'clock, when, a breeze springing up, the clouds, after a short struggle, were swept away. The market-women spread out upon the pavement their tomatoes, their purple _aubergines_, their peaches, and green almonds; the harvesters, long hesitating, went out into the fields to reap; and I, leaving the Tarn, took my way up the valley of the gleaming Dourbie. Millau was soon nearly hidden in its basin, but above it, on the sides of the surrounding hills, scattered amongst the sickly vines, or the vigorous young plants which promised in a few years to make the stony soil flow once more with purple juice, were the small white houses of the wine-growers. Where I could, I walked in the shade of walnut and mulberry trees, for the heat was great, and the rain that had fallen rose like steam in the sun-blaze from the herbage and the golden stubble. In this low valley all corn except maize had been gathered in, and Nature was resting, after her labour, with the smile of maternity on her face. Nevertheless, this stillness of the summer's fulfilment, this pause in the energy of production, is saddening to the wayfarer, to whom the vernal splendour of the year and the time of blossoming seem like the gifts of yesterday. The serenity of the burnished plains now prompts him upward, where he hopes to overtake the tarrying spring upon the cool and gra.s.sy mountains. Although the mountains towards which I was now bearing were the melancholy and arid Cevennes, I wished the distance less that lay between me and their barren flanks, where the breeze would be scented with the bloom of lavender. There were flowers along the wayside here, but they were the same that I had been seeing for many a league, and they reminded me too forcibly of the rapid flight of the summer days by their haste--their unnecessary haste, as I thought--in pa.s.sing from the flower to the seed. A sprig of lithosperm stood like a little tree laden with Dead Sea fruit, for the naked seeds clung hard and flinty where the flowers had been. The glaucium, although still blooming, had put forth horns nine inches long, and the wild barley, so lately green, was now a brown fringe along the dusty road. And thus all these familiar forms of vegetable life, which we notice in our wanderings, but never understand, come and go, perish and rise again--so quickly, too, that we have no time to listen to what they say; we only feel that the song which they sing along the waysides of the world is ever joyous and ever sad.

In the lower part of this valley were scattered farmhouses, which looked like small rural churches, for their high rectangular dovecots at one end had much the air of towers with broach spires. Throughout Guyenne one is amazed at the apparently extravagant scale on which accommodation has been provided for pigeon-rearing. There are plenty of pigeons in the country, but the size of their houses is usually out of all proportion to the number of lodgers, and dovecots without tenants are almost as frequently seen as those that are tenanted. They are seldom of modern construction; many are centuries old. All this points to the conclusion that people of former times laid much greater store by pigeon-flesh than their descendants do. It may have been that other animal food was relatively more expensive than at the present day.

But as I ascended the valley the breadth of cultivated land grew narrower, and the habitations fewer. On either side the cliffs rose higher, and the walls of Jura.s.sic rock, above the brashy steeps, more towering, precipitous, and fantastic. Where vegetable life could draw sustenance from crumbling, stones stretched a veritable forest of box.

Now, in a narrow gorge, the Dourbie frolicked about the heaps of pebbles it had thrown up in its winter fury. Strong wires, attached to high rocks, crossed the gorge and the stream, and were made fast to the side of the road. Bundles of newly-cut box at the lower end showed the use to which these wires were put. Far aloft upon the heated rocks women were cutting down the tough shrub for firewood or manure, for it is put to both uses. It serves a very useful purpose when buried in dense layers between the vine rows. When I looked aloft, and saw those petticoated beings toiling in the terrible heat, I thought it a pity that there was no society to protect women as well as horses from being cruelly overworked. Let social reformers ponder this truth: The more the man is encouraged to s.h.i.+rk work, the more the woman will have to toil to make up for wasted time. As it is, women everywhere, except perhaps in England, work harder than men, as far as I can speak from observation.

I was on my way to Vieux Montpellier--the 'Devil's City'--and already the scenery began to take the character to be expected of it in such a neighbourhood. It seemed as though the demon builder of the fantastic town, sporting with man's architectural ideals before his appearance on the earth, had hewn the red and yellow rocks above the Dourbie into the ironic semblance of feudal towers and heaven-pointing spires.

The highest limestone rocks in this region, those which rise from the plateau or _causse_ and strike the imagination by the strangeness of their forms, are dolomite; in the gorges they approach the character of lias towards the base, and not unfrequently contain lumps of pure silex embedded in their ma.s.s. The redness which they so often show, and which, alternating with yellow, white, or gray, adds to the grandeur of their rugged outlines, is due to the iron which the rock contains.

A young gipsy-woman, carrying a child upon her shoulders, and holding on to a dusky little leg on each side of her neck, followed in the wake of an old caravan drawn by a mule of resigned countenance--a beast that seemed to have made a vow never to hurry again, and to let the flies do their worst. She vanished upon the winding road, and presently I saw another wayfarer seated on the bank beside the stream, binding up a bleeding foot under the trailing traveller's joy. Before reaching the village of La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite, I pa.s.sed a genuine rock dwelling. A natural cavern, some twenty or thirty feet above the level of the road, had been walled up to make a house. It had its door and windows like any other dwelling, and some convenient crevice in the rock had probably been used for a chimney.

Having taken an hour's rest and a light meal in the village, I commenced the ascent towards the 'Devil's City.' A mule-path wound up the steep side of the gorge, which had been partly reclaimed from the desert by means of terraces where many almond-trees flourished, safe from the north wind. Very scanty, however, was the vegetation that grew upon this dry stony soil, burning in summer, and washed in winter of its organic matter by the mountain rains. Tall woody spurges two feet high or more, with tufts of dusty green leaves, managed to draw, however, abundant moisture from the waste, as the milk that gushed from the smallest wound attested. An everlasting pea, with very large flowers of a deep rose-colour, also loved this arid steep. I was wondering why I found no lavender, when I saw a gray-blue tuft above me, and welcomed it like an old friend. The air was soon scented with the plant, and for five days I was in the land of lavender. On nearing the b.u.t.tresses of the plateau the ground was less steep, and here I came to pines, junipers, oaks, and the bird-cherry prunus. But the tree which I was most pleased to find was a plum, with ripe fruit about the size of a small greengage, but of a beautiful pale rose-colour.