Part 13 (1/2)

'Yes, I am.'

'Will you please tell me your quality?'

In reply I asked him if he wished to see my papers.

'If it will not vex you,' he said. His manners were quite charming. If he was a native of the Rouergue, the army had polished him up wonderfully. After looking at the papers and finding them satisfactory, he said: 'Je vous demande pardon, monsieur, mais vous comprenez-----'

'Oh yes, I understand perfectly, and I a.s.sure you that my feelings are not at all hurt!'

And so we parted on very good terms. A woman standing at a cottage door at a little distance watched the scene with a scared and wondering look in her face. When I was again alone, and she saw me coming towards her, she disappeared with much agility into her fortress and shut the door. She must have thought that, although I had managed to escape arrest that time, I should certainly come to a bad end.

After reaching the top of the hill, white smoke rising continually into the blue air led me to the _Montagnes fumantes_. Coming at length to the spot so named, 'Surely,' I thought, 'my wayfaring has brought me at last to the Phlegraean Fields.' All about me were rocks that had been burnt red, black, or yellow, and on their scorched surface not a shrub, nor a blade of gra.s.s, nor even a tuft of spurge, grew. The subterranean fires which had burnt these upper rocks had long since gone out; but a hot and sulphurous vapour still pa.s.sed over them when the wind blew it in their direction. Continuing down the hillside, I heard a crackling as of stones being split by heat, and presently saw little tongues of flame shooting up from the crevices in the soil almost at my feet, but scarcely perceptible in the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne.

From these and other vents, however, came intermittent puffs, or continuous fillets of smoke, and the air was almost overpoweringly hot and sulphurous. To wander by night among these jets of fire must be very stimulating to the imagination, for then the hill is lit up by them; but I thought the spot sufficiently infernal by daylight.

Beds of coal lying underneath this rocky hill, perhaps at a great depth, have been burning for centuries, and the same phenomenon is repeated elsewhere in the district. The popular legend is that the English, when they were compelled to abandon Guyenne, set fire to these coal-measures with the motive of doing all the mischief they could before leaving. Such fables are handed down from generation to generation. All the evil that happened to the region in the dim past is placed to the account of the English. These burning hills in the Aveyron have been turned to one good purpose. The hot air that escapes from crevices where there is neither smoke nor fire is used for heating little cabins which have been constructed for the treatment of persons suffering from rheumatic disorders. There they can obtain a natural vapour-bath that is both cheap and effectual.

At the foot of the cliffs lay Cransac, bristling with tall chimneys and in a cloud of dark coal-smoke that filled the valley. Here, instead of the solemn calm of the barren uplands, the murmurous chanting of rills and shallow rivers, and the mystical voices that speak from the depths of the forest, I heard the fretful buzz of a human beehive. Here was human life intensified and yet lowered in tone by aggregation, by the strain of organized effort that suppresses initiative and makes the value of a man merely a question of dynamics.

The number of shops, especially of drinking-shops--sordid _cafes_ and flashy _buvettes,_ where the enterprising poisoners of the coal-miner stood behind their zinc counters pouring out the corrosive absinthe and the beetroot brandy--told of the prosperity of Cransac. Evidently it was a place in which money could be earned by those prepared to accept the conditions. The women wore better clothes than the wives of the peasants; but low morality, instead of the sad but always honourable stamp of ravaging toil, was impressed on many a female face. Even the children looked as degraded by the social atmosphere as they were blackened by the smoke and ever-falling soot. Hastening along the road towards Aubin, I soon found that the two places, separated according to the map by a considerable distance, had grown together. The long road powdered with coal-dust was now a street lined on each side with houses and hovels. Wooden shanties with sooty, bushes of juniper hanging over the door, and the word 'Buvette'

painted beneath, competed for the miner's money at distances of twenty or fifty yards. One had a notice such as is rarely seen in France, and which was significant here: 'Ready money for everything sold over the counter.' Close by was the sign of a _sage-femme_, who, under the picture of a woman holding aloft in triumph an unreasonably fat baby, announced that she also bled and vaccinated. Grimy children and grimy pigs that were intended to be white or pink sprawled upon the thresholds or wallowed in the hot dust.

Having left the blissful coal basin, I met the Lot again near the boundary-line of the Aveyron and entered the department named after the river. Thence to Capdenac the valley was a curving line of uninterrupted but ever-changing beauty.

The season was farther advanced when I continued the journey from this point to Cahors.

A person who had contracted the 'morphia habit' would probably find the most effectual cure for it by forced residence at Capdenac, because the town does not boast the luxury of a chemist's shop.

Supposing the patient, however, to be a lady of worldly tastes, she might die of _ennui_ in twenty-four hours. The Capdenac of which I am speaking is not the utterly unpicturesque collection of houses that has been formed about the well-known railway junction on the line to Toulouse, but old romantic Capdenac, whose dilapidated ramparts, dating from the early Middle Ages, crown the high rocky hill that rises abruptly from the valley on the other side of the Lot, which here separates the department named after it from, the Aveyron. The situation of this town is one of the most remarkable. It is perched upon a lofty table of reddish rock of the same calcareous composition as that which prevails throughout the region of the _causses_. Its walls are so escarped that the topmost crags in places overhang the path that winds about their base far below. Only strategical considerations could ever have induced men to build a town on such a site. The Gauls set the example, and their _oppidum_ was long supposed to have been Uxellodunum, but the controversy has been settled in favour of the Puy d'Issolu.

I chose the hour of eight in the morning for climbing the rock of Capdenac. The broad winding river was brilliantly blue, like the vault overhead, and although the vine-clad hills, which shut in the valley, and the bare rocks, whose outlines were sharply drawn against the sky, were luminous, the light had the pure and clear sparkle of the morning. Reaching the hill, I took a zigzag stony path that led through terraced vineyards. The vintage had commenced, and men, women, and children were busy picking the purple grapes still wet with dew.

The children only, however, showed any joy in the work, for the bunches hung at such a distance from each other that a vine was very quickly stripped. The _vigneron_, with his mind dwelling upon the bygone fruitful years, when these arid steeps poured forth torrents of wine as surely as October came round, wore an expression on his face that was not one of thankfulness to Providence. They are a rather surly people, moreover, the inhabitants of this district, and I do not think at any time their hearts could have been very expansive. As I approached a woman who had a great basket of grapes in front of her, she hastily threw a bundle of leaves over them, casting a keenly suspicious glance at me the while. If she meant me to understand that the times were too bad for grapes to be given away, the movement was unnecessary. Where now are the generous sentiments and the poetry traditionally a.s.sociated with the vintage? Not here, certainly. Men go out into their vineyards by night armed with guns, and the depredators whom they fear most are not dogs that have acquired a taste for grapes. The stony path was bordered by brambles, overclimbed by clematis, whose glistening awns were mingled with blackberries, which not even a child troubled to pick. There was much fleabane--a plant that deserves to be cherished in these parts, if it be really what its name indicates, but it would have to be extensively cultivated to be a match for the fleas. After the vineyards came the dry rock, that held, however, sufficient moisture for the wild fig-tree, wherever it could find a deep, crevice.

Pa.s.sing underneath the perpendicular wall of rock, and the vine-clad ramparts above it, built on the very edge of the precipice, the winding path led me gradually up to the town. A little in front of an arched gateway was a ruined barbican, the inner surface of the walls being green with ferns and moss. Four loopholes were still intact. Had it been night I might have seen ghostly men with crossbows issuing from the gateway, but it being broad daylight, I was met by a troop of young pigs followed by a little hump-backed woman who addressed her youthful swine in the language of the troubadours.

In the narrow street beyond the arch a company of gigantic geese drew themselves up in order of battle, and challenged me in chorus to come on; but their courage was like that of Ancient Pistol. No other living creature did I see until I had walked nearly half through the ancient burg, between houses several centuries old, their stories projecting over the rough pitching and the stunted fig-trees which grew there unmolested. Some of these dwellings were in absolute ruin, with long dry gra.s.ses waving on the roofless walls. n.o.body seemed to think it worth while to rebuild or repair anything. The town appeared to have been left to itself and to time for at least two hundred years. And yet there really were some inhabitants left. I found another gateway and another ruined barbican, and near to these, on the verge of the precipice, a high rectangular tower, which was the citadel and prison.

The lower part was occupied by the schoolmaster of the commune, and he allowed me to ascend the winding staircase, which led to two horrible dungeons, one above the other. Neither was lighted by window or loophole, and but for the candle I should have been in utter darkness.

Great chains by which prisoners were fastened to the wall still lay upon the ground, and as I raised them and felt their weight, I thought of the human groans that only the darkness heard in the pitiless ages.

In another part of the building was a heavy iron collar that was formerly attached to one of these chains. There were also several old pikes in a corner.

A little beyond the citadel I found the church, a small Romanesque building without character. An eighteenth-century doorway had been added to it, and the tympan of the pediment was quite filled up with hanging plants. Still more suggestive of abandonment was the little cemetery behind, which was bordered by the ramparts. It was a small wilderness. Just inside the entrance, a life-sized figure with outstretched arms lay against a damp wall in a bed of nettles and hemlock. It had become detached from the cross on which it once hung, and had been left upon the ground to be overgrown by weeds. I have seen many a neglected rural cemetery in France, but never one that looked so sadly abandoned as this. It was like the 'sluggard's garden,' where 'the thorn and the thistle grow higher and higher.'

Most of the gravestones and crosses were quite hidden by dwarf elder, artemisia, wild carrot, and other plants all tangled together. A grave had just been dug in this wilderness and it was about to have a tenant, for the two bells in the open tower were sounding the _glas_, and a distant murmur of chanting was growing clearer. The priest had gone to 'fetch the body,' and the procession was now on its way. On the top of the earth and stones thrown up on each' side of the new grave were a broken skull, a jawbone, several portions of leg and arm bones, besides many smaller fragments of the human framework. I thought the gravedigger might at least have thrown a little earth over these remains out of consideration for the feelings of those who were about to stand around this grave, but concluded that he probably understood the people with whom he had to deal. Presently this functionary--a lantern-jawed, nimble old man, with a dirty nightcap on his head--made his appearance to take a final look at his work. After strutting round the very shallow hole he had dug, in an airy, self-satisfied manner, he concluded that everything was as it should be, and retired for the priest to perform his duty.

The great difficulty with the people of Capdenac in time of war must have been the water supply. When their cisterns were empty, they had the river at the bottom of the valley and a spring that flowed at certain seasons, as it does now, at the foot of the rock on which they had built their little town. When they were besieged, they could not descend to the Lot to draw water; consequently they laid great store by the stream at the base of the rock. A long zigzag flight of steps down the side of the precipice was constructed, and it was covered by a wall that protected those who fetched water from arrows and bolts.

Near the spring this wall was built very high and strong, and was pierced with loopholes. It also served as an outwork. The steps and much of the wall still exist. The spring in modern times came to be called Caesar's Well, because the elder Champollion and others endeavoured to prove that Capdenac was the site of Uxellodunum. The fact, however, that the spring is dry for several months in the year, and could never have been aught else but the drainage of the rock, is in itself a sufficient refutation of the hypothesis; because, according to Caesar, the fountain at Uxellodunum was so perennially abundant that when he drew off the water by tunnelling, the Gauls recognised in this disaster the intervention of the G.o.ds.

Capdenac appears to have given the English a great deal of trouble, which the natural strength of the place fully explains. It must have been a fortress of the first order in the Middle Ages, and would be so to-day, if the French thought it worth while to use it in a military sense; but, happily for the inhabitants of this part of France, their territory now lies far from the theatre of any war that is likely to occur. A charter by Philippe le Long, dated 1320, another by King John, and a third by Charles VII., recognise the immunity of the people of Capdenac from all public charges on account of the resistance which they constantly opposed to the English. The rock must, nevertheless, have fallen into the hands of a company attached to the British cause, for the Count of Armagnac bought the place in 1381 of a band of so-called English _routiers_. Sully lived there after the death of Henry IV., and the house that he occupied still exists.

According to a local tradition, Capdenac was on the point of being captured by the English, when it was saved from this fate by a stratagem. The defenders were starving, and the besiegers were relying upon famine to reduce them. In order to make the English believe that the place was still well provisioned, a pig was given a very full meal of all the corn that could be sc.r.a.ped together and then pushed over the side of the rock in a cautious manner, so that the animal might appear to be the victim of its own indiscretion. The pig fulfilled expectations by splitting open when it struck the ground, and thus revealed the corn that was in its body. When the English saw this, they said: 'If the men of Capdenac can afford to feed their swine on wheat, they must still have plenty for themselves.' Discouraged by this reflection, they raised the siege. When they went away there was not an ounce of bread left to divide amongst the garrison.