Part 5 (1/2)

As I felt the need of talking to-night, I fetched the farming innkeeper from his kitchen and persuaded him to drink some of his own cognac. This he did without wincing, but he soon returned the compliment by bringing out of a cupboard a bottle of clear greenish liquor, which he said was _eau de vie de figues_. It was something new to me. I had tasted alcohol distilled from a considerable variety of the earth's fruits, but never from figs before.

It retained a strong flavour of its origin, and might have been correctly described as fire-water, for it was almost pure spirit.

I drew this man into conversation upon the peasant's life. All that he said was only confirmation of the opinion I had already formed from other testimony respecting the occupation of Adam when he had to struggle with nature outside of the terrestrial paradise. Let a man own as much soil as he can till with his hands, let him have an ox, too, to help him: he can only live at the price of almost incessant labour and rigorous frugality.

This is the normal condition of the peasant-proprietor's existence.

'The peasant who works seriously,' said the farmer, 'does not sleep more than four hours a night during the summer months. He goes to bed at ten, and gets up at two. This would not hurt him if he were better fed, but he eats little besides his soup, and drinks bad _piquette_.'

The man went back to his kitchen, and then to his bed close by; the flame of the lamp became sick unto death, for it now wanted oil, and the house grew so quiet that the squeaking of the rats and the pattering of their feet could be heard from places that seemed far away. But for the rumbling of the thunder, the only sound from the mysterious world outside would have been the scream, now like the cry of a cat, now like a puppy's bark, of an owl flying with m.u.f.fled wings up and down the valley. Very different, however, was this little owl's cry from the madman's shout of the great eagle owl, which I had often heard in the rocky vale of the Alzon. I threw open the window of my bedroom and looked out upon the night. It was illumined, not by moon nor by stars, but by lightning flashes, which followed one another with such rapidity that there was no darkness. The quivering flame threw an awful brightness into the great woods upon the tops of the hills.

A few hours later I was wandering through these woods, which were now filled with another light that dried the dripping leaves.

Some miles of forest, then cultivated slopes, and at length the Dordogne again. I was growing rather weary of searching for the mediaeval town of Domme, when I recognised it by its old ramparts upon the summit of a high bare hill, which looked very forbidding indeed where it changed to rock, whose naked escarpments seemed to float as inaccessible as a cloud in the blue air far above the valley. As I climbed the shadeless stony hill in the mid-day sun-glare, I thought that if the soldiers of five or six centuries ago used strong language as they toiled up here in their heavy armour, it was excusable. I was wellnigh repenting of my resolution to reach Domme, when, by a turn of the road, I found myself not many yards in front of a fortified gateway of the fourteenth century, with a drumtower on each side connected by a curtain with the ramparts. At first glance nothing seemed to be wanting. The towers, however, were ruinous in the upper part, and the battlements had disappeared.

With the help of a local pork-butcher, who kept the key, I was able to enter the towers of this gateway. In each was a guard-room of considerable size, and the men-at-arms while on duty there evidently found that in time of peace the hours lagged, for some of them had carved upon the wall with their knives or daggers crucifixes and representations of the Virgin and Child, all closely imitated from church sculpture, painting or window decoration of the Gothic period. Many names are cut in Gothic character on the same walls; a further proof that the vanity of man has ever sprouted in much the same way as now. The antiquary, because he has his own prejudices, perceives an abyss between the act of the c.o.c.kney tourist of to-day who carves his name upon an old tower or a menhir, and that of a man who five centuries ago, for no better reason than the other, left upon a guard-room wall a similar record of his pa.s.sage. The man of the present is a vulgar defacer of interesting monuments, whereas he of the past added to their interest, and prepared a pleasant little surprise for the archaeologist who might walk that way a few centuries later.

Enough of the fortifications of Domme remains to show what a very strong place it was in the Middle Ages. Much of the wall where the town was not naturally defended by the high naked rock, forming a frightful precipice that no besiegers would have attempted to scale, has been well preserved.

Standing upon some bastion of this rampart, with the deep valley far below him and the sky above him, the wanderer may allow his fancy almost to convince him that he is really standing upon some 'castle in the air.'

Of the many rock-perched towns of the South, this is one of the most remarkable; although, with the exception of the fortifications, little remains of archaeological interest.

According to the chronicles of Jean Tarde, a canon of the neighbouring town of Sarlat, who wrote at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, Domme was first taken by the English in 1346, but not without the help of '_quelques traistres_.' From this stronghold they hara.s.sed the surrounding country, 'while the armies of one and the other party were in Normandy and Picardy, and that battle of Cressi (Crecy) was fought to the disadvantage of the party of France. Towards the end of the year a truce was accorded, but it was in no way observed in Perigord by the English.'

The correct date of the capture of Domme appears to have been 1347. The men who treasonably delivered up the place were afterwards hanged by the French party when they regained possession of the stronghold. In 1369 the English again invested the rock, this time under the command of Robert Knolles.

(Tarde, who spelt all English names as he had heard them p.r.o.nounced in the country, writes Robert Canole.) The place was then so well defended, and success appeared so far off to the partisans of Edward III., that the siege was raised in despair at the end of a month; and the annalist goes on to say that the English then marched into the Quercy and took Roc-Amadour.

Domme, however, fell into the English power again; but in 1415 it was once more in the hands of the French. Then we read that the seneschal sent the crier into the public place to proclaim '_de par le Roy_' that every inhabitant of Domme was forbidden to leave the town with the intention of living elsewhere, under the penalty of having any property that he might possess in the town confiscated. The motive of this ordinance is explained as follows: 'The wars had already rendered the country so desolate, that at Domme, where the ordinary number of inhabitants who were heads of families was a thousand, there were now no more than a hundred and twenty. The people who had left had abandoned everything, and gone to Spain or elsewhere.'

From the bare and windy hill I went down again into the quiet valley, where, when a few more miles were left behind, I came to La Roque-Gageac, a village at the foot of high-reaching rocks of fantastic outline, not far from the Dordogne. Many houses long ago seem to have climbed far up the warm limestone under the shelter of cornice and canopy, fas.h.i.+oned by the sculptor Time, braving all the storms of centuries, and the danger of being hurled in fragments towards the valley by some falling crag.

In an open s.p.a.ce, forming a little square, a man and a woman were holding down a pig, one at each end of a board, where the animal had been stretched out against its inclination, while a third person had the knife ready for action. And the spot chosen for the execution was immediately in front of a very old and interesting shrine, with gabled roof, surmounted by a rude Gothic crucifix. I caught a glimpse of the pale statue and the flowers before it; but only a glimpse, for the struggles of the doomed pig, and the momentary expectation of seeing the red stream gush forth, made me turn away. One sees much that is anything but poetical in the romantic land of the troubadours.

Near this strikingly-picturesque village is a cave such as one might read of in a story of fanciful adventure. It is in a rock beside the Dordogne, where, the river rests in a deep pool. The entrance is under water, and it can only be reached with safety by a good diver when, the sun s.h.i.+ning at a certain hour, and the light striking in a particular way, the pa.s.sage into the cavern is lit up. A boy had made the dive successfully not long before my visit to this place, but he found so much to interest him in the cave while it was lighted a little by the borrowed gleam from the water, that he lingered there until, the sun moving on his course, the angle of refraction suddenly changed. The child had not the courage to take a plunge into the dark gulf, where there was no beacon to guide him, and where he might have struck against the rock. He therefore remained the rest of the day and all night in the cavern. When the sun again lit up the pa.s.sage leading from his prison, the boy plunged, and a few seconds afterwards he was sitting on the river-bank drying himself in the sun.

I have entered upon the tenancy of a small house beside the Dordogne at Beynac, a village a few miles below La Roque, partly crouching beneath a very high rock, and partly built upon its terraces or ledges up to the inner wall of a feudal castle that was much modified and refas.h.i.+oned in later ages under the pressure of two forces--time, that ruins, and the eternal striving of each generation to attain its own ideal of comfort and elegance. But the grand old keep still rears its rectangular ma.s.s behind and far above the later masonry, and when the evening sun s.h.i.+nes upon it, the stones, no longer gray, wear again their bright colour of six or seven centuries ago. Presently, as the glow moves higher, the battlements and machicolations take a golden clearness that marks every detail against the blue depth of sky whose fire is fading and preparing to change into the calm splendour that mingles with the dusk. Between the base of the rock and the river is just s.p.a.ce enough for a road, which is dazzlingly white now, and well powdered with dust; but in winter it not infrequently disappears under water.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEYNAC.]

On the opposite sh.o.r.e, above a shelving beach of yellow pebbles and a broken line of osiers, stretch meadows that are intensely green in spring, and would be quickly so again if rain were to fall; but now they are very brown, and the long-tailed sheep that wander over them, tinkling their bells, like to keep near the Dordogne, where they can moisten their mouths from time to time, and thus help themselves to imagine that they are eating gra.s.s. Beyond the reach of meadow, almost at the foot of high wooded hills which mark the boundary of the valley on that side, is a modern chateau; but the architect found his model for it in the past, when castles were more picturesque than comfortable. When the amber-tinted towers are seen through the haze of a summer morning against the background of wooded hill, one thinks that in just such a castle as this Ta.s.so or Spenser would have put an enchantress, whose wiles, combined with the indolent influence of the valley, few pilgrim knights taking the eastward way to Roc-Amadour would have been able to resist.

I found the valley so hot in the steady blaze of summer that, having reached Beynac, I felt no inclination to go any farther. I thought I would stop there until cooler weather came, and live meanwhile princ.i.p.ally in the Dordogne. Several families from different parts of Perigord had already come here to spend a mildly exciting and not too costly river season; and there they were, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, splas.h.i.+ng in the blue tepid water, with their clothes laid carefully in little heaps upon the pebbly beach or upon the brown gra.s.s by the osiers. Despising the shelter which in more fas.h.i.+onable watering-places is thought indispensable, they lazily undressed and dressed in the open air with an appreciation of suns.h.i.+ne and regardlessness of apparel that was almost lizard-like in its freedom from conventional restraint.

I was charmed by the spectacle as I meditated upon the opposite bank. The more I meditated the better I liked the idea of tarrying in a spot where Arcadian simplicity of life was so unaffectedly cultivated. I resolved that I, too, would take a house at Beynac if there was one to be had, and that I would have what I figuratively termed my 'caravan' brought up here. At the auberge--the only one in the place--I learnt that there was but a single house still vacant, and that it was not a very beautiful one. A young fisherman started off barefoot to fetch the owner from his village, four miles away. The country had to be scoured for him, so that it was long before he showed himself.

While waiting, I went out and amused the fish in the Dordogne by pointing a borrowed rod at them, and tempting them with the fattest house-flies I could find; but as soon as they saw the bait they all turned their tails to it. My angling was a complete failure. And yet there were mult.i.tudes of fish swimming on the surface; the water seemed alive with them. I concluded that they were observing a solemn fast.

At length the fisherman returned, looking very hot and dusty, and of course thirsty. He was accompanied by a hard-baked man of about sixty--a peasant, apparently, but one who had put on his best clothes in view of an important bargain that was to be made. He had cunning little eyes, and a mouth that seemed to have acquired from many ancestors, and from the habits of a lifetime, a concentrated expression of rustic chicanery which told me that no business was to be done with him without a fight.

He led the way to his house, which was on the road just above the river. I came to terms with him for a month, after the expected fight; but it was not until he had gone away that I began to realize that I had not distinguished myself by my wisdom in this transaction. Even the villagers, who are not dainty in the matter of lodging, described the house as a _baraque_. It gave me the same impression when I saw the inside of it; but I closed my eyes to its drawbacks, because I had taken a fancy to Beynac, and this was the only furnished dwelling to be obtained there. I thought all the little drawbacks belonging to it, such as the rustic hearth to cook upon, pots with holes in them, rusty frying-pans, deficiency of crockery, and more than a sufficiency of fleas, would be overcome somehow, as they had been elsewhere during my peregrinations in out-of-the-way districts, where the traveller who nurses his dignity, and has a proper regard for the comforts of life, never thinks of stopping. But things did not settle down this time quite so quickly as I had expected.

After the arrival of the 'caravan' I took to fis.h.i.+ng--always with the same rod borrowed of the blacksmith-innkeeper--with a zeal that I had not known since I was a boy. I found that things settled down better when I was out of the way. But there was something that settled down only too rapidly.