In The Heart Of The Vosges And Other Sketches Part 5

The superb edition of the _Enid_ (Moxon, 1868), a folio bound in royal purple and gold, and printed on paper thick as vellum, the volume weighing four pounds, awakens melancholy reflections. What would have been poor Dore's feelings had he lived to see such a guinea's worth, and cheap at the price, gladly sold, rather got rid of, for three shillings!

Dore's last work, the unconventional monument to the elder Dumas, was left unfinished.

Completed by another hand, the group now forms a conspicuous object in the Avenue Villiers, Paris.

The striking figure of the great quadroon, with his short crisped locks, suggests a closer relationship to the race thus apostrophized by Walt Whitman--

"You, dim descended, black, divine souled African...."

He surmounts a lofty pedestal, on the base being seated a homely group, three working folks, a mob-capped woman reading a Dumas novel to two companions, evidently her father and husband, sons of the soil, drinking in every word, their att.i.tude of the most complete absorption.

Cla.s.sicists and purists in art doubtless look askance at a work which would certainly have enchanted the sovereign romancer.

"Will folks read my stories when I am gone, doctor?" he asked as he lay a-dying. The good physician easily rea.s.sured his patient. "When we have patients awaiting some much-dreaded operation in hospital," he replied, "we have only to give them one of your novels. Straightway they forget everything else." And Dumas--"the great, the humane," as a charming poet has called him--died happy. As well he might, in so far as his fame was concerned. _La Tulipe Noire_ would alone have a.s.sured his future.

VI

QUISSAC AND SAUVE

One should always go round the sun to meet the moon in France, that is to say, one should ever circ.u.mambulate, never make straight for the lodestar ahead. The way to almost any place of renown, natural, historic or artistic, is sure to teem with as much interest as that to which we are bound. So rich a palimpsest is French civilization, so varied is French scenery, so multifarious the points of view called up at every town, that hurry and scurry leave us hardly better informed than when we set out. Thus it has ever been my rule to indulge in the most preposterous peregrination, taking no account whatever of days, seasons or possible cons, hearkening only to the pros, and never so much as glancing at the calendar. Such protracted zigzaggeries have been made easy to the "devious traveller" by one unusual advantage. Just as pioneers in Australasia find Salvation Army shelters scattered throughout remotest regions, so, fortunately, have I ever been able to count upon "harbour and good company" during my thirty-five years of French sojourn and travel.

To reach a certain Pyrenean valley in which I was to spend a holiday would only have meant a night's dash by express from Paris. Instead, I followed the south-eastern route, halting at--Heaven knows how many!--already familiar and delightful places between Paris and Dijon, Dijon and Lyons, Lyons and Nimes; from the latter city being bound for almost as many more before reaching my destination.

Quite naturally I would often find myself on the track of that "wise and honest traveller," so John Morley calls Arthur Young.

Half-way between Nimes and Le Vigan lies the little town of Sauve, at which the Suffolk farmer halted in July 1787. "Pa.s.s six leagues of a disagreeable country," he wrote. "Vines and olives."

But why a disagreeable country? Beautiful I thought the landscape as I went over the same ground on a warm September afternoon a century and odd years later, on alighting to be greeted with a cheery--

"Here I am!"

As a rule I am entirely of Montaigne's opinion. "When I travel in Sicily," said the philosopher of Gascony, "it is not to find Gascons."

Dearly as we love home and home-folk, the gist of travel lies in oppositeness and surprises. We do not visit the uttermost ends of the globe in search of next-door neighbours. That cordial "Here I am!"

however, had an unmistakable accent, just a delightful suspicion of French. My host was a gallant naval officer long since retired from service, with his English wife and two daughters, spending the long vacation in his country home.

High above the little village of Quissac rises the residence of beneficent owners, master and mistress, alas! long since gone to their rest. From its terrace the eye commands a vast and beautiful panorama, a richly cultivated plain dotted with villages and framed by the blue Cevennes. Tea served after English fashion and by a dear countrywoman, everywhere _"le confortable Anglais"_ admittedly unattainable by French housewives, could not for a single moment make me forget that I was in France. And when the dinner gong sounded came the final, the unequivocal, proof of distance.

Imagine dining out of doors and in evening dress at eight o'clock in the last week of August! The table was set on the wide balcony of the upper floor, high above lawn and bosquets, the most chilly person having here nothing to fear. It is above all things the French climate that transports us so far from home and makes us feel ourselves hundreds, nay, thousands of miles away.

I have elsewhere, perhaps ofttimes, dwelt on the luminosity of the atmosphere in southern and south-western France. To-night not a breath was stirring, the outer radiance was the radiance of stars only, yet so limpid, so l.u.s.trous the air that cloudless moonlight could hardly have made every object seem clearer, more distinct. The feeling inspired by such conditions is that of enchantment. For the nonce we may yield to a spell, fancy ourselves in Armida's enchanted garden or other "delightful land of Faery."

Not for long, however! Pleasant practical matters soon recall us to the life of every day. That laborious, out-of-door existence, which seems sordid in superfine English eyes, but which is never without the gaiety that enchanted Goldsmith and Sterne a hundred and fifty years ago.

Whilst host and guest dined on the balcony, the farming folk and such of the household as could be spared were enjoying a starlit supper elsewhere. Later, my hostess took me downstairs and introduced her English visitor to a merry but strictly decorous party having a special bit of sward to themselves, bailiff, vintagers, stockmen, dairywoman, washerwoman and odd hands making up a round dozen of men, women and boys. All seemed quite at home, and chatted easily with their employer and the visitor, by no means perturbed, rather pleased by the intrusion.

And here I will mention one of those incidents that lead English observers into so many misconceptions concerning French rural life.

Little things that seem sordid, even brutifying to insular eyes, really arise from incompatible standards.

The Frenchman's ideal of material comfort begins and ends with solvency, the sense of absolute security from want in old age. Small comforts he sets little store by; provided that he gets a good dinner, lesser considerations go. I do not hesitate to say that the comforts enjoyed by our own farm-servants half a century ago were far in excess of those thought more than sufficient by French labourers and their employers. On the following day my hosts took me round the farmery, fowl-run, piggeries, neat-houses and stalls being inspected one by one. When we came to the last named, I noticed at the door of the long building and on a level with the feeding troughs for oxen, a bed-shaped wooden box piled up with fresh clean straw.

"That is where our stockman sleeps," explained the lady.

Here, then, quite contentedly slept the herdsman of a large estate in nineteenth-century France, whilst his English compeers two generations before, and in much humbler employ, had their tidy bedroom and comfortable bed under the farmer's roof. What would my own Suffolk ploughmen have said to the notion of spending the night in an ox-stall?

But _autres pays, autres moeurs_. In Deroulede's fine little poem, "Bon gite", a famished, foot-sore soldier returning home is generously entreated by a poor housewife. When she sets about preparing a bed for him, he remonstrates--

"Good dame, what means that new-made bed, Those sheets so finely spun?

On heaped-up straw in cattle-shed, I'd snore till rise of sun."

The compensations for apparent hardship in the case of French peasants are many and great. In Henry James's great series of dissolving views called _The American Scene_, he describes the heterogeneous ma.s.ses as having "a promoted look". The French proletariat have not a promoted look, rather one of inherited, traditional stability and self-respect.

One and all, moreover, are promoting themselves, rising by a slow evolutionary process from the condition of wage-earner to that of metayer, tenant, lastly freeholder.

Although the immediate environs of Quissac and Sauve are not remarkable, magnificent prospects are obtained a little farther afield--our drives and walks abounded in interest--and a.s.sociations! Strange but true it is that we can hardly halt anywhere in France without coming upon historic, literary or artistic memorials. Every town and village is redolent of tradition, hardly a spot but is glorified by genius!

Thus, half-an-hour's drive from our village still stands the chateau and birthplace of Florian, the Pollux of fabulists, La Fontaine being the Castor, no other stars of similar magnitude shining in their especial arc.

Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian was born here in 1755, just sixty years after the great fabulist's death. Nephew of a marquis, himself nephew-in-law of Voltaire, endowed with native wit and gaiety, the young man was a welcome guest at Fernay, and no wonder! His enchanting fables did not see the light till after Voltaire's death, but we will hope that some of them had delighted his host in recitation. Many of us who loved French in early years have a warm corner in our hearts for "Numa Pompilius", but Florian will live as the second fabulist of France, to my own thinking twin of his forerunner.

How full of wisdom, wit and sparkle are these apologues! Take, for instance, the following, which to the best of my ability I have rendered into our mother tongue--

VANITY (LE PEt.i.t CHIEN).

I Once on a time and far away, The elephant stood first in might, He had by many a forest fray At last usurped the lion's right.

On peace and reign unquestioned bent, The ruler in his pride of place, Forthwith to life-long banishment Doomed members of the lion race.

II Dispirited, their best laid low, The vanquished could but yield to fate, And turn their backs upon the foe In silence nursing grief and hate.

A poodle neatly cropped and clipped, With ta.s.selled tail made leonine, On hearing of the stern rescript, Straightway set up a piteous whine.

III "Alas!" he moaned. "Ah, woe is me!

Where, tyrant, shall I shelter find; Advancing years what will they be, My home and comforts left behind?"

A spaniel hastened at the cry, "Come, mate, what's this to-do about?"

"Oh, oh," the other gulped reply, "For exile we must all set out!"

IV "Must all?" "No, you are safe, good friend; The cruel law smites us alone; Here undisturbed your days may end, The lions must perforce begone."

"The lions? Brother, pray with these, What part or lot have such as you?"

"What part, forsooth? You love to tease; You know I am a lion too."

[Footnote: The first translation appeared with others in _French Men, Women and Books_, 1910. The second was lately issued in the _Westminster Gazette_.]

Here is another, a poem of essential worldly wisdom, to be bracketed with Browning's equally oracular "The Statue and the Bust," fable and poem forming a compendium.

THE FLIGHTY PURPOSE (LE PAYSAN AND LA RIVIERE).

"I now intend to change my ways"-- Thus Juan said--"No more for me A round on round of idle days 'Mid soul-debasing company.

I've pleasure woo'd from year to year As by a siren onward lured, At last of roystering, once held dear, I'm as a man of sickness cured."

"Unto the world I bid farewell, My mind to retrospection give, Remote as hermit in his cell, For wisdom and wise friends I'll live."

"Is Thursday's worldling, Friday's sage?

Too good such news," I bantering spoke.