CHAPTER XII.

THE TRACK-BOAT ON THE CANAL DU MIDI--APPROACH TO THE MEDITERRANEAN--SALT-MARSHES AND SALT-WORKS--A CIRCUS THRASHING-MACHINE--THE MEDITERRANEAN AND ITS CRAFT--CETTE AND ITS MANUFACTURED WINES, WITH A PRIEST'S VIEWS ON GOURMANDISE.

I left Beziers for the Mediterranean, by Pierre Paul Riquet's canal. The track-boat passes once a-day, taking upwards of thirty-five hours to make the passage from Toulouse to Cette. The Beziers station is about a mile from the town; and on approaching it early in the morning, I found a crowd of people collected on the banks, looking at men dragging the canal with huge hooks at the end of poles. They were searching for the body of a poor fellow from Beziers, who had drowned himself under very remarkable circumstances; and just as the packet-boat came up, the corpse was raised, stark and stiff, almost from beneath it. The deceased was a _decrotteur_, or boot-cleaner, and a light porter at Beziers--a quiet, inoffensive man, who, by dint of untiring industry, and great self-denial, had scraped together upwards of two hundred and fifty francs, all of which he lent another _decrotteur_, without taking legal security for the money. After the stipulated term for the loan had elapsed, the poor lender naturally pressed for his cash. He was put off from month to month with excuses; and when, at length, he became urgent for repayment, the debtor laughed in his face, told him to do his best and his worst, and get his money how he could. The _decrotteur_ went away in a state of frenzy, and procured and charged a pistol, with which he returned to the rascal borrower.

"Will you pay me?--ay or no?" he said.

"No," replied the other; "go about your business."

The creditor instantly levelled his pistol and fired. Down went his antagonist, doubled up in a heap on the road, and away went the assassin as hard as his legs could carry him, to a bridge leading over the canal, from the parapet of which he leaped into the water; while, as he disappeared, the _quasi_ murdered man got up again, with no other damage than a face blackened by the explosion of the pistol. He had fallen through terror, for he was absolutely unscathed.

The travelling by the Canal du Midi is a sleepy and monotonous business enough. Mile after mile, and league after league, the boat is gliding along between grassy or rushy banks, and rows of poplar, and sometimes of acacia trees, the monotonous tramp of the team upon the bank mingling with the endless gurgle of the waters beneath. The towing paths are generally very lifeless. Now and then a solitary peasant, with his heavy sharp-pointed hoe--an implement, in fact, half hoe and half pick-axe--upon his shoulder, saunters up to see the boat go by; or a shepherd, whistling to his flock, paces slowly at their head, wandering to and fro in search of the greenest bits of pasture; or a handful of jabbering women, from some neighbouring bourg, will be squatted along the water's edge, certainly not obeying Napoleon's injunction to wash their _linge sale en famille_, but pounding away at sheets and shirts with heavy stones or wooden mallets--the counterparts of the instruments used in Scotland to "get up" fine linen, and there called "beetles." The bridges are shot cleverly. At a shout from the steersman, the postillion, who rides one of the hindmost horses of the team, jumps off, casts loose the tow-line, runs with the end of it to the centre of the bridge, drops it aboard as the boat comes beneath, catches it up again on the opposite side, flies back after his horses which have trotted very tranquilly ahead, hooks on the rope again, jumps into his saddle, cracks his long whip, and the boat is off again in full career long ere she has lost her former headway. Little of the country can be seen from the deck, but along the southern and eastern half of the canal you seldom lose sight of the dusty tops of the formal olive groves, varied now and then by a stony slope covered with ugly, sprawling vines, and as you approach the sea, dotted with white, little country houses--of which more hereafter--the glimpses of the changing picture being continually set in a brown frame of sterile hills.

The boats are long and narrow; the cabins like corridors, but comfortably cushioned and stuffed, so that you can sleep in them, even if the boat be tolerably crowded, as well as in a diligence. If there be few passengers, you will have full-length room. The _restaurant_ on board is excellent--as good as that on the Garonne boats, and very cheap. Let all English travellers, however, beware of the steward's department on the Loire and Rhone steamers, in both of which I have been thoroughly swindled. The style of people who seemingly use the track-boat on the Canal du Midi, are the _rotonde_ class of diligence passengers. Going down to Cette, there were two or three families, almost entirely composed of females, aboard; the elder ladies--horrid, snuffy old women, who were always having exclusive cups of chocolate or coffee, or little basins of soup, and who never appeared to move from the spots on which they were deposited since the voyage began.

Two of these families had canaries in cages, a very common practice in France, where the people continually try, even in travelling, to keep their household gods about them. Look at the baggage of your Frenchman _en voyage_. All the old clothes of the last dozen of years are sure to be lugged about in it. There is, perhaps, a pormanteau, exclusively devoted to old boots, and half-a-dozen pasteboard hat-boxes, with half-a-dozen hats, utterly beyond wearing. The plague of all this baggage is dreadful; but the proprietor would go through any amount of inconvenience rather than lose one stitch of his innumerable old _hardes_.

After passing the headland and dull old town of Agde, the former crowned by the lighthouse I had seen from the road to Beziers, we fairly entered into the great zone of salt swamps which here line the Mediterranean. It was a desolate and dreary prospect. The land on either side stretched away in a dead flat; now dry and parched, again traversed by green streaks of swamp, and anon broken by clear, shallow pools of water. Sometimes, again, you entered a perfect jungle of huge bulrushes, stretching away as far as the eye could follow, and evidently teeming with wild ducks, which rose in vast coveys, and flew landward or seaward in their usual wedge-shaped order of flight. The sea, to which we were approaching at a sharp angle, was still invisible, but you felt the refreshing savour of the brine in the air, and now and then you caught, sparkling for a moment in the bright, hot sunshine, a distant jet of feathery spray, as a heavier wave than common came thundering along the beach. Presently, the brown waste through which we were passing became streaked with whitish belts and patches--the salt left by the evaporation of the brine, which now begins to soak and well through the spongy soil, and presently to expand into lakes and shallow belts of water. Across these, long rows of stakes for nets, stretched away in endless column, and here and there a rude, light boat floated, or a fisherman slowly waded from point to point. Great herons and cranes stood like sentinels in the shallow water, and flocks of sandpipers and plovers ran along the white salt-powdered sand. Then came on the left, or landward side, a series of tumuli of pyramidical form, some of them white, others of a dark brown, scattered over a space of scores of square miles. I wondered who were the inhabitants of this lake of the dismal swamp, and accordingly pointed out the houses, as I conceived them, to the captain.

"Houses, monsieur!" he said; "these are all salt heaps. Salt is the harvest of this country, and they stack it in these piles, just as the people inland do their corn. When the heap is not expected to be wanted soon, they thatch it with reeds and grass; but if they expect to get a quick sale, they don't take the trouble. So you see that some of the heaps are dark, and the others like snow-balls."

"But if there come rain?"

"Not much fear of that in this part of the world. There may be a shower, but the salt is so hard and compacted, that it will do little more than wash the dirt off."

Presently we came to the salt-making basins--great shallow lakes, divided by dykes into squares somewhat in the style of a chess-board; and here the solitude of the expanse was broken by the figures of the workmen clambering along the narrow dykes to watch and superintend the progress of evaporation. By the side of these lakes, rows of ugly rectangular cottages were erected, and slight carts drawn by two horses, one ahead of the other, moved the loads of salt from the pans, or pools, to the heaps in which it was stored. Here and there, where the ground rose a little, a thin crop of maize, or barley, appeared to have been cultivated; and it was probably some such harvest that I saw being thrashed by the peculiar process in use all through Provence and southern Languedoc. There are very few thrashing mills, even in the best cultivated parts of France. Over the vast proportion of the kingdom, the orthodox old flail bears undisturbed sway; but the farmer of the far South chooses rather to employ horse than human muscles in the work. He lays down, therefore, in a handy spot, a circular pavement, generally of brick, a little larger than the ring at Astley's. All along the swampy shores of the Mediterranean, traversed by the delta of the Rhone, and stretching westward towards Spain, there feed upon the scanty herbage great herds of semi-wild horses, said to have been originally of Arabian descent. These creatures are caught, when needed, much in the style of the Landes desert steeds, and every farmer has a right to a certain number corresponding with the size of his farm. When, then, the harvest has been cut, and the thrashing time comes on, you may see, approaching the steeding, an unruly flock of lean, lanky, leggy horses, most of them grey, driven by three or four mounted peasants--capital cavaliers--each with a long lance like a trident held erect, and a lasso coiled at the saddle-bow. Then work commences: the wild steeds are tolerably docile, although shy and skittish. A heavy bit is forced into the mouth of each, with a long bridle attached. The creatures are arranged in a circle on the edge of the brick flooring, exactly as when Mr. Widdicombe or M. Franconi prepare for an unrivalled feat of horsemanship upon eight bare-backed steeds by the "Whirlwind Rider," surnamed the "Pet of the Ring," or the famous artiste, "Herr Bridleinski, the Hungarian Tamer of the Flying Steeds." The sheaves of corn are placed just where the active grooms at Astley's rake the sawdust thickest; and then, in answer to the thundering exhortations of Mr. Widdicombe and his coadjutors in the centre of the ring, and the cracking of the whips, the horses, held by their long bridles, go plunging and rearing round the arena, and, after more or less obstreperousness, settle into a shambling trot, treading out the corn as they go, and preserving the pace for a wonderful length of time. At night, the creatures are released, and left to shift for themselves. They seldom stray far from the farm, and are easily recaptured and brought back to work next day. The four-legged thrashers, I am sorry to say, are rather scurvily treated, for they get nothing in return for their labour better than straw--a poor diet for a day's trot. The first time I saw this equestrian thrashing-machine in motion, the effect was very odd. I could not dissociate it from the equestrian performance of some wandering company of high-bred steeds and "star riders." The only thing that seemed strange was, that there should be no spectators; and, after a little time, that there should be no human performers. Round and round, at a long, irregular trot, went the lanky brutes--sometimes breaking out--plunging, and taking it into their heads, as their Rochester cousin, hired by Mr. Winkle, did, to go sideways, but always reduced to obedience by a few smacking persuaders from the whip. But where was the illustrious Whirlwind Rider, who should have stood on all their necks at once, or the famous Bridleinski, who should have stood on all their haunches? No shrill clown's voice echoed from the circus. The stolid, bloused, straw-hatted master of the ring was a perfect disgrace and reproach to Mr. Widdicombe, who, if he had been on board the boat, would infallibly have taken refuge in the run, rather than contemplated such a melancholy mockery of his mission and his functions.

At length there gleamed before us a noble sheet of water, ruffled by a steady breeze, before which one of the Lateen-rigged craft of the Mediterranean was bowling merrily, driving a rolling wave of foam on either side of her bluff bows. This was the Lagoon, or Etang, of Thau, a salt-water lake about a dozen of miles long, and opening up by a narrow channel--on both banks of which rises the flourishing town of Cette--into the Mediterranean. For the greater part of its length, only a strip of sand and shingle interposes between the lake and the sea, and as the steamer to which we were transferred, at the end of the canal, paddled its way to Cette, we could see every moment the surf of the open ocean rising beyond the barrier. The passage along the Etang is pretty and characteristic. On the left lie, in a long, blue chain, the hills of the Cevennes--distance hiding their barren bleakness from the eye--while along the inland edge of the water, village after village, the houses sparklingly white, are mirrored in the lake, with a little fleet of lateen-rigged fishing boats, the sails usually very ragged, pursuing their occupation before each hamlet. Now and then we were passed by huge feluccas, rolling away before the wind, and bound for the Canal du Midi, with great cargoes of hay and straw, heaped up half as high as the mast--the lateen-sail having to be half furled in consequence, and the captain shouting his orders to the steersman as from the top of a stack in a barnyard. The scene reminded me greatly of the hay-barges of the Thames bringing up to London the crops of Kent and Essex.

At length we were landed among groups of Mediterranean sailors, with Phrygian caps--otherwise conical red night-caps--and ugly-looking knives in their belts. The women had the usual Naiad peculiarity of short petticoats, and wore them, too, of a showy, striped stuff, which reminded me of the Newhaven fish-wives, near Edinburgh. This Phrygian cap, by the way, is the prototype of the ordinary cap of liberty, which our good neighbours are so fond of sticking on the stumps of what they call "trees of liberty"--of painting, of carving, of apostrophising, of waving, of exalting--which, in short, they are so fond of doing everything with--but wearing. The effect, as a head-dress, on the Cette fishermen, was not unpleasant. The long, conical top, and tassel, give a degree of drapery to the figure, and the cap itself seems luxuriously comfortable to the head.

A well-appointed little omnibus rattled me through busier streets than I had seen for many a day, by open counting-houses, and under the great lateen yards of feluccas lying in rows, with their bows to the quays, and across a light, wooden swing-bridge, haunted by just such tarry mortals as you see about St. Katherine's docks; and at length I was set down at the wide portal of the Hotel de Poste--a straggling, airy hostelry, such as befits the hot and glaring South. Still, I had not seen the Mediterranean. The great _coup_ was yet unachieved: so, getting five words of instruction from a waiter, I hurried through some narrow streets, crossed two or three more swing-bridges, skirted half-a-dozen boat-building yards, very like similar establishments in Wapping, and then suddenly emerged upon the open beach, with sand-hills, and long bent, or seagrass, rustling in the soft southern wind, with the blue of the great inland sea stretching away, deep and lovely, before me; and with the hissing water and foam-laced inner wavelets of the surf creaming to my feet. A sensation, it will be admitted, is a pleasant thing in these _blasé_ days, and the Mediterranean afforded one. There came on me a vague, crowded, and indistinct vision, at once, of schoolboy recollections and many a subsequent day-dream--of Roman galleys, _triremes_ and _quadremes_, with brazen beaks and hundred oars, moving like the legs of a centipede; of all the picturesque craft of the middle-ages; of the fleets of Venice; the argosies and tall merchant-barks which carried on the rich commerce of northern Italy; of the Algerine corsairs, which so often bore down upon the Lion of St. Marks; of the quick-pulling piratical craft; the rovers who pillaged from the mouths of the Nile to the Pillars of Hercules; and of the whole tribe of modern Mediterranean vessels, which thousands and thousands of pictures have made classic, with their high peaked sails, and striped gaudy canvass; the whole tribe of feluccas and polacres, whereof, as I gazed, I could see here and there the scattered sails, gleaming like bird-wings upon the sea. The Mediterranean is, after all, the sea of the world: we associate it with everything classic and beautiful, either in art or climate; and although we know well that its lazy, saint-ridden seamen, and its picturesque, but dirty and ill-sailed, vessels would fly before a breeze which a North-sea fisherman or a Channel boatman would consider a mere puff,--still there is something racily and specially picturesque about the black-eyed, swarthy, copper ear-ringed rascals, and something dearly familiar about the high, graceful peaks of the sails around which they cluster. From the beach I went to the harbour, which was crowded almost to its entrance, but, for reasons to be presently alluded to, I was not sorry to recognise not one union-jack among the Stars and Stripes--Dutch and Brazilian ensigns, which were flying from every mast-head. Few Mediterranean harbours are savoury places. It will be remembered that "there shrinks no ebb in that tideless sea;" and accordingly, when the drainage of a town or a district is led into the harbours, there it stays. Marseilles enjoys a most unenviable notoriety in this respect. The horrible fluid beneath you becomes, in the summer time, despite its salt, absolutely putrid; and I was told that there had been instances in which it bred noisome and abhorrent insects and reptiles--that, literally and absolutely, "slimy things did crawl, with legs, upon the slimy sea."

As for the stench, the richness of the steam of fat gases perpetually rising, must be smelt to be appreciated. The Marseillaise, however, have sturdy noses, which do not yield to trifles. They say the dirt preserves the ships, and besides, adds Dumas--a great favourer of the ancient colony of the Greeks--"what a fool a man must be, who, under such a glorious sky, turns his eyes down to gaze on mud and water!"

The harbour of Cette is not quite so bad, but it has no particular transparency of water to recommend it. Brave its foulness, however, and go and visit the quays for the fishing-boats, as they are returning from their night's toil. Mark the Catalan craft--you will perhaps remember that the redoubted Monte Christo's first love was a Catalan girl, of a Catalan village near Marseilles:--did you ever see more exquisitely-formed boats afloat on the water? They swim apparently on the very surface--the curve of the gunwale rising to a gondola peak at stem and stern; but yet they are most buoyant sea-boats, and I suspect their speed, particularly in light winds, would put even that of the Yankee pilot-boats to a severe test. Look, too, at their cargoes, as the slippery masses are being shovelled up in glancing, gleaming spadefuls, to the quays. Did you ever see such odd fish? Respectable haddocks, decent and well-to-do cods, and unpretending soles, would never be seen in such strange, eccentric company--among fellows with heads bigger than bodies, and eyes in their backs, and tails absurdly misplaced, and feelers or legs where no fish with well-regulated minds would dream of having such appendages--never was there seen such a strange _omnium gatherum_ of piscatory eccentricities as the fishes of the Mediterranean.

I said that it was good--good for our stomachs--to see no English bunting at Cette. The reason is, that Cette is a great manufacturing place, and that what they manufacture there is neither cotton nor wool, Perigord pies, nor Rheims biscuits,--but wine. "_Ici_," will a Cette industrial write with the greatest coolness over his Porte Cochere--"_Ici on fabrique des vins._" All the wines in the world, indeed, are made in Cette. You have only to give an order for Johannisberg, or Tokay--nay, for all I know, for the Falernian of the Romans, or the Nectar of the gods--and the Cette manufacturers will promptly supply you. They are great chemists, these gentlemen, and have brought the noble art of adulteration to a perfection which would make our own mere logwood and sloe-juice practitioners pale and wan with envy. But the great trade of the place is not so much adulterating as concocting wine. Cette is well-situated for this notable manufacture. The wines of southern Spain are brought by coasters from Barcelona and Valencia. The inferior Bordeaux growths come pouring from the Garonne by the Canal du Midi; and the hot and fiery Rhone wines are floated along the chain of etangs and canals from Beaucaire. With all these raw materials, and, of course, a chemical laboratory to boot, it would be hard if the clever folks of Cette could not turn out a very good imitation of any wine in demand. They will doctor you up bad Bordeaux with violet powders and rough cider--colour it with cochineal and turnsole, and outswear creation that it is precious Chateau Margaux--vintage of '25. Champagne, of course, they make by hogsheads. Do you wish sweet liqueur wines from Italy and the Levant? The Cette people will mingle old Rhone wines with boiled sweet wines from the neighbourhood of Lunel, and charge you any price per bottle. Do you wish to make new Claret old? A Cette manufacturer will place it in his oven, and, after twenty-fours' regulated application of heat, return it to you nine years in bottle. Port, Sherry, and Madeira, of course, are fabricated in abundance with any sort of bad, cheap wine and brandy, for a stock, and with half the concoctions in a druggist's shop for seasoning. Cette, in fact, is the very capital and emporium of the tricks and rascalities of the wine-trade; and it supplies almost all the Brazils, and a great proportion of the northern European nations with their after-dinner drinks. To the grateful Yankees it sends out thousands of tons of Ay and Moet, besides no end of Johannisberg, Hermitage, and Chateau Margaux, the fine qualities and dainty aroma of which are highly prized by the transatlantic amateurs. The Dutch flag fluttered plentifully in the harbour, so that I presume Mynheer is a customer to the Cette industrials--or, at all events, he helps in the distribution of their wares. The old French West Indian colonies also patronise their ingenious countrymen of Cette; and Russian magnates get drunk on Chambertin and Romanee Conti, made of low Rhone, and low Burgundy brewages, eked out by the contents of the graduated phial. I fear, however, that we do come in--in the matter of "fine golden Sherries, at 22_s._ 9-1/2_d._ a dozen," or "peculiar old-crusted Port, at 1_s._ 9_d._"--for a share of the Cette manufactures; and it is very probable that after the wine is fabricated upon the shores of the Mediterranean, it is still further improved upon the banks of the Thames.

At dinner-time, I found myself placed by the side of a benevolent-looking old priest, with white hair, but cheeks and gills of the most approved rubicund hue, who first eyed the dishes through a pair of vast golden spectacles, and meditated profoundly ere he made a choice--waving away the eternal _bouilli_ with an expression which showed that he was not the man to spoil a good appetite with mere boiled beef. This worthy, hearing me making interest with the waiter for a peculiar bottle of wine, not of native manufacture, smiled paternally, and with an approving countenance: "I would recommend," he said, softly, and in a fat voice, "you to try Masdeu; and, if you please, I will join you. I know Gilliaume (the waiter) of old. _C'est un bon enfant._" And then, in a severe voice, "_The_ Masdeu, William."

The priest was clearly at home; and presently the wine came. It had the brightly deep glow of Burgundy, a bouquet not unlike Claret, and tasted like the lightest and purest Port glorified and etherealised; in fact, it was a rare good wine.

"Ah!" said the priest, pouring out a second glass; "the vineyard where this was grown once belonged to the Church. The Knights of the Temple once drank this wine, and the Knights of St. John after them. It is a good wine."

"The Church understood the grape," I remarked. "I have drunk Hermitage where the recluse fathers tended the vines, and have always looked upon Rhone wine as one of the reasons why the Holy Father at Avignon was long so loath to be the Holy Father at Rome."

"Wine," replied my compotator, "is not forbidden, either by the laws of God or the Church; and never was. Only the Vulgate denounces mixed wines."

"By the mixed wines prohibited in Holy Writ," said I, "I presume you understand adulterated, not watered liquors. If so, we are in a sad city of sinners."

The priest smiled, but changed the topic.

"Masdeu," he said, "is Catalan; you know the wine is grown not far from Perpignan, where the people are half Spanish. Do you know the meaning of Masdeu? It is a very old name for the vineyard, and it signifies 'God's field.'"

I thought of the difference of national character between the French and the Germans--"God's field" in France, a vineyard; "God's field" in Germany, a churchyard.

"The ancient Romans," continued my friend, "liked the wines, the sweet wines of this country, better than any other growths in Gaul."

"The Romans," I said, "had a most swinish taste in wines, and dishes too. The Falernian was boiled syrup, cooked up with drugs, and tempered with salt water. Only think of mixing brine with your tipple; or of placing it in a _fumarium_, to imbibe the flavour of the smoke! The Romans were mere liqueur drinkers. Aniseed, or maraschino, or parfait amour, or any trash of that kind, would have suited them better than genuine, fine-flavoured wine."

"_Pourtant_;" said my friend; "you go too far; maraschino and parfait amour are not trash. Although I agree with you, that the palate which eternally appeals for sweets is in a morbid condition. But the Romans, after all, must have had tongues of peculiar nicety for some savours. A Roman epicure could tell, by the relative tenderness, the leg upon which a partridge had been in the habit of sitting at night, and whether a carp had been caught above or below a certain bridge."

"Or was it not," I asked, with hazy reminiscences of Juvenal floating about me,--"was it not a certain sewer--the Cloaca Maxima, perhaps?"

"Only," argued the priest in continuation, "I could never understand their fondness for lampreys."

"Perhaps," said I, "it is because you never tasted them after they had been fattened on slaves."

"Perhaps it is," replied the good man, musing.

By this time dinner was over, and the guests gone. We had the remains of the dessert, the pick-tooths, and another bottle of the Catalan wine to ourselves.

"You French," I ventured, "hardly seem worthy of your fine wines. You never appear to care about them; you seldom sit a moment after dinner to enjoy them; and if you relish anything more than another, it is Champagne, which, after all, is but a baby taste. All your very best wine goes to England; most of your second-class growths to Russia; and your lower sorts to the northern nations on the Baltic. I don't think there is anything like a generally cultivated taste for good wine in France, and yet you are supreme in the _cuisine_."

"It was the _fermiers generaux_, and the _financiers_," replied the priest, "who made French cookery what it is. They tried to outshine the old noblesse at table; they revived truffles, and they had the first dishes of green pease, at eight hundred francs a _plat_. Next to the financiers were the chevaliers and the abbés. _Oh, mon Dieu! qu'ils étaient gourmands ces chers amis_; the chevaliers all swagger and dash; the sword right up and down--shoulder-knot flaunting--a bold bearing and a keen eye. The abbés, in velvet and silk--as fat as carps, as sleek as moles, and as soft-footed as cats--little and sly--perfect enjoyers of the gourmandise. Oh, there was nothing more snug than an _abbé commanditaire_! He had consideration, position, money; no one to please, and nothing to do."

"These were the good old times," I said.

"_Ma foi!_" replied the clerical dignitary; "they were bad times for France in general; but they were rare times for the few who lived upon it. There were Frenchmen, at any rate, then, who understood wine; at least, they drunk enough of it to understand the science, from the alpha to the omega."

We parted, after a proper degree of hand-shaking; and a quarter of an hour afterwards I was rattling along the Montpellier and Cette railway, with a ticket for Lunel in my pocket.