CHAPTER XIV.

FLAT MARSH SCENERY, TREATED BY POETS AND PAINTERS--TAVERN ALLEGORIES--NISMES--THE AMPHITHEATRE AND THE MAISON CARRÉE--PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC--THE OLD RELIGIOUS WARS ALIVE STILL--THE SILK WEAVER OF NISMES AND THE DRAGONNÆDES.

As Launcelot Gobbo had an infection to serve Bassanio, so I somehow took ill with an infection to walk, instead of ride, back to Lunel. I suppose that Auguste had innoculated me, in some measure, with his mysterious love for the boundless swamps and primeval jungles of bulrush around; so that I felt a sort of pang in leaving them, and would willingly depart lingeringly and alone. Sending on my small baggage, then, by _roulage_, I strode forth out of the dead city, and was soon pacing alone the echoing causeway, like an Arab steering by the sun in the desert. There is one dead and one living English poet who would have made glorious use of this fen landscape, so repulsive to many, but which did, after all, possess a strange, undefinable attraction for me. The dead poet is Shelley, who had the true eye for sublimity in waste. Take the following picture-touch:--

"An uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree, and some few stakes, Broken and unrepaired; and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon."

This is the sort of landscape, too, which, in another department of art, Collins delighted in representing. But Shelley's picture of the luxuriant rush and water-plant vegetation would have been magnificent. Listen how he handles a theme of the kind:

"And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath, Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth-- Prickly and pulpous, and blistering and blue, Livid and starred with a lurid dew; Spawn-weeds, and filth, and leporous scum, Made the running rivulet thick and dumb; And at its outlet, flags huge as stakes Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes."

Tennyson is the living poet who would picture with equal effect the region of swamp, and rush, and pool. Brought up in a fen district, his eye and feeling for marsh scenery and vegetation are perfect. Remember the marish mosses in the rotting fosse which encircled the "Moated Grange." Musing thus of the Poet Laureate, I would assign to this landscape embodiment of King Death, I passed the half-way tower, where three _douaniers_, seated in chairs, were fishing and looking as glum and silent as their prey, and began to discern the gravelly, shingly land of vines and olives again before me. The clear air of the South cheats us northerns like a mirage. You see objects as near you as in England they would be brought by a very fair spy-glass, and the effect, before you began to make allowances for the atmospheric spectacles, is to put you dreadfully out of humour at the length of the way, before you actually came up with the too distinct goal. So was it strongly with me in pedestrianising towards Lunel. Lunel seemed retreating back and back, so that my consolation became that it would be surely stopped by the Cevennes, even if the worst came to the worst; and go where it would, I was determined to come up with it somehow. Entering the region of the vine, the moppy olive, and the dust which was flying about in clouds, I halted at a roadside auberge to wash the latter article out of my throat, and reaped my reward in the sight of a splendid cartoon suspended over the great fireplace, which represented, in a severe allegory, "The Death of Credit killed by bad Payers." The scene was a handsome street, with a great open _café_ behind, at the _comptoir_ of which sat Madam Commerce aghast at the atrocity being committed before her. In a corner are seen a group of _gardes de commerce_--in the vernacular, bailiffs--lamenting over their ruined occupation. I came to know the profession of these gentlemen, from the fact that their style and titles were legibly imprinted across their waistcoats. In the foreground, the main catastrophe of the composition was proceeding. Credit, represented by a fat, good-natured-looking, elderly gentleman in a blue greatcoat, was stretched supine upon the stones, while his three murderers brandished their weapons above him. The delineation of the culprits was anything but flattering to the three classes of society which I took them to represent. The "first murderer," as they say in _Macbeth_, was a soldier. His sabre was deep in poor Credit's side. The second criminal must have been a musician, for he has just hit Credit a superhuman blow on the head with a fiddle--not a very deadly weapon one would suppose; while the third assassin, armed with a billiard cue, seemed to typify the idler portion of the community in general. Between them, however, there could be no doubt that Credit had been fairly done to death--the grim intimation was there to stare all topers in the face.

The fact is, indeed, that all over rural France, in the places of public entertainment, poor M. Credit is in exceedingly bad odour. I have seen dozens of pictorial hints, conveying with more or less delicacy the melancholy moral of that just described. Sometimes, however, the landlord distrusts the pencil, puts no faith in allegory, and stern and prosaic--with a propensity to political economy--and giving rise to dark suspicions of a tendency to the Manchester school, writes up in sturdy letters, grim and hopeless--

"ARGENT COMPTANT."

At other times, cast in a more genial mould, he deviates into what may be called didactic verse--containing, like the "Penny Magazine"--useful knowledge for the people, and hints poetically to his customers, the rule of the establishment--taking care, however, to intimate to their susceptible feelings that generous social impulses, rather than sombre commercial necessity, are at the bottom of the regulation. Thus it is not uncommon to read the following pithy and not particularly rhythmical distich:--

"Pour mieux conserver ses amis, Ici on ne fait pas de credit."

At last Lunel was fairly caught, and an hour of the rail brought me to Nismes and to the Hotel de Luxembourg, running out at the windows with swarms of _commis voyageurs_, the greater number connected with the silk trade. One of these worthies beside whom I was placed at dinner, told me that he intended to go to London to the Exhibition, and that he had a very snug plan for securing a competent guide, who would poke up all the lions; this guide to be a "_Marin du port de Londres; car tenez ils sont des galliards futés, les marins du port de Londres_." I had all the difficulty in the world in making the intending excursionist aware of the probable effects of hiring, as a west-end guide, the first sailor or waterman he picked up at Wapping.

The great features of Nismes are, as every body knows, the features which the Romans left behind them. Provence and Languedoc were the regions of Gaul which the great masters of the world liked best, probably because they were nearest home; and obscure as was the Roman Nismes--for I believe that Nimauses lays claim to no historic dignity whatever--it must still have been a populous and important place: the unmouldering masonry of the Roman builders proves it. I had never seen any Roman remains to speak of, and, to tell the truth, had never been able to work up any great enthusiasm about the fragments of the ancient people which I had come across. I had bathed in all the Roman baths wherewith London abounds, but found no inspiration in the waters--I had stood on grassy mounds of earth, believed to have been Roman camps; traced like the Antiquary, the _Ager_, with its corresponding _fossa_--marked the _porta sinistra_ and the _porta dextra_--and stood where some hook-nosed general had reclined in the _Pretorium_; but I again confess that my imagination did not fly impulsively back, and bury itself among _patres conscripti_, togas, vestal virgins, lictors, patricians, equites, and plebeians.

And, in fact, such mere vague traces and memorials as baths, bits of pavement, and dusty holes, with smouldering brick-basements, which people call "Roman villas,"--are not at all fitted, whatever would-be classicists may pretend, to stir up the strong tide of enthusiastic association. These are but miserable odds and ends of fragments, from which you can no more leap to the dignity and the grandeur of the Romans, than you could argue, never having seen a man, from finding a cast-away tooth-pick, up to the appearance and nature of the invisible owner. But let us see a great specimen of a great Roman work, and then we are in the right track. Any builder could have made you a bath--any sapper and miner could have traced you out a camp--any of the small architects with whom we are infested could have knocked you up a villa--but give us a characteristic bit of the great people who are dead and gone, and then we can, or, at all events, we will try, to take their measure.

The amphitheatre or arena at Nismes rose on me like a stupendous spectre, and frowned me down. I was smote with the sight. The size appalled me: mightiness--vastness--massiveness were there together--a trinity of stone, rising up, as it were, in the middle of my little preconceived and pet notions, and shivering and dispersing them, as the English three-decker in the _Pilot_ came bowling into view, driving away the fog in wreaths before her and around her. First I walked about the great stone skeleton; but though the symmetrical glory of the architecture, its massive regularity, and what I would call soldier-like precision of uniformity, kept urging my mind to look and admire; still the impression of vastness was predominant, and all but drove out other thoughts. And yet it was not until I had entered, that impression reached its profoundest depth.

As I emerged from the vaulted and cavern-like corridor, through which a garrulous old woman led me, into the blaze of keen sunshine, that fell upon a mighty wilderness of stone; and as instinctively I laid my hand upon the nearest ponderous block, the full and perfect idea of size and power closed on me. _Roma!--Antiqua Roma!_--had me in her grasp; and as I felt, I remembered that Eothen had described a similar sensation, as produced by the bigness of the stones of the great pyramid. My old woman having, happily, left me, I was alone within that enormous gulf--that crater of regularly rising stone. Round and round, in ridges where Titans might have sat and seen, megatheria combat mastadons, mounted up the mighty steps of grey, dead stone--sometimes entire for the whole round--sometimes splintered and riven, but never worn, until your eye--now stumbling, as it were, over rubbish-heaps--now striding from stone ledge to stone ledge--rested upon the broken and jagged rim, with a hoary beard of plants and long dry weeds standing rigidly up between you and the blue. I turned again to the details of the building--to the vastness of the blocks of stone, and to the perfect manipulation which had placed them. If the Romans were great soldiers, they were as great masons. They conquered the world in all pursuits in which enormous energy and iron muscularity of mind could conquer. The universe of earth, and stone, and water was theirs. But they were not cloud compellers. They had none of the great power over the essences of the brain. Beauty was too subtle for them; and they only got it, incidentally, as an element--not a principle. The arena in which I stood was sternly beautiful; but it was the beauty of a legion drawn up for battle--iron to the backbone--iron to the teeth--the beauty of that rigid symmetric inflexibility which sat upon the bronze faces which, when Hannibal, encamped on Roman ground set up for sale, and grimly and unmovedly saw bought, at the common market rate, the patch of earth on which the Carthaginian lay entrenched.

I remained in the amphitheatre for hours--now descending to the arena, where the men and beasts fought and tore each other--now scrambling to the highest ridge, and watching, with a calmness which soothed and lulled the mind, the vast bowl which lay beneath--so massive, so silent, and so grey. You can still trace the two posts of honour--the royal boxes, as it were--low down in the ring, and marked out by stone barriers from the general sweep. Each of them has an exclusive corridor sunk in the massive stone; and behind each are vaulted cells, which you will be told were used as guard-houses by the escort of soldiers or lictors. Tradition assigns one of these boxes to the proconsul--the other to the vestal virgins; but the latter, if I remember my Roman antiquities aright, could have no business out of Rome. There were no subsidiary sacred fire-branch establishments, like provincial banks, to promulgate the credit of the "central office,"--kindled in the remote part of the empire. The holy flame burnt only before the mystic palladium, which answered for the security of Rome. Whoever occupied the boxes in question, however, were no doubt what one of Captain Marryatt's characters describes the Smith family to be in London--"quite the topping people of the place;" and up to them, no doubt, after the gladiator had received the steel of his antagonist, and the thundering shout of "Habet!" had died away, the poor Scythian, or Roman, as the case might be, turned a sadly inquiring eye--intent upon the hands of the great personages on whom his doom depended--on the upturned or the downturned thumb. A very interesting portion of the arena is the labyrinth of corridors, passages, and stairs, which honeycomb its massive masonry, and into which, in the event of a shower, the whole body of spectators could at once retreat, leaving the great circles of stone as deserted as at midnight. So admirable, too, are the arrangements, that there could have been very little crowding. The vomitories get wider and wider as they approach the entrance, where the people would emerge on every side, like the drops of water flung off by the rotatory motion of a mop. There was an odd resemblance to the general disposition of the opera corridors and staircases, which struck me in the arrangement of the lobbies and passages behind. One could fancy the young Roman men about Nemauses, in their scented tunics, clasped with glittering stones and their broad purple girdles--the Tyrian hue, as the poets say--gathering in knots, and discussing a blow which had split a fellow-creature's head open, as our own opera elegants might Grisi's celebrated holding-note in _Norma_, or Duprez' famous _ut du poitrine_. The execution of a _débutant_ with the sword might be praised, as the execution now-a-days of a _prima donna_. Rumours might be discussed of a new net-and-trident man picked up in some obscure arena, as the _cognoscenti_ now whisper the reported merits of a tenor discovered in Barcelona or Palermo; and the _habitués_ would delight to inform each other that the spirited and enterprising management had secured the services of the celebrated Berbix, whose career at Massilia, for instance, had excited such admiration--the _artiste_ having killed fifteen antagonists in less than a fortnight. And then, after the pleasant and critical chat between the acts, the trumpets would again sound, and all the world would turn out upon the vast stone benches--the nobles and wealthy nearest the ring, as in the stalls with us, and the lower and slave population high up on the further benches, like the humble folks and the footmen in the gallery--and then would recommence that exhibition of which the Romans could never have enough, and of which they never tired--the excitement of the shedding of blood.

From the arena I walked slowly on to the Maison Carrée. All the great Roman remains lie upon the open Boulevard, on the edge of the stacked and crowded old town, while without the circle rise the spacious streets of new _quartiers_ for the rich, and many a long straggling suburb, where, in mean garrets and unwholesome cellars, the poor handloom weavers produce webs of gorgeous silk which rival the choicest products of Lyons. Presently, to the left, appeared a horribly clumsy theatre; and, to the right, the wondrous Maison Carrée. The day of which I am writing was certainly my day of architectural sensation. First, Rome, with her hugeness and her symmetric strength, gripped me; and now, Greece, with her pure and etherial beauty, which is essentially of the spirit, enthralled me. The Maison Carrée was, no doubt, built by Roman hands, but entirely after Greek models. It is wholly of Athens: not at all of Rome--a Corinthian temple of the purest taste and divinest beauty--small, slight, without an atom of the ponderous majesty of the arena--reigning by love and smiles, like Venus; not by frowns and thunder, like Jove. Cardinal Alberoni said that the Maison Carrée was a gem which ought to be set in gold; and the two great Jupiters of France--Louis Quatorze and Napoleon--had both of them schemes for lifting the temple bodily out of the ground and carrying it to Paris. The building is perfectly simple--merely an oblong square, with a portico, and fluted Corinthian pillars--yet the loveliness of it is like enchantment. The essence of its power over the senses appears to me to consist in an exquisite subtlety of proportion, which amounts to the very highest grace and the very purest and truest beauty. How many _quasi_ Grecian buildings had I seen--all porticoed and caryatided--without a sensation, save that the pile before me was cold and perhaps correct--a sort of stone formulary. I had begun to fear that Greek beauty was too subtle for me, or that Greek beauty was cant, when the Maison Carrée in a moment utterly undeceived me. The puzzle was solved: I had never seen Grecian architecture before. The things which our domestic Pecksniffs call Grecian--their St. Martin's porticoes, and St. Pancras churches--bear about the same relation to the divine original, as the old statue of George IV. at King's Cross to the Apollo Belvidere. Of course, these gentry--of whom we assuredly know none whose powers qualify them to grapple with, a higher task than a dock-warehouse or a railway tavern--have picked all manner of faults in the divine proportions of this wondrous edifice. There is some bricklaying cant about a departure from the proportions of Vitruvius, which, I presume, are faithfully observed in the National Gallery, and some modification of them, no doubt, in the Pavilion at Brighton--which variations are gravely censured in the Maison Carrée; while, in order, doubtless, to shew our modern superiority, the French hodmen have erected a theatre just opposite the Corinthian temple, with a portico--heavens and earth! such a portico--a mass of mathematical clumsiness, with pillars like the legs of aldermen suffering from dropsy. Anything more intensely ugly is not to be found in Christendom. It actually beats the worst monstrosity of London; and this dreadful caricature of the deathless work of the glorious Greeks is erected right opposite to, perhaps, the most perfect piece of building and stone-carving in the world.

I believe that it requires neither art-training nor classic knowledge to enjoy the unearthly beauty of the Corinthian temple. Give me a healthy-minded youth, who has never heard of Alcibiades, Themistocles, Socrates, or Æschylus, but who has the natural appreciation of beauty--who can admire the droop of a lily, the spring of a deer, the flight of an eagle--set him opposite the Maison Carrée, and the sensation of divine, transcendant beauty, will rush into his heart and brain, as when contemplating the flower, or beast or bird. The big man in the parish at home will point you out the graces of the new church of St. Kold Without, designed after the antique manner, by the celebrated Mr. Jones Smith, and because you hesitate to acknowledge them, will read you a benignant lecture on the impossibility of making people, with uneducated taste, fully appreciate what he will be sure to call the "severity" of Greek architecture; the worthy man himself having been dinned with the apocryphal loveliness in question until he has come actually to believe in it. Never mind the grave sermons preached about educating and training taste. An educated and trained taste will, no doubt, admire with even more fond appreciation and far higher enjoyment; but he who cannot, at the first glance, see and feel the perfect grace of pure Grecian art, must be insensible to the blue of the sky, to the beauty of running water, to the song of the birds and the silver radiance of moonlight. I never revisited the amphitheatre while I remained in Nismes, but I haunted the temple. The grandeur, and the massiveness of the Roman work, was like the north wind. It rudely buffeted the wayfarer, but he clung to his cloak. The Grecian trophy shone out like the gentle sun, and the traveller doffed mantle and cap to pay it adoration.

Nismes, as most people know, is one of the points of France where Protestantism and Catholicism still glare upon each other with hostile and threatening eyes. The old Catholic and Huguenot hatred has descended lineally from the remote times of the Albigenses, and at this moment broods as bitterly over the olive city as when Raymond of Toulouse proclaimed a crusade against the Paulician heretics, and twenty thousand people were slaughtered under the pastoral care of the Bishop of Beziers. That the animosity, however, has not died out centuries ago, we have to thank the pious precautions of Louis XIV., Madame de Maintenon, and the priest, who waged as bitter war upon the Huguenots of the Cevennes as ever their fathers of these same mountains had been exposed to. The dragoonades are still fiercely remembered in the South. The old-world stories in Scotland of the cruelties of Claverhouse and his life-guards, have well-nigh ceased to excite anything like personal bitterness; but in portions of Languedoc, the animosity between neighbour and neighbour--Catholic and Protestant--is still deepened and widened by the oft-told legends of those wretched religious wars. Nismes is the head quarters of the sectarianism--Catholics and Protestants are drawn up in two compacted hostile bodies, living, for the most part, in separate _quartiers_; marrying each party within itself; scandalising each party the other whenever it has a chance; and carrying, indeed, the party spirit so far as absolutely to have established Protestant _cafés_ and Catholic _cafés_, the _habitués_ of which will no more enter the rival establishments than they would enter the opposition churches.

The day after my arrival, I had a singular opportunity of becoming acquainted with the spirit of the place. North from Nismes rises a species of chaos of steep hills and deep valleys, or rather ravines, composed almost entirely of shingle and rock, covered over, however, with olive-groves and vines, and dotted with little white summer-houses, to which almost the entire middle and working class population retire upon Sundays to pass the day, partly in cultivating their patches of land--there is hardly a family without an allotment--and partly to amuse themselves after the toils of the week. Rambling among these rugged hills and dales, I chanced to ask my way of a person I met descending towards Nismes. He was a tall, ungainly, raw-boned man--pallid and worn, as if with sedentary labour; but he seemed intelligent, and was very polite--pointing out a number of localities around. Presently, he told me that he had been up to his _cabane_, or summer-house; that he was a silkweaver in Nismes; that his wages were so poor, that he had a hard struggle to live; but that he still managed to give up an hour's work or so a-day to go and feed his rabbits at the _cabane_. As we talked, he inquired whether I were not a foreigner--an Englishman--and, with some hesitation, but with great eagerness--a Protestant? My affirmative answer to the last interrogatory produced a magical effect. The man's face actually gleamed. He jumped off the ground, let fall his apronful of melons and fresh figs, while he clutched both of my hands in his, and exclaimed, "A Protestant! _Dieu merci! Dieu merci!_ an English Protestant! Oh, how glad I am to see an English Protestant! Listen, monsieur. We are here. We of the religion (the old phrase--as old as Rosny and Coligni), we are here fifteen thousand strong--fifteen thousand, monsieur. Don't believe those who say only ten. Fifteen thousand, monsieur--good men and true. All ready--all standing by one another--all _braves_--all on the _qui vive_--all prepared, if the hour should come. We know each other--we love each other, and we hate"--a pause; then, with a significant grin--"_les autres_. You will tell that, in England, monsieur, to our brothers. Fifteen thousand, monsieur; and every man, woman, and child, true to the cause and the faith."

The whole tone of the orator did not appear to me to be so much a matter of religious bitterness, as it marked a hatred of race. The two contending parties at Nismes were evidently of different blood: their religious animosities had gradually divided them into two distinct and hostile peoples.

"See!" said the weaver; "this is the Protestant side of the valley,--all Protestants here. Not a Catholic _cabane_--no, no! they must go elsewhere,--we have nothing to do with them,--we shake off the dust of our feet upon them and theirs. You and I are one, upon our own ground--Protestant ground--staunch and true;" and he stamped with his foot upon the pebbles. "Monsieur must absolutely go with me to my _cabane_, and drink a glass of wine to the good cause; and see my rabbits--Protestant rabbits."

Who could resist this last attraction? We turned and toiled up the flinty paths together; my acquaintance informing me, with great pride, that M. Guizot was a good Protestant of Nismes, as his father, who had fallen, _dans le terreur_, was before him. He understood that M. Guizot was then in England, and he was sure that he would be delighted at seeing such a fine Protestant country, and such a staunch Protestant people. Stopping at length at an unpainted door, in the rough, unmortared wall, my friend opened it, and we stepped into a little patch of garden, planted with olives and straggling vine-bushes. "They are much better cultivated, and give better oil and better wine," he said, "than the Catholic grounds;" and I am sure he believed the asseveration. Having duly inspected the "Protestant rabbits," we entered the _cabane_, a bare, rough, white-washed room, with a table, a few chairs, and unglazed lattices. Unless when the mistral blows, the open air is seldom or never unpleasant; and then wooden shutters are applied to the windward side of the houses. On this occasion, however, there was not a breath stirring amid the silvery grey leaves of the olives. The grasshoppers--fellows of a size which would astound Sir Thomas Gresham--chirped and leaped in the grass at the foot of the wall; scores and scores of lithe, yellow lizards, with the blackest of eyes, flashed up and down over the rough stones, and shot in and out of the crevices; but, excepting these sights and sounds, all around was hushed and motionless; and the sun, wintry though it was, flooded all the still, brown valley with a deluge of pure, hot light.

The weaver filled a very comfortable couple of glasses with a small, but not ill-tasted, wine. "Here's to----;" he uttered a sentiment not complimentary to the Catholic Church, and, indeed, consigning it to the warmest of quarters, and took off his liquor with undeniable unction. I need not say whether I drunk the toast: anyhow, I drunk the wine.

"And now look there," continued my host, pointing with his empty glass through the open window, to the north. The bare, blue hills of the Cevennes lay--a long ridge of mountain scenery, stretching from the valley of the Rhone as far and farther than the eye could follow them--towards that of the Garonne.

"There it was," he said, "that were fought the fiercest battles, in those cruel times, between the people of the religion and the troops of the king. Can you see a valley or a ravine just over the olive there? My eyes are too much worn to see it; but we look at it every Sunday--my wife and my children. That was the valley, monsieur, where my family lived for ages and ages, weaving the rough cloth that they made in those days, and tending their flocks upon the hill. Early in the troubles, their cottage was beset by the dragoons of the king. The mother of the family was suckling her child. They bound her to the bed-post, and put the child just beyond her reach, and told her that not a drop more should pass its lips till she cried _Ave Maria_ and made the sign of the cross. They took the father and hung him by the feet, head downward, from the roof-tree, and he died hanging. The children they ranged round the mother, and tied matches between their fingers; and, when the first match burned down to the flesh, the mother cried _Ave Maria_ and made the sign of the cross. Then they released her, and held an orgie in the cottage all night long, and the widow and the children served them. Next morning, the woman was mad, and she wandered away into the woods with her baby at her breast, and no one heard of her more. The children were scattered over the country; and, whether they lived or died, I know not; but one of them, monsieur, the eldest girl, whose name was Nicole, became a famous prophetess. Yes, monsieur, she was inspired, and taught the people among the rocks and the wild gorges of the hills. First, she had _l'avertissement_--that is, the warning, or first degree of inspiration; and then the _souffle_, or the breath of the Lord, came on her, and she spoke; at last, she was endowed with _la prophetie_, and told what would come to pass. Yes, monsieur; and many of her prophecies are yet preserved, and they came true; for, in times like these, God acts by extraordinary means. The people, monsieur, loved her, and honoured her, and kept her so well, and hid her so closely, that the persecutors could never seize her; and she survived the troubles; and I, monsieur, a poor weaver of Nismes, have the honour to be her descendant."

That night I walked late along the Boulevards. Protestant _cafés_ and Catholic _cafés_ were full and busy, and, no doubt, resounding with the polemics of the warring creeds. Outside all, the by turns straggling and crowded town lay, bathed in the most glorious flood of moonlight, poured down, happily, alike upon Papist and Protestant, lighting up the grey cathedral with its Gothic arches, and the heathen temple with its fluted columns, and surely preaching by the universal-blessing ray that sermon--so continuous in its delivery, yet so little heeded by the congregation of the world--the sermon which enjoins charity and forbearance, and love and peace, among all men.

CHAPTER THE LAST.

AGRICULTURE IN FRANCE--ITS BACKWARD STATE--CENTRALISING TENDENCY--SUBDIVISION OF PROPERTY--ITS EFFECTS--FRENCH "ENCUMBERED ESTATES."

In the foregoing pages I have sketched, with as much regard to a readable liveliness, and to vivid local colouring as I could command, the features and incidents of part--the most interesting one--of an extended journey through France. My primary purpose in undertaking the latter was, to prepare a view of the social and agricultural condition of the peasantry, for publication in the columns of the _Morning Chronicle_; and accordingly a series of letters, devoted to that important subject, duly appeared. These communications, however, were necessarily confined to statements of agricultural progress, and the investigation of solid social subjects, to the exclusion of those matters of personal incident and artistic, literary, and legendary significance, which naturally occur in the prosecution of a desultory and inquiring journey. To this latter field--that of the tourist rather than the commissioner--then, I have devoted the foregoing chapters; but I am unwilling to send them forth without appending to them--extracted from my concluding Letter in the _Morning Chronicle_--a summary of my impressions of the social condition of the French agricultural population, and the effects of the system of the infinitesimal division of the land. These impressions are founded upon a five months' journey through France, keeping mainly in the country places, being constantly in communication with the people themselves, and hearing also the opinions of the priests and men of business engaged in rural affairs, as well as reading authors upon all sides of the question. My conclusions I have summed up carefully, and with great deliberation; and I offer them as an honest, and not ill-founded estimate of the present state and future prospects of rural France.

The French are undoubtedly at least a century behind us in agricultural science and skill. This remark applies alike to breeding cattle and to raising crops. Agriculture in France is rather a handicraft than what it ought to be--a science. As a general rule, the farmers of France are about on a level with the ploughmen of England. When I say this, I mean that the immense majority of the cultivators are unlettered peasants--hinds--who till the land in the unvarying, mechanical routine handed down to them from their forefathers. Of agriculture, in any other sense than the rule-of-thumb practice of ploughing, sowing, reaping, and threshing, they know literally nothing. Of the _rationale_ of the management of land--of the reasons why so and so should be done--they think no more than honest La Balafrè, whose only notion of a final cause was the command of his superior officer. Thus they are bound down in the most abject submission to every custom, for no other reason than that it is a custom: their fathers did so and so, and therefore, and for no other reason, the sons do the same. I could see no struggling upwards, no longing for a better condition, no discontent, even with the vegetable food upon which they lived. All over the land there brooded one almost unvaried mist of dull, unenlightened, passive content--I do not mean social--but industrial content.

There are two causes principally chargeable with this. In the first place, strange as it may seem in a country in which two-thirds of the population are agriculturists, agriculture is a very unhonoured occupation. Develop, in the slightest degree, a Frenchman's mental faculties, and he flies to a town as surely as steel filings fly to a loadstone. He has no rural tastes--no delight in rural habits. A French amateur farmer would, indeed, be a sight to see. Again, this national tendency is directly encouraged by the centralizing system of government--by the multitude of officials, and by the payment of all functionaries. From all parts of France, men of great energy and resource struggle up and fling themselves on the world of Paris. There they try to become great functionaries. Through every department of the eighty-four, men of less energy and resource struggle up to the _chef-lieu_--the provincial capital. There they try to become little functionaries. Go still lower--deal with a still smaller scale--and the result will be the same. As is the department to France, so is the arrondissement to the department, and the commune to the arrondissement. Nine-tenths of those who have, or think they have, heads on their shoulders, struggle into towns to fight for office. Nine-tenths of those who are, or are deemed by themselves or others, too stupid for anything else, are left at home to till the fields, and breed the cattle, and prune the vines, as their ancestors did for generations before them. Thus there is singularly little intelligence left in the country. The whole energy, and knowledge, and resource of the land are barrelled up in the towns. You leave one city, and, in many cases, you will not meet an educated or cultivated individual until you arrive at another--all between is utter intellectual barrenness. The English country gentleman, we all know, is not a faultless character, but his useful qualities far prevail over his defects; and it is only when traversing a land all but destitute of any such order that the fatal effects of the blank are fully realized. Were there more country gentlemen in France, there would be more animal food and more wheaten bread in the country. The very idea of a great proprietor living upon his estates implies the fact of an educated person--an individual more or less rubbed and polished and enlightened by society--taking his place amongst a class who must naturally look up to him, and whose mass he must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, leaven. It is easy to joke about English country gentlemen--about their foibles, and prejudices, and absurd points; but to the jokers I would seriously say, "Go to France; examine its agriculture, and the structure and calibre of its rural society, and see the result of the utter absence of a class of men--certainly not Solomons, and as certainly not Chesterfields, but, for all that, most useful personages--individuals with capital, with, at all events, a certain degree of enlightenment--taking an active interest in farming--often amateur farmers themselves--the patrons of district clubs, and ploughing matches, and cattle-shows--and, above all, living daily among their tenantry, and having an active and direct interest in that tenantry's prosperity." I do not mean to say that here and there, all over France, there may not be found active and intelligent resident landlords, nor that, in the north of France, there may not be discovered intelligent and clear-headed tenant-farmers; but the rule is as I have stated. Utterly ignorant boors are allowed to plod on from generation to generation, wrapped in the most dismal mists of agricultural superstition; while what in America would be called the "smart" part of the population, are intriguing, and constructing and undoing _complots_, in the towns. To all present appearance, a score of dynasties may succeed each other in France before La Vendée takes its place beside Norfolk, or before Limousin rivals the Lothians.

A word as to the subdivision of property. I know the extreme difficulties of the subject, and the moral considerations which, in connection with it, are often placed in opposition to admitted physical and economical disadvantages. I shall, therefore, without discussing the question at any length, mention two or three personally ascertained facts:--

The tendency of landed properties, under the system in question, is to continual diminution of seize.

This tendency does _not_ stop with the interests of the parties concerned--it goes on in spite of them.

And the only practical check is nothing but a new evil. When a man finds that his patch of land is insufficient to support his family, he borrows money and buys more land. In nine cases out of ten, the interest to be paid to the lender is greater than the profit which the borrower can extract from the land--and bankruptcy, and reduction to the condition of a day-labourer, is sooner or later the inevitable result.

The infinitesimal patches of land are cultivated in the most rude and uneconomical fashion. Not a franc of capital, further than that sunk in the purchase of spades, picks, and hoes, is expended on them. They are undrained, ill-manured, expensively worked, and they would often produce no profit whatever, were it not that the proprietor is the labourer, and that he looks for little or nothing save a recompense for his toil in a bare subsistence. It is easy to see how the consumer must fare if the producer possess little or no surplus after his own necessities are satisfied.

It is not to be supposed from the above remarks, that I conceive that in no circumstances, and under no conditions, can the soil be advantageously divided into minute properties. The rule which strikes me as applying to the matter is this:--where spade-husbandry, can be legitimately adopted, then the extreme subdivision of land loses much, if not all, of its evils. The reason is plain: spade-husbandry, while it pays the proprietor fair wages, also, in certain cases, develops in an economical manner the resources of the soil. The instance of market-gardens near a populous town is a case in point. But in a remote district, removed from markets, ill provided with the means of locomotion--where cereals, not vegetables, must be raised--spade-labour is so far mere toil flung away. Near Nismes I found a man digging a field which ought to have been ploughed. He told me that the spade produced more than the plough. Then why did not the farmers use spade-husbandry? "Because, although spade-husbandry was very productive, it was still more expensive. It paid a small proprietor who could do the work himself, but not a large proprietor, who had to remunerate his labourers." Herein, then, lies the fallacy. Truly considered, a mode of cultivation unprofitable for the great proprietor, must be unprofitable, in the long run, for the small proprietor also. The former, by spade-husbandry, loses his profit by paying extravagantly for labour; the latter must pay for labour as well, but he pays himself, and is therefore unconscious of the outlay--an outlay which is, nevertheless, not the less real. If the plough, at an expense of 5_s._, can produce 20_s._ worth of produce--and if the spade, at an expense of 20_s._, can produce 30_s._ worth of produce--the difference between the proportionate outlays is so much deducted from the resources of the country in which the transaction takes place; and this because that difference of labour, or of money representing labour, if otherwise applied--as by the agency of the plough it would be free to be applied--might, profitably to its proprietor, still raise the sum total of the production to the stated amount of 30_s._

Are small properties, then, in cases in which spade-husbandry cannot be economically applied, injurious to the social and industrial interests of the community in which they exist?

The following propositions appear to me to sum up what may be said on either side of the question:

Small landed holdings undoubtedly tend to produce an industrious population. A man always works hardest for himself.

Small landed holdings tend to breed a spirit of independence, and wholesome moral self-appreciation and reliance.

On the other hand--

Small landed holdings, by breeding a poor and ignorant race of proprietors, keep back agriculture, and injure the whole community of consumers; and--

Small landed holdings tend to grow smaller than it is the interest of their owners that they should become. Capital, borrowed at usurious rates of interest, is then had recourse to for the purpose of enlarging individual properties--and the result is the production of a race of involved, mortgaged, and frequently bankrupt proprietors.

At this present moment, I believe the proprietorship of France to be as bankrupt as that of the south-west of Ireland. The number of "Encumbered Estates" across the Channel would stagger the stoutest calculator. The capitalists, notaries, land-agents, and others in the towns, and not the peasantry, are the real owners of the mortgaged soil. The nominal proprietors are sinking deeper and deeper at every struggle, and they see no hope before them--save one--Socialism. French Socialism is simply the result of French poverty. A ruined labourer has no resource but casual charity. No law stands between him and starvation. He has no right to his life unless he can support himself; and as the ponderous machine of the law gradually grinds down his property to an extent too small for him to exist on, and as the increasing interest swallows up the comparatively diminishing products, he sees nothing for it but a scramble. There is property--there is food--and it will go hard but he shall have a share of them. Herein is the whole problem of the dreaded Socialism. I cannot put the matter better than in the words of the old song--

"Moll in the wad and I fell out, And this is what it was all about, She had money, and I had none, And that was the way the row begun."

Whether a Poor-law, and a change in the law of heritage might not check the evil, I am not, of course, going to inquire; but the present state of rural France--all political considerations left aside--appears to me to point to the possibility, if not the probability, of the world seeing a greater and bloodier _Jacquerie_ yet than it ever saw before.

THE END.

HENRY VIZETELLY, PRINTER AND ENGRAVER, GOUGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET, LONDON.