Chapter 8

Sometimes the Otter made nocturnal expeditions far up the channels of the little streams that fall into the Dordogne. Then he was after crayfish. The ordinary method of catching these crustaceae, namely, with a piece of netting covering a small wire hoop, and baited with meat, had little charm for him. There was another much more in keeping with his passion for movement. He would walk up the beds of the streams quite heedless of the water, holding in one hand a lantern, and having the other free to make a grab at every crayfish he might see scuttling out of harm's way over the stones or sand. As he went slowly up the narrow valleys, the gleam of his lantern through the osiers, the tall loose-strife and hemp-agrimony startled the owls, the hedgehogs and the weasles; but not the sound of water wailing in the darkness, nor the cries of disturbed animals, nor the weird blackness of overhanging trees that hid the stars, troubled his nerves. On he went, through water-meadows, at the bottom of gloomy little gorges, and by the fringe of the forest, until he had wandered miles away from Beynac. We very nearly met one night, both being out with the same object in view. I, however, had very little of his zeal for the sport, and was less interested by the crayfish than by the fantastic indistinctness of trees and shrubs and flowers, which, in the light of the stars and the lantern, seemed to belong to a world with which I was but vaguely familiar, although I had travelled all over it in dreams.

Sometimes I used to go out fishing with the Otter on the Dordogne. When the casting-net was left at home (it was of little use when the water was clear) chub-fishing with the flying-line was generally the chosen form of sport. Here I may say that my companion, who could turn his hand to anything, made his own rods from hazel-sticks. Where the water was sufficiently deep, the boat was rowed and steered with a single-bladed paddle, but where it was shallow much better progress could be made by polling. These are the two methods invariably used by the fishermen and ferrymen of the Dordogne, and it is astonishing with what success they can get a boat up the rapids without having recourse to the towing-line.

When we went chub-fishing, we took the boat a mile or so up-stream, and then let it drift down with the current near a bank that was fringed with willows and acacias. Although we needed only six inches of water, the depth was sometimes miscalculated, and we went aground on a bank of pebbles. Then the Otter, whose bare feet were always ready for such emergencies, stepped out into the sparkling current, and hauled or pushed the boat over the obstacle. What with rapids and banks of pebbles, the excitement of boating on the Dordogne above Lalinde never flags. It looked very easy to throw a line with a worm on it towards the shore, and then draw it back, but the chub showed such little eagerness to be caught by me that I generally preferred to steer and watch my companion pulling them out as he stood in the prow, his face nearly hidden under the thatch of his straw hat. When the fish were in a biting humour, he had one on his hook every time he threw the line.

There are few trout in this part of the Dordogne, but in tributary streams, like the charming little Céou, they are plentiful. Carp are abundant, but they are very difficult to take with the line, and even with the net, except in time of flood, when they get washed out of their holes, and the water being no longer clear, their very sharp eyes are of little use to them. Then a lucky throw will sometimes bring out two or three carp weighing several pounds each. The fish commonly caught are mullet, perch, barbel, gudgeon, bream, and chub. As a food-supplying river, the Dordogne is one of the most valuable in France, and, owing to the rapid current and the purity of the water, the fish is of excellent quality.

The fixed belief of all the riverside people in this and other valleys is that fish should be cooked alive. You enter an inn and ask for a _friture_ of gudgeon. In a few minutes you see the victims, which have been pulled out of a tank with a small net on the end of a stick, jumping on the kitchen table, and they are still jumping when they go into the boiling grease. I am not among those who have grown callous to such sights, common as they are in France. To see fish scraped, opened, and cooked while still alive gives me disgust for it when it afterwards appears on the table. I can imagine somebody saying: 'Why look at what goes on in the kitchen?' That somebody does not quite understand what rural France is. In a country inn we invariably pass through the kitchen to reach the room set apart for guests, and it has often fallen to my lot to seek rest, shelter, and food in a poor auberge, where the kitchen is also the common room of the family and outsiders.

A Beynac character that left on my memory a lasting impression was old Suzette. Suzette might have been any age between fifty and seventy. She had no beauty, but she must have had a little vanity left, for when I showed her a photograph I had taken of her, she put her hard old hands together, swayed her head from shoulder to shoulder, and actually wept. She could not speak much French, but she said as well as she could that she did not know that she had grown so ugly. I have noticed, however, that my photographs have a tendency to draw tears or angry expressions from most of those on whom I operate, which I can only account for by the reason that these people have not the pleasure of paying for their portraits. What is done for nothing is seldom appreciated. Suzette, not wishing to hurt my feelings, soon wiped out her eyes with her largest knuckle, and, having composed her countenance, thanked me for having photographed her. She had had a rough life, but as she had known little else but hardship and privation, she was contented with what Providence considered enough for her. This was now a two-roomed cottage to live in, and for food a bunch of grapes, a peach or a pear to eat with her bread in the fruit season, a few walnuts to go with it in autumn or winter, chestnuts to boil or roast, and a piece of fat bacon hanging to a beam, from which she cut only just enough at a time to disguise the water which, when thickened with bread, a handful of haricots, and some scraps of other vegetables, made her daily soup. She was a widow now, but although whenever she spoke of her dead husband her head began to wag and the tears to start from her eyes, she had less care and worry and pain as a lonely woman than when she was bearing children and working harder than any pack-mule to bring them up. Her husband was a fisherman of the Dordogne, and she sold his fish in the Sarlat market, some eight miles distant from where they lived by the river. In order to be early in the market, she had to start at about two in the morning, and the road, which was uphill all the way, ran between woods where the wolves, descending from the vaster forests of Black Périgord, often howled in winter. She told me it frequently happened when she reached the market that her arms and hands were so benumbed with the cold that she could not take the basket of fish from her head. As a widow, she had lived for a while with a married son, but the young woman soon turned the old one out. Poor Suzette told the story without bitterness; she recognised the law of nature in this expulsion of the mother when she was of no further use to her children, and accepted thankfully the ten francs a month which her son allowed her. She managed to live by fetching and carrying for anyone who would give her two or three sous for an hour's trudging. She used to take my letters to post at the nearest railway-station, and no one who merely noted how nimbly her bare feet moved along the hot, dusty road would have supposed that she had left her youth so far behind her. Battered and pinched and harassed as she had been by destiny, she still believed in the working out of eternal justice, and one day before sunrise she started off on a pilgrimage to a distant sanctuary, and did not return until after many hours. With all this she was gay, and could tell a lively story with plenty of Southern salt. She was a good bit of human nature, worth studying.

Sarlat, where old Suzette went to sell her husband's fish, was a very important stronghold of Black Périgord in the Middle Ages, and the chief place in that Sarladais which the English kings of Norman and Angévin descent found such a tough bone to pick. The way to it from Beynac leads up steep valleys and gorges, covered with dense forest. Here wolves are to be seen occasionally in winter, but the wolf country begins a little to the north of Sarlat, and stretches towards the Limousin. The town appears to be composed of one long street, and to be dismally uninteresting. There is, however, an old Sarlat that lies a little off the main artery, and which a lazy visitor who does not like the trouble of asking questions might easily miss. There are few scenes more original and picturesque in France than that presented by the ruinous old church, half open to the weather, and the ancient houses that form a framework round it. Under the lofty Gothic vaulting are wooden shops and shanties, and, looking up, you see the smoke from bakers' ovens hanging about the ribs of the great arches, which it has blackened.

Of the old houses, one of the most remarkable is that which was the residence of the philosophical writer, Etienne de la Boëtie, the friend of Montaigne, It is an interesting example of the French Renaissance, the exterior being richly ornamented with carvings.

A very rough, bad time had the men of Sarlat during the long years that they were fighting intermittently for their lives and property with the lawless bands of so-called English, who had turned so many rocks into fastnesses, and who issued from their fortified caverns, that they made almost impregnable, to prey upon the unfortunate people who strove to live by husbandry. These hardened ruffians and freebooters had no respect for treaties, and inasmuch as peace never lasted long, and the English kings of that epoch always liked to feel that they were ready for anything that might happen in France, the companies of brigand soldiers who preferred to serve under the leopards rather than under the golden lilies were left to do pretty much what they pleased in the wilder parts of Guyenne.

After the treaty that followed the battle of Poitiers they continued their depredations, heedless of the orders communicated to them by the English commissioners. They carried their raids up to the walls of Sarlat, even at the time of vintage, although this season was much respected in the Middle Ages by violent men, from a motive that was perhaps not disinterested. They seized the bullocks that were harnessed to the waggons, and bore them off to their strongholds. It is but fair to add, however, that the Sarladais did not formally submit to English authority until 1361--five years after the battle of Poitiers. Then Chandos went to Sarlat and received the submission of the burghers. Soon afterwards Edward III confirmed all the privileges they had been enjoying under the kings of France. But they did not remain quiet long. Persuaded by Talleyrand and other nobles, they rebelled in 1369, and the town became again French. Speaking of this event, Tarde observes:

'And behold how and when the salamander [Footnote: This reptile was borne in the arms of Sarlat.] was again placed under the three fleurs-de-lys, having carried the leopards in chief only eight years two months and a half.'

The people of Sarlat often boast that their town never submitted to the English. In this matter, however, they are in error.

September came, and I was still at Beynac, although I had found another house. The fruit season was then at its height. Peaches were sold at three sous the dozen, a good melon cost about the same sum, and figs were to be had almost for nothing. On these terms quite a mountain of fruit could be placed upon the table for half a franc. There was often no necessity to run into this extravagance, for the people at Beynac are good-natured, and they would frequently send a basket of their earliest grapes or other fruit. Although the present might have been made by a woman with bare feet, her feelings would have been hurt had money been offered in return.

One day rather late in the month, having grown ashamed of inactivity, I carried my knapsack down to the river and put it into the Otter's smallest boat, which he called the _périssoire_, although it was not really a canoe. He was the chief builder of it, and as a contrivance for bringing home to man the solemn truth that life hangs to a thread or floats upon a plank--perhaps the worst state of the two--it certainly did him infinite credit. It was a flatbottomed outrigged deal boat, very long, and so narrow that to look over one's shoulder in it was a manoeuvre of extreme delicacy, especially where the rapids caused the water to be in wild commotion. I was told that it would go down stream like an arrow, and so it did. There was no need to row hard, for the current took the fragile skiff along with it so fast that the trees on the banks sped by as if they were running races, and every few minutes brought a change of landscape. It was very delightful; only one sensation of movement could have been better--that of flying.

The water was as blue as the sky above, and over the valley, the wooded hills, and naked rocks lay the sunshine of early autumn, tender in its strength, mingling a balm with its burning. I seemed to be floating swiftly but gently down some lovely but treacherous river of enchanted land. And where is the river that lends itself better to this illusion than the Dordogne--ever charming, changing, and luring like a capricious, fascinating, and rather wicked woman? Now it flows without a sound by the forest, where the imagination places the fairy people and the sylvan deities; now it roars in the shadow of the castle-crowned and savage rock, over which the solitary hawk circles and repeats its melancholy cry; now it seems to sleep like a blue lake in the midst of a broad, fair valley, where in the sunny fields the flocks feed drowsily.

The depth of the water was as variable as the strength of the current. Sometimes I saw the stony bed seven or ten feet below, and then quite suddenly the boat would get into rushing water that sparkled with crystal clearness over a bank of pebbles, and I expected momentarily to hear a grating noise and to feel myself aground; but the little boat went over the shallows like a leaf. I passed a bank large enough to be called an island. The water had not covered it for months, and it was all thickly overgrown with persicaria, which the late summer had stained a carmine red, so that the island was all aflame. The swallows that dipped their wings in the water, the kingfishers that flew along the banks or perched on the willow stumps, and the graceful wagtails, were for some miles my only river companions--excepting, of course, the fish, with which a treacherous current or a sunken rock might have placed me at any moment on terms of still closer intimacy.

But time flew like the boat, and I soon came in sight of a charming little village whose houses with peaked roofs seemed to have been piled one upon another. Here upon stones in the water I recognised the human form supported by two bare legs, and in the posture as of a person about to take a dive, which is not perhaps very graceful, but is one that certainly lends character to the riverside scenery of France. Two or three women were rinsing their linen.

On nearing St. Cyprien the current became swifter and the turmoil of the rapids so great that I prepared my mind here to being swamped by the waves. The question whether I would abandon or try to rescue my knapsack after the wreck was distressing. The risk being over, it was with a sigh of relief that I beached the boat, now half full of water, at the nearest spot to the small town. Having moored it and given the sculls in charge of a man whose house was close by, I was soon walking in the warm glow of the September afternoon by cottage gardens where the last flowers of summer were blooming.

The small burg of less than three thousand inhabitants which bears the name of the African saint was probably, like many others, much more important in the Middle Ages than it is now. In accordance with the building spirit of the past, so strongly pronounced throughout Aquitaine, and obviously inspired by a defensive motive, the houses are closely packed together on a steep hillside. A few ancient dwellings, notably one with a long exterior gallery, show themselves very picturesquely here and there. The town grew up at the foot of an abbey, of which the church still existing exhibits a massive tower that might easily be mistaken at a little distance for an early feudal keep. The lower part of this tower is Romanesque. The interior of the church is in the very simple pointed style of the twelfth century, but the interest has suffered much from restoration. What is chiefly remarkable here is the carved oak of the reredoses and pulpit.

The English in 1422 took the town of St. Cyprien and besieged the abbey, which was a veritable citadel where the inhabitants in the last resort found shelter. A French force coming, however, to the relief of the people, the English, who were probably not very numerous, deemed it prudent to retire.

There being still an hour or more of daylight, I continued the ascent of the hill above the houses and the solemn old church to find a certain Château de Pages, which I knew to be somewhere in the locality. A woman working her distaff and spindle with that meditative air which the rustic spinners so often have, her bare feet slowly and noiselessly moving over the rough stones, pointed out to me a little lane that wound up the deserted hill between briars bedecked with scarlet hips and bits of ancient wall to which ferns and moss and ivy clung, tinged by the waning golden light. I passed through vineyards from which the grapes had been gathered, then rose by broom and blackthorn to the level land.

I looked in vain for the castle. I might have searched for it until darkness came, but for the help of a boy who was taking home a goat. At length I found it lying in a hollow, a sufficient sign that it was never a stronghold. In feudal times it was probably a small castellated manor belonging perhaps to a knight who could not afford to build himself a _donjon_ on some eminence and to fortify it with walls; but centuries later what remained of the original structure was patched up and considerably enlarged. Now, as I saw it in the dusk, it seemed a very ghost-haunted place. The building had not fallen into ruin; it was still roofed, and might easily have been made habitable; but there was no glass in the windows; all the rooms were silent with that silence so deep and sad of the long-deserted house which is not sufficiently wrecked by time and decay to have lost the pathos of human associations. The breath of the dying twilight stirred the ivy leaves upon the wall of the detached chapel where never a person had prayed for many a year, and the goblin bats came out from the shadowy places to flutter against the pale sky. Then I felt that I had lingered long enough on this desolate spot, and the thought of the awaking hearths brightening the little town with the blaze of wood made me hasten through the heather and gorse that had grown up on the grave of many a vine.

The next morning saw me afloat again. As I was getting away from the shore a man called out to me: 'Your boat is worth nothing! If you try to pass the third bridge you will go to the bottom!'

He spoke very seriously, and I wished to take further counsel of him; but having once got into the current, it carried me off at such a rate that while I was thinking of putting a question I was taken out of speaking distance. I shot through one of the arches of the first bridge, and soon found myself in water that was a little rough for my poor skiff. Here were the rapids again. I had been warned against these before I left the inn. There was no turning back now, and if the commotion of water had been ever so great I should have had to take my chance in it. The Otter's advice when I came to rapids was to pull as hard as I could in the middle of the current. I followed it, and my shallow boat, which had just been described as worthless, darted into the midst of the turmoil, and went through it all as swift as a swallow on the wing. The river, however, had risen considerably during the night, and the strength of the current having much increased in consequence, my belief in the _périssoire's_ worthiness was not sufficient to make me run the risk of being swamped at the third bridge. I therefore landed at the next one, which was close to the village of Síorac. It seemed that I had only just started from St. Cyprien, and yet I had travelled about six miles. With the help of a willing man the boat was carried to the railway-station, which was not far off, and its journey home having been paid, I ceased for awhile to be a waterfarer, and became again a wayfarer.

Although there was not much to interest me at Siorac, I stayed there to lunch in a small inn, where an old woman grilled me a chop over the embers, and then set before me a pile of grapes, another of pears, and a third of fresh walnuts. The fruit was to me the best part of the meal, for the long hot summer had caused me to look upon meat very much as a necessary evil in the routine of life. While I was seated at the table, the old woman, who now dozed over her distaff in the chimneycorner, would start up every five minutes or so, as if from the beginning of a nightmare, and rush at the flies, which were ravenously busy upon the grapes and pears that I had set aside for them. She hated them with a hatred so fierce and bitter that I thought it rather unbecoming at her time of life.

'_On ne pent rien manger,_' she said, '_sans que ces diables y touchent._'

This was quite true; but it was not the flies' fault that their parents were prolific, and that they had been hatched in a climate eminently conducive to their vigour and happiness. Their numbers and their voracity showed that they, too, were compelled by the struggle for life to be active and enterprising. Unlike some beings of a higher order, they did not take this trouble sadly; but, then, they were Southern flies.

Having driven them from the table, the aged woman nodded her head with vindictive satisfaction, and murmured, '_C'est égal; elles vont bientôt crever_'--unmindful of the fact that she, too, had reached the season of life when the frost comes suddenly and catches people unawares.

I returned to the river and crossed the bridge. On one side of it was a high statue of the Madonna and Child, with these words on the pedestal: '_Protectrice du pont, priez pour nous._.' The inscription further stated that the statue was raised in remembrance of the flood of 1866. That was in the time of the Empire; nowadays the Government despises all heavenly assistance in the department of roads and bridges, and religious statues are no longer erected in such places. Just before reaching a village called Coux, I was confronted by a very large army of geese, and while the foremost row advanced to the attack with outstretched necks and bills laid near the ground, the others cheered them on. For a minute or so matters looked very serious; then goose and gander courage failed completely, until the army worked round to my rear, when the screams of defiance arose again.