Chapter 9

Poor wretches! their high spirits were not going to last long. They would soon have to undergo the cramming process, which a goose detests, for, unlike a pig, it will never of its own will eat more than it needs. In a few weeks the livers of most of them would be made into those excellent truffled _pâtés de foie gras_, which it is the pride and profit of Périgord to send far and wide.

A grand old elm, such as one does not often see in France, stood in front of the village church--a Transition building with a Romanesque portal. Beyond this place the land became marshy, and considerable tracts of it had been planted with Jerusalem artichokes, each of which had now its yellow head that tells its relationship to the sunflower. These artichokes are much grown by damp woodsides, and on other land of little value, in the valleys of Périgord. They are rarely used as food for man, for the French, notwithstanding the wide range of their gastronomy, including as it does squirrels and tomtits, and even snakes in certain localities, as well as various herbs and vegetables seldom or never eaten in England, have not been able to acquire a liking for the tubers of the artichoke. The plant is cultivated for feeding cattle, the whole of it doing good service in a region where there is but little grass. The multitude of golden flowers floating, as it were, on sombre green waves light up the autumnal landscape with a new flame when the skies turn gray.

A solitary man whom I found working a loom in a cottage by the side of the river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself--now under a gray sky--on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the gleam of a white flower upon the erect stem of a marsh-mallow. But what gave to this spot a strange and almost weird character was the number of great hoary willows, thirty or forty feet high, with gnarled and twisted boles, scattered over the dark green grass. It was a melancholy grove of fantastic dream-haunted willows, such as belongs to the South and the Virgilian muse:

'Umbrarum hic locus est, somni noctisque soporae.'

And the sad solitude, in which there was not a sound of moving leaf or singing bird, seemed to be peopled by the ghosts of men who were waiting and weeping out their hundred years on the Stygian shore.

Hoary willows, dark alders, and then the road. This led me to Le Buisson--a place possessed of the blue devils, and which exists merely out of compliment to the railway-junction here. Having made arrangements for returning to the inn, I wandered out again to look at the river in the gray evening, and at the bridge where it was predicted that I should go to the bottom if I remained in the little boat. I crossed fields from which tobacco and maize had lately been carried, and reached the bridge of evil prophecy. The river certainly seemed to be doing its best to sweep away the piers, and when it escaped from the arches it raised its voice to a roar; but it seemed to me that on one side the _périssoire_ would have gone through gaily without being swamped. The cry of troubled water in the dusk fascinated me. I lingered, and yet felt the strong impulse to hurry back to the society of men, out of the sound of the angry river, whose slaty waves flashed out strange gleams. What is it in the gloom and horror of nature that so draws us and yet warns us to flee? The day was ending stormily. The poplars wailed, and bent under the lash of the rising wind; dark masses of cloud stood still in the sky, whilst others, torn and scattered below them, rushed hither and thither madly. Every few minutes the faint gleam of lightning, still far off, brought to the black woods along the hills a momentary return of radiance, as though it were the fitful flashing of the day's dying lamp.

The roaring and wailing of the turbid flood now seemed to be repeating in cruel mockery the despairing cries of all the drowning people who were ever the prey of the water-fiends that draw downward in whirlpools to depths where twilight passes into darkness, and take the form of the long waving weeds that look so innocent, but whose grasp is deadly, or guide the current that utters never a sound as it seizes its victim and bears him into an unfathomed gulf under the pitiless rock. A voice within me cried 'Home!' but home had I none anywhere of the staple sort: mine was like a home on wheels.

As I returned to the inn across the fields, I saw some scattered peasant figures moving slowly the same way under the wild sky; men with the ox that was weary like themselves, women with bundles of forage on their heads--melancholy forms or phantoms in the dusky air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh.

In the morning I was on the road to Cadouin. The air was keen and a little frosty, for the hour was early. Men were mowing the last crop of grass, which was powdered with rime. After the meadows came the woods, for the road went south, and was therefore carried over the hills which rise above the valley of the Dordogne. The woods were mainly of chestnut, and, under the action of the storm, followed by the first frost, many a nut lay shining on the road within its gaping prickly shell. After two or three miles of ascent the road sloped downward, and it was not long before I entered a very neat and trim little town, which, however, was altogether village-like. This was Cadouin, and in the centre stood its venerable Romanesque church. I entered the building, which was silent and very dim; not a soul was there but myself. Presently there was a moan in the tower, which seemed so far away: the clock was striking one of the quarters. Now the dim light brightened suddenly, for the sun had risen high enough to dart its rays through a window, and to flash upon a column the brilliant colours of the glass. With the exception of the apse, which is purely Romanesque, the interior of this church is Gothic of the Transition; but most of the capitals of the pier-columns have a plain Romanesque outline. There is no clerestory, the light being admitted from small round-headed windows in the aisle walls. Much of the building dates from the foundation of the abbey of Cadouin, in the early part of the twelfth century; but the existing cloisters, which are what is most remarkable here, date from the fifteenth century, and owe much of their interest to the partial transformation of their style which they afterwards underwent when the spirit of the Renaissance set in. The Gothic tracery of the arches that face the quadrangle unites the strength of stone with the delicacy of pencil drawing. In the late Gothic and Renaissance part, the ceilings are richly and floridly groined, angelic and other figures forming the termination of the low-reaching bosses, the groins converging in fan-like order towards elaborately-carved canopies against the wall. At one end of this wing is a doorway, the jambs and lintels of which are heavily over-worked with carvings very typical of the exuberant fancy of the early French Renaissance.

For centuries Cadouin was a famous place of pilgrimage, in consequence of the claim laid by the abbey to the possession of the Holy Shroud. The following is the history of the celebrated relic, according to Jean Tarde:

'In the year 1100 Hugh, surnamed the Great, brother of the King of France, and Bishop of Le Puy, in Auvergne, having gone on a voyage beyond the seas with Godefrey de Bouillon, found means, after the taking of Jerusalem, to recover this holy relic, and, dying in Palestine, he left it in charge of a priest, his chaplain. The priest falling ill on board ship, and perceiving that his end was drawing near, gave the shroud into the hands of a clerk, a native of Périgord. He, after the death of his master, took a small barrel, in the middle of which he placed a partition. In one half he put the sacred sheet, and his drink in the other. In this manner he carried the relic back to his native land, and placed it in a church near Cadouin, of which he had charge. Fearing that someone might steal his treasure, he left it in the barrel, which he put away in a chest near the altar, showing it only to a few of the monks of Cadouin. But one day, while he was absent, fire broke out and gained the whole village. All that was in the church was consumed, excepting the chest that contained the barrel. The monks of Cadouin, informed of the fire, hastened to the spot, and, having broken open the chest, took away the barrel, and carried it to their own church. The clerk, on his return, asked for what had been taken from him; but the monks said that, inasmuch as they had risked their lives in saving it from the flames, it belonged to them. The difference was arranged in this wise: the clerk was received as a religious, and the keeping of the relic was entrusted to him during his lifetime. He himself thought it safer there than in a rural church.'

In 1392, when the country was distracted by the dynastic wars between the crowns of France and England, the Holy Shroud was taken for safety to Toulouse. Subsequently, the people of Périgord wished to have it replaced at Cadouin, and the Abbot and Chapter of St. Etienne at Toulouse resisting, much litigation ensued. In 1455 some monks of Cadouin took it away by stealth, and brought it back to their abbey. Tarde mentions, among other circumstances which tended to increase the importance of the abbey of Cadouin, '_les bienfaietz d'une reyne d'Angleterre_'.

Had it not been for other plans, I should have continued my journey southward from Cadouin as far as the Château de Biron, one of the most instructive relics of the past in Périgord, and have taken on my way Modières, one of the English _bastides_ which Edward I. farmed for ten years; but I made my way back to the Dordogne, with the intention of ascending the valley of its tributary the Vézère. I did not, however, return to Buisson, but took the road to Ales, which lies a little lower down the stream.

While I was recrossing the hills the sun warmed the world again, and led back the trembling summer which had been scared by the early morning's frost. The half-benumbed butterflies opened and shut their wings many times upon the bramble leaves before they could bring themselves to believe that that pinch of winter was only a joke. It seemed a cruel jest while the bloom of honeysuckle was upon the hedges.

At Ales--a mere group of houses round a little old church with a broad squat tower--I lunched in a very wretched inn. If a pig had not been killed at an early hour that morning I should have been obliged to be satisfied with vegetable and egg diet; and the knowledge that the pig had met with such bad luck only a few hours before did not dispose me in favour of the various dishes prepared from the external and internal parts of him. The _aubergiste_ was an old boatman of the Dordogne, who had steered many a cargo of wine floating with him down-stream in time of partial flood; but that was before the phylloxera had played havoc with the vines. Now he had to get along as well as he could by combining husbandry, pig-rearing, and innkeeping.

On reaching the river again, I perceived that the annual descent of the Auvergnats had commenced. All the people who live by the higher waters of the Dordogne, whether they belong to the Puy de Dôme, the Cantal, or the Corrèze, are called Auvergnats in Périgord, or, rather, such of them as come down the stream with their small barges laden with wood, when the autumnal rains have commenced, and there is sufficient water in the river for their purpose. Sometimes, in their anxiety to turn their wood into money, they start a little too early, and being misled by an increase of the current which is not maintained, they go aground after a few days' navigation. I have seen one of these boats stuck fast on a bank almost in mid-stream, with the rapids nearly breaking over it with a roar that could be heard a mile away. The wood is cut in the forests, which stretch almost without a break for many a league on both sides of the Upper Dordogne, and is seasoned, dressed, and shaped for barrel-making before it is put afloat. The boats, which are some thirty or forty feet long, are necessarily flat-bottomed, and are so roughly built that there are usually gaping spaces between the planks, which are caked with moss. They are good enough for the voyage, which is their first and last. The men return, but never the boats. These are sold as firewood at Libourne, when they have discharged their cargoes. Where the water is deep and comparatively quiet the speed is increased by rowing with very long oars; but where the current is strong the boat has only to be steered. This, however, is work that needs thorough knowledge of the river.

The autumn is a merry time for these Auvergnats. They look forward to it during the long months that they are working in the woods. The annual voyage to the Bordelais gives them an opportunity of again seeing the old friends whom they have been meeting for years at the waterside inns where they frequently put up at night, because the descent of the Dordogne in the dark is rather too exciting. They always say that they will start again in the morning at sunrise, but it often happens that the sun is very high indeed before they are afloat. After all, an Auvergnat is a man no less than another, and because he lives on next to nothing eleven months in the year is perhaps a reason why he should feel that he has earned the right to let his sentiments expand, and to light the lamp of conviviality in his breast during the remaining two or three weeks that he may be away from home.

There is this, however, to be said: whatever money he may possess, he trusts himself with very little when he goes off on his annual river-voyage, and when he has sold his wood he is anxious to get out of danger as quickly as possible.

I had to return some distance up-stream before I was able to cross to Limeuil. This is one of the most picturesque villages on the banks of the Dordogne. It is built on the side of an isolated rock, close to the point where the Vézère falls into the broader river. Before crossing the bridge I lingered awhile gazing at all those high-gabled roofs with red and lichen-stained tiles rising from the blue water towards the blue sky; vine trellises mingling their sunny green with the red of the roofs. Where no houses clung, the yellow rock was splashed with the now crimson sumach.

Then I climbed the long street over the rock and cobble stones between walls half green with pellitory, houses with high gables and rough wooden balconies where geraniums shone in the shadow, and from which the trailing plants hung low in that supreme luxuriance which is the beginning of their death. A few old women sat at their doors spinning, and geese, in small companies of three or four, waddled out of the way; but there was no sound of any kind--Limeuil was as silent as a cemetery. And yet there were cafés, which gave the place a false air of liveliness. Some tourists, attracted by the caverns in the valley of the Vézère, had possibly wandered as far as Limeuil; but where were the inhabitants now? Had there been an epidemic, and were the old women, whose heads were bent towards their knees while they clutched their distaffs, the few survivors?

Taking the road to Bugues, I passed a small church with an open belfry with a tiled roof supported by wooden pillars. It stood in a grove of tall cypresses and weeping willows, and the gravestones lay scattered round about. The waning sunshine seemed to fall more tenderly here than upon the open fields where the ruddy pumpkins flamed. It was nearly dark when I reached the little town of Bugues.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE VÉZÈRE.

The spring has come again, and I am now at Les Eyzies, in the valley of the Vézère: a paradise of exceptional richness to the scientific bone and flint grubber on account of the very marked predilection shown for it by the men of the Stone Age, polished and unpolished. It is about five in the morning, and the woods along the cliffs are just beginning to catch the pale fire of the rising sun. Just outside my open window are about twenty chickens in the charge of two mother hens, and as they have not been long awake, they do their utmost to make a noise in the world like other creatures that are empty. As soon as the neighbour's door is open they enter in a body, and march towards the kitchen. A female voice is heard to address something sharply to them in patois; there is a scuffle in the passage, and all the chickens scream together as they rush before the broom into the road. This is how the village day opens.

I am waiting for a man who has undertaken to show me some caverns in the neighbouring rocks. Meanwhile, another comes along, and makes mysterious signs to me from the road. He is barefoot and ragged, and does not look as if he had a taste for regular work, but rather as if he belonged to the somewhat numerous class who live by expedients, and have representatives in all ranks of society. He has a small sack in his hand, to which he points while he addresses me in patois. I tell him to come in. The sack contains crayfish, and now I know the reason of his mysterious air, for all fishing is prohibited at this time, and he is running the gauntlet of the _garde-pêche_, who lives close by. The poor ragamuffin has been out all night, wading in the streams, and his wife, who looks, if possible, more eager and hungry than himself, is waiting near, keeping watch. He offers his crayfish for three sous the dozen, and I buy them of him without feeling that respect for the law and the spawning season which I know I ought to have. But I have suffered a good deal from bad example. There was a _Procureur de la République_ not far from here the other day, and the first thing he asked for at the hotel was fish.

Presently the other man--the one I am waiting for--shows himself. He is a lean old soldier of the Empire, with a white moustache, kept short and stiff like a nailbrush. He is still active, and if he has any disease he is in happy ignorance of it; nevertheless, he confides to me that it is in the legs that he begins to feel his seventy-two years. His face has a very startling appearance. It is so scratched and torn that it makes me think of the man of the nursery-rhyme who jumped into the quickset-hedge; and, as it turns out, this one was just such another, only his movement was involuntary. He tells me how he came to be so disfigured. He was coming home with some cronies, at a late hour, from one of those Friendly Society meetings which in France, as in England, move the bottle as well as the soul, when, owing to an irregularity of the road, for which he was in no way to blame, he took an unintentional dive down a very steep bank, at the bottom of which was a dense forest of brambles. As he was quite unable to extricate himself, his companions, after a consultation, decided to haul him up by the legs; and it was to this manner of being rescued that he attributed most of the damage done to his ears.

We passed under the ruined castle of Les Eyzies, which was never very large, because the shelf of rock on which it was built would not have admitted of this; but when defended it must have been almost inaccessible. The ruin is very picturesque, with the overleaning rock above, and the clustered roofs below. The village is continued up the marshy valley of the Beüne, which here joins that of the Vézère. In the face of the overleaning rocks are orifices that strike the attention at once by their shape, which distinguishes them from natural caverns. They have been all fashioned like common doors or windows on the rectangular principle, which proves that they are the artificial openings of human dwellings. The men who made their homes in the side of the precipice, and who cut the rock to suit their needs, must have let themselves down from the top by means of a rope. To what age these Troglodytes belonged nobody knows, but it is not doubted that they came after the flint-working savages, whose implements are found in the natural caverns and shelters near the ground.

We continued up the valley of the Beüne. The banks under the rocks were starred with primroses, and from the rocks themselves there hung with cotoneaster the large and graceful white blossoms of that limestone-loving shrub, the amelanchier. In the centre of the valley stretched the marsh, flaming gold with flags and caltha, and dotted with white valerian. The green frogs leapt into the pools and runnels, burying themselves in the mud at the shock of a footstep; but the tadpoles sported recklessly in the sunny water, for as yet their legs as well as their troubles were to come. I confess that this long morass by the sparkling Beüne, frequented by the heron, the snipe, the water-hen, and other creatures that seek the solitude, interested me more than the caverns which I had set out to see. I nevertheless followed the old man into them, and tried to admire all that he showed me; but there was not a stalactite six inches long the end of which had not been knocked off with a stick or stone. The anger that one feels at such mutilation of the water's beautiful work destroys the pleasure that one would otherwise derive from these caves in the limestone.

A visit, however, to the now celebrated cavern known as the Grotte de Miremont repaid me for the trouble of reaching it. It lies a few miles to the north of Les Eyzies, in the midst of very wild and barren country. From any one of the heights the landscape on every side is seen to be composed of hills covered with dark forest and separated by narrow valleys. Here and there the white rock stands out from the enveloping woods of oak, ilex, and chestnut, or the arid slope shows its waste of stones, whose nakedness the dry lavender vainly tries to cover with a light mantle of blue-gray tufts. It is these sterile places which yield the best truffles of Périgord. Sometimes trained dogs are used to hunt for the cryptogams, but, as in the Quercy, the pig is much more frequently employed for the purpose. A comical and ungainly-looking beast this often is: bony and haggard, with a long limp tail and exaggerated ears. A collar round the neck adds to its grotesqueness.

One has to climb or descend a steep wooded hill to reach the cavern, for the entrance is on the side of it. The _métayer_ acts as guide, and his services are indispensable, for there are few subterranean labyrinths so extensive and so puzzling as this.