Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone - Angus B. Reach

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are in an undulating wooded district, you catch sections of it as it climbs each successive ridge; and you know that in the valleys it is just the same as on the hill tops. You see your dinner before you, as Englishmen say over roast mutton. You see your journey before you, as Frenchmen may say, over the slow trotting team. And how drear and deserted the country looks—open, desolate, and bare. Here and there a distant mite of a peasant or two bending over the sun-burnt clods. No cottages, but ever and anon a congregation of barns—the bourgs in which the small land-owners collect; now a witch of an old woman herding a cow; anon a solitary shepherd all in rags, knitting coarse stockings, and followed by a handful of sheep, long in the legs, low in the flesh, with thin dirty fleeces as ragged as their guardian's coat. Upon the road travellers are scanty. The bronzed Cantonier stares as you pass, his brass-lettered hat glittering in the glare. There go a couple of soldiers on furlough, tramping the dreary way to their native village, footsore, weary and slow, their hairy knapsacks galling their shoulders, and their tin canteens evidently empty. Another diligence, white with dust, meeting us. The conductors shout to each other, and the passengers crane their heads out of window. Then we overtake a whole caravan of roulage, or carriers, the well-loaded carts poised upon one pair of huge wheels, the horses, with their clumsy harness and high peaked collars, making a scant two miles an hour. Not an equipage of any pretension to be seen. No graceful phaeton, no slangy dog-cart, no cosey family carriage—only now and then a crawling local diligence, or M. le Curé on a shocking bad horse, or an indescribably dilapidated anomalous jingling appearance of a vague shandry-dan. And so on from dawn till sunset, through narrow streeted towns, with lanterns swinging above our heads, and open squares with scrubby lime trees, and white-washed cafés all around; and by a shabby municipality with gilded heads to the front railings, a dilapidated tricolor, and a short-legged, red-legged sentinel, not so tall as his firelock, keeping watch over it; and then, out into the open, fenceless, hedgeless country, and on upon the straight unflinching road, and through the long, long tunnels of eternal poplar trees, and by the cantonnier, and the melancholy bourgs, and the wandering soldiers, and the dusty carriers' carts as before.

      One thing strikes you forcibly in these little country towns—the marvellously small degree of distinction of rank amid the people. No neighbouring magnate rattles through the lonely streets in the well-known carriage of the Hall or the Grange, graciously receiving the ready homage of the townspeople. No retired man of business, or bustling land-agent, trots his smart gig and cob—no half-pay officer goes gossipping from house to house, or from shop to shop. There is no banker's lady to lead the local fashions—no doctor, setting off upon his well-worked nag for long country rounds—no assemblage, if it be market day, of stout full-fed farmers, lounging, booted and spurred, round the Red Lion or the Plough. Working men in blouses, women of the same rank in the peasant head-dress of the country, and here and there a nondescript personage in a cap and shooting jacket, who generally turns up at the scantily-attended table d'hôte at dinner time—such are the items which make up the mass of the visible population. You hardly see an individual who does not appear to have been born and bred upon the spot, and to have no ideas and no desires beyond it. Left entirely to themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull streets from generation to generation, and, though clustered together in a quasi town—perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of liberty, and billiard tables by the half-dozen—the population is as essentially rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except on rent-day, by either landlord or agent. It often happens that a large landed proprietor has not even a house upon his ground. He lets the land, receives his rent, and spends it in Paris or one of the large towns, leaving his tenants to go on cultivating the ground in the jog-trot style of their fathers and their grandfathers before them. The French, in fact, have no notion of what we understand by the life of a country gentleman. A proprietor may pay a sporting visit to his land when partridge and quail are to be shot; but as to taking up his abode au fond de ses terres, mingling in what we would call county business, looking after the proceedings of his tenants, becoming learned, in an amateur way, in things bucolic, in all the varieties of stock and all the qualities of scientific manures—a life, a character, and a social position of this sort, would be in vain sought for in the rural districts of France. There are not, in fact, two more differing meanings in the world than those attached to our "Country Life," and the French Vie de Chateau. The French proprietor is a Parisian out of Paris. He takes the rents, shoots the quails, and the clowns do the rest.

      An Englishman ought to feel at home in the south-west of France. That fair town, rising beyond the yellow Garonne, was for three hundred years and more an English capital. Who built these gloriously fretted Gothic towers, rising high into the air, and sentinelled by so many minor steeples? Why Englishmen! These towers rise above the Cathedral of St. Andrew, and in the Abbey of St. Andrew the Black Prince held high court, and there, after Poitiers, the captive King of France revelled with his conqueror, with the best face he might. There our Richard the Second was born. There the doughty Earl of Derby, long the English seneschal of Bordeaux, with his retinue, "amused themselves," as gloriously gossipping old Froissart tells, "with the citizens and their wives;" and from thence Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, went forth, being eighty-six years of age, mounted upon a little palfrey, to encounter the Duke of Anjou, in those latter days when our continental dominions were shrinking, as we deserved that they should shrink, after the brutal murder of the glorious Maid of Domrémy. It is true that we are at this moment in the department of the Dordogne, and that when we cross the river we shall be in that of the Gironde. But we Englishmen love the ancient provinces better than the modern departments, which we are generally as bad at recognising, as we are in finding out dates by Thermidors and Brumaires. No, no, departments may do for Frenchmen, but to an Englishman the rich land we are crossing will ever be Guienne, the "Fair Dutchy," and part and parcel of old Aquitane, the dowry of Eleanor, when she wedded our second Henry.

      Is it not strange to think of those old times, in which the English were loved in the Bourdelois—fine old name—and the French were hated, in which the Gascon feudal chiefs around protested that they were the "natural born subjects of England, which was so kind to them?" Let us turn to Froissart:—The Duke of Anjou having captured four Gascon knights, forced them, nolens volens, to take the oath of allegiance to the King of France, and then turned them about their business. The knights went straight to Bordeaux, and presented themselves before the seneschal of the Landes, and the mayor of the city, saying, "Gentlemen, we will truly tell you that before we took the oath, we reserved in our hearts our faith to our natural lord, the king of England, and for anything we have said or done, we never will become Frenchmen." Our gallant forefathers appear on the whole, to have led a joyous life in Guienne. In truth, their days and nights were devoted very much to feasting themselves, and plundering their neighbours: two pursuits into which their Gascon friends entered with heart and soul. It is quite delightful to read in Froissart, or Enguerrand de Monstrelet, how "twelve knights went forth in search of adventures," an announcement which may be fairly translated, into how a dozen of gentlemen with indistinct notions of meum and tuum, went forth to lay their chivalrous hands upon anything they could come across. Of course these trips were made into the French territory, and really they appear to have been conducted with no small degree of politeness on either side, when the English "harried" Limousin, or the French rode a foray into Guienne. The chivalrous feeling was strong on both sides, and we often read how such-and-such a French and English knight or squire did courteous battle with each other; the fight being held in honour of the fair ladies of the respective champions. Thus, not in Guienne, but in Touraine, when the English and the Gascons beleaguered a French town, heralds came forth upon the walls and made this proclamation:—"Is there any among you gentlemen, who for love of his lady is willing to try some feat of arms? If there be any such, here is Gauvin Micaille, a squire of the Beauce, quite ready to sally forth, completely armed and mounted, to tilt three courses with the lance, give three blows with the battle-axe, and three strokes with the dagger. Now look you, English, if there be none among you in love." The challenge was duly accepted. Each combatant wounded the other, and the Earl of Shrewsbury sent to the squire of Beauce his compliments, and a hundred francs. This last present takes somewhat away from the Amadis de Gaul, and Palmerin of England vein; but the student of the old chroniclers, particularly of the English in France, will be astonished to find how long the chivalric feeling and ceremonials co-existed with constant habits of plundering and unprovoked forays.

      Another

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