II
From early June to Michaelmas our valley and half our hills are deep in flowering hay, or busy with haymaking, or studded with haycocks. As a poet says, with whom I hope to acquaint my readers—
“Noun! jusqu’ ohuéi digun n’o pas enbentat res
Coumo oquelo sentour des prats seguats de frès
Que porfumo, l’estiou, l’Oubergno tout entièiro!”
No one has ever invented anything like the smell of the new-mown hayfields, which, in summer, perfumes the whole of Auvergne! Hay is our wealth, and—when it has suffered a transmutation into cheese and cattle—our only export and exchange with the valleys below. It is in order that we may grow our hay all summer for the winter’s needs, that our cattle are sent in troops to feed on the mountain-tops, leaving behind only the draught-oxen and the cows for milking. We need plenty of hay, for, in the stables during the five months of snow that follow All Saints, you may roughly calculate four cartloads of it to every cow. On the higher slopes, we cut it once in July and again in September; while June, August, Michaelmas, and early October are haymaking time for the water-meadows in the bottoms, which yield four crops a year.
So, the summer long, the hay is out on hill or valley, and at night the cattle pull through the narrow roads the primitive hay-wains—two mighty ladders set a tilt on a plank above two wheels. After the wains, the herds come tramping. I love to watch them, and pass an hour most evenings seated upon our garden wall—a low stone bench above the orchard, which drops on the other side some thirty feet to the rocky lane below. Here come the cows, a score at most (for half a hundred of the herd are on the mountain), beautiful kine of Salers, small and neatly made, of a bright deep-red colour all over, all alike, with thick curly coats and branching horns above their deer-like heads. They are herded by a tiny cow-boy of seven; a few black goats loiter in the rear. The finely toned bells tinkle faintly across the silence. The beasts low as they pass the open door of the huge two-storied barn, into which a cow and an ox, yoked together, are backing a great toppling wain of hay. Old Gaffer Langeac, the farmer’s father, has come out to view the crop. He is five and eighty, and, being past work, he wears out all the week his long-treasured Sunday garments—a sleeved waistcoat of black cloth, the full sleeves buttoned into a tight wristband, a white shirt of coarse hemp-linen, and dark trousers of thick homespun rase or frieze. His blue eyes, still bright, and his straggling white locks gleam under a huge soft sombrero of black felt. He is a fine old fellow—but is not this the very valley of green old age? An ancient goatherdess comes down the lane, twirling the distaff set with coarse grey hemp, as she follows her flock; and as she stops to pass the time of day with her neighbour, her youngest grandchild runs out to meet her from the red-gabled cottage by the village bakehouse. The cows low to the calves in the byre; the kid in the orchard springs to its mother; the brown long-tailed sheep follow the shepherd. One handsome haymaker leans against the wall and whispers soft nothings in the ear of Annotou, the blonde little maid at the farm. A scent of cabbage-soup and hot buckwheat comes up from the cottage kitchens. ’Tis the hour of rest and general home-coming, not greatly changed since Sappho of old used to watch it in her Ionian isle—
Έσπέρε, πάντα φέρεις ὅσα φαιυόλις ἐσκέδασ’ Αὐὼς,
ϕέρεις οἶν, φέρεις αἶγα, φέρεις ματέρι παῖδα.
There are empty places to-night at the vast table in Langeac’s kitchen; for the Vacher, or chief cowherd and dairy-master, with two bouviers, or cowboys, and a little lad, the pâtre (whose business is to watch the cattle that pasture on the moor), are up on the mountain with some fifty cows, half as many young calves, a young bull or two, a score of swine to fatten on the buttermilk, and some dozen goats. At the end of May, one mild afternoon, the troop set out from the valley under the farmer’s care and marched the whole night through, till the next day, in the morning, they reached the mountain farm, some thirty miles away. Every farm in our valley has thus its Sennenhütte, sometimes quite near at hand, sometimes at a considerable distance. Langeac, the farmer, rode back on the morrow; but every fortnight he repeats the journey, to inspect his herds, and to count the increasing number of the cheeses. Often we meet him on the mountain roads; he sits astride a solid roan cob, a grey linen blouse on his shoulders; a sack half-filled swings on either side his saddle, in which he carries a store of blackbread, fresh cabbage, news and letters (with sometimes an old newspaper or so) to the exiles who, all summer long, see neither rose nor fruit, nor face of wife or child, on the great green pasture of the mountain-top.
While the herds are afar, we are busy in the valleys, where the recent advent of the railroad has little changed the ancestral mode of life. The farm grows almost all the necessaries of our table. Our soil is too poor for wheat, but rye and buckwheat flourish on the mountain-sides; whole slopes and ledges, too dry for hay, are a garden of tall, crisp, white flowers, where the buckwheat (sarrazin) waves through August until mid-September. A little before Michaelmas the flowers die, the seed turns gradually black, the stems coral-red; and then the farm-hands come and reap the harvest, bringing great sheets of linen, which they spread in the field, and thrash thereon the grain with high-dancing flails. Ground into meal, the buckwheat yields the staple of our diet; the bourriol—a large, thin, soft, round crumpet, which, eaten hot with butter, or cold with clotted cream, or a nugget of cheese, or dipped in new milk, is not to be despised. Every morning, the housewife’s earliest care is to fill the pail of bourriols which stands in every kitchen; next she warms the milk until the cream clots and rises. Besides the buckwheat, we grow oats for the cattle and rye for bread and straw. The rye-bread, very black, at once sweet and sour (which makes, to my thinking, the most delicious bread and butter in the world), is shaved into large thin slices in the two-handled porringers, or écuelles, “pour tremper la soupe.” Four times a day, and five at midsummer, the farm-hands gather in Madame Langeac’s kitchen and take their bowl of cabbage-soup, where the bacon, potatoes, black bread and cabbage make a mess so thick that the spoon stands up in it; they eat also a crumpet of buckwheat, and a noggin of Cantal cheese; and often a dish of curds and whey, when a cheese is in progress; a sausage if the pig has been lately killed; a fry of mushrooms in September; a tart of wild-cherries in July; or carrots sliced and fried with snippets of bacon; sometimes a queer stew of potatoes and curds called truffado; or some other homely treat which, at mid-day, serves to mark the importance of dinner, always washed down with a glass of the strong bluish-red wine they call Limousin, brought from the neighbouring departments of the Lot and the Corrèze. Fine brawny men and buxom maids, who work hard and live long, are grown upon this sober fare. With their open expression, frank brown eyes, upturned noses, abundant hair and vigorous frames, the Auvergnats, so ridiculed in France (“ni hommes, ni femmes, tous Auvergnats,” as Daumier’s legend has it), would be, if but a shade or so less dirty, a wholly pleasant-looking race, obviously Celtic, kind, frank, genial, and free.
The Auvergnat has some of the characters of the Yorkshireman. He is jovial, independent, frank, and shrewd. No man is keener at a bargain, and neither Greek, Jew, nor Armenian ever got the better of him; yet he is not sordid, as, for instance, the peasants of Maupassant’s Normandy are sordid. The broken old grandfather, long past work, is here surrounded with every care and attention; the doctor is sent for when he ails; medicine, wine, and broth are his in plenty; those terrible stories of the old and useless who are left to starve, when they can no longer take their share in the work of the fields, could never have been told of the poorest among our uplands. Notwithstanding his overweening love of money, there is something simple, candid, and kind, which mellows the heart of the child of Auvergne. His naïveté is legendary, and forms the subject of a hundred stories and farces, ever since the days of the Queen of Navarre. I will give none of them here, being anxious in this little book to set down chiefly the things I have seen for myself, or which have come under my own knowledge. But here is an example in point. A cousin of my husband’s, whose country place is about fifteen miles from Aurillac, prefers spending her winters in town, and has hired for this purpose the top floor of a friend’s house. One December morning, the farmer of La Romiguière, her small estate, brought her in to town a cart-load of wood for fuel. As he was going upstairs he met an old gentleman in a smoking-cap and plaid dressing-gown—in point of fact, the landlord. A minute later the farmer was in my cousin’s lobby, very red and flustered.
“I fear, madam, my manners have not been all they ought!”
“Your manners!” said my cousin, astounded.
“Yes, ma’am. On the stairs I met a foreign priest, and I just bowed. It comes over me that I ought to have fallen on my knees, and perhaps kissed his ring.”
“A foreign priest!” cried my cousin, more and more bewildered.
“Yes, madam, with a gold thing round his head, most beautiful, and a gown all over checks—uno raubo touto corrolado. Certainly, I ought to have dropped on my knees!”
This naïveté does not exclude a shrewd and kindly humour, which is, in fact, a sort of glorified good sense. One of the members of my husband’s family was a nun in the Convent of Aurillac—a recluse—who was, however, permitted to spend a few weeks every summer at her mother’s country place. One day she was walking there with the old lady, when they met the farmer driving his harrow.
“Good morning, farmer,” says she. “Is that an ox or a cow?”
“It’s a cow, madam.”
“And how do you know the difference?”
The farmer hesitated an instant, and then, with an indescribable look of roguish respect, he answered the nun—
“By the horns, madam!”
I give the little dialogue in patois, in case my book should stray into the hands of a philologist.
“Oquel es un biòu o uno baco, Bouriaïré?”
“Co’s (oco es), uno baco.”
“Cossì lou counessès?”
“Ò los couornos, Modomo!”
Another farmer of our acquaintance answered an amateur agriculturist (it was not I!), who advised him to irrigate a particularly arid hayfield, “I’ll put the water-course, if you’ll find the water!” (Ièu forai lou truel se me fosès benì l’aigo.)
These genial and kindly peasants live in farms roomy and solid, built of blocks of grey volcanic stone; the steep roof has several tiers of windows; one would suppose it from outside a comfortable home. But in name and in fact the attics are granaries, and all the household crowd together in one or two rooms on the ground-floor. A huge chimney, with a hospitable mantle, shelters a couple of comfortable salt-box settles, reserved for the old; one stands on either side the cavernous hearth, where, winter or summer, smoulders the half-trunk of a tree; a tall grandfather’s clock by the dresser, is bright with painted earthenware dishes and pewter tankards; the best bed, high as a catafalque, stands, warmly curtained, in the corner under the stairs; a linen cupboard of walnut or cherry-wood, a huge massive table of unstained oak, flanked by two benches, a straw-bottomed chair or so, a few rough stools: such is the furniture of a kitchen in our parts, seldom clean. Here all the cooking is done, and the eating; here the other day I saw, in a box-bed, like a ship’s berth, built into the wall, a young mother and her baby one day old, perfectly happy, while the farm-hands lunched at the table, and the fowls strolled in and out; here the masters sleep, in sickness and health; here visitors are received and farm-hands paid—it is, as they say in Yorkshire, the house-place. With its one window, its floor of dark unsmoothed volcanic stone (swept every day, but rarely washed), with its ceiling hung with herbs and sausages and huge sides of bacon, it is a warm and homely refuge, but not, as a rule, a bright or a pleasant place.
Sometimes I think the beasts have the best of it. The barns here are as large as churches. Built against the side of the mountain, they have two entrances, each on the level of the ground: the higher story forms the barn, the lower the byre. I have sometimes counted as many as twenty windows, set some two metres apart, along one side of those huge stone structures. Here from mid-November till mid-May the cattle live under cover, chew the cud and see in memory, no doubt, the meadows hard by with their delicious grass and the aromatic pastures on the mountain-top. Here in February and March the calves are born. Nothing is quainter than to see their wild delight, their leaps, their bounds, their joy, their tearing races, their frantic gambols,
when, for the first time in their lives, they come forth into the green fields and balmy air of May.
The pigsties, airy, spacious, comfortable, form a long line near the farm. The swine, too, are kept close in winter, but in summer they roam all over the hillsides and munch the grass like sheep. The pigs here are, I think, the ugliest and perhaps the wittiest in the world—great long-backed, long-legged creatures, far larger than a sheep. They climb the rocky fells, scamper down the smooth sides of the combes, trot all night after the herds to the mountain farm in summer, are hardy, inquisitive, and sociable, beyond belief. With their coal-black heads and pink, naked bodies, my sister says they remind her of the famous Dame au Masque. But they have no shame of their ugliness, and, when they hear a friendly voice on the other side the hedge, come trooping down from the top of the field to pass the time of day, with all the ease and assurance of an honoured acquaintance. A natural humour enlivens their indecent countenance—for, in France, a cochon is always indecent, and Madame Langeac, when she speaks to her social superiors, seldom forgets to call the pigs “les habillés de soie.” (One day I asked her the destination of a cool, stone-floored room: “Sauf votre respect, madame,” she replied, “elle sert pour saler les habillés de soie.”) Clad in silk or clad in bristles (the two words are the same in French), at least during their lifetime our wide-wandering mountain-swine have a good time of their own; and, though it is natural in humans to esteem them chiefly in their ulterior form of ham, I believe we should miss them from the landscape. We have a proverb in our parts which says of a pair of friends that they are “Camarades comme cochons”—or sochons, as we say in Auvergne. In vain, a learned professor of Clermont has sought to explain away the unseemly word as a corruption of the Latin socius. Why should we say, “Camarades comme socius?” There’s no meaning in it. Glance at the hills, my good Don, and see the friendly creatures ambling about, in pairs or little troops, knocking their heads together, grunting out their gossip or their confidences, complaining about that last dish at dinner, grazing and grunting over all the green volcanoes of Auvergne, and then you may hope to understand the people’s wit.
But listen! What unearthly noise is that which rises at this very moment from the farm? No pigsticking, for we are in summer still. There goes Madame Langeac, followed by her two maids and a small boy; each of them holds high a copper saucepan, warming-pan, or kettle (serving as a cymbal), on which she clatters with a key or fork. The three dogs and old Gaffer Langeac look on and grin. Slowly in calm procession they move down the lane till they reach the old walnut-tree in the field beneath our wall. And now I see a sort of fruit on a bough of the tree, like a black hanging pear or melon. It is a swarm of bees. From field to field, its owners have followed it with this infernal symphony, which serves, as they suppose, to attract the bees, or in any case to advertise the owner of the land on which they settle, whose property they are. See, a woman brings the hive. To-morrow, the swarm will be busy in its straw-clad home on the sunny bench beneath the south-east wall. And the bees will take rank as friends. On feast-days the children will deck their hive with flowers or coloured ribbons; a bow of crape will be tied to it in times of mourning. So, deeming themselves beloved and associate, the bees will work and supply their masters with the sweet, dark honey of Auvergne, so pungently perfumed, so luscious and aromatic, filled with the scent of the heather and the savour of the sarrazin.