III
Despite this direful vengeance at the end of it, the Jacquerie had left the French peasant conscious of his force. He had learned that nobles are mortal men and can perish by fire, scythe-cut, or blow of club as certainly as Jacques himself. Henceforth, let them respect his women and his horned cattle! Jacques Bonhomme is, on the whole, a patient fellow. Let the nobles do their duty, and keep their hands off his wife, his daughter and his herds, and it is astounding what he will submit to: exactions growing year by year, and corvées such as a decadent fancy may invent. He will beat the moats all night when my lady is lying in, lest the croaking of the frogs disturb her delicate slumbers. Only let my lord keep to his part of the bargain, and respect Jacques Bonhomme’s womankind and those two white oxen in his stall, those—
“Deux grands bœufs blancs marqués de roux,”
which (as Pierre Dupont, who knew him well, declares) the French peasant, although no bad husband, still holds a little dearer than his wife. The murders recorded in the Lettres de Rémission, as committed by the labourer upon the persons of his betters, are nearly always caused by rape or cattle raids. On such occasions these “misérables personnes et gens de labeur” have ever shown themselves capable of a desperate courage; on such occasions the “croquant” does not fear to raise his club of greenwood, and dust the embroidered jacket of his liege lord, even to risk of that noble life and damage of those seigneurial limbs, as it happened to François Rabault, Seigneur d’Ivay. Sometimes, more legally, he appeals to the justice of my Lord Governor of the province, drawing down condign punishment on the head of the noble offender; indeed, the ravisher of at least one village beauty was condemned to death by the Courts of Bordeaux. More than once, for such reasons, some Lovelace of a country gentleman has had his manor sacked or even burned; as may be seen in the vast manuscript treasure of the Lettres de Rémission; in those printed by the care of M. Douët d’Arcq; and in a new and charming volume: “Gentilhommes Campagnards de l’Ancienne France,” by M. Pierre de Vaissière.
The village Hampden flourishes in France, where Jacques has always had a keen sense of his rights. Ever since the Romans bent their stubborn shoulders, still unwilling, beneath the yoke, this same independent race of hardy crofters has never ceased to dream—if not of liberty, in the magnificent, imaginative, political sense—at least of freedom, of standing up in one’s own plot of ground (though not in one’s province) master of one’s fate. Centuries before the French Revolution, the first dim forebodings of it were already taking shape in the slow brains of these Croquants, Pastoreaux, Jacques, or Gauthiers. From the sands of Sologne or the plains of Brie, but more especially from the Celtic mountains of the Morvan and Auvergne, ever and anon they would rush in eruption, like an old volcanic force still untamed, destroying the superficial civilization of the aristocratic world. But more often the volcano slept in peace. The peasant asked for little here below.
On the whole, we may say that, from the end of the Hundred Years’ War till the middle of the sixteenth century, the peasant lived on excellent terms with his masters, fairly prosperous and passably content. The nobles of those times dwelt in their villages, dealing “basse et moyenne justice,” punishing petty offences, redressing minor wrongs, settling the quarrels of neighbours, sending a good soup to the sick, relieving the necessitous, cultivating their own lands, not themselves too far removed from the humble interests of the soil, and yet, none the less, examples of a broader life, an ampler culture to the poor at their gates. Even so in his manor dwelt Michel Eyquem, Lord of Montaigne; and if the ordinary country gentleman was more often as simple of spirit as noble of birth, and sometimes even brutal and violent, he appears on the whole to have been a fairly good landlord. Foreign visitors to France marvel at his attachment to the soil. “The nobles in France,” writes Soranzo, the Venetian ambassador in 1558,—“and this style of ‘noble’ comprises alike the gentry and the prince—do not dwell in the large towns, but in their villages, where their castles stand.”
Living on their lands and reaping the profit of them, the French gentry and their peasants under them became notable husbandmen. The end of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries saw endless forests reclaimed, marshes drained, and fields of wheat flourishing in place of the scrub oak and the rush. Claude de Seyssel estimates the land under cultivation, during the reign of Louis XII., at one-third of the kingdom; and, in 1565, J. Bodin writes: “Depuis cent ans on a défrichi un infini de forêts et de landes.” Peace reigned abroad, activity at home, masters and men were animated by the same interests; if one of our country gentlemen goes to war or to Court, be sure his letters will be full, not of details of the king’s glory, but rather of instructions to those at home that they forget not to gather the stones from the fields, hoe the barley, turn the hay, weed the kitchen garden, prune the trees, shear the sheep, and steep the hemp. And, as soon as possible, he rides home again, his head already full of the price he must pay his harvesters, of the coming cattle-fair, the building of the new barn by the five-acre field, and the salting of the pork he is wont to despatch for sale to a certain worthy Thomas Quatorze, in Paris. As yet the landed gentry and the peasants have the same interests and preoccupations.
The blot on the landscape is the excess of feudal rights. Even by the first years of the sixteenth century these had become excessive, and astounded the wisest traveller of that age. What does Erasmus say in his Adages?
“Open your purse and pay, for you enter a port; pay, for you cross a bridge; pay, for you need the ferry-boat. And what is the reason of all these taxes which pare down the poor man’s crust? There’s a tax for the carrying of the harvest, a tax when the corn goes to the mill, a tax on the baking of bread. Give half your vintage to my Lord for the right of putting the other half in cask. There’s no selling a colt or an ass without settling the rights of the fisc.” Erasmus, not given to mincing matters, calls the great nobles a set of disgraceful harpies, harpiis istis scelaratissimis.” And yet, despite the truth and blackness of this picture, owing to the force of a similar life and habits, owing also to a kindly social instinct in the race, the French country gentleman—and even the great noble—was a prosperous, honourable, and useful member of society, so long as he lived on his lands and served the State, within the boundaries of his own parish, as captain of militia and justice of the peace. He began to degenerate when the king, jealous of the authority of the landed gentry, invented a regular army, which soon usurped the place of the feudal volunteers; and established a regular magistrature, in which the country squire had neither part nor lot. Unaccustomed to his enforced idleness, he found provincial life intolerably dull, and soon began to sell a farm or two, and set out for Versailles. Quite early in the seventeenth century the rural exodus has begun, and the country cousins come trooping to Fontainebleau and Versailles from their deserted villages. The court, the army attract these noble sons of the soil as a candle the moth. The highly centralized government of the Kings Louis—XIII., XIV., XV., and XVI., of the name—draws to the court all the resources of France, and disposes at Versailles of all advancement and favour. St. Simon goes so far as to accuse the king of augmenting the splendour of his court with a view to sapping the independence of his nobles: “La cour devient un manège de la politique du despotisme—le roi vent épuiser tout le monde et le réduire peu à peu a dépendre entièrement de ses bienfaits.” So the old manors were forgotten; an agent took the rent that paid for the laced coats at court; the fields became marsh and forest again, and my lord thought no longer of shearing his sheep and hoeing his corn, but of serving his majesty in the army, or in the palace of Versailles. For here also—
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
And no man in the kingdom was so unenviable as that honest country gentleman, faithful to his father’s fields, of whom, on mention of his name, the king would say, with cold disapproval: “Je ne le vois jamais.” In this connection, it is instructive to read the memoirs of that martinet of courtiers, St. Simon, and the letters of Madame de Sévigné (that admirable country squire), who wrote to her daughter: “J’aime mieux parfois lire un compte de fermier que les Contes de La Fontaine.”
Absolute monarchy was the ruin of the French peasant; or at least it was his moral ruin; for the absence of his lord, while depriving him of his one glimpse into a world a little larger than his own, was sometimes incidentally the occasion of enlarging Jacques Bonhomme’s narrow field. My lord spent a terrible deal at Versailles. Dress, play, an outfit for the wars, soon ran away with the income of parental inheritance. Often enough the agent had to sell (and pretty much for what it would fetch) a strip of meadow here, a spinney there. Now, while my lord was always spending, the peasant, on the other hand, was in a peculiarly favourable position for saving. Money scarcely ever left his horny grasp. He paid his rent chiefly in kind, stock, corvées, and quit-rents of one sort or another; but he sold his cattle and crops for coin, at the fair, and put the treasured sols and livres in some safe place behind the rafter or beneath the hearthstone. The corvée was the making of the peasant: pure profit, as he thought, since he only paid in sweat and sinew, instead of lessening his hoard of secret silver. He mowed his lord’s meadows, mended his roads, carried his grist, and wood, and fodder, lent his cart and horse for transport, worked on the estate so many days a month with nary a penny of wage, was harassed, hampered, overworked, if you like; but the corvée was a form of rent, and the form his soul preferred. In exchange he had his cot and his fields, the right to fatten his porkers in the oakwood, the right to pasture his cow on the grassy edges of the lane, the right of gleaning his master’s corn in the fields, his faggots in the forest, and also the dried beech-leaves which stuffed his bed, and foddered his kine. Every corvée brought him in some specific advantage; so that, while his masters were running a break-neck race to ruin at Court, Jacques Bonhomme was buying, out of their parental acres, here a strip of rye and there a cabbage-patch: inconsiderable snippets of land scattered here and there, up and down the country-side, presenting no importance to the eye, but representing a small estate increasing with every generation. Jacques’ grandson may be Georges Dandin, even as the great-grandsire of my Lord, perhaps, may have been the wealthy boor of the “Lai de l’Oiselet.” The seventeenth century has little but mockery for the peasant-parvenu who marries the squire’s daughter, yet their son, ennobled by the mother’s gentlehood (for there are many houses où le ventre anoblit), may carry arms and be a gentleman. Even without this maternal warrant, there are short cuts to rank; for the snob is of no generation or society, but pan-endemic, so to speak, in all highly civilized centres. Does not Madame de Sévigné paint for us a certain little Lord “who is all honey, especially to dukes and peers”? Does not Molière show us his Arnolphe, who ennobles himself with scant ado and calls himself M. de la Souche?
“Et d’un vieux tronc pourri de votre métairie
Vous faites dans le monde un nom de seigneurie.
. . . . . .
Je sais un paysan qu’on appelait Gros-Pierre,
Qui, n’ayant pour tout bien qu’un seul quartier de terre,
Y fit tout à l’entour faire un fossé bourbeux
Et de Monsieur de l’Isle en prit le nom pompeux.”