IV
Yesterday, we drove to the buron on the mountain. Buron is a local word, which we fondly believe to be derived from the Greek, a relic perhaps of antique settlers, in the south, near Marseilles; however this may be, it is not patois: in our dialect, we call the buron, lou mosut—“the little house.” Has not Vermenouze sung the little red-tiled hut, on the summit of the mountain, “like a young cock, red and small, reared up there in his glory, in the middle of the blue sky.”
“Lou mosut, coumo un golitchiou
Quilhat omoun, rougi e pitchiou,
Ol mièt dèl cieu blus, dins lo glorio.”
However we may call it, a buron expresses a little lonely habitation on the mountain, almost a hut, where the neatherds sleep in summer, and where the cheese is made, day after day, from the end of May till mid-October. It is a long climb from Olmet to the plateau whereon these little cheese-farms multiply and prosper. The road, in steep zigzags, mounts the hill; we leave the pasture behind us, and the fields of flowering buckwheat, and even the high heathery ridge of the Pas du Luc; we enter the hanging beechwoods and crawl up the wall of the cliff, until lo! we emerge on a great sea of undulating pasture-land, apparently illimited, save here and there by a grey mountain peak. The foreground is studded with tiny red-roofed burons, each shaded by its group of centenary limes.
“L’erbo[1] que pousso eici, pès puèts è sus plotèu
N’es pas coumo en obal, e pus rudo e pus sono,
E sent bon; li troubai l’ourgulhouso cinsono,
Que despleguo soi flours jiaunos coumo un dropéu.”
Do you understand?
“The grass that grows up here, on the puys and the plateau,
Is not like that below, it is rougher and more wholesome:
It smells good; there you find the proud gentian
Who displays her yellow flowers like a banner.”
It was after four when we at last reached the buron. The cows had come in from the moor to the fold. The milkmen had donned their blouses of grey hemp-linen, which hung in stiff hieratic folds. Each had, tied to his loins, a queer stumpy stool, like some odd sort of bustle. Now they call: “Frijado! Morgorido! Marquise!” Amid a silvery tinkle of cow-bells the beautiful red beasts approach. As each takes her stand, a cow-herd brings up to her a curly red calf. But the poor beastie has scarce pulled a throatful or so of its mother’s milk (its mother or its foster-mother, for at the buron each calf has a mother and a nurse) when a strong arm pulls it away and holds it tightly until the pail is full, when it may resume its supper, while the cow caresses it with a loving maternal tongue. All round the fold the beasts are being milked, the calves are bleating or sucking, the herdsmen are busy. Only in the middle, impassible and haughty, sits the bull, with a look that seems to say: “All this has nothing to do with me. Let them settle it among themselves.”
Now the cattle will remain all night in the fold, unsheltered. Every morning three sides of the palisade are displaced, so that the cows never sleep twice in the same bed; and in this primitive fashion, at the end of the summer, the whole pasture has been manured: it is called the fumado. After the milking time at dawn the cattle are set free, and all day long they pasture in the aigado, or marshy moor, where the gentian, the pink, the meadowsweet and larkspur grow among the rush and the broom, the bilberry and heather. Here the grass is scantier, but sweet and aromatic. To the quantity of wild thyme and savoury herbs in the aigado, the peasants attribute the wholesome flavour of the Cantal cheese.
A mountain farm often boasts in summer some three score to a hundred head of cattle, besides the pigs to fatten, and the goats, from whose milk is made a delicate little round cream-cheese, the cabecou. The herd is under the care of a responsible dairyman, aided by two or three bouviers, or cowboys, and at least one little cowherd. It is wonderful to see how mere a hut suffices to house them all. The cattle sleep in the open, save the youngest calves, who have a little byre all to themselves. The men sleep in a rough attic under the sloping roof of the hut, whose one downstair room serves to make the cheese. Cheese-making is the great trade of our parts, for here the cheese is the gentleman who pays the rent (le fromage paie le fermage), say our farmers. Push open the door under the lime-trees. You enter a moderate-sized room which occupies the whole ground floor, paved with rough volcanic stone, dark grey, and slopped with whey. In one corner stands a primitive open fireplace, with a pan or two and a cauldron for the herdsmen’s soup; close to it are placed a rough table and a bench. The rest of the space is devoted to cheese-making,
and is filled with narrow, man-high wooden measures, or gerles, each containing a hundred litres of milk or so, with cheese-moulds, and cheese-wrings, with tubs in which the whey ferments, producing at the end of three days a pale fat cream of which the herdsmen make their butter, and finally with the churn—the whole indescribably sordid and dirty. A tiny garden surrounds this primitive dwelling, and furnishes a few rough roots for the soup; turnips come well there; it is often too bleak and high for cabbage. But the wealth of the buron is stored in a cellar under the hill-top, opening to the north. There are laid, on a rough trellis of wood, the huge golden cheeses, each a hundred pounds in weight (fifty kilos). They look like so many full moons, laid under the earth to keep fresh till they are wanted in Heaven.... These cellars generally join the hut; but, as their coolness and depth is of vast importance, sometimes a cavern is hewn in a favourable spot on a solitary mountain side. Few things are more startling to the traveller unaccustomed to our parts than, while admiring the vast and melancholy landscape, so wild, so green, so unutterably lonely, to find himself suddenly assailed by an unmistakable stench of Cantal or Roquefort cheese.
Summer at the buron is without a change in its season from the blossoming of the limes till the flowering of the gentian. There rose and lily, strawberry and peach, green peas and melon, are words of a dead language. Day succeeds day, with the milking at dawn and the milking at even, the cheese-making of a morning, and, after the mid-day siesta (for the cowboys rise at three), the turning of the heavy cheeses in the cellar. The vacher on the mountain-top is as lonely and as frugal as the sailor on the sea. Few incidents mark the progress of the summer. In July the farmer comes and takes away the bulls; at the end of August the yellow gentian has finished flowering, and the herdsmen make a brief but lucrative harvest of its plants. The days grow shorter, the nights cold and sharp, the pasture rarer on fumado and aigado. Yet, such is the sense of freedom, such the exhilaration of the mountain air, that never have I heard our herdsmen lament the length or dull remoteness of their estivade.