IX
The castle is the chief interest at Pierrefonds, but not the only one; for, down by the lake, on the overgrown and weedy promenade, there stands the Établissement des Bains. Here tepid sulphur springs are captured and turned to healing uses. Happy sick people, who are sent to get well in this enchanting village! How they must gossip in the lime-walk and fish in the lake, read on the castle terraces,
and wander in the forest! Happy sick people; for, alas! (unless one stand in need of sulphur baths) Pierrefonds, in its lovely valley, is not, they say, a very healthy place. So, at least, from Compiègne, proclaims the trump of Envy; or perhaps the imparadised Pierrefondois, eager to keep their lovely home safe from the jerry-builder, have started these vague rumours of influenza, of languor, of rheumatisms. ’Tis a wise ruse, a weapon of defence against the Parisian—a sort of sepia shot forth to protect the natural beauty of the woods against the fate of Asnières.
There are three courses open to the visitor to Pierrefonds. He may stay there, and that would certainly be the pleasantest course. Or he may take the train, and after little more than half an hour arrive at Villers-Cotterets, where he will sleep, reserving for the morrow the lovely drive through the forest to Vaumoise, and the visit to the quaint old high-lying town of Crépy en Valois, whence the train will take him on to Paris. Crépy is a dear old town. No one would think that such a dull disastrous treaty once was signed there. The road that slopes down from Crépy to the plain is full of a romantic, almost an Umbrian picturesqueness. We drove there once, years ago, and visited the knolly forest full of moss and pines. But we have never seen Villers-Cotterets; for when we were at Pierrefonds we followed the third and worst course open to us: we drove back to Compiègne, and thence we took the train direct to Paris.
Part II
1901
Never again have I visited Pierrefonds or the woods of Compiègne. They lie an hour or so from Paris by the rail, but still to me they seem as inaccessible as fairyland. Sometimes, on a fine morning at Eastertide, a longing goes through me to start for those tall glades of oak, with the road that runs right through them to the lovely Vieux Moulin. But, to tell the truth, I have not dared; I doubt not, at the back of my heart, that village, forest, hill, and lake, have long since crumbled into ashes.
Years later, it was my fate, however, to return to Chantilly. The time was midwinter; January wrapped the earth in a shroud of snow and ice. But even in midwinter there still beats in copse and wold a heart of life too deep and sound for any frost to touch it. Not a flower, not a leaf, enlivened the forest; but how large and frequent seemed the forest-birds relieved against that dazzling steppe! The green woodpeckers, hopping about, two or three of them together, appeared (although, in fact, not more than fourteen inches long) as large and bright as parrots. This fine bird, the pivert of France where it is common, ever excites my admiration, so graceful is its shape, from the long bill to the slender somewhat drooping tail, so bright is its colouring—a mantle of moss green, a breast of greenish yellow, some yellow feathers in a tail of chequered brown and white, and a coif like a jewel, ruby-red, blood-red, drawn close over head and neck. In England I have never seen him, though I believe the bird exists with us; nor, though I sometimes find him in my Cantal orchards, have I ever seen the pivert so much to his advantage as during that cold week in January, relieved against a vast expanse of snow. The winter that year was unusually hard. The pools of Commelle were all fast bound in ice; the snow lay heaped beneath the lacy boughs of the beech roots twisted on their banks. Silent and deserted stood the castle of Queen Blanche. On every twig and branch of the woods glittered a spray of diamond dewdrops frozen hard. Brilliant, still, and white, the great forest stretched all round us, like an enchanted place where no one lived but we, until, as we reached the third pool of the chain, we suddenly found that we were not alone: a company of wild ducks had alighted on the ice, still disposed, as when they fly, in a long straggling V, and stood shuffling incessantly their webbed feet as if to warm them on that bitter floor.
One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer; a thaw had set in; a light white mist enveloped everything. We walked on the common as in a world of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a pack of hounds, in full cry, broke out of the moist damp mist; we saw them for a yard or two, and then the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of the piqueurs, in a vision of horses, kept appearing and disappearing. It was the Duke of Chartres’ meet. Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter. The Orleans princes, the Barons de Rothschild, with a bevy of local nobility and gentry, are bent on the pleasures of the chase. It is a land of races, too. In many a corner of the woods you may come upon a set of training stables with, hard by, a queer little sham-Gothic villa, which looks as if it came from Leamington, emblazoned with its English name—Rose Cottage or Ivy Lodge. In every lane you come across the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their thoroughbreds. More than once as they rode by, I saw the stalwart peasants in their blouses glance up with a jest from their work at the saw-mill or the woodpile, half contemptuous of the jockeys’ wizened youth, half content that their money should enrich the country-side. And I thought of that long-forgotten France where, for so many decades, the English lads rode by, slim and haughty, and the French peasants chuckled “Levez votre queue, levez!” being persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys, in those sad old times of the Hundred Years’ War.
On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We walked in the taillis where the wood-cutters were hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is almost all planted in taillis composé with hornbeam, elm, and oak—three species which, however often you may fell them, will rise again from the roots, apparently immortal. Each tree in the coppice as it reaches thirty years is marked for the axe, with the exception of a reserve, drawn from the finest subjects, which is permitted to fulfil its natural growth, and affords a permanent covert for the rest. Such is a taillis composé or taillis sous futaie—perhaps the most profitable crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or too light for the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The hornbeam and the beech are the best of all woods for burning; the oak is their rival, and commands several markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetmaker’s oak, props for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves, too, are a source of profit; for dead leaves in France serve almost all the purposes of straw, and stuff a mattress, or litter a stable, or manure the kitchen garden.
I love these feathery woods and coppices of France. A long, low, cliff-like hill, with a landslip at the foot; a pasture sloping to the river; a spinny or taillis in the middle distance:—there is a landscape which you may see on any day in any part of France; and I ever find it full of a delicate yet homely grace. But, for beauty and wonder, the haute futaie is incomparably finer than the copse. In the futaie the trees are left to grow to their natural shape, the axe serving only to weed out the misshapen trunks, or to eliminate the intrusive birch and poplar which push unbidden among the better sort. Here, at least, the oak and beech, adult, with a century and a half behind them, fall only in their prime, the rich prize of the woodman’s axe, which still respects the elect reserve. Compiègne, Fontainebleau, St. Germain, have all their futaies; but few private owners can afford to wait a hundred and fifty years for their reward (which, indeed, is princely when it comes due), or have so vast a property that, during more than a century, some part of it may fall every winter to the axe in due rotation. For who can boast a hundred and fifty groves, duly planted and tended year after year? Perhaps the State alone. A third system, much used in parks and woods round houses, as combining use and ornament, is that of jardinage. Here, as in an earthly paradise, trees of all ages grow together, and every year the axe takes its toll of young and old alike: yon great fir may boast two centuries, and here is yesterday’s sapling at its feet. The fir and the beech are generally grown en jardinage.
Hark, the sharp tang of the axe! Let us go and see. There is an art in wood-cutting, especially in felling a taillis; for if the wound be not clear and sharp, if the least uneven crevice or hollow let the rain sojourn and sodden in the stump, the root will lose its virtue. But the woodman knows his trade. He was born in our woods, most likely; if not, ten to one he comes from the Belgian Ardennes, perhaps from Bavaria: be sure he is a sylvan; mixed with his blood is the sap of the forest. There, under that spreading oak, he has built his hut of tree-trunks: long perches of young oaks covered by sods of earth, with the grass turned inwards. Let us peep in. A pile of dead bracken occupies one corner. Three stout poles, planted in the beaten earth which forms the floor, are tied together at the top, and support a great iron soup-pot, swinging over a fire of braise, under the hole in the roof. There is no window, hardly a door. Evidently our woodman is a bachelor.
For in the forest of St. Germains I know another hut which is the very pride and pink of neatness. The woodman’s wife used to sit there, on a deep bench of turf built against her rustic house, mending the week’s wash, while her children played at her feet. The hut itself, though built, as usual, of trunks and sods, was pleasant to look at, with a neat white-curtained window in a frame of deal set in the wall of logs; a door of the same pattern swung on a pole passed through a double set of iron loops. Door and window were evidently portable, and had been used on many a clearing. Within, a folding table, a stool or two, and even some canvas folding chairs such as are used in gardens, gave the rough place a look of comfort. A wide truckle-bed supported a mattress of sacking, stuffed, no doubt, with forest leaves; a red blanket covered the whole. A stock-pot simmered above a portable iron stove. Sometimes the good woman would do her cooking, as she always did her week’s washing, out-of-doors, and then—ye sylvan deities!—what savoury fumes would rise from that huge marmite! It was, no doubt (for so she said), a jay or so, perhaps a squirrel (the peasants here account them dainty eating), which so tickled our
appetite in passing. And yet I could have sworn to the aroma of a hare, a pheasant, some piece of good wild game. Since no trade is warranted to breed perfection, let me admit that my friends the woodmen are nearly always past-masters in the noble art of poaching. How should it be otherwise? Only on Sundays can they tramp to the nearest village to buy, with their scanty pence, their flitch of bacon and their bag of meal. The cow, which their children lead to pasture in the glades, affords them milk, but that is all. And meanwhile the woodland teems with life. So poor, remote from all society, cognizant of the ways of bird and beast, shall they mark unmoved the traces of the hare, note with a disinterested eye the break a fawn has made in yonder brushwood, or that thick splash of mud on the ridgy pine-trunks, where the wild boar last night stopped to scratch his miry flanks, on his road to the nearest turnip-field? Meanwhile the man hungers, and the children need their daily bread.
Who does not remember a charming page of Gustave Droz, which tells how a young couple, surprised by a thunderstorm in the forest, took shelter in the charcoal-burner’s hut, and shared their savoury mess? Such luck has never been mine. It was one of the things for which I envied my revered and admirable friend, M. Taine, whose childhood, spent on the edge of a great forest, made him familiar with every sylvan thing.
“In these old forests,” he writes, in an essay on the Ardennes, “there lingers a race of men still half savage; they are the woodcutters. They scarcely know the taste of bread; a side of bacon, some potatoes, a little milk, compose their daily fare. I have spent the night with them in huts without a window. The large, low, open chimney let in the daylight and let out the smoke. There the meat was hung to dry. The children spoke scarce a word of French, expressing themselves in a rude patois; wild as young colts, they roamed the forest all day long; when they reached their twelfth year, their father put an axe in their hands, and they chopped the branches of the fallen trees; a few years later, they felled an oak like him. A mute animal life, full of legends and strange beliefs, was theirs.”
But all this was sixty years ago. Nowadays the children are supposed to go, at least sometimes and when convenient, to the nearest village school (for education is compulsory in France); the young men inevitably serve their time at the regiment; the girls enter domestic service. And so difficult is it to find recruits for the woodman’s free but rough and lonely life, that the lack of woodcutters is becoming a grave question among foresters in France.
When March is well out, and the trees are felled, when the wood is piled in stacks, the woodman consults the sky, and, on the first soft mild and sappy morning, he begins to bark his oaks, or at least such of them as are devoted to that tragic end. It is a nice and delicate business, which must be undertaken before the leaves are green. For, while the sap is springing, the bark and the wood are separated by a layer of viscuous vegetable tissue, the cambium, but so soon as the foliage is full-formed, this cambium turns hard and welds the two together. Yet the weather must be warm; a blast of cold wind, the shadow of too black a cloud, by suddenly lowering the temperature, may at any moment interrupt the operation: the bark will not strip from the oak. The woodman (who knows nothing of this capricious cambium, worse than a woman for yielding only at its pleasure) swears that a herd of sheep must have passed to his windward, and throws down his axe, well aware, despite his false premises, that no more stripping will be done that day. He must wait on sun and zephyr. The next warm day he returns, cuts a sharp ring round the foot of the tree, another at his right arm’s topmost reach, and rips the bark in long ribbons, which he lays in the sun to dry, face downward, for a day and a night, ere he stack them for the tanner. That is the prime bark, flayed from the living trunk; having taken this, he fells the oak, and strips as best he can the upper branches.
Woodcutter, bark-stripper, he turns planter next, and, where the natural fruit of the trees has not sufficiently renewed the glade, he hoes the earth, relieves it from the stifling moss and turf, digs a deep hole, and plants a sapling. By early autumn he must change his trade anew; in September the woodman becomes a charcoal-burner. The suns of August have dried last winter’s logs; they are ready for the next metamorphosis. The woodcutter, who knows by heart each glade and clearing and coppice of the forest, selects some open space, far from the century-old revered Reserve, and cuts the turf from a chosen circle. Having beaten hard the ground, he plants in the middle three or four stout stakes and swathes them together; round these he sets some light inflammable brushwood; beyond this centre—which will serve as a chimney—he places his logs in close rings, standing straight on end in the middle, then slantwise more and more, till they are almost flat at the edge. And now the stack takes on the shape of a great flattish cake or pie. Thereon he packs a layer of dead leaves, four inches thick, and over that again a layer of sand and sods, till, save for a small open space in the middle, the whole is tightly roofed. At last he casts a flaming brand into the brushwood at the core, and waits: in an instant the faggots crackle, the smoke rises up thick and yellow, the sand and earth of the crust begin to ooze and “sweat,” as they say, from the sap and moisture of the buried logs. Now let the woodman look to the wind, lest too strong a blast cause the pile to burn too quickly, ruin the charcoal, and endanger the forest. If a sudden gale should rise, he will build a screen of branches and break the force of its impact; and all this while the fire burns steadily, smoking and sweating, until—on the third day, as a rule—a faint wreath alone of bluish vapour curls lightly from the exhausted pile. After a few days more the mound may be unpacked; if all be well, the charcoal is ready for sale. The sylvan year has run its course. Our woodman is a woodcutter again.
Forestry in France is not only an art, a science, an industry, and a passion. Several generations of savants such as M. Bouquet de la Grye—to whom, with all who love the woods, I owe a debt, here gladly acknowledged—have reduced the rule of forestry to a method. Thanks to them, the returns are as sure, the cultivation as regular, as in any other branch of agriculture. If I had been a man, I would, I think, have been a forester; not a woodman, but an inspector of woods and waters, like Jean de la Fontaine, riding all day long under the green and musical covert, among the fresh scents of herb and leaf and resin, sleeping at night in the forest-warden’s lodge, deciding the destinies of oak and beech and pine. At Nancy there is an Ecole Forestière, which forms to this kindly calling the pupils of the Agronomic Institute. Thence sometimes, or else from Stuttgard, we used to draw our foresters for the vast woods of India, until, in 1884, a School of Forestry was established at Cooper’s Hill.
The last years of the nineteenth century, the first of this, have brought the youth of France back, with a sort of passion, to the land. In Shakespeare’s time, as we know,
“Young gentlemen in France
Were wont to sigh and look as black as night
From very wantonness.”
I am glad to think that in our days they are at once more cheerful and more practical. Cheesemaking, cattle-farming, wine-growing, farming, forestry, are all enterprises which a young gentleman may pursue with credit, and even with enthusiasm. And forestry, at least, is cultivated as it never was before. Until the last hundred years, more or less, a forest was just a wood-mine, to be worked until the vein should be exhausted. But now we sow and tend even more than we destroy. We are like provident children who seek to repair the ruin wrought by a generation of prodigals. I have before my eyes the statistics for the expense which the forests of France have cost the State between 1882 and 1902: they average some three and a half million of francs per annum. The foresters of France find such a sum the miserable pension of a miser, and men of science bid us plough, and plant, and fence in our hillsides, unless we be prepared to see their rocky flanks ravined by headlong torrents, and the plains at their feet alternately a quagmire and a Sahara. The course of rivers, the distribution of rains, the maintenance of mountains in their magnificent integrity, all depend upon the deep-draining roots, the rain-absorbing foliage of our woods. The French Revolution, in order to supply the peasants with a great expanse of arable land, set the axe in the forests of France. Liancourt wrote in 1802, on his return from exile, that, all round his estates, the great woods which covered that portion of the Oise had been cut down or rooted up—an excess of deforestation which had already produced disastrous effects upon the climate. He preached in the desert; content with their new fields of corn and beet (astonishingly productive, like all virgin soil), the peasants of the Oise would not hear of replanting; where the woods had been merely felled and not uprooted, the shepherds drove their flocks of sheep and goats, fattening them on the young shoots which should have renewed the forest. But to-day we are wiser: we plant. Sandy moors and heaths, desolate stretches of barren chalk, are planted with the hardy sylvan pine, and shortly become things of use and beauty in themselves, no less than happy influences on the local climate. The pine gives deal and resin, and grows in any soil. Clays too stiff and damp for corn or turnip will rear the glorious and profitable oak; the steepest flanks and scaurs of the fell-side are sufficient for the beech; the elm and the ash spring in small spinnies on almost any sterile field, and their leaves afford a delicious food for cattle, a crop as regular and as nourishing as hay. Any wood, treated with care and method through a space of years, will yield a good return for careful husbandry.
And this, I think, is the special beauty of France—her great and increasing stretches of woodland. Be they the merest coppices of scrub oak and horn-beam, yet are they haunted by the birds, starred in spring with primroses and dog-violets, oxlips and white wood-strawberries. And what tongue shall declare the majesty of the forest? I love the great freedom of the wild high mountain-pastures, I admire the rich harvest of the lowland plain; but something deeper and more secret—dating from the days before our ancestors were nomad shepherds or farmers on a forest-clearing—a thrill primæval, is awakened in me by the rustle of the woods.