VI
Life and Nature are here my friends and great delight—the round of the harvests, the flowers in their courses, the ways of beast and bird; and I can say with the great emperor, “Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature.” From earliest June till mid-July or later, before the hay is cut, our fields are as full of flowers as any Paradise of Fra Angelico’s. Nowhere have I seen plants so robust and brilliant, blossom of all sorts so abundant. In the water-meadows, the forget-me-not grows in high bright patches among the ox-eye daisies; the meadow-sweet is tall along the runnel’s edge among the flowering mint and willowherb; the loose-strife springs crimson in the hollows; the columbine stands high and blue in every hedge; on the heights the fox-glove hangs its blood-red bells from every rock or bank; at the base of the beech-woods grows a smaller, more delicate sort, of a faint lemon-yellow with glossy leaves, and the look of a hothouse plant. The hedges are smothered with wild roses all July, and with honeysuckle all the summer long; the banks are full of Ragged-Robin. Now the various campanulas appear—the thyrsis-campanula, with its dark, deep buds set close against an upright stem, one would say a bunch of violets tied to a staff; and paler Canterbury bells, swinging from every hedge-side, and harebell—our English Fare-thee-well Summer!—on all the moors. The bright rose-pink blooms of the mallow, larger and more abundant than elsewhere, flourish on the fallow fields. The moors, in June, are one field of cloth of gold when the broom is out in flower; later the scabious and the exquisite soft blue tufts of the mountain jasione dapple many a sunburned hillside with azure and fawn. The red and white silene, the yellow impatiens with its balsam-like blossoms, the wild geraniums, sedum of every sort and saxifrage, and all the Alpine epilobes, the pink saponaria, which looks like a large rose-coloured single phlox, with all kinds of woodruff, asperule, and lady’s bed-staw, cover hill and field with a dazzling perfumed carpet. In the woods and hedges of Clavière the wine-coloured Japanese-looking Martagon lilies spring in companies, tall and slender. But the glory of our summers are the mountain pinks; sometimes small deep eyes of an intensest crimson, and sometimes large pale-patterned feathery picotees; they grow in beds about the lava-rocks and spring in thousands among the budding heather. On the higher mountains, at the Lioran for instance, and on our tablelands at Les Huttes, the gentian grows, beautiful deep-blue cups close set to the earth, or free-flowering yellow blossoms arranged in tiers round a tallish stalk. Here, too, may you find the anemone, larkspur, grass of parnassus, monk’shood, orchid, martagon lily, and a huge sort of Solomon’s seal which branches like a bracken. In every cranny of the loose stone walls abound the most delicate ferns. Every bank is bright with the wood-strawberry; the gooseberry grows in the hedge; the tall wild cherry, so frequent in Auvergne, drops its dark sweet fruit in your lap as you sit under the trees; but you must climb the woods to find the thick growing raspberry-canes, rose-red with fruit, and the myrtle-like bilberry close set with round blue berries. In autumn, on every moor and height, the heather comes out among the second blossom of the broom. Here is the place for mushrooms, for the large-domed Chevalier or coucorlo, spotted like the breast of a missel-thrush; among the beech-woods grow the huge delicious cèpes, grotesque in form and colour; on the higher pastures we find the pink-fleshed English sort, the best of all. We string them like beads on filaments of broom, knotted together, and tie them round our necks in chains and necklaces, in order to carry them safe home for dinner.
At last the blackberries shine in the hedges, the whortleberry on the hills. Now comes the last flower of all, the pale veilleuse, or lilac colchicum, springing in myriads in the aftermath and orchard-grass, although, on the heights, a few stunted scabious, wild pinks, and gentians may linger until Martinmas. Chill October is at hand. Already, a fortnight ago, one stormy afternoon, I watched the swallows gather in the clouds. The time of flowers is over.
To us, the beautiful blossoms are a mere delight. To the mountain shepherds, the gentian gathering is a fruitful, unsown harvest. In the first days of September, when the plants are out of flower, a great massacre of the innocents takes place upon the mountain-tops. The victim is the tall yellow gentian, much in request among druggists and manufacturers of liqueurs. Already, on the last day in August, we met an old mountain farmer, much elate. He had just sold his bundles of gentian—twenty-three quintals at twenty-seven francs a quintal (a quintal is a hundred pounds—fifty kilos)—that is to say, about a large cartful which brought him in some twenty guineas, at no expense save the pay of the pickers. The herdsmen can earn at this play of flower-picking, or rather root-pulling, as much as six francs a day. No wonder the gentian is popular in Auvergne, and that we celebrate in prose and verse our ourgulhouso cinsono! Did any one ever turn so pretty a penny out of Irish shamrock or Scotch thistle? The profit of it is considerable enough to have furnished endless troubles and quibbles between landlord and tenant, each asserting the gentian his perquisite, until at last the law courts of Aurillac settled the matter in favour of the farmer.
L’amère gentiane et la douce réglisse have each their partisans; but the liquorice is less abundant. Still, in autumn, you may see the mountain shepherds dig holes upon the hill-tops and carefully disentangle the fine red filaments leading to the blonde, supple, horse-radishlike root which furnishes the Spanish juice. This they tear from the ground, and carefully treasure in pouch or shirtfront; for this, too, commands its price.