BETWEEN BILLY AND BESSEY
To those tourists who are looking for out-of-the-way corners of Europe I commend Billy. It is not pronounced in our frivolous way, but "Bee-yee," which you see gives it at once the French dignity. I call Billy "out-of-the-way" because we saw no tourists in the neighborhood, and we had never before heard of the place, which has a bare three-line mention in Baedeker.
Billy is on the Allier, a beautiful river, and, seen from a distance, with its towering ruin, is truly picturesque. Of course the old castle is the chief feature of Billy—a ruin of great extent, and unrestored! The last item alone makes it worth seeing. A good many of the ruins of France have been restored under the direction of that great recreator of the architectural past, Viollet le Duc, who has done his work supremely well and thoroughly—oh, thoroughly, no name! I am glad he did it, for it means preservation for the ages, but I am so glad that there is now and then a ruin that
Monsieur V. le Duc
Happened to overlook.
I even drift into bad poetry when I think of it.
The Château de Billy seems to have been built about 1232 by one of the sires of Bourbon Robert of Clermont, son of St. Louis, to control the river traffic. It was a massive edifice of towers and bastions, and walls of enormous thickness. A good portion of the walls and some of the towers still stand. And there is a dungeon into which no light or air could come, once used to convince refractory opposition. They put a man in there for an hour. When they took him out he was either convinced or dead, and so, in either case, no longer troublesome.
The guardian of Billy was a little old woman as picturesque as the ruins, and lived in a little house across the way, as picturesque as herself. When we had seen the castle she let us look into her house. It consisted of just one small room with a tiny stove in one corner and a bed in the other. But the stove, with its accessories of pans and other ware all so shining and neat, and her tiny, high-posted, canopied bed so spotless and pretty with its white counterpane and gay little curtains, set us to wondering why anybody in the world needed a home more ample or attractive than that.
It seemed amusing to us that the name of the next place along that route should be Bessey. We lunched between Billy and Bessey, on a green level roadside, under some big trees, where there was a little stream which furnished our cooking water. It is not always easy to select the luncheon place. A dry spot with water and shade is not everywhere to be had, and then we do not always instantly agree on the conveniences of a place, and while we are discussing it we are going right along at a fifteen or twenty-mile rate and that place has drifted a mile or two behind before the conference ends. But there always is a place somewhere that has most of the things we want, and it lies around the next turn or over the next hill, and it is always so new and strange and foreign, so away and away from the world we have known, so intimately a part of a land and of lives we have never seen before and shall never see again.
A gypsy of very poor class came along while we were at luncheon. His little wagon-house was quite bare of furnishings. The man walked outside beside the meager donkey—a young woman with a baby sat on the floor in the wagon.
Gypsies, by the way, are an institution in France. The French call them nomades, and provide them with special ordinances and road limitations. At first, when we saw signs "Limites de Nomades" in the outskirts of villages we wondered what was meant, and did not associate the notice with the comfortable and sometimes luxurious house-wagons that we met or overtook, or found solidly established by some pleasant waterside. Then it dawned upon us that these gypsy folk were the nomades and that the signs were provided for their instruction.
We met them, presently, everywhere. France, with its level roads and liberal laws, is gypsy heaven. A house on wheels, a regular little flat, with parlor, bedroom and kitchen, big enough to hold a family and its belongings, can be drawn by a single horse over the hard, perfectly graded highways. They work north in the summer, no doubt, and in the autumn the Midi calls them. Every little way we saw them camped, working at their basketry or some kindred industry. Not all the villages limit them, and often we found them located in the midst of a busy town. I do not think they do any harm, and I always envied them. Some of their little houses are so cozy and neat, with tiny lace curtains and flower pots, and pictures on the walls. When we first saw such wagons we thought they belonged to artists.