IN THE VISCOUNTY OF TURENNE.
What gives us the zest to wander until the hour comes when we must fain be content to sit in the porch, thankful if the evening sun shines warmly, is the fascination of the unknown. As children, did we not long to get at the horizon's verge, to touch the painted clouds of the morning or of the sunset—ay, and to grasp with our outstretched hands that reached such a little way the blood-red glory of the sun itself? The garden, with its glowing tulips and its roses haunted by gilded beetles, became too small to satisfy the mind of infancy fresh from the infinite. Surely, I thought, when I was again in the open country beyond Beaulieu, I must have carried something of my childhood on with me, for me to go wandering over these hot hills exposing myself to sunstroke, weariness, and thirst for the sake of the unknown.
The road at first led up vine-covered slopes towards the west, where the waysides were blue with the flowers of the wild chicory. A priest astride upon a rough old cob passed me, his hitched-up soutane showing his gaitered legs. The French rural priests are generally rubicund, but this one was cadaverous. He would have looked like Death on horseback, swathed in a black mantle, but for the dangling gaitered legs, which spoilt the solemn effect. A very curious figure did he cut upon his shaggy, ambling steed. On the top of the hill was a village, in the midst of which stood a little old Gothic church with a gable-belfry, and hard by was a half-timber house, its porch aglow with climbing petunias.
Beyond this village was a deep valley, the sides of which were covered with chestnut-trees. On ascending the opposite hill, I took a by-path through a steep wood, thinking to cut off a long turn of the hot and dusty road. It led me into difficulties and bewilderment. The path disappeared, but I went on. After climbing rocks densely overgrown with brambles, which left their daggers in my skin, I reached the top of the hill, and saw before me a desert of disintegrated rock or drift dotted over with low juniper bushes. Although it was the middle of September, the sun blazed above me with the ardour of July, and the rays were thrown back by the bare stones, on which there was not a trace of moss, nor even lichen. These arid rocky places, so characteristic of Southern France, have a poetry of their own that to me is ever enticing. I love the stony wastes and their dazzling sun-glitter. There I find something that approaches companionship in the prickly juniper, the narcotic hellebore, and the acrid spurge. And these plants likewise love the places where the world has remained unchanged by man. The heat, however, was too great for me to linger upon this shadeless hill, where every stone was warm, and the reflected glare was almost as blinding as that of the sun itself, which seemed so near.
Having crossed another valley, after much casting about, I found the highroad again. The altitude was considerable here, so that the view embraced a wide expanse of the Corrèze and the department of the Lot, which I was approaching. The scene was everything that an English landscape is not. No soft verdure, no hedgerows setting memory astir with pictures of the flowering may and the pink, clambering dog-rose gemmed with dew; no lustrous meadow crossed by shadows thrown by ancient dreaming elms; no flash from the briskly-flowing brook: no, nothing of this, but in its place a parched and rugged land of hills or knolls, stony, wasteful, where for countless ages the juniper, the broom, the gorse, and the heather have disputed the sovereignty, the intervening valleys, timidly cultivated, producing little else but rye and buckwheat, and the deep gorges sombre with overhanging trees.
This road was so tedious, so hot and dusty, that, after walking a few miles upon it, I lost patience altogether with what seemed to be its unreasonable windings, and again made an effort to strike across country by means of by-paths, in order to reach the spot where, according to the map and compass, I thought Vayrac ought to be. I came to a seventeenth century country-house, large enough to be termed a château, but now the dwelling of some peasant-farmer. It was a dilapidated, apparently owl-haunted building, with a dovecote tower over grown with ivy, and was half surrounded by a wall, whose tottering, ornamental pinnacles told a story of comparative grandeur that had come to grief in this remote spot. The farmer had been winnowing his corn outside, and the narrow lane was ankle-deep with chaff. The only human being that I could find here was a wild-looking girl, with a bush of hair on her head, who made me understand, half in French, half in patois, that I should never reach Vayrac by the way I was going. She sent me off in another direction. I walked on, I know not how many miles, without coming to any village or wayside auberge, over a shadeless plain in the department of the Lot. There was no water; consequently not a bird was to be seen or heard. But there were myriads of flies, and too many hornets for my comfort, for some of them followed me with impertinent curiosity.
I confess that I do not like hornets. When I see them, they remind me of the story of a donkey told me by a man in these parts. He in his youth saw an unlucky ass that, quietly browsing, unconscious of indiscretion, disturbed a hornets' nest. Suddenly the animal showed symptoms of unusual excitement, which became rapidly more violent, until, after some amazing antics, first on his front-legs and then on his hind-legs, he rolled over on his back, and kicked violently at the sky. His master knew what had happened, but stood lamenting afar off, not daring to go to the rescue. In a short time the poor donkey ceased kicking, and swelled up in a manner horrible to behold.
All nature now appeared to be baking. Even the blackberries, which I ate by the handful to slake my raging thirst, were warm. A long, straight road that I thought would never end brought me at length to Vayrac, where there was a good inn. Oh, the luxury of rest at last in a shaded room, with the companionship of a jug of frothing beer just brought up from the cool cellar!
* * * * *
Months passed before I continued from this point my journey on foot. The spring had come, and the face of nature was wondrously changed. Over the valley that I had seen before so parched had spread the soft verdure of young grass; hedges of quince were all abloom, and at their roots the stitchwort mingled its white starry flowers with the matchless blue of the Germander speedwell, so dear to English eyes. The roadsides were bright with daisies and the gold of the ill-appreciated dandelion.
A lane from Vayrac led up to the escarped sides of the Puy d'Issolu—the Uxellodunum of the Cadurci, according to Napoleon III. and others who have made Caesar's battlefields in Gaul their study. It was April, and from near and afar came the warbling of nightingales. They moved amongst the new leaves of almost every shrub and tree. A very abrupt ascent through thickets brought me to the tableland, where the turf was flashed with splendid flowers of the purple orchids. From the waste land the sombre junipers rose like scattered cypresses in a cemetery.
If this was not the site of Uxellodunum, we may pretty safely believe it to have been that of some important oppidum of the Gauls. A circumvallation there could never have been in a strict sense, for where the plateau rests upon high calcareous walls there was no need of a fortification. But elsewhere, where the position was accessible from the valley, it was protected by a strong wall. On the northern side this rampart can be followed for a considerable distance without a break. In one spot the soil which has collected about it has been dug away, leaving the masonry bare. It is not composed of loose stones of various sizes, like that of the Celtic city at Murcens, but of small flat stones neatly laid together, with layers of mortar between; a circumstance that sets one conjecturing and doubting. The wall appears to have been six or eight feet thick. The line of it now only rises very slightly above the edge of the plateau.
I met a peasant who owned the highest part of the tableland, and who managed to grow crops upon it. Near his cottage he pointed out the remains of an ancient structure, which he called the fort. The masonry was of the same character as that of the wall. Near to it were fragments of ancient pottery and tiles, which he had dug out of the ground. The tiles were very heavy and flat, with turned-up edges, so that they could hang one to another. There were holes, too, for the nails which held them to the roof. Thrown on one side were human bones, which had from time to time been turned up by the plough. The peasant told me that his father, while digging rather deeply, had found a skeleton wearing a bracelet and part of a helmet. A visitor to the Puy d'Issolu, many years ago, was allowed to take these remains away, together with a quantity of iron arrow-heads, on his promise to come back and pay 600 francs for them. He never came back.
The view from the Puy takes in an immense expanse of the solemn Limousin country. To the south is the stone-strewn Quercy, while to the north and east is the still wilder Corrèze. On the west lie the forests of Black Périgord. Looking to the east, I saw the mountains of Auvergne, the Mont-Dore range rising beyond the Corrèze against the blue sky, as white as the sugar towers and pinnacles upon a bride-cake. Here it was warm, like June weather in England; there winter still reigned upon the snowy hills. Standing against the north-western horizon were the high towers of the vast feudal fortress of the Viscounts of Turenne. It was there that Madame de Condé, escaping from Mazarin, planned the rising of Guyenne in 1648. I could only distinguish the towers, but I knew that a little below them was the small mediaeval town of Turenne, which grew up under the protection of the Viscounts, who for centuries were virtually the sovereign princes of this region. No lover of the picturesque would waste his time by going there.
Descending from the tableland on the southern side, where the rocks form a steep little gorge, I came to the stream from which the besieged Cadurci are supposed to have drawn their water-supply, until it was cut off by Caesar. Looking at the spot, it is easy to understand how it all happened. The natural fortress, selected with so much judgment by the Cadurci, was almost unassailable. To help them, they had the cover of the wood that still fills the gorge, but which was probably much denser then than it is now. From his tower of ten stages, which commanded the fountain, Caesar continually harassed with darts, thrown by the tormenta, those who came to the spring; and he, moreover, tells us that he caused a gallery to be tunnelled to the fountainhead, and thus drew off the water, to the utter astonishment and despair of the Cadurci, who perceived in this disaster the intervention of the gods. A tunnel such as he describes exists, and the stream flows through it. At a point some distance higher, the sound of gurgling water can be distinctly heard beneath the stones; and it was here probably where the stream originally broke out, and where the inhabitants of the oppidum came with their vessels. Napoleon III. had the subterranean gallery cleared, and its artificial character was proved by the discovery that massive beams of wood, of which there were some remains, had been used to prevent the soil from falling in upon the workers. It has now been nearly filled up again by the calcareous deposit of the water. The river mentioned by Caesar as the one that flowed in the valley beneath Uxellodunum [Footnote: 'Flumen infimam vallam lividebat quae totum poene montem cingebat, in quo positum erat praeruptum undique oppidum Uxellodunum.'—'De Bello Gallico,' Lib. VIII.] is a small tributary of the Dordogne, called the Tourmente. This is assuming the Puy d'Issolu to have been Uxellodunum. The most convincing material proof that the two places are the same was furnished by the discovery of the tunnel; but some strong corroborative evidence is to be found in local names. The word puy affords no clue; for it simply means a high place. In the dialect of the Viscounty of Turenne the Puy d'Issolu is pronounced Lo Pê dê Cholu. In the word Issolu or Cholu, we may have something of the Celtic word, which was Latinized by Caesar after his custom; but this verbal similarity would not in itself go far to prove the identity of the height near Vayrac with the position defended by Drappes and Lucterius. Lying in the Corrèze at no great distance from the Dordogne is the town of Ussel—a name that approaches much more nearly the sound of Uxellodunum. But an educated native of Vayrac, whom I chanced to meet months after my visit to the Puy d'Issolu, furnished me with some local testimony which appears to be of value in connection with a subject that has given rise to so much controversy. The stream where it issues near the base of the rocky height has been known in the neighbourhood from time immemorial as 'Lo foun Conino'—Conino's Fountain. Conino is a natural Romance corruption of Caninius, the name of Caesar's lieutenant who in the first instance directed the siege of Uxellodunum. The French name for the stream at the bottom of the valley already mentioned is derived from the Romance one, Lo Tourmento. Now, as Caesar made so much use of tormenta as engines of war, to prevent the besieged Cadurci from drawing water, something may easily have occurred to associate the stream with one of these machines. It is to be observed, however, that there are other streams in France to which the name Tourmente has been given, and of which the explanation is much more simple.
[Illustration: A PEASANT OF THE CAUSSE.]
How solemnly still seemed this spectre-haunted spot in the quiet evening! There was the groaning murmur of the stream flowing down its subterranean passage, and there was the low and fitful warble of a nightingale; but this was all. Who, passing by here without foreknowledge, would suppose that on this bit of desert the great struggle between Rome and Gaul was brought to a close? What a wonderful thing is a book, that it should preserve age after age, with undiminished reality, all the torment, anguish, and passion of a siege, and give a human interest to rocks and streams, which without such aid would tell us nothing of the horrid tumult that raged over and around them! Now I can see the half-naked Gauls rolling down their barrels of flaming pitch upon the Roman engineers, and hear that great clamour of the besiegers and the besieged of which Caesar speaks. Above were the Celtic heroes defending their last rock with the obstinacy of despair, and ready to accept death in any form but that of thirst; and here were the veteran legionaries exposing themselves day after day to the burning pitch, the stones, and the arrows of the defenders, with that disciplined courage and unwavering resolve to conquer which made Rome the mistress of the world. But the most terrible scene must have been that in which the Gaulish warriors, after their surrender, had their hands cut off. What frightful business was that, and what a heap of hands must have been buried somewhere, either upon the table-land or in the valley! A deep-ploughing peasant may long since have come upon an extraordinary collection of little bones, and been much puzzled by them. And poor Drappes, who, after his capture, refused to eat, and died from starvation; he must have been buried somewhere near. But Nature says nothing about all these things; she covers up the traces of human ferocity with her new leaves and moss, and smiles there as tenderly as upon children's graves.
I passed the night at St. Denis, a modern place brought into existence by the line to Toulouse. At the auberge the evening was enlivened by dancing. Two maids of the inn found partners in a couple of rustic youths, and a young soldier en congé provided the music by whistling, or imitating the hurdy-gurdy with his mouth. For it was the bourrée that was danced.
The next morning I was on the road to Martel, with nightingales and blackcaps singing all around from blossoming quince and hawthorn and copses filled with a gold-green glimmer, until I reached the bare upland country. Upon the barren causse, besides the short turf, the gray ribs of rock, and scattered stones, little was to be seen but dark little junipers, tall broom, not yet in flower, hellebore, with bright tufts of new leaves and evil-looking green blossoms edged with dull purple, and the numberless gilded umbels of the spurge, which in springtime lend such beauty to the Southern desert. In the dips and little dingles there were stunted oaks with the brown foliage, that had been beaten by the winter winds in vain, still clinging to them, but which every breath of western breeze now scattered, because the buds were swelling and the unborn leaves were asking to come forth. At wide distances above the undulating, sterile land a farmhouse would appear, with high-pitched tiled roof, and a pigeon-house rising like a tower at one end. The stranger marvels to see such substantially-built houses in the midst of such sterility; but he finds the explanation when he has time to consider that there are so many stones lying about that, where it is possible to plough, the peasant heaps them up in his field, or makes walls that are little wanted. Having reached the top of a knoll, I saw beneath me many old tiled roofs whose lines ran at all angles, and above these rose the massive walls of a half-fortified church, and various towers or fragments of towers. I was looking at Martel.
According to legend and local history, Charles Martel, after defeating the Saracens near this spot, caused a church to be built on a piece of fertile land a few miles from the battlefield, and dedicated it to St. Maur. A town grew around church and monastery, and was named Martel in honour of the founder. In the early days of the Crusades, when princes and barons rivalled one another in virtuous zeal, a Viscount of Turenne decreed that inhabitants of Martel who were convicted of sinning against the marriage tie should be dragged naked through the town. The charter that contains this enactment treats of villeinage also, and orders that whoever has a man for sale within the limits of the viscounty shall fix the price, and shall not change it afterwards.
The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet brought the English to Martel in the twelfth century; but it does not appear that they obtained or cared to keep anything like a permanent grip on the place until the fourteenth century. Inasmuch, however, as Henry Short-Mantle, the rebellious son of Henry II., met with no resistance at Martel when he came thither, after pillaging the sanctuary of Roc-Amadour in 1183, it may be concluded that English influence was already established there. In the market place is a house a portion of which was once included in a building that has now nearly disappeared, but which is known to every inhabitant as the 'palace of Henry II.' On the first floor, communicating with a spiral staircase, is a room paved with small pebbles. On one side is a broad chimney-place, just such as we see now all through Guyenne, even in the towns. According to the tradition preserved by the family to whom the house belongs, it was in one of the chimney-corners of this room that Prince Henry sat on the evening of the day that he left Roc-Amadour. It is uncertain, however, whether the Prince went to Martel immediately after the sacrilege, or after a pilgrimage that he made to the sanctuary to atone for his crime, when he was suffering from the disease that killed him. There is a local legend that he was followed by two monks, who contrived to put poison into his goblet; but whether he was poisoned or died of dysentery at Martel, as the chroniclers maintain, is a detail of small importance. That he did die here, and very repentantly, on a bed of ashes, and held up by the Bishop of Cahors, is a historical fact.
An indubitable testimony of the English occupation of Martel is the heraldic leopard of the Plantagenets. I found it carved in stone among the ruins of King Henry's palace, and hard by I saw it again upon a rusty fireplate that had been thrown into a corner. There is not a native of Martel who is not ready to talk of le leopard anglais.
The English were never loved by the Martellois. The people of this district are strong in their attachments, and perhaps even stronger in their animosities and prejudices. Without doubt the English did not treat them with marked tenderness; but there was very little human kindness in the Middle Ages, and the French, or the races which now compose France, left nothing to be invented in the arts of cruelty and oppression in the wars that they waged among themselves before they learnt, or were forced to learn, that it was to their interest to hold together and form one nation. Moreover, the greater number of the so-called English who kept a considerable part of Aquitaine in continual terror for three centuries were natives of the soil.
All the men of Martel who could carry arms joined the forces of King John, who was defeated by the Black Prince at Poitiers. The consuls of Martel had to pay heavy ransoms for their fellow-townsmen who fell into the hands of the English. Notwithstanding the disaster at Poitiers, the Martellois closed their gates and prepared for a siege, after having obtained from the Viscount a company of crossbow-men to help them in the defence. But an English garrison was soon established at Montvallent, only a few miles off, and this fact seems to have demoralized the Martellois, who, after enduring a few assaults, surrendered the town. The longest period of unbroken English possession of Martel appears to have occurred after this surrender. It is probable that the Sénéchaussée, which now exists under the name of the Hôtel de Ville, was commenced about this time, although the King of England must have been represented in the town by his seneschal long before. By the treaty passed between Henry III. and Reymond VI. of Turenne in 1223, it was stipulated that the Viscount should pay homage to Henry, but that the English officers should exercise no jurisdiction in the viscounty, except in the town of Martel, where the King could hold his assizes with the consent of the Viscount. It was, moreover, provided that in the event of resistance on the part of his fiefs, the Viscount could apply to the English seneschal at Martel for armed assistance. The burghers were in the enjoyment of their political franchises from the year 1256. They had town councillors, who elected four consuls every four years, who represented the borough in the États Vicomtains—an assembly composed of the principal landholders and dignitaries of the viscounty. The more they tasted freedom the more the burghers felt disposed to quarrel with the Viscount. In 1355 they sent a deputation to the Pope at Avignon begging him to ask their lord if it was his wish that the town should retain its privileges. The minutes of the municipal meeting, at which this decision was come to, are in existence, and they show how the Romance language was written at Martel in those days:
'Item fo ordenat que Moss. Aymar de Bessa et P. Karti ano a Vinho far reverensa al papa per nom de la vila eque Phi recomendo la vila. E quelh fasso supplicacio quelh plassa far am los vescomte se bot que nos garde nostres previleges.'
This ancient town has suffered grievously from that spirit of demolition which was so active during the first half of the present century, but which in France has been somewhat checked by the Commission of Historic Monuments. There are people who can remember when the town was surrounded by two walls; now only a few remnants of the fortifications remain. The church is exceedingly interesting. There are details indicating a very early origin—they may possibly have come down from the foundation; but the structure in the main belongs to the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The east end—the oldest portion—has more the character of a stronghold than of a church. It has no apse, and the terminating wall, which is carried far above the roof, has a row of machicolations, and the massive buttresses by which it is flanked are really towers pierced with loopholes. At the foot of the wall is a deep pool of water, which serves as the horse-pond for the town; but it may originally have been part of a moat.
In the tympanum of the twelfth-century portal is one of those bas-reliefs representing the Last Judgment upon which the artistic ambition of the early Gothic period appears to have been chiefly directed in this region.
The fourteenth-century Sénéchaussée, with its embattled belfry, its little turrets or bartizans hanging high at the angles of the wall, its dim old court, with a deep well in the centre, speaks with a ghostly voice of ancient Martel. This building, after the English left, was the residence of the seneschals of the Viscounts of Turenne down to the Revolution. In two of the rooms are chimney-pieces very artistically carved in oak.
Notwithstanding all the demolition that has gone on, bits of picturesque antiquity meet the eye everywhere in the old English town. Now it is a half-ruinous watch-tower, now the Gothic doorway of a thirteenth-century house, now a gateway that has lost its tower, but whose wounds are covered with yellow wallflowers in spring; now a turret running up an entire front, with little windows looking out upon the quiet street, or some high-pitched roof curving inward under the weight of years and tiles.
The inn where I put up was like a hostelry of romance. Entering by a broad archway, I passed along a passage vaulted and groined, where corbel-heads grimaced from dim corners; climbed a staircase broad enough for a palace, and, having reached the landing, saw a great room with hearth and chimney to match, massive old furniture, pots and pans of highly-polished copper, and a hostess stout and cheery, who welcomed me as though I were an old friend, and not a wanderer to whom food and shelter were to be exchanged for money. This good woman had evidently no faith in new fashions; she dressed as she did thirty years ago, and every dish that she cooked for me was kept warm by a pewter brazier filled with embers from the hearth. One of these dishes was a goose's liver half roasted, half stewed, and sprinkled with capers.
While at Martel I was arrested as a spy by an old garde champêtre, who, seeing me taking notes of the church, wished to know who gave me permission to 'make a plan of the town.' I did not reply to him with the politeness that he evidently considered himself entitled to. It is probable that I should have chosen my words with more circumspection had I guessed what an important person he was; but as he wore a blouse, and was squatting upon a heap of stones which he had been pulling about, I underestimated his dignity. That he united the functions of cantonnier and garde did not occur to me. He sprang to his feet, put on his official badge, and, seizing me by the arm, shouted: 'I arrest you!' Then, when I took the liberty of removing his hand, he called out: 'Au secours!'
But those to whom he appealed were women, who preferred to let him manage his own business, and who, moreover, were too much amused to interfere. When he had calmed down a little I walked with him to the deputy-mayor, whose office was over a little shop. After hearing me and examining my papers, this gentleman was satisfied that I was not a very dangerous person, and he told me that I had better forget the incident.
The fierce old man could not understand why I was released. He even protested: 'Il dit qu'il est un anglais; mais il le dit!'
The deputy-mayor tried to calm him by observing that I had a right to be an Englishman. The garde then walked out, looking very hot and puzzled. From his childhood he had heard of the English as the worst tyrants that the region had known. Was not the country strewn with the ruins of the fortresses they had built? To his mind they were more dangerous enemies than the Germans, who never came near Martel. I bear no grudge against the old man. He believed that he was doing his duty in arresting me, and if I had made more allowance for his age and prejudices the unpleasantness might have been avoided. To him the old struggle with the English was almost as fresh as if it had taken place in his father's time.
People who remain in the same place all their days, and who never read, live much more in the past than others, and remember injuries done to their remote ancestors as if they, the latest descendants, were still suffering from them, I remember asking a woman in an inn not far from Martel how an old gateway and other mediaeval buildings close by had been brought to such a sad state of ruin.
'It was you,' she exclaimed, 'who did that—vous autres anglais!'
And she looked so resentful for a few moments that I wished I had let the sleeping dog lie.