IV
After this came two or three pictures of quite another complexion—pictures of which a long green valley, almost in the centre of France, makes the general setting. The valley itself, indeed, forms one delightful picture, although the country which surrounds it is by no means one of the regions that place themselves on exhibition. It is the old territory of the Gâtinais, which has much history, but no renown of beauty. It is very quiet, deliciously rural, immitigably French; the typical, average, "pleasant" France of history, literature, and art—of art, of landscape-art, perhaps, especially. Wherever I look I seem to see one of the familiar pictures on a dealer's wall—a Lambinet, a Troyon, a Daubigny, a Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the majority; the mood of the landscape usually expresses itself in silvery lights and vivid greens. The history of this part of France is the history of the monarchy, and its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic tongue, but a nearer approach to it than any local patois. The peasants deliver themselves with rather a drawl, but their French is as consecutive as that of Ollendorf.
Each side of the long valley is a continuous ridge, which offers it a high, wooded horizon, and through the middle of it there flows a charming stream, wandering, winding and doubling, smothered here and there in rushes, and spreading into lily-coated reaches, beneath the clear shadow of tall, straight, light-leaved trees. On each side of the stream the meadows stretch away flat, clean, magnificent, lozenged across with rows of lateral foliage, under which a cow-maiden sits on the grass, hooting now and then, nasally, to the large-uddered browsers in front of her. There are no hedges nor palings nor walls; it is all a single estate. Occasionally in the meadows there rises a cluster of red-roofed hovels—each a diminutive village. At other points, at about half an hour's walk apart, are three charming old houses. The châteaux are extremely different, but, both as pictures and as dwellings, each has its points. They are very intimate with each other, so that these points may be amicably discussed. The points in one case, however, are remarkably strong. The little old castel I mention stands directly in the attenuated river, on an island just great enough to hold it, and the garden-flowers grow upon the farther bank. This, of course, is a most delightful affair. But I found something very agreeable in the aspect of one of the others, when I made it the goal of certain of those walks before breakfast, which of cool mornings, in the late summer, do not fall into the category of ascetic pleasures. (In France, indeed, if one did not do a great many things before breakfast, the work of life would be but meagrely performed.)
The dwelling in question stands on the top of the long ridge which encloses the comfortable valley to the south, being by its position quite in the midst of its appurtenant acres. It is not particularly "kept up," but its quiet rustiness and untrimmedness only help it to be familiar. A grassy plateau approaches it from the edge of the hill, bordered on one side by a short avenue of horse-chestnuts, and on the other by a dusky wood. Beyond the chestnuts are the steep-roofed, yellow-walled farm-buildings, and under cover of the wood a stretch of beaten turf, where, on Sundays and holidays, the farm-servants play at bowls. Directly before the house is a little square garden, enclosed by a low parapet, which is interrupted by a high gateway of mossy pillars and iron arabesques, the whole of it muffled in creeping plants. The house, with its yellow walls and russet roof, is ample and substantial; it is a very proper gentilhommière. In a corner of the garden, at the angle of the parapet, rises that classic emblem of rural gentility, the pigeonnier, the old stone dovecot. It is a great round tower, as broad of base as a lighthouse, with its roof shaped like an extinguisher, and a big hole in its upper portion, in and out of which a dove is always fluttering.
You see all this from the windows of the drawing-room. Be sure that the drawing-room is panelled in white and gray, with old rococo mouldings over the doorways and mantelpiece. The open gateway of the garden, with its tangled creepers, makes a frame for the picture that lies beyond the grassy esplanade where the thistles have been suffered to grow round a disused stone well, placed in odd remoteness from the house (if, indeed, it be not a relic of an earlier habitation): a picture of a wide green country, rising beyond the unseen valley and stretching away to a far horizon in deep blue lines of wood. Behind, through other windows, you look out on the gardens proper. There are places that take one's fancy by some accident of expression, some mystery of accident. This one is high and breezy, both genial and reserved, plain yet picturesque, extremely cheerful and a little melancholy. It has what in the arts is called "style," and so I have attempted to commemorate it.
Going to call on the peasants was as charming an affair as a chapter in one of George Sand's rural tales. I went one Sunday morning with my hostess, who knew them well and enjoyed their most garrulous confidence. I don't mean that they told her all their secrets, but they told her a good many; if the French peasant is a simpleton, he is a very shrewd simpleton. At any rate, of a Sunday morning in August, when he is stopping at home from work and has put on his best jacket and trousers, and is loafing at the door of his neighbour's cabin, he is a very charming person. The peasantry in the region I speak of had admirably good manners. The curé gave me a low account of their morals, by which he meant, on the whole, I suspect, that they were moderate church-goers. But they have the instinct of civility and a talent for conversation; they know how to play the host and the entertainer. By "he," just now, I meant she quite as much; it is rare that, in speaking superlatively of the French, in any connection, one does not think of the women even more than of the men. They constantly strike the foreigner as a stronger expression of the qualities of the race. On the occasion I speak of the first room in the very humble cabins I successively visited—in some cases, evidently, it was the only room—had been set into irreproachable order for the day. It had usually a fine brownness of tone, generated by the high chimney-place, with its swinging pots, the important bed, in its dusky niche, with its flowered curtains, the big-bellied earthenware in the cupboard, the long-legged clock in the corner, the thick, quiet light of the small, deeply-set window, the mixture, on all things, of smoke-stain and the polish of horny hands. Into the midst of this "la Rabillon" or "la mère Léger" brings forward her chairs and begs us to be seated, and, seating herself, with crossed hands, smiles expressively and answers abundantly every inquiry about her cow, her husband, her bees, her eggs, her baby. The men linger half outside and half in, with their shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every one smiles with that simple, clear-eyed smile of the gratified peasant; they talk much more like George Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. And if they receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed us on our way with proportionate urbanity. I go to six or eight little hovels, all of them dirty outside and clean within; I am entertained everywhere with the bonhomie, the quaintness, the good faces and good manners of their occupants, and I finish my tour with an esteem for my new acquaintance which is not diminished by learning that several of them have thirty or forty thousand francs carefully put away.
And yet, as I say, M. le Curé thinks they are in a bad way, and he knows something about them. M. le Curé, too, is not a dealer in scandal; there is something delightfully quaint in the way in which he deprecates an un-Christian construction of his words. There is more than one curé in the valley whose charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest of whom I speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has been accused, I believe, of pretensions to illuminisme; but even in his most illuminated moments it can never occur to him that he has been chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet to say that he is the curé, not of Gy, but of the village nearest to Gy. I write this sentence half for the pleasure of putting down that briefest of village-names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If you wish to be very specific, you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains—Gy of the Little Nuns. I went with my hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Curé, who himself opened his garden door to us (there was a crooked little black cross perched upon it), and, lifting his rusty calotte, stood there a moment in the sunshine, smiling a greeting more benignant than his words.
A rural presbytère is not a very sumptuous dwelling, and M. le Curé's little drawing-room reminded me of a Yankee parlour (minus the subscription-books from Hartford on the centre-table) in some out-of-the-way corner of New England. But he took us into his very diminutive garden, and showed us an ornament that would not have flourished in the shadow of a Yankee parlour—a rude stone image of the Virgin, which he had become possessed of I know not how, and for which he was building a sort of niche in the wall. The work was going on slowly, for he must take the labour as he could get it; but he appealed to his visitors, with a smile of indulgent irony, for an assurance that his little structure would not make too bad a figure. One of them told him that she would send him some white flowers to set out round the statue; whereupon he clasped his hands together over his snuff-box and expressed cheerful views of the world we live in. A couple of days afterward he came to breakfast, and of course arrived early, in his new cassock and band. I found him in the billiard-room, walking up and down alone and reading his breviary. The combination of the locality, the personage and the occupation, made me smile; and I smiled again when, after breakfast, I found him strolling about the garden, puffing a cigarette. Of course he had an excellent appetite; but there is something rather cruel in those alternations of diet to which the French parish priest is subjected. At home he lives like a peasant—a fact which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he has usually—or in many cases—been brought up to that life. But his fellow-peasants don't breakfast at the château and gaze down the savoury vistas opened by cutlets à la Soubise. They have not the acute pain of relapsing into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day, or every week even, that M. le Curé breakfasts at the château; but there must nevertheless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a labourer, yet he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes to have rather a point of irony. But to the ideal curé, of course, all characters are equal; he thinks neither too ill of his bad breakfasts nor too well of his good ones. I won't say that the excellent man I speak of is the ideal curé, but I suspect he is an approach to it; he has a grain of the epicurean to an ounce of stoicism. In the garden-path, beside the moat, while he puffed his cigarette, he told me how he had held up his head to the Prussians; for, hard as it seemed to believe it, that pastoral valley had been occupied by ravaging Teutons. According to this recital, he had spoken his mind civilly, but very distinctly, to the group of officers who had made themselves at home in his dwelling—had informed them that it grieved him profoundly that he was obliged to meet them standing there in his soutane, and not out in the fields with a musket in his hands and a dozen congenial spirits at his side. The scene must have been dramatic. The first of the officers got up from table and asked for the privilege of shaking his hand. "M. le Curé," he said, "j'estime hautement votre caractère."
Six miles away—or nearer, by a charming shaded walk along a canal—was an ancient town with a legend—a legend which, as a child, I read in my lesson-book at school, marvelling at the woodcut above it, in which a ferocious dog was tearing a strange man to pieces, while the king and his courtiers sat by as if they were at the circus. I allude to it chiefly in order to mention the name of one of its promenades, which is the stateliest, beyond all comparison, in the world; the name, I mean, not the street. The latter is called the Promenade des Belles Manières. Could anything be finer than that? With what a sweep gentlemen must once have taken off their hats there; how ladies must once have curtsied, regardless of gutters, and how people must have turned out their toes as they walked!