III.
The Ossalais, however, have ordinarily a gentle, intelligent, and somewhat sad physiognomy. The soil is too poor to impart to their countenance that expression of impatient vivacity and lively spirit that the wine of the south and the easy life give to their neighbors of Languedoc. Three-score leagues in a carriage prove that the soil moulds the type. A little farther up, in the Cantal, a country of chest-nut-trees, where the people fill themselves with a hearty nourishment, you will see countenances red with sluggish blood and set with a thick beard, fleshy, heavy-limbed bodies, massive machines for labor. Here the men are thin and pale; their bones project, and their large features are weatherbeaten like those of their mountains. An endless struggle against the soil has stunted the women as well as the plants; it has left in their eyes a vague expression of melancholy and reflection. Thus the incessant impressions of body and soul in the long run modify body and soul; the race moulds the individual, the country moulds the race. A degree of heat in the air and of inclination in the ground is the first cause of our faculties and of our passions.
Disinterestedness is not a mountain virtue. In a poor country, the first want is want of money. The dispute is to know whether they shall consider strangers as a prey or a harvest; both opinions are true: we are a prey which every year yields a harvest. Here is an incident, trifling, but capable of showing the dexterity and the ardor with which they will skin a flint.
One day Paul told his servant to sew another button upon his trousers. An hour after she brings in the trousers, and, with an undecided, anxious air, as if fearing the effect of her demand: “It is a sou,” said she. I will explain later how great a sum the sou is in this place.
Paul draws out a sou in silence and gives it to her. Jeannette retires on tip-toe as far as the door, thinks better of it, returns, takes up the trousers and shows the button: “Ah! that is a fine button! (A pause.) I did not find that in my box. (Another and a longer pause.) I bought that at the grocer’s; it costs a sou!” She draws herself up anxiously; the proprietor of the trousers, still without speaking, gives a second sou.
It is clear that she has struck upon a mine of sous. Jeannette goes out, and a moment after reopens the door. She has resolved on her course, and in a shrill, piercing voice, with admirable volubility: “I had no thread; I had to buy some thread; I used a good deal of thread; good thread, too. The button won’t come off. I sewed it on fast: it cost a sou.” Paul pushes across the table the third sou.
Two hours later, Jeannette, who has been pondering on the matter, reappears. She prepares breakfast with the greatest possible care; she takes pains to wipe the least spot, she lowers her voice, she walks noiselessly, she is charming in her little attentions; then she says, putting forth all sorts of obsequious graces: “I ought not to lose anything, you would not want me to lose anything; the cloth was harsh, I broke the point of my needle; I did not know it a while ago, I have just noticed it; it cost a sou.”
Paul drew out the fourth sou, saying with his serious air: “Cheer up, Jeannette; you will keep a good house, my child; happy the husband who shall lead you, pure and blushing, beneath the roof of his ancestors; you may go and brush the trousers.”
Beggars swarm. I have never met a child between the ages of four and fifteen years who did not ask alms of me; all the inhabitants follow this trade. No one is ashamed of it. You look at any one of the little girls, scarcely able to walk, seated at their threshold busy in eating an apple: they come stumbling along with their hands stretched out towards you. You find in a valley a young herdsman with his cows; he comes up and asks you for a trifle. A tall girl goes by with a fagot on her head; she stops and asks a trifle of you.
A peasant is at work on the road. “I am making a good road for you,” says he; “give me just a trifle.” A band of scapegraces are playing at the end of a promenade; as soon as they see you, they take each other by the hand, begin the dance of the country, and end by collecting the usual trifle. And so it is throughout the Pyrenees.
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And they are merchants as well as beggars. You rarely pass along the street without being accosted by a guide who offers you his services and begs you to give him the preference. If you are seated on the hillside, three or four children come dropping out of the sky, bringing you butterflies, stones, curious plants, bouquets of flowers.
If you go near a dairy, the proprietor comes out with a porringer of milk, and will sell it to you in spite of yourself. One day as I was looking at a young bull, the drover proposed to me to buy it.
This greediness is not offensive. I once went up the brook of la Soude, behind Eaux-Bonnes: it is a sort of tumbledown staircase which for three leagues winds among the box in a parched ravine. You have to clamber over pointed rocks, jump from point to point, balance yourself along narrow ledges, climb zigzag up the scarped slopes covered with rolling stones. The foot-path is enough to frighten the goats. You bruise your feet on it, and at every step run the risk of getting a sprain. I met there some young women and girls of twenty, all barefooted, carrying to the village, one a block of marble in her basket, another three sacks of charcoal fastened together, another five or six heavy planks; the way is nine miles long, under a mid-day sun; and nine miles for the home journey: for this they are paid ten sous.
Like the beggars and the merchants, they are very crafty and very polite. Poverty forces men to calculate and to please; they take off their cap as soon as you speak to them and smile complaisantly; their manners are never brutal or artless. The proverb says very truly: “False and courteous Béarnais.” You recall to mind the caressing manners and the perfect skill of their Henry IV.; he knew how to play on everybody and offend nobody. In this respect, as in many others, he was a true Béarnais. With the aid of necessity, I have seen them trump up geological disquisitions. In the middle of July there was a sort of earthquake; a report was spread that an old wall had fallen down; in truth the windows had shaken as if a great wagon were passing by. Immediately half of the bathers quitted their lodgings: a hundred and fifty persons fled from Cauterets in two days; travellers in their night-shirts ran to the stable to fasten on their carriages, and to light themselves carried away the hotel lantern. The peasants shook their heads compassionately and said to me: “You see, sir, they are going from the frying-pan into the fire; if there is an earthquake, the plain will open, and they will fall into the crevices, whereas here the mountain is solid, and would keep them safe as a house.”
That same Jeannette who already holds so honorable place in my history, shall furnish an example of the polite caution and the over-scrupulous reserve in which they wrap themselves when they are afraid that they shall be compromised. The master had drawn the neighboring church, and wanted to judge of his work after the manner of Molière.
“Do you recognize that, Jeanette.”
“Ah! monsieur, did you do that?”
“What have I copied here?”
“Ah! monsieur, it is very beautiful.”
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"But still, tell me what it is there.”
She takes the paper, turns it over and over again, looks at the artist with a dazed air and says nothing.
“Is it a mill or a church?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Is it the church of Laruns?”
“Ah! it’s very beautiful.”
You could never get her beyond that.