A large family is a source of wealth to the farmer, who has to pay five pounds a year to his herdboy or goose-girl, ten or twelve pounds a year to the maid who helps his wife, and sixteen pounds a year to every labourer and ploughman, in addition to their keep. So when the farmer really is a farmer and cultivates his neighbour’s land, his quiver is well plenished, as in Auvergne. But in Touraine the peasant works on his own land; and the dread of having to divide that treasured morsel, dearer than wife or child, sorely limits his descendants. A law permitting a greater freedom in the making of wills would certainly be followed by an immediate increase in the rural population. The French as a nation are lovers of children and hoarders of money. Who would not multiply the curly heads around the bowl of cabbage-soup, and save by the same stroke the money spent in wages?
A labourer living and eating in his own cottage earns in Touraine, as a rule, some two and thirty pounds a year, or is paid for piecework at a rate of threepence an hour. Or if he hire himself out by the day, he earns two francs in winter, finding his own food; three francs from haymaking to harvest; and five francs for the few golden weeks that pay the rent. The rate of wages is to me a mystery. A long course of mediæval studies has left no doubt in my mind that in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and down to the middle of the sixteenth century, the rural class of the population was better paid and wealthier, in relation to the rest of society, than is the case to-day. Never perhaps have the poor been poorer than in the last three or four hundred years—the era of polite civilization. And yet the peasant of Touraine is not a Socialist. Patient, thrifty, humorous, deliberate, and practical, he takes things as they are, and finds them, on the whole, not amiss.
Positive and superstitious, slow and sure, subtle, cautious, and independent, the labourer of Touraine is a character apart; so different from our rough and genial farmers of the Cantal, that it seems strange to think that one and the other are just peasants of Central France. He is fond of pleasure; and though a good worker, a lover of his ease. No man knows better how to hang a garland round the Altar of Duty—a rare art. “Molles Turones,” said Cæsar; and Tasso thought the peasant here was like his land, which is “molle, lieta e dilettosa.” But this softness, this measure which knows nor haste nor passion, are enforced by a patient continuity. Look at the countryman as he saunters along his fields, dressed in a dark-blue blouse, open over a decent woollen suit. He appears the happiest of mortals, nonchalant, easy-going, humorous and delicate. His women are worthy of him. The elder women of Touraine are dignified and lovely to behold in their long circular cloaks of black cloth, and the fine and costly conch of embroidered
muslin that discreetly veils the dark hair. One charming young girl, born to this decorous and dainty costume, used to sport on Sundays (when I knew her) a singular erection of chip, ostrich feathers out of curl, and pink muslin convolvulus. One day I regretted the earlier head-dress. She replied: “Never again, madame, never again! The first day I went into Tours settled that question. Those idle people on the Rue Royale looked at me with a sort of pity (or, perhaps, as you say, ma’am, it was admiration, but I found it very wounding), as if I existed for their entertainment, rather than on my own account.” The little speech, with its fierce independence, was quite as good a piece of local colour as the cap. Jeannette was a person of a refined and delicate temperament, not uncommon in Touraine, and full of quaint niceties of thought, feeling, and expression; but, for all that, she had some vulgar failings of her class: she was fond of money and superstitious. She was quite aware of the first defect, and was sensitive enough to appreciate the beauty of disinterestedness; sometimes she would say, as if she complained of some hereditary malady: “It grieves me to be so avaricious! But something inside me pushes me that way.” She never, I think, discovered that she was superstitious, deeming rather the people of Paris a foolhardy race for not taking certain obvious precautions.... Jeannette, for instance, would not have married into a family of which any member was afflicted even with auburn hair, and when I admired the shade we politely call Venetian, she would exclaim: “Every one knows the meaning of red hair. There’s a sorcerer in that family!” In Touraine, the sorcerer—the jeteux de sorts—has often more authority in a village than the priest; and many a sensible farmer wears in secret some article of clothing wrong side out as a means of diverting the witch’s cruel spell. Once, when I changed house, I found my good Jeannette had loosed her purse-strings to buy a young cockerel; she sacrificed it in my new bedroom, letting at least one spot of the blood fall on the fresh planks: “For the house is new,” she said, “and some one must die in it before the year’s out; better it should be the bird than madame!” She used to tell me all her dreams, and would come to me weeping in a morning if she had dreamed of pearls, a marriage, or I think it was cornflowers—some unlucky blossom. She had two books in her possession. One (a sort of mumbo-jumbo, treasured from pure devotedness) was my Life of Renan. The other, much thumbed and tattered from long use, was La Clef des Songes.
I suppose such devotion to fetishes must exhaust the religious faculty, for like many superstitious persons—especially in Touraine—Jeannette was not pious. She had in her something stiffly, Puritanically, virtuous. She was loyal, honest, upright, quarrelsome, affectionate, precise. While she delicately dawdled through her work, doing it in perfection, her mind was not idle; she had that thoughtful inward habit, combined with a faculty of sharp observation, which I have often noticed in the peasant class. She had a great love of justice; but especially as it affected herself. It was hard for her to see that other people are just as real and as important. Having been at one moment exposed to a baseless calumny, when it was at last cleared up, she burst into tears and exclaimed: “Ce pauv’ Dreyfus!” Suddenly she understood our emotion, and what was the injustice which had caused such a to-do.
If I have drawn her portrait here, it is because Jeannette is just a specimen of the peasant of Touraine. I recognized in her the moral features of her race:—measure and tact, delicacy of sentiment, love of ease, lack of enthusiasm, a fidelity tempered by criticism. Also she made me understand and touch, as it were, certain features of her local class. For instance, that passionate love of amusement which shows itself in summer dances on the green (the heaviest old Tourangeau farmer can dance like any sylph). In winter time, the same bent appears in the endless repartee and story-telling, round a neighbour’s hearth of evenings, when the peasants gather for la veillée. “At least we are not dull in Touraine,” Jeannette used to say, “and we are well-housed, in our nice little stone houses, with the roof stuffed full of hay and grain above us. You must sleep on a sixth floor in Paris, if you would really understand the heat of summer or the winter’s cold.”
VI
The city of Tours stands on a fertile plain of chalk some three hundred feet above sea level—a plain which is diversified by the frequent valleys of considerable rivers. There are the huge and turbid Loire, the winding Indre, the clear green Cher, so wide, and yet at ease in its pebbly bed; a little further off the Creuse and the Vienne. All are great bodies of water, which elsewhere give their names to whole departments. Most of these rivers are accompanied, on one side at least, some little way inland, by a steep rocky ridge of friable white tufa, whose natural caverns are frequently inhabited, enlarged, and made into comfortable dwellings by modern troglodytes. So easy to manipulate is the soft chalky stone! Therein dwell the thrifty peasants, as cosy as a weevil in a cheese. These earthy coteaux, or long level lines of low-banked hills, are peculiar, I think, to France, and common in every part of it: if they lie to the north, they are generally covered by a natural copsewood; if they slope to the south, well set to the sun, they form a perfect nursery for the vine. Near Ballan, the coteaux of the Cher grow an excellent red wine; the banks of the Loire produce the sparkling golden Vouvray; at Chinon, on the Indre, the vines give a claret celebrated in the south of France; Chinon, indeed, which lies a little south of Ballan, is the richest part of all the plain. It is the ample garden of France, beloved of Rabelais, and a land of rich dessert: wine and walnuts, grapes and almonds, plums and pears. If you pass in September, the orchards present a busy scene; the yellow Catherine plums are then in their perfection of mellow ripeness; they are gathered by hand with dainty care, laid to dry in the sun on wicker trays or hurdles, and baked several times in a baker’s oven before they issue thence in the shape of dried fruit for the table in winter: the famous “Pruneaux de Tours.” Not only the Catherine plum, chiefly grown for drying, but the delicious Reine Claude, golden hued and splashed with carmine, the Agen plum that’s red and blue, and the Golden Drop, abound in these orchards; for the hardy plum-tree, that will grow anywhere, demands for its perfection a land of wide airy valleys and low-lying southern slopes. The plum is made for Touraine, and Touraine for the plum; ’tis a happy marriage. In autumn, when the orchards drop with fruit; when the slopes are covered with the turning vine; when the laden pear-trees stand round the fields, which are high with maize and clover sown for fodder after early harvest; when every farmyard, in the angle of its wall, shows a huge heap of those great ribbed and golden gourds, large enough to contain the fairy coach of Cinderella, which feed man and beast with pumpkin-soup all winter; then the plain of Touraine, under its customary sky of sunny grey, has a beauty of its own, drawn from its great wide rivers, its rocky, cavernous cliffs, its smiling valleys, its pretty hills all clothed with oats, their round heads delicately outlined against the soft horizon, its great forests of Loches and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between two rows of pollard willows, its great, straight, white high-roads that the aspen flecks with shadow, and above all from that indescribable grace in the lie of the land which satisfies the eye with scant diversity. Arthur Young may declare it “a dead, flat, unpleasant country—a level of burnt russet meadow,” and affirm the landscape to be “more uninteresting than I could have thought it possible for the vicinity of a great river to be.” We will dare to differ. With Montaigne, we will cry shame on the Highlander, whose eye, too accustomed to his lochs and heather, fails to appreciate the melting beauty of Touraine. With Gilbert White, we’ll declare that the rounded forms of a chalk country make it seem more alive and breathing, as it were, than any other. For one season of the year at least, Touraine is beautiful!