The system is very common in France, and in theory is admirable. It appears a means of uniting capital and labour in the cultivation of the soil. But, if the tenant has no capital behind him, in bad seasons he has to borrow at usurious interest. And then, if the cart-horse break his neck, or the cow die of anthrax, on the top of a bad harvest, his plight is poor indeed; for the landlord has a right to exact that stock and tools shall always correspond to the inventory drawn up when the tenant entered into possession. And too often, if he improves his farm, the owner makes that an occasion for increasing his own pretensions. Such is the fate of Tiennou, who, having spent the better part of his life on bettering his land, in the end receives notice to quit.
Unless he be (as he so often is) a peasant-proprietor, the lot of the French husbandman is austere. In a little pamphlet, En Bourbonnais, M. Guillaumin has added up the yearly receipts of a day-labourer in good work, turn by turn haymaker, harvester, thresher, wood-cutter, and so on. His annual earnings amount, in English coin, to £21 12s. Though he be fed abundantly at the farms where he works all summer long, still his family must live; and he must feed himself all winter-time. And bread is dear in France; out of his twenty guineas a year, the day-labourer must reckon fifteen or sixteen for bread alone. The rent of the cottage will cost another £4; and there remains about 30s. for school expenses, shoes, clothing, fuel, doctoring, wine, tobacco—all the pleasures and luxuries of life. No doubt he sells his pig, and his kids and his poultry, and anything he can, to increase his slender revenues; for, in the valley of the Allier, the peasant is too poor to put a fowl in his pot on Sundays, or enjoy a rasher of his own bacon by his own fireside.
Farther south, among the hills and high valleys of the Cantal, another peasant-farmer, Antonin Dusserre, offers us, in his Jean et Louise, another image of pastoral France: the rich yeomanry, the Couarrous and Couarros, who compose the notable society of those isolated villages, where the château is empty four-fifths of the year or more. The Couarros (rich grazing-farmers, intelligent, tenacious, positive, active, and money-loving) compose a rustic middle-class far wealthier than their simple lives would lead us to suppose, proud of their flocks and herds, and their balance at the bankers. M. Dusserre, I believe, is blind; but before that misfortune fell upon him, he has looked long and lovingly at the high-lying heather, the cliffs capped with basalt, the gentian-starred mountain-pastures, and the green glens and trobers of his native land. The landscapes and the types of the Cantal live on in his inner eye.
Much farther west, on the borders of Anjou and Vendée, a village schoolmaster, M. Pérochon, has recently given us a picture of peasant life in the style of Guillaumin and Dusserre, in Les Creux-de-Maisons. A creux-de-maison is not, as one might expect, one of those cave-dwellings hewn out of the chalky banks of the Indre or the Loire, which look so primitive but which are said to be dry and cosy, possessing the local reputation of keeping off rheumatism; no, a creux-de-maison is a sort of cabin about seven feet high, built of mud or of rough stone cemented with clay, single-roomed, thatch-roofed, with a pane for a window and an earthen floor.
‘C’était une cabane bossue et lépreuse, à peine plus haute qu’un homme; on descendait à l’intérieur par deux marches de granit; il y faisait très sombre, car le jour n’entrait que par une lucarne à deux petits carreaux; l’hiver il y avait de l’eau partout, et cela faisait de la boue qui ne finissait de sécher, sous les lits surtout; il y avait des trous qui empêchaient les tabourets de tenir debout; on les bouchait de temps en temps avec de la terre apportée du jardin.’
Such are the creux-de-maisons, still not infrequent round Bressuire in Vendée, though happily rarer every year, as the spread of creameries and co-operatives brings the sense and the means of comfort into the Ireland of France. M. Pérochon is perhaps a little unfair in taking no notice of this clearing of the horizon: he will not allow us a gleam of consolation; Zola himself was never more resolutely lugubrious. His book is conceived in a low tone, a minor key, by a deliberate purpose, and we must accept the artist’s postulate.
His theme is the life of a day-labourer from the day he leaves the regiment till the time when, at forty-eight years of age, having buried wife and child, he owns that life has been too much for him. He has had his romance, has married the miller’s lovely daughter, and has seen her die of want in the horrible creux-de-maison. He has watched the children grow thinner month by month.
‘Depuis le Mardi-Gras, mes pauvres petits n’ont mangé ni lard, ni œufs, ni lait ... quatre livres de beurre en tout depuis quatre mois.... Je suis fatiguée de n’avoir rien à faire manger aux petits; des haricots et des pommes de terre, des pommes de terre et des haricots! Pas moyen seulement d’élever des poules!’
And indeed in the poorer parts of frugal France, so royally fertile, there are many districts where the married labourer in winter used to have little more in his larder; where a sack of potatoes, a sack of chestnuts, and a sack of buckwheat supplied the chief of his diet, or at least of his children’s diet if he be fed at the farm. I speak in the past tense, but I fear it is so to-day in many a village of Lozère or Brittany, where the food of the agricultural poor is as much worse than it is in England, as it is better and more varied in Normandy or Anjou or Touraine. And this constant strife between hunger and love, between natures naturally tender, gay, and brave, and circumstances continually depressing—has resulted in a stampede towards the towns, a rural exodus, which is the great problem of the day in the poorer provinces of France.
The war has singularly respected the writers of Pastoral novels. It has even added to their ranks a new name, that of M. Henri Bachelin, whose village tales, Le Serviteur, in 1918, Le Village, in 1919, are direct and living sketches of rural France in the minute and finely-stippled taste of Émile Guillaumin.