The above sentences may be taken as a specimen of the ideas with which Jasmin seemed to be actually overflowing at every pore in his body, so rapid, vehement, and loud was his enunciation of them. Warming more and more as he went on, he began to sketch the outlines of his favourite pieces, every now and then plunging into recitation, jumping from French to patois, and from patois to French, and sometimes spluttering them out, mixed up pell-mell together. Hardly pausing to take breath, he rushed about the shop as he discoursed, lugging out, from old chests and drawers, piles of old newspapers and reviews, pointing me out a passage here in which the estimate of the writer pleased him, a passage there which showed how perfectly the critic had mistaken the scope of his poetic philosophy, and exclaiming, with the most perfect naivete, how mortifying it was for men of original and profound genius to be misconceived and misrepresented by pigmy whipper-snapper scamps of journalists. There was one review of his works, published in a London "Recueil," as he called it, to which Jasmin referred with great pleasure. A portion of it had been translated, he said, in the preface to a French edition of his works; and he had most of the highly complimentary phrases by heart. The English critic, he said, wrote in the Tintinum; and he looked dubiously at me when I confessed that I had never heard of the organ in question. "Pourtant," he said, "je vous le ferai voir:" and I soon perceived that Jasmin's Tintinum was no other than the Athenæum.
In the little back drawing-room behind the shop, to which the poet speedily introduced me, his sister, a meek, smiling woman, whose eyes never left her brother, following him as he moved with a beautiful expression of love and pride in his glory, received me with simple cordiality. The walls were covered with testimonials, presentations, and trophies, awarded by cities and distinguished persons, literary and political, to the modern Troubadour. Not a few of these are of a nature to make any man most legitimately proud. Jasmin possesses gold and silver vases, laurel branches, snuff-boxes, medals of honour, and a whole museum of similar gifts, inscribed with such characteristic and laconic legends as—"Au Poete, Les Jeunes filles de Toulouse reconnaissantes——." The number of garlands of immortelles, wreaths of ivy-jasmin (punning upon the name), laurel, and so forth, utterly astonished me. Jasmin preserved a perfect shrubbery of such tokens; and each symbol had, of course, its pleasant associative remembrance. One was given by the ladies of such a town; another was the gift of the prefect's wife of such a department. A handsome full-length portrait had been presented to the poet by the municipal authorities of Agen; and a letter from M. Lamartine, framed, above the chimney-piece, avowed the writer's belief that the Troubadour of the Garonne was the Homer of the modern world. M. Jasmin wears the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and has several valuable presents which were made to him by the late ex-king and different members of the Orleans family.
I have been somewhat minute in giving an account of my interview with M. Jasmin, because he is really the popular poet—the peasant poet of the south of France—the Burns of Limousin, Provence, and Languedoc. His songs are in the mouths of all who sing in the fields and by the cottage firesides. Their subjects are always rural, naive, and full of rustic pathos and rustic drollery. To use his words to me, he sings what the hearts of the people say, and he can no more help it than can the birds in the trees. Translations into French of his main poems have appeared; and compositions more full of natural and thoroughly unsophisticated pathos and humour it would be difficult to find. Jasmin writes from a teeming brain and a beaming heart; and there is a warmth and a glow, and a strong, happy, triumphant march of song about his poems, which carry you away in the perusal as they carried away the author in the writing. I speak of course from the French translations, and I can well conceive that they give but a comparatively faint transcript of the pith and power of the original. The patois in which these poems are written is the common peasant language of the south-west. It varies in some slight degree in different districts, but not more than the broad Scotch of Forfarshire differs from that of Ayrshire. As for the dialect itself, it seems in the main to be a species of cross between old French and Spanish—holding, however, I am assured, rather to the latter tongue than the former, and constituting a bold, copious, and vigorous speech, very rich in its colouring, full of quaint words and expressive phrases, and especially strong in all that relates to the language of the passions and affections.
I hardly know how long my interview with Jasmin might have lasted, for he seemed by no means likely to tire of talking, and his talk was too good and too curious not to be listened to with interest; but the sister, who had left us for a moment, coming back with the intelligence that there was quite a gathering of customers in the shop, I hastily took my leave, the poet squeezing my hand like a vice, and immediately thereafter dashing into all that appertains to curling-irons, scissors, razors, and lather, with just as much apparent energy and enthusiasm as he flung into his rhapsodical discourse on poetry and language.
Hereabouts you begin to become sensible of a change in the cookery at the table-d'hôtes; and in the gradually increasing predominance of oil and garlic, you recognise the kitchen influences of the sweet south. Garlic is a word of fear—of absolute horror to a great proportion of our countrymen, whose prejudices will permit them to learn no better. I admit that the first whiff of the odorous root coming upon inexperienced nostrils is far from pleasant; indeed, I well remember being once driven from the table in a small gasthoff at Strasbourg by the fumes of a particularly strong sausage. Now, however, I think I should know better. A relish for garlic, in fact, is one of those many acquired tastes which grew upon us with curious rapidity. You turn from the first garlicky dish with dismay; the second does not appear quite so bad; you muster up courage, and taste the third. A strange flavour certainly—nasty, too—but still—not irredeemably bad—there is a lurking merit in the sensation—and you try the experiment again and again—speedily coming to Sir Walter Scott's evident opinions touching the petit point d'ail, "which Gascons love and Scotsmen do not despise." Indeed, your friends will probably think it well if you content yourself with the petit point, and do not give yourself up to a height of seasoning such as that which I saw in the salle à manger at Agen, drive two English ladies headlong from the room. Every body in the South eats garlic, and you will find it for your interest, if but in self-defence, to do the same; while the oil eating is equally infectious: you enter Provence, able just to stand a sprinkling upon your salad—you depart from it, thinking nothing of devouring a dish of cabbage, chopped up, and swimming in the viscous fluid. The peasants all through the South eat and drink oil like so many Russians. Wandering through the dark and narrow streets of Agen—for we have now reached the point where the eaves of the roofs are made to project so far as to cast a perpetual shade upon the thoroughfare beneath—I came upon a group of tiny urchins, clustered round a grocer's shop, in great admiration of a row of clear oil-flasks displayed in the window.
"Tiens," said one. "C'est de l'huile ça—de l'huile claire—ça doit etre bon su' le pain—ça!" The little gourmand looked upon oil just as an English urchin would upon treacle.
It was from the heights above Agen—studded with the plum-trees which produce the famous prunes d'Agen—that I caught my first glimpse of the Pyrenees. I was sitting watching the calm uprising of the light smoke from the leaf-covered town beneath, and marking the grand panorama around me—the masses of luxuriant vines climbing up the plum and fig-trees, and the earth frequently yellow with the bursting beds of huge melons and pumpkins—when, extending my gaze over the vast expanse of champagne country, watered by the winding reaches of the Garonne, I saw—shadowy as the phantoms of airy clouds, rising into the far bright air—faintly, very faintly traced, but still visible, a blue vision of sierrated and jagged mountain peaks, stretching along the horizon from east to west, forming the central portion of the great chain of peaks running from Perpignan to Bayonne, and certainly, at least, one hundred and twenty miles distant from me as the crow flies. There they stood,—Louis Quatorze to the contrary, notwithstanding—one of the great landmarks of the world; a natural boundary for ever; dividing a people from a people, a tongue from a tongue, and a power from a power!
Below me, at the back of the town, once rose the ancient castle of Agen. Its ruins were demolished, with those of a cathedral, at the time of the Revolution; but its memory recalls a very curious story, developing the true character of the Black Prince, and shewing that, chivalrous and daring as he was, his tongue had in it an occasional smack of the braggart, and that the Foremost Knight of all the World could occasionally do uncommonly sneaking things. Thus it fell out:—In the year 1368, the Lord of Aquitaine announced that he would raise a hearth-tax throughout Guienne. The measure was, of course, unpopular, and the Gascon lords appealed to the King of France, as Feudal Superior of the Prince; and the King sent, by two commissioners—a lawyer and a knight—a summons to Edward, to appear and answer before the Parliament of Paris. The emissaries were introduced in High Court, at Bordeaux, told their tale, and exhibited their missives. The Black Prince heard in silence, and then, after a long pause, he sternly and solemnly replied: "Willing shall we be to attend on the appointed day at Paris, since the King of France sends for us; but it will be with the helmet on our head, and sixty thousand men behind us."
The envoys fell on their knees, and bowed their heads to the ground. After the Prince had retired, they were assured that they would get no better answer; and so, after dinner, they set forth on the road to Toulouse, where the Duke of Anjou lay, to convey to him the defiance of the Englishman. Meantime, however, Edward began rather to repent the unconditional style of his reply, and to wish the ambassadors back again. Perhaps, after all, he had been a little too hasty, and had gone a little too far; so he called together the chief of his barons, and opened his mind to them. "He did not wish," he said, "the envoys to bear his cartel to the King of France." In the opinion of the straightforward practitioners whom he consulted, the means of prevention were easy: what more practicable and natural than to send out a handful of men-at-arms—catch the knight and the lawyer, and then and there cut their throats? But Edward refused to commit unnecessary slaughter; and possibly exclaiming, as gentlemen in a drama and a dilemma always do—"I have it"—he gave some private instructions to Sir William le Moine, the High Steward of Agenois, who immediately set forth at the head of a plump of spears. Meantime, the envoys were quietly jogging along, when, what was their horror and surprise at being suddenly pounced upon by the Lord Steward, and arrested, upon the charge of having stolen a horse from their last baiting place. It was in vain that the unfortunate pair offered to bring any evidence of the falsity of the charge; Sir William had as many witnesses as he commanded men-at-arms, and the victims were hurried to the castle of Agen, and left to their own reflections in the securest of its dungeons. When they got out again, or whether they ever got out at all, Froissart does not condescend to inform us; but surely the story shews the Black Prince in a new and not exactly favourable light. We would hardly have expected to find the "Lion whelp of England" stooping to trump up a false accusation against innocent men, in order to shuffle out of the consequences of his own brag.