That evening I fortunately did not include the whole company at the table-d'hôte. There was a young gentleman very much jewelled, and an elderly lady also very strongly got up in the way of brooches and bracelets, to whom the young gentleman was paying very assiduous but very forced attention. The lady was sulky, and sent plat after plat untasted away; and when her companion, as I thought, whispered a remonstrance, she snubbed him in great style; at which he bit his lip, turned all manner of colours, and then got moodily silent. I suspected that the young gentleman had married the old lady for her money, and was leading just as comfortable a life as he deserved. But, besides them, we had a couple of the gentlemen who are to be more or less found in every hotel in France—commis voyageurs, or commercial travellers. By the way, the aristocratic Murray lays his hand, or rather his "Hand-book," heavily about the ears of these gentlemen—castigating them a good deal in the Croker style, and with more ferocity than justice: "A more selfish, depraved, and vulgar, if not brutal set, does not exist;" "English gentlemen will take good care to keep at a distance from them," and "English ladies will be cautious of presenting themselves at a French table-d'hôte, except"—in certain cases specified. Now, I agree with Mr. Murray, that commercial travellers, French and English, are not distinguished by much polish of manner, or elegance of address; on the contrary, the style of their proceedings at table is frequently slovenly and coarse, and their talk is almost invariably "shop." In a word, they are not educated people, or gentlemen. But when we come to such expressions as "selfish, brutal, and depraved," I think most English travellers in France will agree with me, that the aristocratic hand-book maker is going more than a little too far. I have met scores of clever and intelligent commis voyageurs—hundreds of affable, good-humoured ones—thousands of decent, inoffensive ones. In company with a lady, I have dined at every species of table-d'hôte, in every species of hotel, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and the Bay of Biscay to the Alps, and I cannot call to mind one instance of rudeness, or voluntary want of civility, from one end of our journey to the other; while scores and scores of instances of attention and kindness—more particularly when it was ascertained that my companion was in weak health—come thronging on me. I know that the French commis voyageur looks after his own interest at table pretty sharply, and also that he is quite deficient in all the elegant little courtesies of society; but to say that he is brutal or depraved, because he is not a petit maître and an elegant, is neither true nor courteous. If there be any set of Frenchmen to whose conduct at table-d'hôtes strong expressions may be fairly applied, it is French officers, who sprung from a rank often inferior to that of the bagman, and, with all the coarseness of the barracks clinging to them, frequently cluster together in groups of half-a-dozen—scramble for all that is good upon the table—eat with their caps on, which the commis voyageur only does in winter, when the bare and empty salle is miserably cold—and in general behave with a coarse rudeness, and a tumultuous vulgarity, which I never saw private soldiers guilty of, either here or in France.
But I must hurry my Pyrenean sketches to an end. The true South—I mean the Mediterranean-washed provinces—still lie before me; and I must perforce leap almost at a bound over a long and interesting journey through the little-known towns of the eastern Pyrenees—quiet, sluggish, tumble-down places, as St. Gaudens, St. Girons, and St. Foix, possessed neither of pump-rooms, nor warm-springs, but vegetating on, lazily and dreamily, in their glorious climate—for, after all, it does sometimes stop raining, and that for a few blazing months at a time, too. I would like to sketch St. Gaudens, with its broad-eaved, booth-like shops, and the snug town-hall, with pictures of old prefects and wigged fermiers generaux, into which they introduced me, and where they set all their municipal documents before me, when I applied for some information as to the landholding of the district. I would like to sketch at length a curious walled village on the head waters of the Garonne—a dead-and-gone sort of place, of which I asked an old man the name. "A poor place, sir," he said; "a poor place. Not worth your while looking at. All poor people here, sir—poor people; not worth your while speaking to. And the name—oh, a poor name, sir—not worth your while knowing; but, if you insist—why, then, it's Valentine." I would like to sketch the merry population in the hills round that dead-and-gone village—half farmers, half weavers, like the Saddleworth peasants, in Yorkshire—a jolly set—all sporting men, too, who give up their looms, and go into the woods after bears as boldly as Sir Peter de Bearne. And I would like, too, to try to bring before my reader's eye the viney valley of the Ariege, and the deep ravines through which the stream goes foaming, spanned by narrow bridges, each with a tower in the centre, where the warder kept his guard, and opened and shut the huge, iron-bound doors, and dropped and raised the portcullis at pleasure. And these old feudal memorials bring me to the castles and ruined towers so thickly peopling the land where lived the bands of adventurers, as Froissart calls them, by whom the fat citizens of the towns were wont to be "guerroyés et harriés," and most of which have still their legends of desperate sieges, and, too often, of foul murders done within their dreary walls. Pass, as I perforce must, however, and gain Provence—there is yet one legendary tale I cannot help telling. It is one of the best things in Froissart, and a little twisting would give it a famous satiric significance against a class of bores of our own day and generation. It relates to the lord of a castle not far from Tarbes, and was told to Froissart by a squire, "in a corner of the chapel of Orthez," during the visit paid by the canon to Gaston Phœbus, Count of Foix—who, I am sorry to say, has been puffed, and most snobbishly exalted by the great chronicler into the ranks of the most noble chivalry, in return for splendid entertainment bestowed; whereas, in fact, Gaston Phœbus was a reckless murderer, possessed of neither faith nor honour. But, alas, the Canon of Chimay sometimes descended into the lowest depths of penny-a-lining, and "coloured" the cases just as a bribed police reporter does when a "respectable" gentleman gets into trouble. Gaston stabbed his son to death, in a dungeon; and the bold Froissart has actually the coolness to assert that the death of the heir took place, inasmuch as his father, in a rage, because he would not eat the dainties placed before him, struck him with his clenched fist, holding therein a knife with which he had been picking his nails, but the blade of which, says the lame apologist, only protruded a "groat's breadth" from his fingers,—the result being that the steel unfortunately happened to cut a vein in young Gaston's throat. The simple truth of the matter is, that the count was jealous of his son's being a favourite of the boy's mother, from whom he (the count) was separated—that he dreaded lest the wrongs of his wife might be avenged by her brother, the King of Navarre—and that he determined to starve the boy in a dungeon; but the child not dying so soon as was expected, his father went very coolly in to him, and cut his throat.
"To speak briefly and truly," says Froissart, "the Count de Foix was perfect in body and mind, and no contemporary prince could be compared to him for sense, honour, and liberality."
"To speak briefly and truly, Sir John Froissart," I reply, "you have written a charming and chivalrous chronicle; but you could take a bribe with any man of your time, and having done so, you could attempt to deceive posterity, and write down what you knew to be a lie, with as gallant a grace and easy swagger as the great Mr. Jonathan Wild himself."
However, there are black spots in the sun—to the legend which I promised. The Lord of Corasse—a castle, by the way, in which Henri Quatre passed some portion of his boyish days—the Lord of Corasse had a quarrel touching tithes with a neighbouring priest, who being unable to obtain his dues by ordinary legal or illegal remedies, sent a spirit to haunt the castle of Corasse. This spirit proceeded to perform his mission by making a dreadful hallabuloo all night long, and breaking the crockery—so that very soon the Lord and Lady of Corasse had to dine without platters. At length, however, the Baron managed to come to speaking terms with the demon, who was invisible, and found out that his name was Orthon, and that the priest had sent him.
"But Orthon, my good fellow," said the sly Lord of Corasse, "this priest is a poor devil, and will never be able to pay you handsomely. Throw him overboard at once, therefore, and come and take service with me."
Orthon must have been the most fickle of all the devils, for he not only acceded to the proposition with astonishing readiness, but took such an affection to his new lord, that he could not be got out of his bedroom at night, to the sore discomfiture of the baroness, "who was so much frightened that the hairs of her head stood on end, and she always hid herself under the bed-clothes;" while the too familiar demon, never seen, but only heard, insisted on keeping his friend, the baron, chatting all night. But the charms of Orthon's conversation at length palled, particularly as they kept the baron night after night from his natural rest; so he took to despatching the demon all over Europe, collecting information for him of all that was going on in the courts and councils of princes, and at the scene of war where there happened to be fighting. Still, as Orthon moved as fast as a message by electric telegraph, the baron found him nearly as troublesome as ever. He was eternally coming in with intelligence which he insisted upon telling, until the Lord of Corasse's head was fairly turned by the amount of news he was obliged to listen to. Never had there been so indefatigable an agent. He would have been invaluable to a newspaper—but he was boring the Lord of Corasse to death.
A loud thunder at the door at midnight. The baron would groan, for he knew well who was the claimant for admission. "Let me in, Let me in. I have news for thee from Hungary or England," as the case might be; and the baron, groaning in soul and body, would get up and let the demon in; while the latter would immediately commence his recitation:
"Let me sleep. Let me sleep, for Heaven's sake!" the victim would exclaim.