"I have not told thee half the news," would be Orthon's reply; "I will not let thee sleep until I have told thee the news;" and he would go on with his budget of foreign intelligence till the day scared him, and left the baron and the baronness to broken and unrefreshing slumbers.
Froissart narrates that at length the demon consented to appear in a visible form to the baron; that he took the shape of a lean sow, upon which the Lord of Corasse ordered the dogs to be let loose upon the animal, which straightway disappeared, and Orthon was never seen after. I suspect, however, that Sir John was hoaxed in this respect. He clearly did not see the fun of the story, which is very capable of being resolved into an allegory—the fact being that the demon was some gentleman of the priest's acquaintance, with supernatural powers of boring whom he let loose upon the recalcitrant tithe-payer, until the arrears were at length paid up. The sow which disappeared was clearly no other than a tithe-pig.
[CHAPTER XI.]
Languedoc—The "Austere South"—Beziers and the Albigenses—The Fountain of the Greve and Pierre Paul Riquet—Anticipations of the Mediterranean—The Mistral—The Olive Country about Beziers—The Peasants of the South—Rural Billiard-playing.
Again in the banquette of the diligence, which, rolling on the great highway from Toulouse to Marseilles, has taken me up at Carcassone, and will deposit me for the present at Beziers. We have entered in Languedoc, the most early civilised of the provinces which now make up France—the land where chivalry was first wedded to literature—the land whose tongue laid the foundations of the greater part of modern poetry—the land where the people first rebelled against the tyranny of Rome—the land of the Menestrals and the Albigenses. People are apt to think of this favoured tract of Europe as a sort of terrestrial paradise—one great glowing odorous garden—where, in the shade of the orange and the olive-tree, queens of love and beauty, crowned the heads of wandering Troubadours. The literary and historic associations have not unnaturally operated upon our common notions of the country; and for the "South of France," we are very apt to conjure up a brave, fictitious landscape. Yet this country is no Eden. It has been admirably described, in a single phrase, the "Austere South of France." It is austere—grim—sombre. It never smiles: it is scathed and parched. There is no freshness or rurality in it. It does not seem the country, but a vast yard—shadeless, glaring, drear, and dry. Let us glance from our elevated perch over the district we are traversing. A vast, rolling wilderness of clodded earth, browned and baked by the sun; here and there masses of red rock heaving themselves above the soil like protruding ribs of the earth, and a vast coating of drowthy dust, lying like snow upon the ground. To the left, a long ridge of iron-like mountains—on all sides rolling hills, stern and kneaded, looking as though frozen. On the slopes and in the plains, endless rows of scrubby, ugly trees, powdered with the universal dust, and looking exactly like mopsticks. Sprawling and straggling over the soil beneath them, jungles of burnt-up, leafless bushes, tangled, and apparently neglected. The trees are olives and mulberries—the bushes, vines.
Glance again across the country. It seems a solitude. Perhaps one or two distant figures, grey with dust, are labouring to break the clods with wooden hammers; but that is all. No cottages—no farmhouses—no hedges—all one rolling sweep of iron-like, burnt-up, glaring land. In the distance, you may espy a village. It looks like a fortification—all blank, high stone walls, and no windows, but mere loop-holes. A square church tower gloomily and heavily overtops the houses, or the dungeon of an ancient fortress rears its massive pile of mouldering stone. Where have you seen such a landscape before? Stern and forbidding, it has yet a familiar look. These scrubby, mop-headed trees—these formal square lines of huge edifices—these banks and braes, varying in hue from the grey of the dust to the red of the rock—why, they are precisely the back-grounds of the pictures of the renaissance painters of France and Italy.
I was miserably disappointed with the olive. It is one of the romantic trees, full of association. It is a biblical tree, and one of the most favoured of the old eastern emblems. But what claim has it to beauty? The trunk, a weazened, sapless-looking piece of timber, the branches spreading out from it like the top of a mushroom, and the colour, when you can see it for dust, a cold, sombre, greyish green. One olive is as like another as one mopstick is like another. The tree has no picturesqueness—no variety. It is not high enough to be grand, and not irregular enough to be graceful. Put it beside the birch, the beech, the elm, or the oak, and you will see the poetry of the forest and its poorest and most meagre prose. So also, to a great extent, of the mulberry. I had a vague sort of respect for the latter tree, because one of the Champions of Christendom—St. James of Spain, I think—delivered out of the trunk of a mulberry an enchanted princess; but the enforced lodgings of the captive form just as shabby and priggish-looking a tree as the olive. The general shape—that of a mop—is the same, and a mutual want of variety and picturesqueness, afflict, with the curse of hopeless ugliness, both silk and oil-trees. The fig, in another way, is just as bad. It is a sneaking tree, which appears as if it were growing on the sly, while its soft, buttery-looking branches—bending and twisting, swollen and unwholesome-looking—put you somehow in mind of diseased limbs, which the quack doctors call "bad legs." In fact, it seems as if the climate and soil of Provence and Languedoc were utterly unfavourable to the production of forest scenery. One of our noble clumps of oak, beech, birch, and elm, at home, is worth, for splendid picturesqueness and rich luxuriance of greenery, every fig-tree which ever grew since fig-leaves were in vogue; every olive which ever grew since the dove from the ark plucked off a branch; and every mulberry which ever grew since St. James of Spain cut out the imprisoned princess. The menestrals of Languedoc no doubt gave our early bards many a poetic lesson; but I can imagine the hopeless stare of the Southern when the Northern rhymer, in return, would chant him a jolly Friar of Copmanhurst sort of stave about the "merry greenwood," and the joys of the "greenwood tree."
As we roll along the dusty highway, intersecting the dusty fields, the dusty olives, and the dusty vines, I pray the reader to glance to the right, towards the summit of a chain of jagged, naked hills. These go by the name of the Black Mountains—a good "Mysteries of Udolpho" sort of title—and they form part of a range which separates the basin of the streams which descend to the north, and form the head waters of the Garonne, and those which descend to the south, and form the head waters of the Aude. Somewhere about 1670, the scattered shepherds who dwelt in these hills frequently observed a stranger, richly dressed, attended by two labouring-looking men, who paid him great reverence. The little party toiled up and down in the hills, and frequently erected and gathered round magical-looking instruments. "Holy Mary!" said the peasants, "they are sorcerers, and they are come to bewitch us all!" For years and years did the richly dressed man and the two labourers haunt the Black Mountains, wandering uneasily up and down, climbing ridges, and plunging into valleys, and always seeming to seek something which they could not find. At length, upon a glaring hot summer day, they came suddenly upon a young peasant, who was quenching his thirst at a fountain.
The cavalier glanced at the spring, and caught the shepherd by his home-spun jacket. The boy thought he was going to be murdered, and screamed out; but a Louis-d'or quieted him in a moment. Then the cavalier, trembling with anxiety, exclaimed: "What fountain is this?"