[CHAPTER XII.]
The Track-boat on the Canal du Midi—Approach to the Mediterranean—Salt-marshes and Salt-works—A Circus Thrashing-machine—The Mediterranean and its Craft—Cette and its Manufactured Wines, with a Priest's Views on Gourmandise.
I left Beziers for the Mediterranean, by Pierre Paul Riquet's canal. The track-boat passes once a-day, taking upwards of thirty-five hours to make the passage from Toulouse to Cette. The Beziers station is about a mile from the town; and on approaching it early in the morning, I found a crowd of people collected on the banks, looking at men dragging the canal with huge hooks at the end of poles. They were searching for the body of a poor fellow from Beziers, who had drowned himself under very remarkable circumstances; and just as the packet-boat came up, the corpse was raised, stark and stiff, almost from beneath it. The deceased was a decrotteur, or boot-cleaner, and a light porter at Beziers—a quiet, inoffensive man, who, by dint of untiring industry, and great self-denial, had scraped together upwards of two hundred and fifty francs, all of which he lent another decrotteur, without taking legal security for the money. After the stipulated term for the loan had elapsed, the poor lender naturally pressed for his cash. He was put off from month to month with excuses; and when, at length, he became urgent for repayment, the debtor laughed in his face, told him to do his best and his worst, and get his money how he could. The decrotteur went away in a state of frenzy, and procured and charged a pistol, with which he returned to the rascal borrower.
"Will you pay me?—ay or no?" he said.
"No," replied the other; "go about your business."
The creditor instantly levelled his pistol and fired. Down went his antagonist, doubled up in a heap on the road, and away went the assassin as hard as his legs could carry him, to a bridge leading over the canal, from the parapet of which he leaped into the water; while, as he disappeared, the quasi murdered man got up again, with no other damage than a face blackened by the explosion of the pistol. He had fallen through terror, for he was absolutely unscathed.
The travelling by the Canal du Midi is a sleepy and monotonous business enough. Mile after mile, and league after league, the boat is gliding along between grassy or rushy banks, and rows of poplar, and sometimes of acacia trees, the monotonous tramp of the team upon the bank mingling with the endless gurgle of the waters beneath. The towing paths are generally very lifeless. Now and then a solitary peasant, with his heavy sharp-pointed hoe—an implement, in fact, half hoe and half pick-axe—upon his shoulder, saunters up to see the boat go by; or a shepherd, whistling to his flock, paces slowly at their head, wandering to and fro in search of the greenest bits of pasture; or a handful of jabbering women, from some neighbouring bourg, will be squatted along the water's edge, certainly not obeying Napoleon's injunction to wash their linge sale en famille, but pounding away at sheets and shirts with heavy stones or wooden mallets—the counterparts of the instruments used in Scotland to "get up" fine linen, and there called "beetles." The bridges are shot cleverly. At a shout from the steersman, the postillion, who rides one of the hindmost horses of the team, jumps off, casts loose the tow-line, runs with the end of it to the centre of the bridge, drops it aboard as the boat comes beneath, catches it up again on the opposite side, flies back after his horses which have trotted very tranquilly ahead, hooks on the rope again, jumps into his saddle, cracks his long whip, and the boat is off again in full career long ere she has lost her former headway. Little of the country can be seen from the deck, but along the southern and eastern half of the canal you seldom lose sight of the dusty tops of the formal olive groves, varied now and then by a stony slope covered with ugly, sprawling vines, and as you approach the sea, dotted with white, little country houses—of which more hereafter—the glimpses of the changing picture being continually set in a brown frame of sterile hills.
The boats are long and narrow; the cabins like corridors, but comfortably cushioned and stuffed, so that you can sleep in them, even if the boat be tolerably crowded, as well as in a diligence. If there be few passengers, you will have full-length room. The restaurant on board is excellent—as good as that on the Garonne boats, and very cheap. Let all English travellers, however, beware of the steward's department on the Loire and Rhone steamers, in both of which I have been thoroughly swindled. The style of people who seemingly use the track-boat on the Canal du Midi, are the rotonde class of diligence passengers. Going down to Cette, there were two or three families, almost entirely composed of females, aboard; the elder ladies—horrid, snuffy old women, who were always having exclusive cups of chocolate or coffee, or little basins of soup, and who never appeared to move from the spots on which they were deposited since the voyage began.
Two of these families had canaries in cages, a very common practice in France, where the people continually try, even in travelling, to keep their household gods about them. Look at the baggage of your Frenchman en voyage. All the old clothes of the last dozen of years are sure to be lugged about in it. There is, perhaps, a pormanteau, exclusively devoted to old boots, and half-a-dozen pasteboard hat-boxes, with half-a-dozen hats, utterly beyond wearing. The plague of all this baggage is dreadful; but the proprietor would go through any amount of inconvenience rather than lose one stitch of his innumerable old hardes.
After passing the headland and dull old town of Agde, the former crowned by the lighthouse I had seen from the road to Beziers, we fairly entered into the great zone of salt swamps which here line the Mediterranean. It was a desolate and dreary prospect. The land on either side stretched away in a dead flat; now dry and parched, again traversed by green streaks of swamp, and anon broken by clear, shallow pools of water. Sometimes, again, you entered a perfect jungle of huge bulrushes, stretching away as far as the eye could follow, and evidently teeming with wild ducks, which rose in vast coveys, and flew landward or seaward in their usual wedge-shaped order of flight. The sea, to which we were approaching at a sharp angle, was still invisible, but you felt the refreshing savour of the brine in the air, and now and then you caught, sparkling for a moment in the bright, hot sunshine, a distant jet of feathery spray, as a heavier wave than common came thundering along the beach. Presently, the brown waste through which we were passing became streaked with whitish belts and patches—the salt left by the evaporation of the brine, which now begins to soak and well through the spongy soil, and presently to expand into lakes and shallow belts of water. Across these, long rows of stakes for nets, stretched away in endless column, and here and there a rude, light boat floated, or a fisherman slowly waded from point to point. Great herons and cranes stood like sentinels in the shallow water, and flocks of sandpipers and plovers ran along the white salt-powdered sand. Then came on the left, or landward side, a series of tumuli of pyramidical form, some of them white, others of a dark brown, scattered over a space of scores of square miles. I wondered who were the inhabitants of this lake of the dismal swamp, and accordingly pointed out the houses, as I conceived them, to the captain.
"Houses, monsieur!" he said; "these are all salt heaps. Salt is the harvest of this country, and they stack it in these piles, just as the people inland do their corn. When the heap is not expected to be wanted soon, they thatch it with reeds and grass; but if they expect to get a quick sale, they don't take the trouble. So you see that some of the heaps are dark, and the others like snow-balls."