Two Summers in Guyenne: A Chronicle of the Wayside and Waterside

by Edward Harrison Barker

A very lazy kind of navigation it was. Two or three barges would pass in a day on their way to Périgueux or Bordeaux. They were of considerable size, and were capable of some sea-faring, but their masts were now laid flat, and they were towed along at the rate of two or three yards a minute by a lean and melancholy horse that had ceased to care for cursing, and was almost indifferent to beating. As the navigation had been nearly killed by the railway, the canal was allowed to fill itself with water-plants, which were interesting to me, but exceedingly hurtful to the temper of the bargees. They vented their fury upon the engineer, who was absent, and the horse that was present—unfortunately for the poor brute, for somehow he seemed to be looked upon as a representative of the negligent functionary.

'You appear to be having a bad time,' said I one day to a great dark bargee who was streaming from every pore, as much from bad temper as from the exertion of cracking his whip, and whose haggard horse looked as if he would soon break off in the middle from the strain of trying to move the barge, which was stuck in the weeds.

'A bad time of it! I believe you. Sacr-r-r-re! If I could only send that pig of an engineer to Nouméa I should be a happy man!'

If wishes could have wafted him, he would have gone farther than New
Caledonia long before.

One day, far on in the summer, this engineer actually appeared upon the canal in his steam yacht, and there was great excitement in the country. The peasants left their work in the fields and ran to the banks to gaze at him. He did not go very far before he got stuck in the weeds himself. Then he reversed his engine, made back as fast as he could, and was seen no more.

But I am going on too fast. I have not yet described the château. The picture of it is clearly engraved upon the memory, and a very pretty picture I still think it; more so now, perhaps, than when the reality was before me, for such is the way of the mind. I can see the extinguisher roofs of the small towers through openings in the foliage rising from a sunny space enclosed by trees. I can see the garden, with its old dove-cot like a low round tower, its scattered aviaries, its rambling vines that climb the laden fruit-trees, its firs, magnolias, great laurels, its glowing tomatoes and melons, its lettuces and capsicums and scattered flowers, all mingled with that carelessness which is art unconscious of its own grace; its daedalian paths, its statues so quaintly placed in unsuspected corners, its—well, the picture is finished, for now begins the effort to recall its details. The eye's memory is a judicious painter that never overcrowds the canvas. I can see on that side of the building, which looks upon a much wilder garden, where peach and plum trees stride over grassy ground adjoining the filbert-grove that dwindles away into the wooded warren, a broad line of tall nettles in the shade against the wall. Hard by, on the line—so it was said—of the filled-up moat, is a row of ancient quinces, with long crooked arms, green, gray, or black with moss and lichen, stretching down to the tall grass, where in the dewy hours of early darkness the glow-worms gleam.

This little château was never a stronghold to inspire an enemy with much respect; it was rather a castellated manor-house, dating from the times when even the residences of the small nobility were fortified. Marred as it had been by alterations made in the present century without any respect for the past, it was still very interesting. In one of the towers, said to be of the fourteenth, and certainly not later than the fifteenth, century, was a chapel on the ground-floor with Gothic vaulting, and which still served its original purpose. A contemporaneous tower flanking the entrance contained the old spiral staircase leading to the upper rooms. I often lingered upon it in astonishment at the mathematical science shown in its design, and the mechanical perfection of its workmanship. What seemed to be a slender column round which the spiral vaulting turned was not really one, for each of the stone steps was so cut as to include a section of the column as a part of its own block. The contrivances by which this staircase en colimaçon was made to hold together, and to hold so well as to have lasted several hundred years, with a promise to continue in the same way another century or two, were deftly hidden from the eye of those unversed in such technicalities. In the hollow at the foot of the stairs was what I took to be a very old and rough christening font, such as I had seen in village churches. But it was not that; it was called a pierre à l'huile. Its purpose a long time ago was to receive the oil taken from the first pressing of walnuts after the annual gathering. Then the priests came and fetched what they wanted of it to serve for the rites of the Church during the year.

All this summer we lived out of doors, except at night. Even Rosalie, our servant, did most of her cooking in the open air with the aid of a portable charcoal stove, which she placed in the shade of some noble plane-trees that were planted by accident on the day of Prince Louis Napoléon's coup d'état. They were already tall and strong when his Will-o'-the-wisp, which he had mistaken for a star, sank in the bloody swamp of Sedan. When the rising wind announced a storm, the swaying branches shed their dry bark, which was piled upon the hearth indoors, where a cheerful blaze shot up if by chance the rain fell and the air grew chilly. But very seldom did even a shower come to moisten the parched land and cool the heated air. Thus the plane-trees came to look upon the stove beneath them as a fixture.

These open-air kitchens are by no means uncommon in Southern France during the hot months. I have a pleasant recollection of dining one scented evening in May with my friend the Otter at Beynac in his garden terraced upon rocks above the Dordogne. The table was under a spreading chestnut-tree in full bloom. Not many yards away the swarthy Clodine had her kitchen beneath an acacia. Strange as it may seem, the hissing of her frying-pan as she dropped into it the shining fish did not mingle unpoetically with the murmur of lagging bees overhead and the soothing plaint of the river running over its shallows below. Nor, when the purple flush faded on the water's face, and little points of fire began to show between branches laden with the snow of flowers, did the fragrant steam that arose from Clodine's coffee-pot make a bad marriage with the amorous breath of all the seen and unseen blossoms. What is there better in life than hours such as those?

But now I am by the Isle. The plane-trees are on the edge of a little dell, in the centre of which is a smooth space encircled by many trees, forming a dense grove. A rough table has been set up here with the aid of planks and tressels. It is our dining-table, and the centre of the grove is our salle à manger. Wrens and blackcaps hop about the branches of the filbert-bushes, and when the métayer's lean cat comes sneaking along, followed by a hungry kitten that is only too willing to take lessons in craft and slaughter, the little birds follow them about from branch to branch, scolding the marauders at a safe distance, and giving the alarm to all the other feathered people in the grove. Here the nightingales warble day and night until they get their young, when, finding that hunting for worms and grubs to put into other beaks than their own is very prosaic business, they only sing when they have time to fly to some topmost twig and forget that they are married.