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

by Edward Harrison Barker

I reached the village of La Mothe by the Dordogne, and while I was casting about for an inn that looked comfortable, and also hospitable, I met a pretty little brunette with a rich southern colour in her cheeks, charmingly coifed à la bordelaise, and tripping jauntily along with a coffee-pot in her hand. It was pleasant to look at a nice face again after all the ill-favoured visages that had risen up against me during the second half of the day, and so I stopped this pretty girl and asked her to tell me which was the best hotel in the place. She would not answer the question, but she mentioned a hotel which she said was as good as any. Thither I went, and found a comfortable little inn, where I was well received. I had not been there long when the little brunette entered. She was the 'daughter of the house.' I now understood that her hesitation was conscientious.

The hostess was a small, sprightly woman with a smiling face, which, together with her bright-coloured coif gracefully hanging to her black hair, made up such a head as puts one in a good temper for a whole evening. She was so highly civilized that she actually asked me if I would like to wash my hands. I expected that she was going to lead me to one of those little cisterns—'fountains' in French—attached to the wall, that one sees throughout Guyenne, and which have come down almost unchanged in form, as well as the roller-towels that often go with them, from the feudal castles of the twelfth century; but I was wrong. She led me to a bucket. Filling a large ladle with water, she fixed it lengthwise, and the handle being a tube, the water ran slowly out from the end. I quite understood that I had to wash my hands with the trickling water, for I had often done it before. These ladles with hollow handles are also used for sprinkling the floors, which are never washed in Southern France. The sprinkling lays the dust, cools the air, and depresses the fleas for at least a quarter of an hour.

After I had dealt with a well-cooked little dinner, plentifully bedewed with a pleasant but not insidious wine grown upon the sunny slopes above the Dordogne, I made the discovery that the best room in the house was occupied by the dark-eyed damsel, except when a guest came along who managed to ingratiate himself with her mother, and then the daughter had to turn out. The room was not exactly luxurious, for it contained little besides the bed, a table, and a chair, but it was bright and clean; and when I had confided myself to the strong hempen sheets that had still half a century of wear in them, and had passed the first quarter of an hour, which is always critical, without being made aware by scouts and skirmishers of the advance of a hostile force, I was very thankful that I was not received with open arms in the village of St. Michel-Montaigne.

The next morning I met the Dordogne again after a long separation. It was now a great river flowing quietly through a vine-covered plain. The rapids had all been left far away, but it had begun to feel the tide, and this to a river is like the first shock of death. It struggles for awhile with destiny, and a sadder sound than the cry which it made when it came forth from the rock or the little lake is heard in the quiet evening or the more solemn night. Although it is flowing back to its true source, the river shrinks from the vast and mysterious ocean as we shrink ourselves from the immense unknown.

But at this hour of eight in the morning, with a sun so bright and a sky so blue, only the broad and serene beauty of the water makes itself felt. As the river goes curving over the vine-covered land, its stillness is almost that of a lake, and it mirrors nothing but the sky, save the trees and flowers of it's banks. The moments are precious, for the tender loveliness of the landscape will wane as the light gains strength.

On each side of the Dordogne, between the water and the vineyards, which stretch away with scarcely a break across the plain and up the sides of the distant hills, is a strip of rough field. The sunshine of four months, with hardly a shower to moisten the earth, has made flowers scarce, but on this long curving bend of coarse meadow the grass has kept something of its greenness, and the season of blossoming stays by the beautiful stream. There is a wanton tangling and mingling of the waste-loving flowers, such as the yellow toad-flax, the bristling viper's bugloss, the thorny ononis that spreads a hue of pink as it creeps along the ground, sky-blue chicory on wiry stems, large milk-white blooms of datura, and purple heads of centaurea calcitrapa, whose spines are avoided like those of a hedgehog by people who walk with bare feet. Upon the banks, the high hemp-agrimony and purple loosestrife, with here and there an evening primrose, flaunt their masses of colour over the water or the pebbly shore.

From a distant church tower that rises above the wilderness of vines a clear-voiced bell calls through the morning air, Sanctus! sanctus! sanctus! by which all know who care to think of it that the priest standing at the altar there has come to the most solemn part of his mass.

Wandering on, indifferent to the flight of time, upon these pleasant banks, which, but for a bullock-cart that came jolting and creaking along by the edge of the vines, I might have thought quite abandoned by all other humanity, I saw afar off a little cluster of white houses that seemed to be floating on the blue water. I knew that this could be nothing else but Castillon, and that the effect of floating houses was an illusion caused by a bend of the river. And so I was nearing at length that place where the destinies of France and England, so long interwoven, became again distinct, and where the English nationality, which five-and-twenty years before was in imminent danger of absorption as the fruit of victory, was decisively saved from this fate by a defeat for which all England then in her blindness mourned. The loss of Guyenne made an alien dynasty national, and by stopping the outflow of the Anglo-Saxon race upon the Continent, preserved its energies for the fulfilment of a very different destiny from that which had almost begun when a peasant-girl dropped her distaff and took up the sword.

On reaching Castillon I had one of those disappointments to which a traveller should always be prepared after being taught so often by experience that distance idealizes a scene. How much less romantic the town looked now than when I saw it floating, as it seemed, upon the sky-blue water in a haze of gold-dust fired by the slanting rays! It was then like the Castillon of some troubadour's song; now it was a mean-looking little sun-baked town modernized to downright plainness, with no remnant of its ramparts remaining save a sombre old Gothic gateway near the river, and no ecclesiastical architecture deserving notice. Its site, however, is the same as that which it occupied in the Middle Ages, namely, close to the Dordogne, upon a ridge of rising land running up towards the hills which close the valley on the north. On the eastern side this ridge for some distance is so steep as to be almost escarped, but it is covered with grass or vines; on the opposite side it is now only a little above the plain. The battle was fought, not under the walls of the town, but somewhat to the north-east of it in the open country.

Talbot's mistake lay in the confidence with which he attacked an entrenched army much stronger than his own, and especially in his contempt for Messire Jean Bureau's guns. The old leader now belonged to a dying epoch, and his great faith in British and Gascon archers may well have led him to undervalue the power of artillery, notwithstanding that it was used with terrible effect by Edward III. at Crecy more than a hundred years before. The French had profited by that lesson, and at Castillon they turned the tables on their tenacious adversaries.