Wanderings by Southern Waters, Eastern Aquitaine

by Edward Harrison Barker

The monthly fair at Figeac offers some curious pictures of rural life. The peasants crowd in from the valleys and the surrounding causses. Racial differences, or those produced by the influences of soil and food—especially water—for a long series of generations, are very strongly marked. There is the florid, robust, blue-eyed, sanguine type, and there is the leaden-coloured, black-haired, lantern-jawed, sloping-shouldered, and hollow-chested type. Then there are the intermediates. Considered generally, these peasants of the Haut-Quercy are not fine specimens of the human animal. They are dwarfed, and very often deformed. Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this physical degeneration of the Cadurci. Their character is honest in the main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the force of circumstance. Their worst qualities are shown at a fair, where they cheat as much as they can, and place no limit to lying. Their canon of morality there is that everyone must look after himself. I have been assured by a priest that they never think of confessing the lies that they tell in bartering, because they maintain that every man who buys ought to understand his business. I much wondered why, at a Figeac fair, when there was a question of buying a bullock, the animal's tail was pulled as though all his virtue were concentrated in this appendage. I learnt that the reason of the tugging was this: Cattle are liable to a disease that causes the tail to drop off, but the people here have discovered a very artful trick of fastening it on again, and it needs a vigorous pull to expose the fraud. Among other tricks of the country is that of drenching an ill-tempered and unmanageable horse with two litres of wine before taking him to the fair. He then becomes as quiet as a lamb. I heard the story of a curé, who was thus imposed upon by one of his own parishioners. He wanted a very quiet horse, and he found one at the fair; but the next day, when he went near the animal, it appeared to be possessed of the devil. All this is bad; but there is satisfaction to the student of old manners in knowing that everything takes place as it did centuries ago. The cattle-dealers and peasants here actually transact their business in pistoles and écus. A pistole now represents 10 francs, and an écu 3 francs.

The summer is glorious here, and as the climate is influenced by that of Auvergne, it is less enervating by the Célé than in the neighbouring valley of the Lot. There, some twenty miles farther south, the grapes ripen two or three weeks sooner than they do upon these hillsides. But the vent d'autan—the wind from the south-east—is now blowing, and, although there is too much air, one gasps for breath. The brilliant blue fades out of the sky, and the sun just glimmers through layers of dun-coloured vapour. It is a sky that makes one ill-tempered and restless by its sameness and indecision. But the wind is a worse trial. It blows hot, as if it issued from the infernal cavern. It sets the nerves altogether wrong, and disposes one to commit evil deeds from mere wantonness and the feeling that some violent reaction from this influence is what nature insists upon. It is a wind that does not blow a steady honest gale, but goes to work in a treacherously intermittent fashion—now lulled to a complete calm, now springing at you like a tiger from the jungle. Then your eyes are filled with dust, unless you close them quickly, or turn your back to the enemy in the nick of time. The night comes, and brings other trouble. You try to sleep with closed windows, so that you may hear less of the racket that the wind makes outside, but it is impossible: you stifle. You get up and open a window—perhaps two windows. The wind rushes in, but it is like the hot breath of a panting dog. The noise of swinging persiennes that have got loose, and are banged now against the wall, now against the window-frame, mingles with a woful confusion of sounds within, as though a most unruly troop of ghosts were dancing the farandole all through the house. If any door has been left open, it worries you more by its banging at intervals of a minute than if it went on without stopping to consider. Therefore you are compelled to rise again, and go and look for it—anything but a cheerful expedition if you cannot find the matches. When this south wind falls, the rain generally comes, bringing great refreshment to the parched earth, and all the animals that live upon it.

As I have referred to the house in which I live, I may as well say something more with regard to it and the things which it contains. It is not one of the ancient houses of Figeac, but it is old-fashioned and provincial. The rooms are rather large, the floors are venerably black, and the boarded ceilings supported by rafters have never had their structural secrets or the grain of the timber concealed by a layer of plaster. What you see over-head is simply the floor of the room or the loft above. And yet this is not considered a poor-kind of house; it is as good as most good people hereabouts live in. The furniture is simple, but solid; it was made to last, and most of it has long outlasted the first owners. In every room, the kitchen excepted, there is a bed, according to the very general custom of the country. The character of the people is distinctly utilitarian, notwithstanding the blood of the troubadours. There is even a bed in the salle à manger. A piece of furniture, however, from which my eye takes more pleasure is one of those old clocks which reach from the ceiling to the floor, and conceal all the mystery and solemnity of pendulum and weights from the vulgar gaze. It has a very loud and self-asserting tick, and a still more arrogant strike, for such an old clock; but, then, everybody here has a voice that is much stronger than is needed, and it is the habit to scream in ordinary conversation. A clock, therefore, could not make itself heard by such people as these Quercynois, unless it had a voice matching in some sort with their own. Another piece of furniture that pleases me, because it is of shining copper, which always throws a homely warmth into a room, is a large basin fixed upon a stand against the wall, with a little cistern above it, also of copper. It is intended for washing the hands by means of a fillet of water that is set running by turning the tap. In this dry part of the world water has to be used sparingly, and, indeed, there is very little wasted upon the body. Everybody who has travelled in Guyenne must be familiar with the article of household furniture just described. Every young wife piously provides herself with one, together with a warming-pan; for the old domestic ideas are religiously handed down here from mother to daughter. But I must shorten this 'journey round my room,' so little in the manner of Le Maistre.

Most of the furniture was once the property of a priest, and would be still if he were alive. The good man is gone where even the voices of the Figeacois cannot reach him; but he has left abundant traces of his piety behind him. The walls of these rooms are almost covered by them. I cannot help being edified, for I am unable to look upon anything that approaches the profane.

When I grow thoughtful over all these works of art and objets de piété—engravings, lithographs, statuettes, crucifixes, crosses worked in wool, stables of Bethlehem, little holy-water stoops, and the faded photographs belonging to the early period of the art (portraits, no doubt, of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces, all revealing that air of rusticity in Sunday clothes which is not to be mistaken)—I have before me the whole story of a simple life, surrounding itself year after year with fresh emblems and tokens of the hope that reaches beyond the grave, and the affections of nature that become woven on this side of it, and which mingle joy and sorrow even in the cup of a village priest.

It is in these quiet, provincial places, where existence goes on in the old-fashioned, humdrum way, that people take care of their household property, and respect the sentiment that years lay up in it: they hand it down to the next generation as they received it. Little objects of common ornament, of religious or intellectual pleasure, thus preserved, throw in course of time a vivid light on human changes.

And it is this vivid light that I am now feeling in these dim rooms. I am aware that nearly everything here is the record of an epoch to which I do not belong—that the world's mind has undergone a great change even in the provinces since the influence that comes forth from these silent traces of past thought were in harmony with it. What interests me more than anything else here is an allegorical or mystical map, designed, drawn, and coloured with all the patience and much of the artistic skill of an illuminating monk of the thirteenth century. I doubt if in any presbytery far out in the marshes or on the mountains a priest could now be found with the motive to undertake such a task. It belongs to the same order of ideas as the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' In this map one sees the 'States of Charity,' the 'Province of Fervour,' the 'Empire of Self-Contempt,' and other countries belonging to a vast continent, of which the centre is the 'Kingdom of the Love of God,' connected to a smaller continent—that of the world—by a narrow neck of land called the 'Isthmus of Charity.' In the continent of the world are shown the 'Mountain of Ingratitude,' the 'Hills of Frivolity,' the territory of 'Ennui,' of 'Vanity,' of 'Melancholy,' and of all the evil moods and vices to which men are liable. Separated from the mainland, and washed by the 'Torrent of Bitterness,' are the 'Rocks of Remorse.' Among the allegorical emblems in various parts of the chart is a very remarkable tree with blue trunk and rose-coloured leaves called the 'Tree of Illusions.' Far above it lies the 'Peninsula of Perfection,' and near to this, under a mediaeval drum-tower, is the gateway of the 'City of Happiness.'

There is a little garden at the back of the house, where flowers and vegetables are mixed up in the way I like. The jessamine has become a thicket. Vines ramble over the trellis and the old wall, and from the window I see many other vines showing their lustrous leaves against tiled roofs of every shade, from bright-red to black. In the next garden is my friend the aumônier, an octogenarian priest, who is still nearly as sprightly of body as he is of mind. He lives alone, surrounded by books, in the collection of which he has shown the broad judgment, and impartiality of the genuine lover of literature. There is a delicious disorder in his den, because there is no one to interfere with him. He is now much excited against the birds because they will not leave his figs alone, and someone has just lent him a blunderbuss wherewith to slay them. Perhaps he will show them the deadly weapon, and hope that they will take the hint; but there is too much kindness underneath his wrath for him to be capable of murdering even a thievish sparrow. He likes to make others believe, however, that he is desperately in earnest. His keen sense of the comic and the grotesque in human nature makes him one of the raciest of story-tellers; but although he does not put his tongue in traces, he is none the less a worthy priest. There are many such as he in France—men who are really devout, but never sanctimonious, whose candour is a cause of constant astonishment, who are good-natured to excess, and who are more open-hearted than many children. Their friendship goes out readily to meet the stranger, and, speaking from my own experience, I can say that it wears well. In the street, on the other side of the house, six women have perched themselves in a row. They have come out to talk and enjoy the coolness of the evening, and, in order that their tender consciences may not prick them for being idle, they are paring potatoes, and getting ready other vegetables for the morrow. They all scream together in Languedocian, which, by-the-bye, is anything but melodious here when spoken by the common people. It becomes much less twangy and harsh a little farther South. How these six charmers on chairs can all listen and talk at the same time is not easy to understand. The truth is, very little listening is done in this part of the world. The saying On se grise en parlant is quite applicable here. People often get drunk on nothing stronger than the flow of their own words.

All the women being now on their way to the land of dreams, and consequently quiet for a few hours, and all the sounds of the earth being hushed save the song of the crickets among the vine-leaves, and in the fruit-trees of the moonlit garden, I will try to see Figeac up the vista of the ages, and if I succeed, perhaps the reader may be helped at the same time to gather interest in this queer old place, whose name, having been made familiar to the English who followed Henry II to France in the twelfth century, is perhaps a reason why their descendants will not 'skip' at first sight these few pages of local history.

The early history of Figeac, or what has long passed as such, is based upon an ingenious stratification of fraud, arising out of a very old quarrel between the monks of Figeac and the monks of Conques, and the determination of the former to prove at all costs that their monastery was the more ancient of the two. This would be a matter of indifference to me had I not been myself entrapped by the snares laid by certain abbots of Figeac for their contemporaries and posterity, and been obliged to throw away much that I had written, and which was far more interesting than the truth. If I had only suspected the fraud, I might have been tempted to keep suspicion down in order to spare the picture of the Carlovingian age which I had elaborated; but it is known at the École des Chartres, and the Abbé B. Massabie of Figeac has, moreover, written a book that removes all doubt as to the spuriousness of the charters upon which the abbots of Figeac, when their jealousy of Conques reached its climax in the eleventh century, based their pretensions to priority. The most important of these charters, and the one that has sent various local historians on a voyage into the airy realms of fiction, is attributed to Pepin le Bref, and bears the date 755. Another is a Bull attributed to Pope Stephanus II., also dated 755, in which is described the ceremony of consecrating the church of St. Sauveur, attached to the abbey, which in the first-mentioned document Pepin is said to have founded. Here it is related that when the Pontiff approached the church strains of mysterious music were heard issuing from the edifice, and such a cloud stood before it that the procession waited for hours before entering. Then, when the Pope walked up to the altar-stone, he found that it had been miraculously consecrated, crosses being marked upon it in oil still wet. Now, the charter attributed to Pepin contains many passages copied verbatim from one preserved at Rodez, and signed by Pippinus, or Pepin I., King of Aquitaine. Its date is 838, and it enriches the monastery of Conques, already existing, with certain lands at Fiacus (Figeac), which is thenceforward to be called New Conques; the motive of this gift being to extend to the monks those material advantages which a rich valley is able to afford, but which are not to be found in a stony gorge surrounded by barren hills. There would have been less scandal to Christianity if Pepin had put a curb on his pious generosity, and had left the monks of Conques to contend with the desert. The charter, moreover, sanctions the building of a monastery at Figeac, which is to remain under the rule and governance of the abbots of Conques. In the eleventh century, the discord between the two monasteries had reached such a pass that popes and councils were appealed to to settle the question of priority. In 1096 the Council of Nîmes laid down a modus vivendi without pronouncing upon the principle. It was decreed that the abbots of Figeac should thenceforth be independent of the abbots of Conques.