Wanderings by Southern Waters, Eastern Aquitaine

by Edward Harrison Barker

This was Estaing. It is a little place full of originality, and looks as if it had been built to set forth the dream of some old writer of romance. The late-Gothic church is more quaint and odd than beautiful. The architect sported with the laws of symmetry, and revelled in the fanciful. The nave is much wider at one end than the other. The great sundial over the door, bearing the date 1636, is scarcely less useful now than when it was placed there. The castle is a strange pile, all the more picturesque by its incongruity. It stands upon a mass of schistous rock about fifty feet above the river. Most of the visible portion of the building is late Gothic and Renaissance; but this was grafted upon the lower walls and arches of a feudal fortress. Towers rise from towers, mullioned windows have their lines cut in the shadow of beetling machicolations, and higher still are dormer windows with graceful Gothic gables. This castle is now a convent and village school. From the court I could see the Sisters' little garden, where flowers and melons and potherbs were curiously mixed without the gardener's systematic art, which is so often a deadly thing to beauty; and nasturtiums climbing the weedy walls from rough deal boxes were basking in the steady glow of afternoon sun, which seemed to me so intensely brilliant because I was in the dark shadow. A Sister consented to let me go to the top of the highest tower, and she went before me rattling her keys officially. On the way she showed me a fine Renaissance chimney-piece with florid carvings.

After Estaing the valley became wilder, and the river fell over rocks in a series of cascades. Clouds came up and hid the sun; a rainy wind made the willows hoary, and set all the poplar leaves sighing and quivering. The vines had disappeared, and the wooded gorge became very solemn in the fading light. There was one figure in the landscape—that of a peasant woman bending and rolling up into bundles the hemp that had been spread out to dry. It added the human touch of melancholy to the sadness of the picture. More and more gloomy became the scene. Great black precipitous rocks of schist, their hollows filled with sombre foliage, rose in solemn grandeur far above me, and in the bottom the plunging stream foamed and roared. The mad wind caught up the dust from the road and whirled it onward, and then the rain began to fall. Rockier and darker became the way, and louder the roar of the stream. So narrow was the gorge at length that the road ran along a ledge that had been cut in the gneiss.

When I was still some miles from Entraygues (called by the peasants Entrayou), I met a young gendarme. He did not ask me for my papers, for he was a native of the district of Lourdes, and had been brought into contact with so many English people at Pau that he detected at once my Britannic accent, which has not been worn away by many years' residence in France. To him the fact of my being an Englishman was a sufficient assurance that I was respectable. He was a rakish, devil-may-care fellow, who, after being a sub-officer in the army, had lately been moved into the gendarmerie. His heart had been deeply touched by an English governess whom he had met at Pau, and he spoke to me about her with 'tears in his voice.' He talked much about Lourdes, where he said the people were sincerely religious, and not hypocritical. His opinion of the Aveyronnais was somewhat different, but perhaps unjust, for as yet he could not have had much experience of them. Having taken the precaution to tell me that he was anything but a strict Catholic himself, he declared that he was a believer in miracles.

'Why?' I asked.

'Because,' said he, 'my father saw Bernadette go up a rock on her knees—one that no man could climb—and I myself have been a witness of miracles at Lourdes. I have seen at least twenty people cured at the fountain. One was a captain, who was so paralyzed that he had to be carried to the water, and when he came away he walked as if nothing had been the matter with him.'

Thus talking we reached Entraygues. I allowed the gendarme to take me to the inn of his fancy, which he praised with true Southern warmth for its comfort and good cheer. The large kitchen as we entered was only lighted by the flame of the wood-fire on the hearth, in front of which a fowl and a piece of veal were turning on the same spit, moved by clockwork that said 'click-clack, click-clack;' which was as genial an invitation to dinner as any I had ever heard. Presently the lamp was lighted, the table was laid, and I sat down to dinner with the innkeeper and the gendarme from the Basses Pyrénées. The meal was of the substantial kind, such as gives complete satisfaction to the wayfarer at the end of his day's wandering, after putting up with frugal fare on the road. The aubergiste brought out his best wine, and his best cheeses made from goat's milk, and which had been kept carefully wrapped up in vine leaves. These little cheeses, when they have been allowed to mature in a wrapping of vine or plane leaf, are among the best made. The landlord had studied all matters relating to the stomach within the range of his experience. He said that hares were not fit to eat unless they had fed chiefly on thyme, and that a starling had no value in the kitchen until it had been feeding on juniper berries.

This night when I went to bed I had not the frantic crowing of cocks to keep me awake, but the soft murmuring of the flowing river to lull me asleep. The weather being now fair and calm after the troubled evening, I threw the window open, so that I could feel the wafting of the great invisible wings of the summer night, and listen to the soothing song of the water repeating the tales that were told to it by the rocks and the woods on its way down from the Lozère mountains.

I was again on the banks of this beautiful river—at no place more beautiful than at Entraygues—when the rising sun was gilding only the topmost vines of the high western hill that shadows it. The little town of 2,000 inhabitants is close to the spot where the Thuyère falls into the Lot. It lies in the angle where two lovely valleys meet. The Thuyère comes down from the Cantal mountains, and as it reaches Entraygues it spreads out over a broad smooth bed of pebbles, its water as clear as rock-crystal; and when the morning sun looks down upon it over the vine-clad hills, it is like something that has been seen in the happiest of dreams. There is a castle at Entraygues, and, as in the case of the one at Estaing, it is now used as a convent and school. The archaeologist will find perhaps more to interest him in the two thirteenth-century bridges which span the Lot and the Thuyère, both noble specimens of Gothic work.

As I left Entraygues the bells in the church-tower were ringing—not the monotonous ding-dong with which French people generally have had to content themselves since the Revolutionists turned the old bell-metal into sous, but a blithe and joyous peal of high silvery tones that seemed to belong to the blue air, and to be the voices of the little spirits that flutter about the morning's rosy veil. My design was to reach the abbey of Conques before evening, but instead of going directly towards it over the hills, I preferred to keep as long as possible in the valley of the Lot, which is here of such witching loveliness. As there was a road on the river-bank for many miles, I could follow this fancy, and yet feel the comfort of walking on good ground. Although the season was getting late, I found the valley below Entraygues very rich in flowers. Agrimony, mint, and marjoram, with a tall inula, and the pretty, sweet-scented white melilot, were in great abundance along the bank. Upon the rocks, which now bordered the road, were the deep red blossoms of the orpine sedum, and a small crimson-flowered stock with very hoary stem. A tall handsome plant about three feet high, with large white flowers, drew me down a bank to where it was growing near the water. I found that it was a very luxuriant specimen of the thorn-apple (datura). While I was admiring its poisonous beauty a woman stopped on the road just above me, and, after contemplating me in silent curiosity for a few minutes, said to me first in patois and then in French (when I replied to her in this language):

'It is a wicked plant, that! The beasts will not touch it, so you had better leave it alone.'