There was in Briare, as in every town in France larger than a hamlet, an inn the proprietor of which catered to the vagabond class. None but a native tramp could have found the establishment without repeated inquiries; but the miners, needing no second invitation and guided by some peculiar instinct, led the way down a side street and into a squalid cul de sac. The most acute foreign eye would have seen only frowning back walls, but my companions pushed open the door of what looked like a deserted warehouse and we entered a low room, gloomy and unswept. Around the table, to which we made our way through a very forest of huge wine-barrels, were gathered a dozen peasants and a less solemn pair who turned out to be of “the profession.”
The first greetings over, the keeper set out before us a loaf of coarse bread and a bottle of wine, demanded immediate payment, and having received it, resumed his seat on a barrel. His shop was, in reality, the wine cellar of a café the gilded façade of which faced the main street. In it the liquor that sold here for four sous the litre would have cost us a half-franc. One of the miners, having gained my consent to the extravagance, invested two sous in raw, salt pork which he and his companion ate with great relish. I was content to do without such delicacies, for the wine and bread made a very appetizing feast after hours of trudging under a broiling sun.
Canal-boats laden with lumber from Nièvre entering Paris
“They are excellently built, the Routes Nationales of France”
In the course of the afternoon I photographed the miners, a proceeding which caused them infantine delight, both declaring that this was the first time in their begrimed existence that they had ever been tirés. We found lodging in a peasant’s wheat stack. I was a bit chary of spending the night in so deserted a spot with two such vagabonds, for the kodak and the handful of coins from which I had paid for our dinner was a plunder worth a roadster’s conspiracy. My anxiety was really ungrounded. Morning broke with my possessions intact and, after an hour’s work in picking straw and chaff from our hair and clothing, we set off at sunrise.
I left my companions behind soon after, for their mode of travel resulted in far less than the thirty miles a day I had cut out for myself, and passed on into the vineyard and forest country of Nièvre. Harvest was over in the few fertile farms that were not given up to the culture of the grape; the day of the gleaners had come. In the fields left bare by the reapers, peasant women gathered with infinite care the stray wheat stalks and, their aprons full, plodded homeward. To the thrifty French mind there is nothing so iniquitous as to waste the smallest thing of value. Before this army of bowed backs one could not but wonder whether it had ever occurred to them that labor also may be wasted.
The most extravagant of its inhabitants were already lighting their lamps when I entered the village of La Charité. To whatever benevolence the quiet hamlet owes its name, it was typical of those rural communities that line the highways of France. A decrepit grey church raised a time-mellowed voice in the song of the evening angelus. Squat housewives gossiped at the doors of the drab stone cottages lining the route. From the neighboring fields heavy ox-carts, the yokes fastened across the horns of the animals, lumbered homeward. In the dwindling light a blacksmith before his open shop was fitting with flat, iron shoes a piebald ox triced up on his back in a frame.
In lieu of the familiar sign, Ici on loge à pied et à cheval, the village inn was distinguished from the private dwellings by a bundle of dried fagots over the door. I entered, to find myself in a room well-stocked with wooden tables, with here and there a trio of villagers, over their wine and cards, blowing smoke at the unhewn beams of the ceiling. In answer to the customary signal, the tapping of pipes on the tables, an elderly woman appeared and inquired bruskly wherein she could serve me.