Autumn Impressions of the Gironde

by I. Giberne Sieveking

Coming back to Arcachon, we met a typical old peasant woman, with two huge straw baskets—one white and one black, a big stick, and a black handkerchief tied over her head, and a most characteristic face, crumpled, seamed and lined with all the different hand-writings over it that the pencil of Fate had drawn during a long lifetime. When young, the peasant women of the Landes are not striking. The peculiar characteristics of the face are unvarying; you meet with them everywhere all about the Gironde and Bordeaux. The faces are sallow, low-browed, with dark hair and eyes. They are brisk-looking, but just escape being either pretty or noticeable. Most of the women, too, that we saw, were of small stature and insignificant looking. It is when they are old that the beauty to which they are heir, is developed. The women of the Landes are evening primroses: the striking quality of their faces comes out after the heyday of life is over. It seems that the face of the Gironde woman needs many seasons of sun and heat to bring out the sap of the character. The autumn tints are beautiful in faces, as in trees. Theirs is the beauty that Experience—that Teacher of the Thing-as-it-is—brings; and it is in the clash of the meeting of the peculiar personality with the experience from outside, that character springs to the birth. You see—if you can read it—their life, in the eyes of the dweller by the countryside. In a more civilised class one can but read too often, what has been put on with intention, as a mask. Civilisation and convention eliminate individuality, as far as possible, and they recommend dissimulation, and we, oftener than not, take their recommendation.

So in all countries, and in all ages, Jean François Millet's idea is the right one—that to find life at its plainest, at its fullest, one should study it, au fond, in the lives of the sons and daughters of the soil. Their open-air life prints deep on their faces the divine impress of Nature, obtainable, in quite the same measure, in no other way; they have become intimate with Nature, and have lived their everyday life close to her heart-beats. What she gives is incommunicable to others: it can only be given by direct contact, and can never be passed on, for only by direct contact can the creases of the mind, caused by the life of towns and great cities, be smoothed out, and a calm, strong, new breadth of outlook given.

I remember a typical face of this kind. We had been out for a day's excursion from Arcachon, and, coming home, at the station where we took train, there got into our carriage, a mother and daughter. After getting into conversation with them—a thing they were quite willing to do, with ready natural courtesy of manner,—we learned that the mother was eighty-one years old and had worked as a parcheuse in her young days. She had a fine old face, wrinkled and lined with a thousand life stories. Kindly, pathetic, had been their influence upon her, for her eyes and expression were just like a sunset over a beautiful country: it was the beauty that is only reached when one has well drunk at the goblets of life—some of us to the bitter dregs—and set them down, thankful that at last it is growing near the time when one need lift them to one's lips no more.

The mother told me that the women parcheuses could not earn so much as the men, three francs a day—perhaps only thirty centimes—being their ordinary wage. She turned to me once, so tragically, with such a sudden world of sorrow rising in her eyes. "I have worked all my life in the fields, and at fishing, and now, one by one, all whom I love have left me, and I am so lonely left behind."

"Ah, c'est malheureux!" exclaimed the daughter, turning sympathetically to her.

We parted at Arcachon station, but how often since, have I not seen the face of the old mother looking sadly out of our carriage window, the tears gathering slowly in her eyes as she remembered those with whom she had started life, and whom death had distanced from her now, so far.

There are two distinguishing characteristics of the villages of the Landes as we saw them, and these are the absence of beggars and of drunkenness—I didn't see a single drunken man. As one knows, it is somewhat rare to meet with them in other parts of France, and one remembers the story of the English barrister who was taken up by the police and thought to be drunk (so seldom had they been enabled to diagnose drunkenness), and taken off to the lock-up! It turned out that he was only suffering from an over-emphasised Anglicised pronunciation of the French language, studied (without exterior aid) at home, before travelling abroad.

Thrift and sobriety are two virtues which generally go in company—they are very much in evidence in the country of the Gironde to-day. Happy the land where this is the case! Unfortunately it is not the case in England now, nor has been indeed for many a long year. Think of the difference too there is in manner between the countrymen of our own England and that of France. One cannot travel in this part of France without meeting everywhere that simple, native courtesy which is so spontaneously ready on all occasions. It is a perfect picture of what the intercourse of strangers should be.

As a nation, we are apt to be stiff and awkward in our initial conversation with a stranger. We require so long a time before we thaw and are our natural selves; our introductory chapters are so long and tiresome.