In our struggles we had pulled off a strap, and I went to the harness-maker’s to see if it could there be re-fastened, while J—— knocked at the blacksmith’s. For five minutes no one answered; and then at last an old woman, clean and neat as her village, opened the door, and made quite a show of briskness by asking what I wanted. She said of course the matter could be attended to. But when I represented I must have it done at once——
“My dear Madam, it is impossible,” she said. “The workmen have been gone two days, and I cannot tell when they will return.”
—At the blacksmith’s J——’s knocks summoned only two children, who stared as if nothing was more unlooked for at the shop than a customer.—Our needs were urgent, and it was useless to attempt to make them understand. J—— went boldly in, and helped himself to wire and a nail.—While he was blacksmithing for himself their mother came out and bade him take whatever he wanted. The workmen had been away a week, and she did not know when they would be back again.—That workmen should leave Chailly to find something to do did not seem surprising. The only wonder was they should think it worth their while to stay there at all.—As we stood in front of the shop, J—— mending the luggage-carrier with an energy I am sure had never gone to the operation before, a little diligence carrying a young lady and an artist in Tam o’ Shanter—there was no mistaking his trade—passed with a great jingling of bells. But even it failed to awake Chailly from its slumbers.
The blacksmith’s wife refused to take any money for the wire and nail.—However, J—— insisting on making some payment, the woman told him he could give sous to the children. I have never seen anything to equal her honesty. When she found that two of her neighbour’s little girls had come in for a share of the profits, she forced them to relinquish it, while she would not allow her own children to keep more than two sous a-piece. Nothing we could say could alter her resolution, and with Spartan-like heroism she seized the extra sous and thrust them into J——’s hand.
After experiencing these things, we rode out on the great plain of Barbizon. It would be affectation to pretend we did not at once think and speak of Millet. Was it not partly to see his house and country we had come this way? His fields, with here and there scattered grey boulders, and in the middle distance a cluster of trees, stretched from either side of the road to the far low horizon, the beauty of their monotony being but accentuated by the afternoon’s soft cloud-shadows. It seemed to us a bright, broad prospect, though I suppose we should have found it full of infinite sadness.—There was not much pathos in near cabbage-patches glowing and shining in two o’clock sunlight, and we could not believe the weariness of the peasants to be quite genuine. Their melancholy seemed less hopelessness, than consciousness of their duty to pose as pathetic features in the landscape.—Even an old woman, a real Millet, with sabots and handkerchief turban, and a bundle of grass on her back, stopped on her homeward way to strike a weary attitude on a stone heap by the wayside the minute she saw J——’s sketch-book.—The peasants of Barbizon have not served an apprenticeship as models for nothing. They have learned to realise their sufferings, and to make the most of them.——
“Now I know,” said J——, putting up his sketch-book, “if I were to tell her to put her arms or her legs or head in another position, she would say, ‘Mais non, Monsieur, it was thus I posed for Monsieur Millet,’ or Monsieur somebody else. Bah! it’s all a fashion!”
—The old woman, disappointed, got up and walked onwards, to be speedily out-distanced by us.