Smoking and drinking led us, as it naturally does, into trouble. There was a Jamaica Irishman with a very dark skin and a very loud brogue, called Thomas, who was passing the winter for the benefit of his chest at Pau. He delighted in encouraging us for mischief sake. One raw snowy day he gave us his strongest cigars, and brewed us a bowl of potent steaming punch, which was soon followed by another. Edward, not being very well, was unusually temperate, and so I, not liking to waste it, drank for two. A walk was then maliciously proposed, and the cold air acted as usual as stimulant to stimulant. Thomas began laughing aloud, Edward plodded gloomily along, and I got into half a dozen scrimmages with the country people. At last matters began to look serious, and the too hospitable host took his two guests back to their home. I managed to stagger upstairs; I was deadly pale, with staring eyes, and compelled to use the depressed walk of a monkey, when I met my mother. She was startled at my appearance, and as I pleaded very sick she put me to bed. But other symptoms puzzled her. She fetched my father, who came to the bedside, looked carefully for a minute at his son and heir, and turned upon his heel, exclaiming, "The beast's in liquor." The mother burst into a flood of tears, and next morning presented me with a five-franc piece, making me promise to be good for the future, and not to read Lord Chesterfield's "Letters to his Son," of which she had a dreadful horror. It need hardly be said that the five francs soon melted away in laying in a stock of what is popularly called "a hair of the dog that bit."
What we learnt last at Pau was the Bearnais dialect. It is a charmingly naïve dialect, mixture of French, Spanish, and Provençale, and containing a quantity of pretty, pleasant songs. The country folk were delighted when addressed in their own lingo. It considerably assisted me in learning Provençale, the language of Le Geysaber; and I found it useful in the most out-of-the-way corners of the world, even in Brazil. Nothing goes home to the heart of a man so much as to speak to him in his own patois. Even a Lancashire lad can scarcely resist the language of "Tummas and Mary."
At length the wheezy, windy, rainy, foggy, sleety, snowy winter passed away, and the approach of the warm four months, warned strangers to betake themselves to the hills. This time the chosen place was Argélés. In those days it was a little village, composed mainly of one street, not unlike mining Arrayal in Brazil, or a negro village on the banks of the Gaboon. But the scenery around it was beautiful. It lay upon a brawling stream, and the contrast of the horizontal meadow-lands around it, with the backing of almost vertical hills and peaks, thoroughly satisfied the eye. It had cruel weather in winter time, and a sad accident had just happened. A discharged soldier had reached it in midwinter, when the snow lay deep and the wolves were out, and the villagers strongly dissuaded him from trying to reach his father's home in the hills. He was armed with his little briquet, the little curved sword then carried by the French infantry soldiers, and he laughed all caution to scorn. It was towards nightfall; he had hardly walked a mile, before a pack came down upon him, raging and ravening with hunger. He put his back to a tree, and defended himself manfully, killing several wolves, and escaped whilst the carcases were being devoured by their companions; but he sheathed his sword without taking the precaution to wipe it, and when he was attacked again it was glued to the scabbard. The wolves paid dearly for their meal, for the enraged villagers organized a battue, and killed about a score of them as an expiatory sacrifice for the poor soldier.
We two brothers, abetted by our tutor, had fallen into the detestable practice of keeping our hands in by shooting swifts and swallows, of which barbarity we were afterwards heartily ashamed. Our first lesson was from the peasants. On one occasion, having shot a harmless bird that fell among the reapers, the latter charged us in a body, and being armed with scythes and sickles, caused a precipitous retreat. In those days the swallow seemed to be a kind of holy bird in the Bearnais, somewhat like the pigeons of Mecca and Venice. I can only remember that this was the case with old Assyrians and Aramæans, who called the swift or devilling the destiny, or foretelling bird, because it heralded the spring.
There was a small society at Argélés, consisting chiefly of English and Spaniards. The latter were mostly refugees, driven away from home by political changes. They were not overburdened with money, and of course looked for cheap quarters. They seemed chiefly to live upon chocolate, which they made in their own way, in tiny cups so thick and gruelly, that sponge-cake stood upright in it. They smoked cigarettes with maize-leaf for paper, as only a Spaniard can. The little cylinder hangs down as if it were glued to the smoker's lower lip. He goes on talking and laughing, and then, by some curious movement of a muscle developed in no other race, he raises the weed to the horizontal and puffs out a cloud of smoke. They passed their spare time in playing the guitar and singing party songs, and were very much disgusted when asked to indulge the company with Riego el Cid. There was a marriage at Argélés, when a Scotch maiden of mature age married M. Le Maire, an old French mousquetaire, a man of birth, of courtly manners, and who was the delight of the young ones, but his plaisanteries are utterly unfit for the drawing-room. There was also a Baron de Meydell, his wife, her sister, and two very handsome daughters. The eldest was engaged to a rich young planter in the Isle of Bourbon. We two lads of course fell desperately in love with them, and the old father, who had served in the Hessian Brigade in the English army, only roared with laughter when he saw and heard our polissoneries. The old man liked us both, and delighted in nothing more than to see us working upon each other with foil and sabre. The parting of the four lovers was something very sad, and three of us at least shed tears. The eldest girl was beyond such childishness.
As the mountain fog began to roll down upon the valley, our father found that his poor chest required a warmer climate. This time we travelled down the Grand Canal du Midi in a big public barge, which resembled a Dutch trekschuyt. At first, passing through the locks was a perpetual excitement, but this very soon palled. The L'Estranges were also on board, and the French part of the company were not particularly pleasant. They were mostly tourists returning home, mixed with a fair proportion of commis-voyageurs, a class that corresponds with, but does not resemble, our commercial traveller. The French species seems to have but two objects in social life: first, to glorify himself, and secondly, to glorify Paris.
Monsieur Victor Hugo has carried the latter mania to the very verge of madness, and left to his countrymen an example almost as bad as bad can be. The peculiarity of the commis-voyageur in those days, was the queer thin varnish of politeness, which he thought it due to himself to assume. He would help himself at breakfast or dinner to the leg, wing, and part of the breast, and pass the dish to his neighbour when it contained only a neck and a drumstick, with a pleased smile and a ready bow, anxiously asking "Madame, veut elle de la volaille?" and he was frightfully unprogressive. He wished to "let sleeping dogs lie," and hated to move quiet things. It almost gave him an indigestion to speak of railways. He found the diligence and the canal boat quite fast enough for his purpose. And in this to a certain extent he represented the Genius of the Nation.