CHAPTER V
Mme. Ducros—A Southern French country town—"Tartarin de Tarascon"—His prototypes at Nyons—M. Sisteron the roysterer—The Southern French—An octogenarian pesteur—French industry—"Bone-shakers"—A wonderful "Cordon-bleu"—"Slop-basin"—French legal procedure—The bons-vivants—The merry French judges—La gaiete francaise—Delightful excursions—Some sleepy old towns—Orange and Avignon—M. Thiers' ingenious cousin—Possibilities—French political situation in 1874—The Comte de Chambord—Some French characteristics—High intellectual level—Three days in a Trappist Monastery—Details of life there—The Arian heresy—Silkworm culture—Tendencies of French to complicate details—Some examples—Cicadas in London.
As it had already been settled that I was to enter the Diplomatic Service, my father very wisely determined that I should leave Harrow as soon as I was seventeen to go to France, in order to learn French thoroughly. As he pointed out, it would take three years at least to become proficient in French and German, and it would be as well to begin at once.
The French tutor selected for me enjoyed a great reputation at that time. Oddly enough, she was a woman, but it will be gathered that she was quite an exceptional woman, when I say that she had for years ruled four unruly British cubs, varying in age from seventeen to twenty, with an absolute rod of iron. Mme. Ducros was the wife of a French judge, she spoke English perfectly, and must have been in her youth a wonderfully good-looking woman. She was very tall, and still adhered to the dress and headdress of the "sixties," wearing little bunches of curls over each ear—a becoming fashion, even if rather reminiscent of a spaniel.
The Ducros lived at Nyons in the south of France. Nyons lay twenty-five miles east of the main line from Paris to Marseilles, and could only be reached by diligence. I think that I can safely say that no foreigner (with the exception of the Ducros' pupils) had ever set foot in Nyons, for the place was quite unknown, and there was nothing to draw strangers there. It was an extraordinarily attractive spot, lying in a little circular cup of a valley of the Dauphine Alps, through which a brawling river had bored its way. Nyons was celebrated for its wine, its olive oil, its silk, and its truffles, all of them superlatively good. The ancient little walled town, basking in this sun-trap of a valley, stood out ochre-coloured against the silver-grey background of olive trees, whilst the jagged profiles of the encircling hills were always mistily blue, with that intense blue of which the Provence hills seem alone to have the secret. So few English people knew anything about the conditions of life in a little out-of-the-way French provincial town, where no foreigners have ever set foot, that it may be worth while saying something about them. In the first place, it must have been deadly dull for the inhabitants, for nothing whatever happened there. Even the familiar "tea and tennis," the stereotyped mild dissipation of little English towns, was quite unknown. There was no entertaining of any sort, beyond the formal visits the ladies were perpetually paying each other. The Ducros alone, occasionally, asking their legal friends to dinner, invitations accepted with the utmost enthusiasm, for the culinary genius who presided over the Ducros' kitchen (M. Dueros' own sister) deservedly enjoyed an enormous local reputation.
Most people must be familiar with Alphonse Daudet's immortal work, Tartarin de Tarascon, in which the typical "Meridional" of Southern France is portrayed with such unerring exactitude that Daudet himself, after writing the book, was never able to set foot in Tarascon again.
We had a cercle in Nyons, in the Place Napoleon (re-christened Place de la Republique after September 4, 1870), housed in three rather stately, sparsely furnished, eighteenth-century rooms. Here, with the exception of Tartarin himself, the counterparts of all Daudet's characters were to be found. "Le Capitaine Bravida" was represented by Colonel Olivier, a fiercely moustached and imperialled Crimean veteran, who perpetually breathed fire and swords on any potential enemy of France. "Costecalde" found his prototype in M. Sichap, who, although he had in all probability never fired off a gun in his life, could never see a tame pigeon, or even a sparrow flying over him, without instantly putting his walking-stick to his shoulder and loudly ejaculating, "Pan, pan," which was intended to counterfeit the firing of both barrels of a gun. I once asked M. Sichap why so excellent a shot as he (with a walking-stick) invariably missed his bird with his first barrel, and only brought him down with his second. This was quite a new light to M. Sichap, who had hithered considered the double "Pan, pan," an indispensable adjunct to the pantomime of firing a gun; much as my young brother and I had once imagined "Ug, ug," an obligatory commencement to any remark made by a Red Indian "brave."
In so remote a place as Nyons, over four hundred miles from the capital, the glamour of Paris exercised a magical attraction. The few inhabitants of Nyons who had ever visited Paris, or even merely passed through it, were never quite as other people, some little remnant of an aureole encircled them. The dowdy little wife of M. Pelissier, who had first seen the light in some grubby suburb of Paris, either Levallois-Perret or Clichy, held an immense position in Nyons on the strength of being "une vraie Parisienne," and most questions of taste were referred to her. M. Sisteron, the collector of taxes, himself a native of Nyons, had twenty years before gone to Paris on business, and spent four days there. There were the darkest rumours current in Nyons, to the effect that M. Sisteron had spent these four days in a whirl of the most frantic and abandoned dissipation. It was popularly supposed that these four days in Paris, twenty years ago, had so completely unsettled M. Sisteron that life in Nyons had lost all zest for him. He was perpetually hungering for the delirious joys of the metropolis; even the collection of taxes no longer afforded him the faintest gratification. Every inhabitant of Nyons was secretly proud of being able to claim so dare-devil a roysterer as a fellow-townsman. The memory of those rumored four hectic days in Paris clung round him like a halo; it became almost a pleasure to pay taxes to so celebrated a character. M. Sisteron was short, paunchy, bald, and bearded. He was a model husband and a pattern as a father. I am persuaded that he had spent those four days in Paris in the most blameless and innocuous fashion, living in the cheapest hotel he could find, and, after the manner of the people of Nyons, never spending one unnecessary franc. Still, the legend of his lurid four days, and of the amount of champagne he had consumed during them, persisted. In moments of expansion, his intimate friends would dig him in the ribs, remembering those four feverish days, with a facetious, "Ah! vieux polisson de Sisteron, va! Nous autres, nous n'avons pas fait des farces a Paris dans notre jeunesse!" to M. Sisteron's unbounded delight. It was in the genuine spirit of Tartarin de Tarascon, with all the mutual make-believe on both sides. His wife, Mme. Sisteron, was fond of assuring her friends that she owed her excellent health to the fact that she invariably took a bath twice a year, whether she required it or not.
The other members of the cercle were also mostly short, tubby, black-bearded, and olive-complexioned. When not engaged in playing "manille" for infinitesimal points, they would all shout and gesticulate violently, as only Southern Frenchmen can, relapsing as the discussion grew more heated into their native Provencal, for though Nyons is geographically in Dauphine, climatically and racially it is in Provence. In Southern France the "Langue d'Oil," the literary language of Paris and Northern France, has never succeeded in ousting the "Langue d'Oc," the language of the Troubadours. From hearing so much Provencal talked round me, I could not help picking up some of it. It was years before I could rid myself of the habit of inquiring quezaco? instead of "qu'est ce que c'est?" and of substituting for "Comment cela va-t-il?" the Provencal Commoun as? I found, too, that it was unusual elsewhere to address people in our Nyons fashion as "Te, mon bon!"
Those swarthy, amply waistcoated, voluble little men were really very good fellows in spite of their excitability and torrents of talk.