It is the fashion to call the South languid, but nowhere more than at Bordeaux—where the Garonne joins La Gironde—will you find so great and ceaseless an activity.
The people are not, to be sure, of the peasant class, still they are not such town-dwellers as in many other parts, and seem to combine, as do most of the people of southern France, a languor and keenness which are intoxicating if not stimulating.
Between Bordeaux and Toulouse are not many great towns, but, in the words of Taine, one well realizes that "it is a fine country." The Garonne valley, with a fine alluvial soil, grows, productively and profitably, corn, tobacco, and hemp; and by the utmost industry and intelligence the workers are able to prosper exceedingly.
The traveller from the Mediterranean across to the Atlantic—or the reverse—by rail, will get glimpses now and then of this wonderfully productive river-bottom, as it flows yellow-brown through its osier-bedded banks; and again, an intermittent view of the Canal du Midi, upon whose non-raging bosom is carried a vast water-borne traffic by barge and canal-boat, which even the development of the railway has not been able to appreciably curtail.
Here, too, the peasant proprietor is largely in evidence, which is an undoubted factor in the general prosperity. His blockings, hedgings, and fencings have spoiled the expanse of hillside and vale in much the same manner as in Albion. This may be a pleasing feature to the uninitiated, but it is not a picturesque one. However, the proprietorship of small plots of land, worked by their non-luxury demanding owners, is accountable for a great deal of the peace and plenty with which all provincial France, if we except certain mountainous regions, seems to abound. It may not provide a superabundance of this world's wealth and luxury, but the French farmer—in a small way—has few likes of that nature, and the existing conditions make for a contentment which the dull, brutal, and lethargic farm labourer of some parts of England might well be forced to emulate, if even by ball and chain.
Flat-roofed houses, reminiscent of Spain or Italy—born of a mild climate—add a pleasing variety of architectural feature, while the curiously hung bells—with their flattened belfries, like the headstones in a cemetery—suggest something quite different from the motives which inspired the northern builders, who enclosed their chimes in a roofed-over, open-sided cubicle. The bells here hang merely in apertures open to the air on each side, and ring out sharp and true to the last dying note. It is a most picturesque and unusual arrangement, hardly to be seen elsewhere as a characteristic feature outside Spain itself, and in some of the old Missions, which the Spanish Fathers built in the early days of California.
Between Bayonne and Bordeaux, and bordered by the sea, the Garonne, and the Adour, is a nondescript land which may be likened to the deserts of Africa or Asia, except that its barrenness is of the sea salty. It is by no means unpeopled, though uncultivated and possessed of little architectural splendour of either a past or the present day.
Including the half of the department of the Gironde, a corner of Lot et Garonne, and all of that which bears its name, the Landes forms of itself a great seaboard plain or morass. It is said by a geographical authority that the surface so very nearly approaches the rectilinear that for a distance of twenty-eight miles between the dismal villages of Lamothe and Labonheyre the railway is "a visible meridian."
The early eighteenth-century writers—in English—used to revile all France, so far as its topographical charms were concerned, with panegyrics upon its unloveliness and lack of variety, and of being anything more than a flat, arid land, which was not sufficient even unto itself.
What induced this extraordinary reasoning it is hard to realize at the present day.