French & English

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Les Morvandeaux.

The great distance between north-western and south-eastern France may lead us to expect wide differences. The variety that exists in great nations is still more striking when we observe the trenchant differences that often divide populations which, geographically, are near neighbours. The Morvan is a district about fifty miles from north to south by thirty from east to west. It is not marked on the maps of France, but the reader will understand its situation when I tell him that it embraces portions of four departments: the Yonne to the north, the Côte d’Or to the east, the Nièvre to the west, and Saône-et-Loire to the south. In shape it resembles the Isle of Man, but it includes about five times as much territory. Autun is just outside of it to the south-east, and Avallon just inside it to the north. This district, or region, is marked by a peculiar physical character. It is a land of hills (not mountains), woods, and running streams, and the inhabitants, until their country was opened by good roads, were scarcely less a people apart than the Bretons. They have a language of their own, which, though akin to French, is not French, and the people are now for the most part able to speak French or Morvandeau at will (just as in the Highlands of Scotland they speak English or Gaelic), and their French is remarkably pure.

The Morvan Race.

Material Civilisation.

Cookery in Burgundy.

Gardening.

Now, if you compare the people of the Morvan with those of the plain of Burgundy and the Saône, which is quite near, you find the most striking differences. First there is a difference of race and of physical constitution, the Morvan race being the smaller of the two, the women more frequently pretty and well made on their small scale, with a predominance of dark hair and eyes, and a rich rather than a fair complexion. Besides this, there is a great disparity in material civilisation. The art of cookery has been accounted one of the most effectual tests of human advancement; when the people are clever cooks they are usually, it is said, clever in other arts besides, and they set a value on civilised life generally, and will be at great pains to maintain it. Such an art as cookery may have nothing to do with the intellectual side of life, and the Muse may exist on a little oatmeal, though she generally does her work better on a more varied and more interesting diet; but cookery is of great economic importance, because a cooking people will appreciate all the alimentary gifts of Nature and master the arts that procure them, whilst the non-cooking races are negligent and careless providers. The French are reputed to be a cooking race, but the Morvan people scarcely understand cookery better than the Scottish Highlanders. Servants from the Morvan are often sharp and active, honest, willing, laborious, cheerful, contented, amiable, yet with all these fine qualities invariably unable to cook a dinner. In the Burgundy wine district and the plain of the Saône a talent for cookery is very common in both sexes, and there are plain unpretending wives of small inn-keepers or wine-growers who would be perfectly capable of serving a royal feast, and not in the least disconcerted by the undertaking. All the Saône bargemen are said to be clever cooks, and they live extremely well. In the Morvan the peasants live with severe self-denial, chiefly on potatoes and thin soup flavoured with a morsel of bacon. Their drink is often a poor kind of perry or cider; they indulge in wine on market-days and sometimes sparingly at home, but then it is of a meagre quality. Near the Saône the people are a gardening as well as a cooking race; the Morvan people are not gardeners; a rich man may have a garden as a matter of luxury, but the peasants do not cultivate vegetables or fruit-trees. In some parts of the Morvan the spring comes six weeks later than at Chalon on the Saône.

The Fine Arts.

Lastly, in the Morvan there are no fine arts. There may be occasional artistic genius, like that of Gautherin, the sculptor, who began life as a poor Morvandeau shepherd boy, but such gifts find no natural development in the district. The Burgundy wine country, on the other hand, has always been favourable to art of all kinds, and to learning. Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and all kinds of scholarship have flourished at Dijon in an association (perhaps not altogether accidental) with good cookery and the richest of all French vintages.

Departments.