On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardèche, I began an improving acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called ‘the gallantry’ of paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I am afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one night a company of bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manège avec des chaises, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches’ Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the comer of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night. At the time, people said it was the devil qui s’amusait à faire ca.
I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some amusement.
The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing than formerly. ‘C’est difficile,’ he added, ‘à expliquer.’
When we were well up on the moors and the Conductor was trying some road-metal with the gauge—
‘Hark!’ said the foreman, ‘do you hear nothing?’
We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east, brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
‘It is the flocks of Vivarais,’ said he.
For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardèche are brought up to pasture on these grassy plateaux.
Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our intentions.
The Conductor told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in these uncouth timidities.