A Book of the Riviera

by S. Baring-Gould

Only after the third harvest is the cork in perfect condition. The tree is then about forty years old. It is first skinned (démasclée) when the tree is aged twenty or five-and-twenty. The second peeling takes place when it is aged thirty or five-and-thirty. The third and best is collected when the tree is between forty and forty-five years old. The cork is taken off the trunk from above the ground to a height of about six feet, leaving the under surface of a coffee colour.

The cork bark is plunged into a cauldron of boiling water, and is left in it for half an hour. Then it is cut into strips, next into squares. It is again boiled for a quarter of an hour, and then allowed slowly to dry, and is not touched again for six months, after which it is cut into shape. The best corks are made out of strips that have been kept for three years. To whiten the corks they are subjected to sulphur fumes.

The great enemy to the cork tree is the Coroebus bifascatus, an insect that bores a gallery, not in the bark, but in the wood of the tree. It attacks the branches, and its presence can be detected by the sickly look of the leaves. When this indication shows that it is burrowing, the branches affected are cut off above the point to which it has bored, and are burnt.

At one time it was supposed that the cork tree required no culture. But of late years great pains have been taken with it, and it readily responds to them. A self-sown tree growing up in the midst of heather and cistus is not likely to attain to a great size. It is cut down to the root; then, when it sends up fresh shoots, one is kept, the rest removed. This operation has to be repeated, and the ground about the root to be well dressed. After six years the tree will take care of itself.

The great danger, above all, to which the cork woods are exposed, is fire; whole tracts have been devastated in this way, and the proprietors ruined. Consequently, precautions are insisted on. Smokers are specially warned not to throw about their unextinguished matches.

The carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua) is another that is met with, and which attracts the attention of the visitor from the north. The pods, called locust beans, are supposed to have been those on which S. John the Baptist fed when in the wilderness. These beans grow in shape like a horn, which has given its name to the tree. They contain a sweet nutritious pulp, enclosing yellow seeds. The fruit is used extensively for feeding animals, and is eaten by children, who, indeed, will eat anything. When the phylloxera was ravaging the vineyards of France, a company started a distillery at Cette to manufacture cognac out of the fruit of the carob. But it failed, as the brandy so made retained a peculiar and disagreeable flavour that could not be got out of it.

The carob is an evergreen, vigorous and beautiful. It grows in most stony, arid spots, where is hardly a particle of soil. Such a tree cannot live only on what it derives from its roots; it must live in a great measure by its leaves, as, indeed, to a large extent, do all evergreens. The scanty soil will in many places not feed trees that drop their leaves in autumn, and supply them afresh every spring. Such renewal exacts from the poor soil more than it can furnish. Consequently, Nature spreads evergreens over the rocky surfaces that contain but slight nutritive elements. Thus it is that in Provence the vegetation is nearly all of an evergreen character.

Beside the manufacture of corks, the inhabitants of the Maures breed silkworms, and so grow mulberry trees for their sustenance.

King Réné is credited with having introduced the mulberry into Provence from Sicily; but it is more probable that it is indigenous. What Réné did was to suggest its utilisation for the feeding of the silkworm. This branch of production was greatly encouraged by Henry IV., but wars and intestine troubles, the ravaging of the country by rival factions, by the Savoyards and by the French, caused the cultivation of the silkworm to decline. Of late years, however, it has been on the increase, and the number of mulberry trees planted has accordingly also, greatly increased. The Chain des Maures takes its name from the Saracens, who occupied it, and made it their stronghold, whence they descended to burn and destroy.

By the infusion of new elements, forms of government, new religious ideas, conceptions of individual and political rights, the old world of Gaul was in process of transformation; it was gradually organising itself on a broad basis, when in the midst of this society in reconstruction appeared a new element, quite unknown, and on whose advent no reckoning had been made. It came from the coasts of Africa, and was Mohammedan. Some called these people Hagarenes, as descendants of Hagar, but they themselves regarded their descent as from Sarah, and so called themselves Saracens.