A few years later Mr. Angus B. Reach, a well-known author, and a contributor to Punch in its earlier days, was appointed a commissioner by the Morning Chronicle to visit, for industrial purposes, the districts in the South of France. His reports appeared in the Chronicle; but in 1852, Mr. Reach published a fuller account of his journeys in a volume entitled 'Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone.'{6} In passing through the South of France, Mr. Reach stopped at Agen. "One of my objects," he says, "was to pay a literary visit to a very remarkable man—Jasmin, the peasant-poet of Provence and Languedoc—the 'Last of the Troubadours,' as, with more truth than is generally to be found in ad captandum designations, he terms himself, and is termed by the wide circle of his admirers; for Jasmin's songs and rural epics are written in the patois of the people, and that patois is the still almost unaltered Langue d'Oc—the tongue of the chivalric minstrelsy of yore.
"But Jasmin is a Troubadour in another sense than that of merely availing himself of the tongue of the menestrels. He publishes, certainly, conforming so far to the usages of our degenerate modern times; but his great triumphs are his popular recitations of his poems. Standing bravely up before an expectant assembly of perhaps a couple of thousand persons—the hot-blooded and quick-brained children of the South—the modern Troubadour plunges over head and ears into his lays, evoking both himself and his applauding audiences into fits of enthusiasm and excitement, which, whatever may be the excellence of the poetry, an Englishman finds it difficult to conceive or account for.
"The raptures of the New Yorkers and Bostonians with Jenny Lind are weak and cold compared with the ovations which Jasmin has received. At a recitation given shortly before my visit to Auch, the ladies present actually tore the flowers and feathers out of their bonnets, wove them into extempore garlands, and flung them in showers upon the panting minstrel; while the editors of the local papers next morning assured him, in floods of flattering epigrams, that humble as he was now, future ages would acknowledge the 'divinity' of a Jasmin!
"There is a feature, however, about these recitations which is still more extraordinary than the uncontrollable fits of popular enthusiasm which they produce. His last entertainment before I saw him was given in one of the Pyrenean cities, and produced 2,000 francs. Every sous of this went to the public charities; Jasmin will not accept a stiver of money so earned. With a species of perhaps overstrained, but certainly exalted, chivalric feeling, he declines to appear before an audience to exhibit for money the gifts with which nature has endowed him.
"After, perhaps, a brilliant tour through the South of France, delighting vast audiences in every city, and flinging many thousands of francs into every poor-box which he passes, the poet contentedly returns to his humble occupation, and to the little shop where he earns his daily bread by his daily toil as a barber and hair-dresser. It will be generally admitted that the man capable of self-denial of so truly heroic a nature as this, is no ordinary poetaster.
"One would be puzzled to find a similar instance of perfect and absolute disinterestedness in the roll of minstrels, from Homer downwards; and, to tell the truth, there does seem a spice of Quixotism mingled with and tinging the pure fervour of the enthusiast. Certain it is, that the Troubadours of yore, upon whose model Jasmin professes to found his poetry, were by no means so scrupulous. 'Largesse' was a very prominent word in their vocabulary; and it really seems difficult to assign any satisfactory reason for a man refusing to live upon the exercise of the finer gifts of his intellect, and throwing himself for his bread upon the daily performance of mere mechanical drudgery.
"Jasmin, as may be imagined, is well known in Agen. I was speedily directed to his abode, near the open Place of the town, and within earshot of the rush of the Garonne; and in a few moments I found myself pausing before the lintel of the modest shop inscribed Jasmin, Perruquier, Coiffeur des jeunes Gens. A little brass basin dangled above the threshold; and looking through the glass I saw the master of the establishment shaving a fat-faced neighbour. Now I had come to see and pay my compliments to a poet, and there did appear to me to be something strangely awkward and irresistibly ludicrous in having to address, to some extent, in a literary and complimentary vein, an individual actually engaged in so excessively prosaic and unelevated a species of performance.
"I retreated, uncertain what to do, and waited outside until the shop was clear. Three words explained the nature of my visit, and Jasmin received me with a species of warm courtesy, which was very peculiar and very charming; dashing at once, with the most clattering volubility and fiery speed of tongue, into a sort of rhapsodical discourse upon poetry in general, and the patois of it, spoken in Languedoc, Provence, and Gascony in particular.
"Jasmin is a well-built and strongly limbed man of about fifty, with a large, massive head, and a broad pile of forehead, overhanging two piercingly bright black-eyes, and features which would be heavy, were they allowed a moment's repose from the continual play of the facial muscles, sending a never-ending series of varying expressions across the dark, swarthy visage. Two sentences of his conversation were quite sufficient to stamp his individuality.
"The first thing which struck me was the utter absence of all the mock-modesty, and the pretended self-underrating, conventionally assumed by persons expecting to be complimented upon their sayings or doings. Jasmin seemed thoroughly to despise all such flimsy hypocrisy. 'God only made four Frenchmen poets,' he burst out with, 'and their names are, Corneille, Lafontaine, Beranger, and Jasmin!'