When Love Calls

by Stanley John Weyman

[Along the Garonne.]

We ascend the valley of the Garonne on our way to Pau, which we intended to use as a base of operations against the Pyrenees. Our route, as originally mapped out, lay by sea to Bordeaux, which is three days from Liverpool; and thence by rail to our destination, a journey merely of hours. But at the last moment we determined to postpone our stay at Pau, and instead to wander along the banks of the Garonne for a time, familiarizing ourselves with the ways of the country. Then, when we had rubbed off our insular corners against the Great French Politeness, and perfected our grasp of the language in talk with the Agenois villagers, we proposed to drop gently into Pau, armed at all points, and scarcely distinguishable from Frenchmen.

So we planned: and so it came about that we were free to enjoy ourselves and look about us critically, as the smoky little tender bore us up the wide channel of the Gironde from Pauillac, where our ship bound for South America had contemptuously dropped us, to Bordeaux itself. A little below the city, the Gironde, which is really the estuary of the Garonne and Dordogne, shrinks to the Garonne pure and simple, but under either name it seems equally a waste of turbid clay-laden waters. On our left hand a bright sun--the month was November--shone warmly on a line of low hills, formed of reddish earth, and broken by great marl quarries. Woods climbed about these, and here and there a village or a little town nestled under them. On our right the bank lay low, and was fringed with willows, the country behind it being flattish, planted as it seemed to us with dead thorn-bushes, and dotted sparely with modern castellated houses. Nevertheless it was towards this modest, almost dreary landscape that we gazed; it was of it we all spoke, and to it referred, as we named names famous as Austerlitz or Waterloo, names familiar in our mouths--and our butlers'--as household words. For are not more people versed in claret than in history? And this commonplace landscape, this western bank of the Gironde, a mere peninsula lying between the river and the low Atlantic coast, is called Medoc, and embraces all the best known Bordeaux vineyards in the world. It seems as if a single parish--say St. George's, Hanover Square, for that is a big one--might hold them all. There, see, is Château Lafitte. The vineyards of St. Estéphe and St. Julien we have just passed. Léoville and Latour are not far off. And now we are passing the Château of Margaux itself, and gaining experience, are beginning to learn that all those little thorn-bushes stuck about the fallows, as though to protect the ground-game from poachers' nets, are vines--vines of the premier crû! The vintage is over. The grapes, black, sour things, about the size of currants, have all been picked. Where we had looked to see the endless interlacings of greenery, and swelling clusters dropping fatness on a carpet of turf, we find only reddish fallows, and rows of dead gooseberry bushes.

But never mind, even though this be but the first of many disillusions, and though the "sunny south" become hourly a more humorous catchword. To-day the sun is warm, the breeze is soft, the custom-house officers are civil. We air--but with the caution due to convalescents, or those of tender years--our shaky, tottering French, and get English answers. So we stride across the broad quays of Bordeaux, our hearts before us, our luggage behind, and ourselves in the best of spirits and tempers.

Bordeaux, as we saw it, was a cheerful, busy city, full of wide streets and open spaces and handsome buildings; a bright clean, airy, city with little smoke, an immense water frontage, and one very fine bridge: a pleasant etherealized Liverpool, in fact. The white blouses and blue trousers of the workmen, the soldiers' uniforms, the bare heads of some women and the gay 'kerchiefs, worn chignon-wise, of others, gave picturesqueness to the crowds circling about the kiosques, and reminded us, from time to time, that we were in a southern city. Not unnecessarily; for the thermometer fell on the day after our arrival to fifty degrees; and rain fell too, and we were quick to discover the true cause of French vivacity. The French have no fires at home. Consequently, when it is cold--and it often is very cold, even as far South as Bordeaux--their only resource is to go out, and jump about in such faint sunshine as they can find, and so make believe to be warm. Every one in Bordeaux seemed to be doing this that day.

We saw a number of churches, but I have jumbled them together in my mind, and dare not distinguish between the beauties of St. Seurin and St. Croix, St. Michel or the Cathedral. Only I attended a service on Sunday morning, and, having heard that no Frenchmen now went to church, noted with interest that of a large congregation one in every four was a man. But then Bordeaux is perhaps the most orthodox city in France, and primitive ideas, good and bad, still prevail in this southwestern province, peopled by descendants of the Huguenots and Albigenses, by devout Basques and simple Navarrese. And two things also in Bordeaux I remember--the semi-circular remains of a Roman amphitheatre, which no one visiting Bordeaux should omit to see; and, secondly, a lofty, detached spire of singular lightness and grace. It is called the Peyberland, and was built by Pierre Berland, who must have been an English subject.

His name strikes the vein of thought which was uppermost in my mind at Bordeaux. I found it impossible to forget that it had been for three centuries a half English city, and the capital of a half English province, ruled by an English king; or that up the wide Gironde, between the marly banks, Edward the Black Prince must many a time have sailed in state. Sir John Chandos and Sir Walter Manny, and many another English worthy, knew these streets as well as they knew Eastcheap or Aldgate. John of Gaunt and Talbot of Shrewsbury dwelt here, as much at home and at their ease as in York or Leicester. It is impossible not to wonder at those old Englishmen; not to think of them with pride, as we remember how firmly, the roving blood of Dane and Norman young in their veins, they grasped this prize; how long they clung to it, how boldly they flaunted the French lilies in the eyes of France; how cheerfully they crowded year by year to cross the bay in open boats! And then what cosmopolitans they were, with their manors in Devon and Aquitane, their houses in London and Bordeaux; with perhaps a snug little box at Calais, and a farm or two in Maine. How trippingly French and Provençal, and the rougher English, passed over their tongues. They founded no empire--on the contrary they lost one. But they were the immediate ancestors of Elizabeth's sea-dogs, for all that. In holding Guienne through those three centuries their strength was wasted. When they lost it (1451), they turned upon one another, and the Wars of the Roses took up half a century. After that they needed half-a-century's holiday to recruit themselves; and then out flashed the Vikings' spirit again--this time to better purpose--and under Drake and Grenville and Hawkins, they, the men of Poitiers and Sluys, made the greater England.

Even in Bordeaux they have left some traces of their work. They built this cathedral which stands here, in the third city of France. Their leopards are not yet effaced from the walls of yonder castle. Their dogs--les dogues des Anglais, our waiter dubbed them, on seeing us fondle them--play about the streets, and sniff with a special friendliness at English calves. Indeed, I never saw such a place for bull-dogs--chiefly brindled ones--as Bordeaux. We drank a toast after dinner the evening before we left. It was, Les dogues des Anglais!

Bordeaux, being like London too high on the river to get the sea-breeze, has its Brighton at Arcachon. To reach the latter from the city, a railway passes some thirty miles westward across a tract of light, sandy soil, thinly clothed with woods. As you glide through these, now in sunshine, now in shade, you catch a glimpse here and there of clearings and wooden shanties, and groups of peasants leaning on axes. Then, scarcely descending, you find yourself on the seashore, with the Bay of Biscay before you. Nearer, a basin of deepest blue, almost cut off from the outer sea by a reef of the dunes, forms a glorified harbor. Along this basin runs a broad beach, backed by a row of magnificent hotels with spacious terraces; and behind these lie two or three streets of rather paltry shops and restaurants. Having seen all this--the plage, the hotels, the terraces, the streets--you fancy you have seen Arcachon, and are inclined to be disappointed. But this is not Arcachon proper, which lies at the back of all this, and at the back even of that fairy-like Casino that rises on the abrupt slope of the sand-dunes behind us, and seemed the rear of all things. For on the land-side of the Casino is a forest of pines and larches, wild, far stretching, and apparently illimitable: a forest that is perpetually running up one sand-hill and down another, as if it were trying to get a view of the sea, and were not easily satisfied. And amid the vivid greens and dull blues of the foliage, glitter here and there and everywhere the daintiest of Swiss chalets or Indian bungalows, bright boxes of wood and stucco, colored and painted, and fretted and carved so delicately that one would infer that rain never fell here; or else that these were not intended for out-of-door wear. Mere toys they seem, set in smooth lawns. Flowers glow about them, and the scent of the pines is everywhere, and everywhere are shady aisles of trees hung with white mosses, and leading into the gloom of the forest. Nature and luxury have come together here; the result is that soft, languid, southern beauty, Mademoiselle Arcachon--of the Théâtre des Folies Bordelaises. Yet is her constitution tolerably strong--thanks to the Atlantic breezes, though the sun was bright on the day we visited her, the wind was cold and the thermometer scarcely above forty degrees. This in early November.

The next evening saw us enter a very different place in a different way. For leaving Bordeaux we reached La Réole on foot and at dusk, welcomed only by the fantastic rays of a few swinging oil lamps. La Réole is the antipodes to Arcachon. It is a small, ancient town, which, small as it is, has a great place in Froissart and Davila, and still frowns bravely down upon the rich plain of the Garonne. It stands on a steep, cloven hill that rises sheer from the wide, yellow, rush-bordered river about forty miles above Bordeaux. On the crest above the Garonne stands a castle once English, and in size and position not unlike that at Chepstow. Beside it are a church, a modern château, and a place of modern houses. Upon the second crest, and in the cleft between the two, are huddled together the steep alleys and crazy tottering houses, all corners and gables, of the old town. A stream on which are several mills pours through the ravine, being overhung by tall, delapidated houses of three stories, with as many sets of wooden balconies and outside stairs. One might almost step across the water from one balcony to another, so much do the houses bulge. We took infinite delight in the old-world quaintness of this scene, in the air of decay that hung about all things, in the crumbling coats of arms, the wavy, tiled roofs, the sinking houses, the swinging lanterns; above all in the gray walls of the castle, brightened here and there by the pure discs of a rose bush, or the green of ivy.