And such was this wide ocean and the shore
More barren than its billows.”
—Shelley.
The Landes—that long, desolate tract on the western coast of France between the Gironde and the Adour, with its vast forests of melancholy pines, its lone moors and solitary deserts, its broad marshes, and its dunes of sand that creep relentlessly on as if they had life—appeal wonderfully to the imagination, that folle du logis, as Montaigne calls it, but which, in spite of him, we love to feed. One may travel for hours through these vast steppes covered with heather without discovering the smoke of a single chimney, or anything to relieve the monotonous horizon, unless a long line of low sand-hills that look like billows swayed to and fro in the wind; or some low tree standing out against the cloudless heavens, perhaps half buried in the treacherous sands; or a gaunt peasant, the very silhouette of a man, on his stilts, “five feet above contradiction,” like Voltaire’s preacher, perhaps with his knitting-work in his hands, or a distaff under his arm, as if fresh from the feet of Omphale, driving his flock before him—all birds of one feather, or sheep of one wool; for he is clad in a shaggy sheepskin coat, and looks as if he needed shearing as much as any of them. Or perhaps this Knight of the Sable Fleece—for the sheep of the Landes are mostly black—is on one of the small, light horses peculiar to the region, said to have an infusion of Arabian blood—thanks to the Saracen invaders—which are well adapted to picking their way over quaking bogs and moving sands, but unfortunately are fast degenerating from lack of care in maintaining the purity of the breed.
During the winter season these extensive heaths are converted by the prolonged rains into immense marshes, as the impermeable alios within six inches of the surface prevents the absorption of moisture. The peasant is then obliged to shut himself up with his beasts in his low, damp cottage, with peat for his fuel, a pine torch for his candle, brackish water relieved by a dash of vinegar for drink, meagre broth, corn bread, and perhaps salt fish for his dinner. Whole generations are said to live under one roof in the Landes, so thoroughly are the people imbued with the patriarchal spirit. Woman has her rights here—at least in the house. The old dauna (from domina, perhaps) rules the little kingdom with a high hand, including her sons and her sons’ wives down to the remotest generation, with undisputed sway. It is the very paradise of mothers-in-law. The paterfamilias seldom interferes if his soup is ready at due time and she makes both ends meet at the end of the year, with a trifle over for a barrel of pique-pout to be indulged in on extraordinary occasions. From La Teste to the valley of the Gave this old house-mother is queen of the hive, active, thrifty, keen of eye, and sharp of tongue. The slightest murmur is frozen into silence beneath the arctic ray of her Poyser-like glance. She is a hawk by day and an owl by night. She directs the spinning and weaving of the wool and flax, orders the meals, and superintends the wardrobe of the whole colony. The land is so poor that it is seldom divided among the children. The oldest heir becomes head of the family, and they all fare better by sharing in the general income. In unity there is safety—and economy.
At every door is the clumsy machine for breaking the flax that is spun during the long winter evenings for the sail-makers of Bayonne or the weavers of Béarn, whose linen, if not equal to that of Flanders, is as good as that of Normandy. Before every house is also the huge oven where the bread is baked for general consumption. Flocks of geese paddle from pool to pool in the marshes, and wild ducks breed undisturbed in the fens. In the villages on the borders of the Landes you hear in the morning a sharp whistle that might serve for a locomotive. It is the swineherd summoning his charge, which issue in a gallop, two or three from each house, to seek their food in the moors. They all come back in the evening, and go to their own pens to get the bucket of bran that awaits them. Feeding thus in the wild, their meat acquires a peculiar flavor. Most of these animals go into the market. The hams of Bayonne have always been famous. We might say they are historic, for Strabo speaks of them.
When the rainy season is at an end, these bogs and stagnant pools give out a deadly miasma in the burning sun, engendering fevers, dysentery, and the fatal pellagra. The system is rapidly undermined, and the peasant seldom attains to an advanced age. He marries at twenty and is old at forty.
A kind of awe comes over the soul in traversing this region, and yet it has a certain mysterious attraction which draws us on and on, as if nature had some marvellous secret in store for us. The atmosphere is charged with a thin vapor that quivers in the blazing sun. Strange insects are in the air. A sense of the infinite, such as we feel in the midst of the ocean, comes over us. We grow breathless as the air—grow silent as the light that gilds the vast landscape before us. One of the greatest of the sons of the Landes—the Père de Ravignan—says: “Solitude is the patrie des forts: silence is their prayer.” One feels how true it is in these boundless moors. It is the only prayer fit for this realm of silence, where one is brought closer and closer to the heart of nature, and restored, as it were, at least in a degree, to the primeval relation of man with his Creator.
Carlyle says the finest nations in the world, the English and the American, are all going away into wind and tongue. We recommend a season in the Landes, where one becomes speedily impressed that “silence is the eternal duty of man.”
We wonder such a region should be inhabited. The daunas, we hope, never have courage enough to raise their still voices in the open air. We fancy wooing carried on in true Shaksperian style: