The valley of Sault was originally independent of any feudal duties, and though later on its lords, the D’Agoults, paid homage and fealty to the counts of Provence and then to the counts D’Anjou, they still retained the sovereign rights of coinage and independent legislation. The country is rocky and woody; for, though reckless wood-cutting decreased the forests round this commune, Sault itself remained a forest oasis, which the provident inhabitants have tried to perpetuate by planting young oaks on the barren slopes of their hills. The Courtois were assiduous planters of trees, and a grove of fairly-grown oaks formed a background to their farm buildings. Quantities of aromatic herbs grow in this neighborhood, and their distillation into essences forms an industry of the country. But the beauty that Sault chiefly lacks is that of water; for, though not far from the famous fountain of Vaucluse, there is no local stream of any importance. This is Alpine scenery without Alpine torrents. But, on the other hand, Sault has a sulphur spring, as yet only locally famous, and the meadows are green and moist. The principal natural curiosity of the valley is the Avens, a kind of rifts in the earth, like craters, which, at the rainy season, gape open and absorb floods of rain, leaving only a small portion to feed the Nesque, a tiny tributary of the Rhone. Beech, birch, and maple abound, and pasturage forms a surer road to fortune than agriculture. Yet the small freeholds are pretty equally divided, and the more advanced among the inhabitants have very clear and approved notions of practical farming. The custom of selling or exchanging the paternal acres was, till the last quarter of a century, unknown, or at least abhorred; and a local tradition dating hundreds of years back had established a modified right of primogeniture—one of the sons, generally but not necessarily the eldest, devoting himself to the care of his aged parents, the settlement of his sisters, the management of the farm, and the accumulation of a reserve fund from his income for the unforeseen necessities of the younger branches of the family. His portion in money was sometimes double, according to the Mosaic precedent, but it was understood that the Support of the House (such was the phrase) should use his advantages only for the general benefit of the family, and also that his wife’s dowry should nearly cover the deficit caused by the marriage and dowries of his sisters.
Those simple people knew nothing of laws, such as shameful excesses have made necessary in Anglo-Saxon countries, for the protection, against the husband and father, of the wife’s fortune and children’s inheritance. Antoine de Courtois, one of these model yeomen of southern France, looked upon any alienation of ancestral property, or even any use of capital, as sheer robbery of his descendants, and says in his family register: “To sell our forefathers’ land is to renounce our name and disinherit our children. Never believe that it can be replaced by other property, and remember that all those who have been ready to exchange their ancestors’ for other land have ruined themselves.... If our farm is well managed, it will always bring in more than six per cent. Any other land you could buy would not bring in three per cent., and would ruin you to improve it. You would have a decreased capital and no income, and it would break your heart.”
The description of the homestead is interesting. The buildings included the master’s house, with ten rooms on the ground-floor, eight others on the first floor, three granaries above, with a dovecote, and three cellars below; a farmer’s house, a shepherd’s, hay-barns and stables, a courtyard and fountain, a garden and orchard with over a hundred fruit-trees, a fish-pond, fifty bee-hives, and two hundred sheep. He had rebuilt much of this himself, and spent ten thousand francs on the work; and in laying some new foundations he had put his wife’s and children’s names below the corner-stone. As to farm management, he emphatically preferred and advised self-work with hired help, instead of renting the place on shares or otherwise to a farmer with a useless family. He gave very judicious rules for sowing, hoeing, harvesting, etc., and impressed upon his son the profit to be derived from bees, and the increased value of land of a certain kind, if planted with young oaks. Work he considered the only condition of happiness, as well as the road to comfort, and he said he would sooner see his sons shoemakers than idlers. The family profession was the law, though he himself in his youth studied medicine, successfully enough in theory, but not in practice, since, after losing his first patient, his scruples and disgust ended by forcing him to leave his calling. The business of a notary public was the one he recommended to his son in the choice of a profession; his family tradition led him in this groove, where, indeed, he had been preceded by some of the greatest men in France.
This choice of a state is so much a matter of custom or of personal inclination that we must carefully discern between things in the Courtois family which were models and things of indifference. Their moral qualities alone are universal types; their local customs, worthy in their own circumstances, would probably be utterly unfit for a country and race so different as ours. But Courtois’ native town, of which he was mayor for nearly twenty years, gives an example less rare in foreign countries than in either England or the United States—that of supporting an institution containing an archæological museum, a botanical collection, and a collection of local zoölogy and mineralogy, besides a library which occupies a separate building, the whole under the care of a member of the French Archæological Society, M. Henri Chrestian—an example which it would be well if our own towns of three thousand inhabitants (Sault has no more) would be public-spirited enough to follow. It is not the lack of money that debars small rural towns of such advantages; they generally contrive to keep three or four barrooms going, a dancing-hall, a Masonic hall, an annual ball and supper, half a dozen discreditable places for summer picnics, and other things either useless and showy or downright disreputable. Instead of paying money year by year for the gratification of folly and temptation to vice, and putting money in the pockets of men who deliberately trade on their fellow-men’s weakness or wickedness, why not pay a subscription the full benefits of which they reap themselves not for one day or night only in a year, but every day? Where there is a library in a small town, what books are most numerous? Trashy novels vilely illustrated, and Saturday newspapers with their ignoble, misleading, immoral tales and cuts. What a contrast to many a French, Italian, German village of three to five thousand inhabitants, or even to some of the island-villages of North Holland, remote and unvisited as they are!
Antoine de Courtois was the natural outcome of the secluded domestic atmosphere in which his family had grown up. The doctrines that led to the excesses of the Reign of Terror—for we must not confound the legal and rightful reforms of 1789 with the bloody fury of 1793—and the abuses that hurried on the great dislocation of society, had not reached his valley. In all lands where the local land-owners had remained at home and identified themselves with their neighbors, keeping only as a badge of their superiority a higher standard of honor and bravery, there was no revolt against the gentlemen. If any village followed the example of the large cities, it was sure to be owing to some scapegrace who had left home and learnt a more successful rascality among the tavern politicians of some seething city, and then come back to play Robespierre on his own small stage. Courtois married in the midst of the Revolution, in 1798, and quietly took up the task of his brother Philip, who had died suddenly without leaving any children, and whose wife, though only a bride of a few months, devoted herself all her life to the family interests. Antoine, always humane and charitable, had given shelter to two of the revolutionary commissioners, pursued by enemies of an opposite faction then uppermost, for which he was speedily denounced by an informer and imprisoned. His widowed sister-in-law travelled to Nice and besought the interference of the man he had formerly saved—the young Robespierre. A respite, then a pardon, was granted, and Antoine retired for a short time to Nice, sheltering himself behind his nominal profession of medicine, until one night the informer who had betrayed him came trembling to his door, begging him to save his life. He fed and clothed him, and gave him money to set him on his way, as well as a promise to turn his pursuers from his track should he be examined.
Such a man acted as he believed, and might say the Lord’s Prayer with a clear conscience. His equable temperament, and his firm reliance on reason as the corner-stone of morality, are very unlike what we attribute to the typical Frenchman—emotional, unreliable, fantastic, or affected; the Parisian has blotted out all worthier types from our sight. His advice to his children on their duty of consulting reason and moderation in all things, and sternly repressing mere inclination or passion, goes so far as to seem exaggerated and to banish from life even its most legitimate pleasures. But he knew the corruption pressing upon his retreat, besieging it and luring it, and to extreme evils he opposed extreme remedies. Besides, ancient custom sanctioned, or at least colored, his advice as to marriage, in which matter not only his daughters but also his son were not to choose for themselves, but let their mother choose and decide for them. He required his children to be wise beyond their years, and would fain have put “old heads on young shoulders”; but the frightful license he saw around him made the recoil only natural. Men had need to be Solomons in early youth, when hoary heads degraded themselves to play at Satyrs. Among other precepts—and there is not one that could not be matched out of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes—he insisted on the duty of neither borrowing nor lending; his teaching was inflexible on this point. “Better go shirtless than borrow money” was his maxim. In these days of lax and indiscriminate pity for all misfortune such advice sounds selfish and harsh; it belongs to the conscience of each man to interpret it and make exceptions. As to the borrowing we might be inclined to say, “Never under any circumstances”; but as to the lending there may be exceptions. In the first you fetter yourself, than which nothing is less wise; in the second you incur no obligation, and, if you can afford to lose the sum lent, there is an additional excuse. Courtois’ objection was founded on the principle he set forth elsewhere, that your property is not your own but your posterity’s, and that you have no right to diminish it. If he had had any other and absolutely personal property, the objection would have been no doubt qualified. In many cases he showed by his own example that he had no objection to give, and to be helpful to his neighbor according to his ability. He was rigidly opposed to the reading of novels, to games of chance, to balls and theatre-going; one could almost fancy one’s self listening to an old Puritan on this subject. But in this respect who is more of a Puritan than St. Jerome in his instructions to Paula for the education of her daughter? Reading consisted, with Antoine de Courtois, chiefly of the Scriptures and of the Following of Christ, that universal book of devotion, with Châteaubriand’s then recently-published Génie du Christianisme. The later development of Christian literature, less florid than Châteaubriand, might have added other books in his own language to his restricted library, but they hardly existed in his day. For instance, he would have sympathized with Joubert, who wrote: “Whenever the words altars, graves, inheritance, native country, old customs, nurse, masters, piety, are heard or said with indifference, all is lost.”
The practical and physical advantages of virtue were always before his eyes, and he never ceased showing his children how sensible and rational are the laws of God. They preserved health and gave success; they ensured happiness and kept peace. Honesty is not only the first duty of man to his fellow, but is the safest road for one’s self, and brings with it the confidence, the respect, and the love of one’s neighbors. On the subject of drunkenness it is worth while to note what a Frenchman, one of a nation of wine-drinkers—who, it is said, are so sober as opposed to a nation of ale and spirit drinkers—and of a generation long preceding any agitation on the temperance question, says in his solemn advice to his children:
“Nothing is more contemptible than drunkenness, and, in order that it may be impossible for you to fall into this sin, I advise you never to drink wine. Water-drinkers live longer and are stronger and healthier. Be sure of this: it is easy to accustom yourself to drink no wine, but, once the habit of drinking wine is formed, it costs a good deal to satisfy it, and often painful efforts to restrain it within the bounds of moderation. I never drank wine till I was five-and-thirty, and I should have done better never to drink any. Wine strengthens nothing but our passions; it wears out the body and disturbs the mind.”
He recommended work, not only as a duty but as the essential condition of happiness, and no one knows how true this is but those who have tried to do without regular employment. One often hears people wonder why so-and-so, being so rich, continues in business, and slaves at the desk instead of enjoying the fruits of his wealth. Nothing is more natural, unless a man has a taste strong enough to form an occupation, such as Schliemann had from his boyhood, and was able to indulge after he earned money enough by business to prosecute researches in the East. The leisure that some people recommend is only idleness under a veil of refinement, and no man or woman can be rationally happy unless through some special occupation which towers above all others. Doing a score of things, and giving an hour or so to each, never brings any result worth mentioning; devoting all your spare time to one pursuit strengthens the mind even where it is not needed to support the body. “If you have no profession,” says Antoine de Courtois, “you will never be anything but useless men, a burden to yourselves and a weariness to others.”
Domestic economy is another cardinal virtue of this thrifty French farmer, and the rule he prescribes—that of laying by one-sixth of one’s income to form a reserve fund, so as not to encroach on one’s capital for repairs or other unexpected expenses—is worthy of notice. Going to law, especially among relations, he utterly abhors, and advises his son, in cases of dispute, to have recourse to the arbitration of some mutual friend. On one occasion, when he was compelled to go to law against a neighbor, he mentions the suit as that of “our mill against ——’s meadow,” and takes the first opportunity to do his adversary a personal favor, carefully distinguishing between the individual and the cause. In a word, all the elements of discord and dissolution most familiar to ourselves, and too unhappily common to cause any surprise, or even to elicit more than languid blame, are, in this family register, studiously held up to execration.