Part 15

I lived a good deal upon the water when I was not in my hermitage under the trees or wandering across country. I found in the water an ever-growing interest and charm. It often drew me from my work, for my canoe was on the canal only a few paces from my dwelling. On each side the high banks were glorious with their many-coloured clothing of summer flowers. There were patches of purple thyme, of blue stachys, and yellow gallium; there were countless spikes of yellow agrimony and heads of wild carrot, and white ox-eyes looked out from amidst the long grasses like snowflakes of summer. Near the water's edge, mingling with sedges, flags, marsh-mallows, bur-reed, and alisma, were the golden flowers of the shrubby lysimachia in dense multitudes, while from the canal itself rose many a spike of water-stachys, with here and there blossoming butomus, near the fringe of the banks. Then there were the pond-weeds, and other true water-plants, whose summer luxuriance nearly stopped the navigation of the canal, and whose pollen in July, collecting near the locks, lay there upon the water like a thick scum. As my little boat moved over them, I could note all the wondrous beauty and delicacy of the strange foliage that lives below the air, and preserves so much of the character of the earliest vegetation of the earth.

It is twilight, and I am paddling up to the river, gliding now along by one bank and now by another. A humming-bird moth, that seems to have been just created, for the eye cannot follow its movement in the dusky air, appears suddenly upon the topmost flower of a stachys, and in another moment it has vanished. Upon the broader and more open river the day appears to revive. There is a faint lustre upon the distant chalky hills and their corn-fields that rise against the quiet sky. But the pale moon just above them is brightening; already the rays are glinting upon the water. A little later the boat is moving up a long brilliant track, where small waves lap and quiver like liquid fire. It is now night, and the forms of the alders in the air and on the water have become weird and awful. I often come alone at this hour, or later, to be filled with the horror of them. There is a strong fascination in their terrible and fantastic shapes, which may be because the sublime and the horrible are so thinly separated. Rarely does the same tree wear the same ghostly appearance when seen a second time, and a shape that may seem to one person appallingly life-like may convey no meaning to another.

Had the gendarmes met me while water-wandering at night, they would certainly have concluded that I was a fish-poacher. All fishing by night in French rivers and streams is illegal, but it is much practised notwithstanding.

There are many carp in the Isle, weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds, but they are very rarely caught. The river is full of very deep pools, caused by the washing away of the sand down to the solid rock, and the carp seldom get within reach of a net except when they are stirred up and washed out of their lairs in time of flood. Then, when an old fish gets entangled in a net, it is almost certain to break through it, so that it is not with a feeling of pure pleasure that the fisherman recognises by the weight and tug that he has thrown his meshes over one of these monsters. Nor does any better success attend the angler--at all events, the angler who is known in these parts. It is quite an extraordinary event when a carp weighing more than five pounds is taken with the line. The bait commonly used is boiled maize or a piece of boiled chestnut. There is another method of hooking these fish which I have seen practised on the quays at Périgueux. The fisher has a very strong rod, and also a strong line many yards long, at the end of which is fastened, not a bait, but a piece of lead two or three inches in length. To this large hooks are fixed, which barbs turned in all directions. The man, whose eyes have become very keen with practice, sees some carp coming up or going down the stream, and, throwing the plummet far out into the river, he draws it rapidly through the water, across the spot where he believes the fish then to be. It is not often that he feels a tug, but he does sometimes, and then follows a deadly struggle, which may result in his landing a splendid carp that is worth more than he might earn by any other industry in two days.

Among the peasants in this part of Périgord there is a deeply-engrained superstitious horror of what is called a rencontre. If a person falls suddenly ill, especially if his sickness be not a familiar ailment, he will begin to probe his memory, and to ask himself if he has lately sat upon a stone or the stump of a tree. If he remembers having done so, he murmurs, unless he should be free from the popular superstition, 'Ah! I thought so. This is a rencontre!'--by which he means that he has met one of the three unholy reptiles, the snake, the toad, or the lizard, although it was hidden under the stone or stump.

'Marie,' said I to an old farm woman who was hobbling about with a rheumatic leg, 'what is the matter?'

Oh, mossieu,' said she, 'it's a rencontre. I sat down the other day upon a stone.'

This made me inquire what was meant by a rencontre.

I will only set down a few impressions of Périgueux, there being already quite enough written respecting the ancient capital of the Petrocorii. The upper part of the town commands a pleasant view of the valley of the curving Isle, with the wooded hills that lead away towards the upper and wilder country of Périgord; but it is in the lower town near the river, where the odours are strong, that the interest really lies. Here is the cathedral of St. Front, a church in the Byzantine style of the tenth century, and closely imitated from St. Mark's at Venice. It is impossible to see it now, however, without regret and disappointment. In many it stirs both sorrow and anger. It is no longer one of the most precious monuments of old France. What we see now on the site of St. Front is a new church, scrupulously rebuilt, it is true, according to the original plan, and with a great deal of the original material, but its interest is that which belongs to a model: its venerable character, with all the associations of the past, is gone. Whether those responsible for the complete demolition of the ancient structure when it threatened to fall and become a heap of ruins were right or wrong in their decision is a technical question on which very few persons are now competent to give an opinion. The plan of the church is a Greek cross, and, like St. Mark's and St. Sophia's, it has five domes; but the building has, nevertheless, a feature of its own which makes it one of the most original of churches. It possesses a Byzantine tower.

In common with many towns of Southern France, Périgueux shows remarkable vestiges of different races and dominations. Remnants of Roman or Gallo-Roman architecture stand with others that belong to the dawn of mediaeval art, and others, again, that are marked by the florid and graceful fancy of the Renaissance. The ruins of the amphitheatre are insignificant compared to those at Nimes and Arles, and there is no beautiful example of Roman art like the Maison Carrée at Nimes; but there is an exceedingly curious monument of antiquity, which was long a puzzle to archaeologists, but which is now generally believed to be the cella of a Gallo-Roman temple dedicated to the city's tutelary divinities. It is called the Tour de Vésone, and, indeed, it was supposed for centuries to have been originally a tower. Its cylindrical shape and its height (ninety feet) give it all the appearance of one. It is built of rubble, faced inside and out with small well-shaped stones, and has chains of brick in the upper part. The circle of the tower is no longer complete, for about a fourth of the wall has been broken down from top to bottom. The ground is strewn with fragments of immense columns and entire capitals, some Corinthian, others Tuscan. These, doubtless, were parts of the peristyle, which, with the exception of such scattered fragments, has quite disappeared. There is something decidedly barbaric in the fantastic structure that has come down to us, and it is difficult to understand the motive of its height. Such a cylinder rising far above the peristyle could not have had a classic effect. This ruin stands in an open field, and the foulness of the spot, although quite in accordance with the Southern manner of showing respect for antiquities, is nevertheless a disgrace to the ideals of modern Vesunna.

Another curiosity of the lower town is the ruin of a very early mediaeval castle, said to have been built by Wulgrin, surnamed Taillefer, the first of the hereditary Counts of Périgord. Close to this picturesque ruin is one of the ancient gateways of the town. It goes by the name of La Porte Normande, but its slightly pointed arch disposes of the suggestion that the Normans were in some manner concerned in its construction.

What interested me most at Périgueux was something that very few strangers, or even townspeople, for that matter, ever see, because, it is hidden from public view. This is a considerable fragment of one of the early walls of the town, which, tradition says, was thrown up in great haste at the approach of the Normans during one of the incursions of these adventurers up the valley of the Dordogne and, its tributary, the Isle, in the tenth century. It is a bit of wall that speaks to us in a language by no means common. It is not built of stones such as could be found anywhere in all ages, but is put together with the fragments of temples and palaces which even now tell of the power and splendour of Rome. The shafts of fluted columns, capitals wearing the acanthus, pieces of cornice and frieze, all mortared together with undistinguishable rubbish, bear testimony in the quiet garden of the Ursuline convent to the vanity of human works. Vesunna, splendid city of Southern Gaul, completely Latinized, with native poets, orators, and historians speaking and writing the language of Virgil and Cicero, raised temples, palaces, thermae, and a vast amphitheatre to be used centuries later as material for building a wall to keep out the Northern barbarians!

FROM PÉRIGUEUX TO RIBERAC (BY BRANTÔME).

From Périgueux I made my way to Brantôme in the neighbouring valley of the Dronne--a tributary of the Isle, which nobody who has not stifled the love of beauty in his soul can see without feeling the sweet and winning charm of its gracious influence. Between the two valleys are some fifteen miles of chalky hills almost bare of trees, a dreary track to cross at any time, but especially detestable when the dust lies thick upon the white road and the summer sun is blazing overhead. But how delightful is the contrast when, going down at length from these cretaceous uplands, where even the potato plants look as if they had been whitewashed, you see below the verdant valley of the Dronne, that seems to be blessed with eternal spring, the gay flash of the winding stream, the grand rocks that appear to be standing in its bed, and the cool green woods that slope up to the sky beyond! The pleasure grows as you descend, and when at length you reach the little town you are quite enchanted with the grace and elegance, the poetic and romantic charm, of the scene. Although the church, with its tower half built upon a rock, dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the influence of the sixteenth century is so strong that no other is felt. The eye follows the terraces with graceful balustrades in the shadow of old trees, dwells on the fanciful Renaissance bridge, that looks as if its first intention was to span the stream in the usual manner, but, having gone some distance across, changed its mind, and turned off at an abrupt angle; then the little pavilion in the style of Francis I., connected with a machicolated gateway, fixes the attention. There is something in the air of the place which calls up the spirit of Shakespeare, of Spenser, and of all the poets and romancers of the sixteenth century; you feel that everything here belongs to them, that you are in their world, and that the nineteenth century has nothing to do with it. Upon these balustraded terraces, beside the limpid river full of waving weeds, you can picture without effort ladies in farthingales and great ruffs, gentlemen in high hose and brilliant doublets; you can almost hear the lovers of three centuries ago kissing under the trees--lovers like Romeo and Juliet, who kissed with a will and meant it, and who were afraid of nothing. But Brantôme has clearer and more precise associations with letters than such as these, which belong purely to the imagination. Its name has been inextricably entangled with literature by Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, author of the famous and scandalous 'Mémoires'--terrible chronicles of sixteenth-century venality, intrigue, and corruption, written in a spirit of the gayest cynicism. Brantôme--he is known to the world by no other name now--was the spiritual as well as the temporal lord here, for he was abbot of the ancient abbey which was founded on this spot in the eleventh century or earlier. His ecclesiastical function, however, was confined to the enjoyment of the title and benefice, for if ever man was penetrated to the marrow by the spirit of worldliness, it was Pierre de Bourdeilles. What he has written about the women of his time is something more than the critical observations of a chronicler who was also a caustic analyst of the female character. Such was his cynicism that he, the Abbot of Brantôme, laughed in his sleeve at the horrible strife of Catholics and Huguenots in his own and neighbouring provinces. It is true that he fought at Jarnac against Coligny, but the admiral had met him in the court of the Valois before these wars, and knew him to be an abbé joyeux, without prejudices, if ever there was one. The astute chronicler played his cards so well as to keep on safe terms with both sides, and it was by this diplomacy of their lord and abbot that the inhabitants of Brantôme escaped the sword and the rope when Coligny and his terrible German mercenaries entered the weakly-defended place on two occasions in 1569. On the first of these Coligny was accompanied by the young Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Orange. They were all made very welcome by Brantôme, and treated by him with 'good cheer' in his abbey. He was rewarded for his diplomatic talent, for he tells us that no harm was done to his house, nor was a single image or window broken in the church. No doubt he had turned to good profit his distant relationship with Madame de Coligny. On the second occasion the admiral merely hurried through Brantôme with his reîtres in full flight after the bad defeat at Montcontour.

The abbey church of Brantôme is not without beauty, but it is the tower that is the truly remarkable feature. It was raised in the eleventh century, and although the architect--probably a monastic one--observed the prevailing principle of Romanesque taste, he showed so much originality in the design that it served as a model, which was much imitated in the Middle Ages. It is not only one of the oldest church towers in France, but its position is one of the most peculiar, it being built, not on the church, but behind it, and partly grafted upon the rock.

Of the old abbey little remains; but there is a cavern, formerly in communication with the conventual buildings, which contains sculptures cut upon the rock in relief, which are a great curiosity to ecclesiologists. They are the work of the monks, who used this old quarry as a chapel, and, it would appear, likewise as an ossuary in a limited sense, if the rows of square holes cut in the rock were to serve as niches for skulls, as some have maintained. One of the compositions in relief has given rise to discussion among archaeologists. The first impression that it conveys is that of an exceedingly uncouth representation of the Last Judgment, but the Marquis de Fayolle's explanation, namely, that the idea which the sculptor-monk endeavoured to work out here was the triumph of Death over Life, meets with fewer objections. There are three figures or heads symbolizing Death, of which the central one wears a diadem that bristles with dead men's bones. Immediately below is Death's scutcheon emblazoned with allegorical bearings. On each side of this is a row of heads rising from the tomb, in which a pope, an emperor, a bishop, and a peasant are to be recognised. In the middle part of the composition are two kneeling angels blowing trumpets, and above these is a vast and awful figure, apparently unfinished, and scarcely more human in its shape than some stalagmites I have met underground. Are we to see here the Eternal Father, or Christ sitting in final judgment? It depends upon the interpretation placed upon the work of the monk, who, with slow and painful effort, gave fantastic life to his solemn thoughts in the gloom of this old quarry, from which stone had been taken to build the church. He was a rude artist, such as might have belonged to the darkest age, but certain ornamental details of the bas-relief indicate that he was a man of the sixteenth century. The walls of the cavern have been blackened by the damp, and these awful shapes reveal themselves but slowly to the eye, so that they look like a vague and dreadful company of ghosts advancing from the darkness.

A visit to this sepulchral cavern gives an appetite for lunch at the good inn which is hard by, and at whose threshold sits or did sit a very fat, broad-faced landlord, seemingly fashioned upon the model of an ideal tapster of old time. Here a friture of the famous gudgeons of the Dronne is placed before the guest, whether the fishing be open or closed, and a magistrate would feel as much aggrieved as anybody if the law were not laughed at when its observance would lay a penalty upon his stomach. At the hospitable board of this inn I made the acquaintance of a somewhat eccentric gentleman who lived alone in a large old house, where he pursued the innocent occupation of hatching pheasants with the help of hens. In almost every room there was a hen sitting upon eggs or leading about a brood of little pheasants. This gentleman was more sad than joyous, for he could not take his handkerchief from his pocket without bringing out the corpse of a baby pheasant with it--one that had been trodden to death by a too fussy foster-mother. I owe him a debt for having led me a charming walk by moonlight to see a dolmen--the largest and best preserved of all those I had already seen in Southern France and elsewhere.

It was not without a little pang that I broke away from the spell of coquettish Brantôme and began my wanderings down the valley of the Dronne. A few miles below the little town the stream passes into the shadow of great rocks. I looked at these with something of the regret that one feels when awaking from a long dream of wonderland. I knew that they were almost the last vestiges towards the west, in the watershed of the Gironde, of the stern jurassic desert, gashed and seamed with lovely valleys, and deep gorges full of the poet's 'religious awe,' where I had spent the greater part of three long summers. And now, on the outskirts of the broad plain or gradual slope of undulating land that leads on from the darker and rockier Périgord, through the greenness of the lusty vine--led captive from the New World and rejoicing in the ancient soil of France--or the yellow splendour of the sunlit cornfields, towards the sea that rolls against the pine-clad dunes, I felt tempted to turn from my course and go back to my naked crags and stone-strewn wastes. But I did not go back. Life being so short in this world of endless variety, we cannot afford to return upon our path.

A little beyond where the double line of rocks ended, I saw a round tower of unusual height with machicolations and embattlements, in apparently perfect preservation, rising from the midst of what once must have been a fortress of great strength, which on the side of the river had no need of a moat, for it was there defended by the escarped rock, to the edge of which the outer ramparts were carried. This was the castle of Bourdeilles, the seat of the family of which the Abbé de Brantôme was a younger son. I was soon able to get a closer view of it. It is one of the most instructive remnants of feudalism in Périgord, and one of the most picturesque, by the contrast of its great gloomy keep and frowning ramparts with the peaceful beauty of the valley below. The tall donjon, 130 feet high, and most of the outer wall, are of the fourteenth century. The inner wall encloses a sixteenth-century mansion, marked with none of the picturesqueness of the Renaissance period, but heavy and graceless. In the interior, however, are sculptured chimney-pieces and other interesting details. This residence was built by the sister-in-law of Pierre de Bourdeilles. The burg itself, which lies close to the castle and is much embowered with trees, has something of the open, spacious, and decorative air of Brantôme. It tells the stranger that it has known better days. The broad terrace, planted with trees so as to form a quinconce, where the people stroll and gossip in the summer evenings, is quite out of keeping with a little place that has scarcely more than a thousand inhabitants.

Near the castle gateway is the 'Logis des Sénéchaux,' a small building of the fifteenth century with turrets capped by extinguisher like roofs, and within a stone's throw of this is a small church, dating from the twelfth century, the artistic interest of which has been lamentably deteriorated by renovation and scraping. The influence of the Byzantine cathedral that rose in the old Roman city by the Isle spread far, and numerous churches in Périgord bear witness to the imitative zeal which it inspired, especially in the application of domes to the vaulting of the nave. This arrangement is frequently to be found in connection with the pointed arch, and such is the case at Bourdeilles. The apse is beautiful, with its five tall windows and its columns with Corinthian capitals in the intervening wall spaces. Although the church is in no style that is recognised as pure, it is typical of one that has been developed in the district, and which is by no means without grace; but the scraping that it has undergone has robbed it of the proper tint and tone of its age, and the ideal interest that belongs to this.

But here is something from which the gray mantle that the centuries have silently spun has not been lifted. I have gone down to the waterside to follow the stream onward, and am held by the quiet charm of a half Gothic bridge that was thrown across it five or six hundred years ago; the miller's house just below, with its bright little garden flaming with flowers a few inches above the water, and two great wheels turning slowly, slowly, as if time and change and the rush of life were the vain words of tiresome fools. On the side of the bridge looking up-stream, each pier is built out in the form of a sharp angle This was intended to lessen the push of the current upon the masonry in time of flood. A great many old bridges in Guyenne show a similar design.

My road had now on one side the reedy Dronne, and on the other overleaning rocks topped with trees or shrubs, whose foliage reached downward as if it were ever troubled by the futile longing to touch the cool green water, and every little ridge or shelf was marked out by a line of ancient moss. Old alders had plunged their roots deep into the banks of the river, and wherever the sunshine struck upon the upper leaves was a cicada scratching out its monotonous note in joyous frenzy.

A long range of densely-wooded, rocky cliffs now stretched along the right bank; but I, keeping to the road on the other side, soon left the stream and rose upon a hill dotted with low juniper bushes. The scene in the widening valley below was full of summer light and gladness. Men were mowing, and women were turning the fallen swathes in the waterside meadows, and upon all the slopes above were patches of yellow corn ready for the sickle. In the green depth between the hills the river flowed vaguely on in the shadow of tall poplars, and was sometimes hidden by its reeds.

Here and there upon the higher ground, half concealed by walnut-trees, were small châteaux or farmhouses, with a castellated air derived from great dovecots and towers, which last once served for the defence of the manor-house or the little castle. When the fury of the religious wars followed upon that tidal wave of dilettantism and sensuality which swept over Europe from the south to the north, and which we call the Renaissance, and when Huguenots and Leaguers gave such frequent dressings of blood to the vineyards of Périgord, every house and church that was in any way fortified was used as a stronghold in the event of sudden attack.

From the broad landscape I turn to the wayside flowers: the agrimony, the little lotus, the candy-tuft--getting rare now that I have left the arid stony region--the blue scabious, and, pleasanter than all, the purple patches of dwarf thyme.

It was not yet evening when I came to Lisle, a rather large village near the Dronne. Here I fell in with a plasterer, and he being a good-tempered man, with some spare time on his hands, he offered to show me before dinner the picturesque ruin of an old bridge, known in the district as the Pont d'Ambon. On our way to the river he talked much, and especially about his village, in which he took a very lively interest. It had not changed its principles, he said, for a hundred years.

'And what are its principles?'

'Republican. We don't go to church here, although there is no ill-will towards the curé.'