Part 27

Near a ruinous donjon, called the Château du Roi, and attributed to Louis VIII., now much overgrown with herbs and shrubs, I stood on a bastion of the town wall, overlooking the crescent-shaped hollow, covered with houses, bits of fortification older than the outer wall, ruined convents--a chaos of lichen-tinted stones and tiles gilded by the warm yet tenderly softened sunshine of early evening. And as I gazed, I longed the more to be able to carry away a picture of that scene, with all its tones and tints, that would last in the memory, as I also wished to draw out of it all the meaning of what I felt. I left with a sense of failure, of weakness, of confused impressions, which was to me like a gnawing weevil of the mind, on the road to Libourne.

Vines, vines, nothing but vines, gradually shading down to the darkness of the night that covers them. Then, when the dusky gauze of the cloudless night is drawn all over it, the broad leafy land sleeps under the sparkling stars.

Here at Libourne I am in a town of whose English origin there can be no doubt. It was one of the thirteenth-century bastides founded in Guyenne by Edward I. These bastides were at the outset intended as places of refuge for serfs and other non-belligerents of the rural districts in time of war. Their character was that of free or open towns, and most of the burgs that still bear the name of Villefranche in the South of France were originally bastides. Not a few of them keep the name of La bastide, in combination with some other to this day. They are to be found all over Guyenne and a great part of Languedoc. They were often fortified with a wall, a palisade, and a moat. Their strong peculiarity, however, the one that has been preserved in spite of all the changes that centuries have brought, was the rectilinear and geometrical manner in which they were laid out. In contrast to the typical mediaeval town that grew up slowly around some abbey, or at the foot of some strong castle that protected it, and in the building of which, if any method was observed, it was that of making the streets as crooked as possible, to assist the defenders in stopping the inward rush of an enemy, the streets of the bastide were all drawn at right angles to each other. Consequently, however old the houses may be, such towns have somewhat of a modern air. For the same reason, one of the chief attributes of the picturesque--an accidental meeting of various motives--is absent. To the inhabitants of these free towns a certain quantity of land was apportioned in equal parts, for which a fixed rent was paid to the king or other feudal lord.

I have said that the bastides were not picturesque. In their early days they must have been quite hideous; but time, that plays havoc with human beings, lends to such of their works as may offer to it the resistance of a long, hard struggle an interest which becomes at length a beauty. There is usually to be found in these towns the thirteenth-century place, or square, which formed, as it were, the heart of the commune. Along each of the four sides is a Gothic arcade, on which the first and all the higher storeys of the houses rest. Thus, there is a broad pavement completely vaulted over on each side of the quadrilateral, where people can walk, sheltered from the sun or rain, These old squares, wherever they are found, are now always picturesque.

Libourne, from being a small bastide, grew to such importance, on account of its position on the right bank of the Dordogne and the wine trade that it was able to carry on by water, that it rivalled Bordeaux before the close of the English domination, and the question of making it the capital and the seat of the Prince of Wales and Aquitaine was seriously pondered. To-day it preserves all the plainness of its line-and-rule origin; but it has a few redeeming features, such as one side of its ancient square, with broad pavement under Gothic arches, a picturesque town-hall of the sixteenth century, and a curious mediaeval tower, with machicolated embattlements, now capped with a very tall and pointed roof, and known as the Tour de l'Horloge. It is a remnant of the fourteenth-century ramparts.

The people of Libourne were steadfast partisans of the English to the last, and after 1453 they did not seek to distinguish themselves by their resignation to the rule of the French kings. When in 1542 the insurrection against the salt-tax, commencing at La Rochelle, spread over Saintonge and the whole of Western Guyenne, the Libournais threw themselves heartily into the movement. When the time of repression came they were made to smart sorely for their turbulent spirit. The Place de l'Hotel de Ville, of which one side remains very much as it was then, bristled with gibbets, and 150 persons were hanged in a single day. The man who had rung the tocsin that called together the insurgents was suspended by the neck to the hammer of the bell, as a warning to others not to ring it again unless they had a better motive.

Standing by the broad river, a little above the point where the Isle is falling into it, carrying down all manner of craft with the tide, I see at a distance of a couple of miles or so towards the west the hill that is known in history as Le Tertre de Fronsac. There Charlemagne built a castle, of which nothing now remains. The hill owes its modern celebrity entirely to its wine. It is not everybody who knows the virtue of the genuine Fronsac, especially that which was yielded by the old vines before the phylloxera destroyed them, but most people are familiar with the brand. But for this, the tertre would long since have ceased to be famous, notwithstanding Charlemagne.

The hill has a strange appearance, for it rises abruptly from the river bank in the midst of the plain. It did not tempt me to walk to it in the scorching heat, but as a steamboat was going there, I paid two sous and went on board. I had never been in such a cockle-shell of a steamer before. It rocked and tumbled like a coracle, and spat and fumed and snorted like a veritable devil composed of an engine, a couple of paddle-wheels, and a few boards. Helped by the tide that was pouring out, it went down stream at a rate that was almost exciting, and in a few minutes I was landed at the bottom of the famous hill. I made a conscientious attempt to reach the top, but was stopped just where it began to grow interesting by a notice-board that warned me, if I ventured any farther, I should be prosecuted and heavily fined. Such things are not often seen in France. Vineyards are generally open, but here they were fiercely protected with walls and fences and notice-boards. The land was evidently very precious. I had wandered into truly civilized country, where land and manners were too highly cultivated to please me, and I again regretted the rocky wastefulness that I had left behind me.

I turned back, and wandering about the village, which is a straggling one, looked for the church, hoping that this at least would show something of interest. Not being able to find it, I asked a man to tell me the way to it, and he, stopping, said:

'L'église pour aller prier dedans?'

What does he mean by asking me that? I thought. Could there be a church at Fronsac that was not used for praying?

'Yes, that is the kind of church I am looking for.' 'Very good,' rejoined the man. 'Now I know what you want I can inform you. I put that question to you because there are some people here called Léglise.'

It was to the church pour prier dedans that I went, not to Mr. Church. Originally Romanesque, it has been pulled about and changed almost as much as the Tertre de Fronsac, which I am sure I shall never wish to climb again.

BY THE GARONNE

I have reached--I need not say how--the south-eastern corner of the Bordelais, and am now at Bazas in very hot September weather, I am not only as warm as a lizard of the dusty roadside likes to be, but am hungry and thirsty. I therefore cast about for an inn that looks both cool and capable of giving a fair meal to a tired wanderer. My choice rests with one that swings the sign of the White Horse; for, to tell the truth, I have somewhat of a superstitious belief in the luck that this emblem brings to the traveller. I place it immediately after the Golden Lion, my favourite beast on a signboard, although it deceived me once. The deception, however, befell in the Bordelais, where the inhabitants are far from being the most pleasant to be found in France; therefore I judged this Lion d'Or charitably, and took account of all that might have frustrated its good intentions.

Having made up my mind to trust myself to the White Horse, I entered a large, salle-à-manger, which, after the glare of the mid-day sunshine, seemed as dark as a cellar that is lighted by a small air-hole. The shutters had been closed against the heat and the flies, but the rays that broke through had the ardour and brilliancy cast by molten metal in a smelting-house, and the sight very quickly accepted with relief the lessened light of the room. There was one other person present, and, although the table was long enough to accommodate fifty, my plate was set immediately opposite his. He was a young negro gentleman, with such a shining ebony skin that he was almost refreshing to eyes that had just left the dazzling whiteness of the outer world. He gave me the impression of being a rather conceited African, but this may have been because my dress compared so unfavourably with his. He was the son of a merchant at St. Louis in Senegal, and was just like a Frenchman in all but his colour. I asked him if he found the weather we were having sufficiently warm, and he replied:

'Regardez comme je sue!'

True enough, the beads of perspiration glistened upon his forehead like black pearls. What is the use, I thought, of being an African if one cannot keep dry in a temperature of 95° Fahrenheit?

I soon left my dark acquaintance, and went forth to roam about Bazas, which, like so many little old towns of Southern France, is in the early hours of a summer afternoon as quiet and deserted as a cemetery. The stones are so heated that a cat that begins to cross the road lazily, stopping to stretch or examine something in the gutter, will suddenly start off at a rush as if a devil had been cast into it.

The interest of Bazas to the traveller lies mainly in its church, which was formerly a cathedral. Its broad and imposing façade, encrusted with ornament, chiefly in the florid Gothic of the fifteenth century, but disfigured by a hideous eighteenth-century fronton that crowns the gable, stands at the top of a broad and rather steep place, of which some of the houses are of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The tower built against the northern end of the front carries a lofty and graceful crocketed spire. Until the Revolution, this west front, ornamented as it was with nearly three hundred statues, was considered the most elaborately decorated in the South of France. Even now, although so many of the niches are vacant, it is exceedingly rich in sculpture. The central doorway is so lofty that it occupies more than half the height of the original façade, and the doorway on each side of it is only a little lower. The central tympanum is divided into five compartments filled with figures in relief. The uppermost panel represents the Last Judgment. The interior admirably combines grandeur and lightness. The nave (without transept) is very long and lofty, and, together with its clerestory, is beautifully proportioned. Finally, the effect of a delightful vista is obtained by the wide sanctuary. With its lofty and airy arcade separating it from the pourlour.

All the old part of the town is built upon a rocky hill, and it is still almost surrounded by ruinous ramparts. The church is just within the wall on the side where the rock is precipitous. Looking upward from the bottom of the narrow valley, the view of the ramparts high overhead, tapestried with ivy and other plants, and above these the tabernacle work, the crocketed pinnacles and spire, and the fantastic far-stretching gargoyles of the venerable cathedral, makes one feel that joy of the eye and the spirit which is the wanderer's reward for all the sun-scorch and other petty tribulations he may have to endure in searching for the picturesque.

From Bazas I made my way to Villandraut, a neighbouring town of about 1,000 inhabitants. I had left the vines, and was now in the landes of the Gironde. I was surrounded by pines, gorse, and bracken, which last was as brown as if it had been baked in an oven. Ten summers had nearly passed since I undertook my long walk through the great pine forests of the Landes. I had wandered on and on, and was again drawing near to them. Already the country wore much the same appearance as that farther south, although less wild and desolate. I expected to have a return of the old feelings when I found myself again in the midst of the pines that said so much to me years ago; but somehow the old spirit would not come back, and I felt little besides the heat and the weariness of the way.

Villandraut, ordinarily a very dull place, was exceedingly animated when I walked into it. A fair was being held there, and a fair in a village or rural town is always a reason for being gay, and often an excuse for worse. There was some local colour here. All the young girls wore the Bordelaise coiffure, the handkerchief being generally of white, yellow, green, or crimson silk. Just clinging to the back of a young head, no coif is more graceful or picturesque than this. There was much dancing. Cheeks flushed and dark eyes flashed as the brilliant coifs and light-coloured dresses whirled round and round. I found more feminine beauty in this south-eastern corner of the Bordelais than I had seen for a very long time among the French peasants. The young women here are well and delicately formed, and have an erect and graceful carriage. They are coquettes from their childhood. They have fine eyes and luxuriant tresses, and the face often shows richness of colour. A few blondes are seen among the brunes; but whether fair or dark they have all the same exuberance of nature. The teeth are rarely good after early youth. The cause of this blemish is said to be the water, which, passing through a sandy soil, contains little or no lime.

My motive in coming to this place was to see the ruined castle of Villandraut, the gloomy stronghold built at the commencement of the fourteenth century by Bertrand de Goth (or Got), Archbishop of Bordeaux, who afterwards as Pope Clement V. took the momentous step of transferring the Papal See from Rome to Avignon. I found it a little outside the burg, but near enough to be used by many of the peasants who had come into the fair as a convenient place for putting up their carts and stabling their animals. Each of the towers had been turned into a stable for horses and oxen, and scattered over the weedy space within the walls were vehicles of all sorts and sizes.

The plan of the castle is a vast oblong, with a high cylindrical tower at each angle, and two additional towers on the side of the town. The deep and wide moat that still surrounds it, except where it has been filled up in front of the gateway from which the drawbridge was once raised and lowered, is like a ravine that is choked with brambles and shrubs. The exterior view is very striking. It is impossible to approach this ruin without being impressed by its mournful grandeur. From all these piled-up stones which the wild plants strive to cover, there comes the sentiment of pride in death. A very slow but a certain death it is. One after another the stones will continue to fall as they have been falling for centuries, and will be put to fresh uses. How many houses and pigsties at Villandraut have been built with materials taken from the castle? Nobody knows exactly, but everybody in the place has a shrewd suspicion on the subject. I climbed up the dilapidated spiral staircase of one of the towers, and after passing through two guard-rooms with Gothic vaulting, where the wind, now blowing up for storm, moaned through the loopholes, I came out upon the chemin de ronde, quite overgrown with shrubs and ivy. All around stretched the pine forest, with tints of violet and the purple rose deepening in the misty distance.

This bastille on the edge of the sandy desert was a queer sort of fold for a shepherd to build. To judge the past, however, by the present is one of the most mischievous of errors. Nothing is easier than to criticise the actions of men in a bygone age, and nothing is more difficult than to do justice to their motives. The militant bishop is intolerable now even, when he is nothing more formidable than a controversialist. It may have been necessary, however, in the Middle Ages for him to make himself dreaded as well as respected, like the judges of Israel. This Clement V., at any rate, must have believed in the need of the Church to be able to defend itself behind strong walls.

From Villandraut I turned towards the Garonne. A furious storm was now raging southward, and after nightfall the lightning flashes kept the whole forest seemingly ablaze. The hour was late when I reached the town of Langon by the river, and at the inn where I put up I met with a cold dinner as well as a cold reception.

When the sun came again I took the road to St. Macaire, and this soon crossed the Garonne. The broad blue river was very beautiful in the early morning sunshine, and a mild lustre lay over the vine-clad plain beyond. The vintagers were getting busy. Bullock-waggons were waiting with the barrels, now empty, that were to bear the grapes to the wine-press, and here and there amidst the green of the motionless leaves was the gleam of a white, yellow, or crimson coif that moved with the head of the woman or girl who wore it.