Part 28

The morning had not lost its freshness when I reached St. Macaire. This is one of those ruinous old towns of the Bordelais where the traveller, if he were an artist, would find a thrilling subject for his pencil at every street corner, and at the angle of every bastion of crumbling rampart, where the bramble, the ivy, and the wild fig-tree strike their roots between the gaping stones. Proud and strong in the centuries that have been left far behind, St. Macaire is now a little spot of slow life in the midst of a wilderness of ruins. Three walls encircled it, and although these did long service as the quarries wherefrom the inhabitants drew such building stone as they needed, yet have they not been demolished, but tell their whole story still, in spite of wide gaps and breaks--ay, and with a far more soul-moving voice than when they could show to the enemy their crenated parapets without a flaw, when not a stone was wanting to any tower or gateway, and when the twang of the cross-bow might have been heard from every loophole. There are heaps of stones where the lizard runs, where the coiled snake basks untroubled, where the dwarfed fig-tree sprouts when the spring has come, and where the wild cucumber pushes forward its yellow flowers that fear not the flame of summer. The fig-tree may also be seen hanging from high walls, and the vine rambles among blooming or embrowned wallflowers on the top of ruinous gateways, through which the people still enter and leave the town as they did centuries ago.

The spirit of originality that animated the mediaeval architects in this part of France, and which has given to so many churches a distinct character, an individual expression, that keeps the interest of the traveller constantly alive, is strongly marked upon the church of St. Macaire. Commenced at the beginning of the twelfth century, its earliest portions show the Pointed style in its infancy, fearful as yet of committing what seemed so like heresy--a departure from the Roman arch; but in the same building a much bolder Gothic asserts itself in the parts that were added in the thirteenth century. The west front and doorway have not the majesty of the style as it was developed chiefly in the North, but they have that venerable air which is not always to be found in the stately and majestic. The low tympanum is crowded with figures belonging to the period when the statuary's art was still swathed in the swaddling clothes of its new infancy, and what with their own uncouthness, and the wear and tear of time, it is no easy matter now to trace in them all the purpose and meaning of the sculptor.

And yet in their blurred and battered state they tell us much more than they would if they had been restored with the best skill and learning of our own time. The age is gone when these bas-reliefs were the religious books of the people. To imitate them is mere aestheticism, and to restore them is often destruction.

A few words must be said of the old market-place of St. Macaire. Thanks to the poverty or the apathy of the commune, three sides have retained all their mediaeval character, the interest of which has been refined and deepened by the artistic touch of time, the sentimental ravisher, the slow and gentle destroyer. A Gothic arcade encloses a wide pavement, and each bay, with its vaulting, forms, as it were, the portico of the house, whose first and higher storeys rest upon it. Here those who are interested in civic architecture can see thirteenth and fourteenth century houses still retaining their wide Gothic doorways.

I rested awhile in a café, and chance led me to one that was kept by an Englishman. He recognised my nationality, while I supposed him to be a Frenchman, and he seemed as glad to see me as if I had been an old friend. He told me that when he was a boy his father brought his family from England to Les Eyzies, where he was employed at the iron works. (The smelting furnace has been cold for many a year.) The man who spoke was middle-aged, and although he expressed himself with difficulty in English, and turned his phrases out of French moulds of thought, he had kept a strong accent of the Midland counties. The tenacity with which an accent adheres to the tongue, even when the language to which it belongs has been half lost, is very remarkable. I remember meeting in my roamings an Englishwoman who had married a French cobbler, and who had been buried alive with him in the Haut-Quercy for forty years. She had learnt to speak patois like a native, but it had become a sore trial to her to put her thoughts into English words; nevertheless, when she did bring out those words that had been so long put away in the mind's lumber-room, the accent was as pure Cockney as if she had but lately drifted away from her own Middlesex.

The freshness of the morning was gone, and even in the shade of the cafe I felt the hot breath of the day. When I was again upon the powdered road between interminable rows of vines, the glare was dazzling; but I was not alone. Groups of people were trudging under the same fiery sky, and upon the same dusty road, and all were moving in the same direction. When I learnt that they were pilgrims on their way to Verdelais, I thought that I might do worse than be a pilgrim, too. I therefore went with the stream, which soon turned up the flanks of the vine-clad hills.

Thus I found myself about noon in a small village, seemingly composed of one wide street lined on both sides with cafés and restaurants. There was also a very conspicuous modern church in a fantastic and debased, but showy, style of architecture. It was densely crowded, and the shine of innumerable candles was seen through the open doors. The whole street was likewise crowded with people, who had come from various parts of the Bordelais, and who seemed determined to spend a happy day in a sense no less material than spiritual. There was a great rush to the restaurants, and there was flagrant overcharging on the part of those who kept them--all speculators on piety.

Perhaps the grandeur of the solitude of Roc-Amadour, the antiquity of the buildings, and the simplicity of the pilgrims had made me a wrong-headed judge of the newer places of pilgrimage. However this may be, after the first glance at Verdelais I wished I had not come. There was no quiet corner here where a wayfarer could sit and refresh himself; in this hurly-burly of eager hunger, and with this infernal clatter of tongues, repose was impossible.

After lunching in the midst of a noisy and vulgar throng, I regained the open country, with the conviction that, should I ever decide to start off upon a serious pilgrimage, the road to Verdelais would not be the one that I would take.

I now turned down towards the valley through the vines, the inevitable vines, and was soon on the banks of the Garonne. Almost facing me upon the opposite hillsides were the famous vineyards of Sauterne, and I knew that the vintagers were busy there, every woman--women are chiefly employed--with her pair of scissors snipping off the grapes one by one from the gathered bunches, and rejecting all that were not sound. It is a costly method, but the wine pays for it.

A steamer comes panting down the river, and stops near the grove of willows where I have been trying to hide myself from the all-searching, all-burning sun. I go on board and take a delicious rest under an awning for two or three hours, while the vine-covered hills on either side glide backward with their many steeples and towers.

I left the steamer at a place called Castres, some fifteen miles below Bordeaux. My motive for stopping here was to see the castle where Montesquieu was born, and where he spent the greater part of his life. The map told me that it lay some five or six miles from Castres in the direction of the landes, and as the day was already far spent, I reckoned upon passing the night at the small town of La Brède, which is very near the castle. The sun's rays were as yet but little calmed as I turned from the broad, blue river.

I had to follow the highway, on which the white dust lay thick. This road was carried up the hills. In the vineyards were crowds of men and women, many of whom had been drawn out of the slums of Bordeaux. Some of them were forlorn-looking beings, whose faces told that they were glad to seize this opportunity of earning for a few days a sure wage. Those who wish to feel the poetic charm of the vintage should not go into the district of Bordeaux to seek it. Here only the legend remains. It is not that the vines are wanting. The Bordelais, except in the sandy and pine-covered region of the landes, has again become one immense vineyard; but whether it be from the struggle to live, or the lust of prosperity, the people fail to impress the traveller with that communicative openness and joyousness of soul which he would like to find in them, if only that he might not have the vexation of convicting himself of laying up for his own fancy another disillusion.

Although the hills were not steep, the long ascent was wearisome in the sultry air that no breath of wind freshened. At length the sun went down in a golden haze, where the vine-leaves spread to the horizon like the sea. Then I descended the other side of the range of hills that follows the line of the river. The vineyards gradually fell away, and scattered pines gave a touch of sadness to the darkening land. By these signs I knew that I was on the outskirts of the landes of the Gironde. But the sand was still some miles away, and the country here was well cultivated. A church spire that looked very high in the clear obscure, as I saw it through an opening of trees, led me to La Brède.

Here I thought I should have no difficulty in finding night quarters, for there was at least one good inn, which in its own estimation was a hotel. But the way in which I was scrutinized when I wearily set down my knapsack on an outside table and took a seat under the plane-trees told me that I was not welcome. Since I had been in the Bordelais I had become rather too familiar with such signs. The hotel-keepers here have but very slight faith in the respectability of travellers who do not come in the usual way--that is to say, by train or omnibus, or something with wheels, though it be but a bicycle. To them the walking traveller, whether he carries a bundle over his shoulder on a stick, or a knapsack on his back (the latter is very rarely seen), is merely a tramp. If he speaks with a foreign accent, he is doubly deserving of suspicion. These people of the Gironde are, perhaps, all the more doubtful of the morality of others because of the little confidence that they are able to place in their own.

My request for a room at this inn was not refused immediately. There was a consultation indoors, the result of which was that I was presently told that every room was already engaged. There was nothing for it but to walk on to the next inn, and hope for better luck there. It would seem as if they had been prepared here for my coming, and had already made up their minds how to act. Two women stood in the doorway, and did not move an inch to make way for me. I had hardly asked the question about the room, when the answer came emphatically 'No.' At the next house to which I went I met with the same answer; but in spite of the unpleasantness of my position, I was almost thankful for it, such a villainous-looking place it was. There now remained but one small auberge at La Brède. If I was denied shelter there, I should have to go to Bordeaux that night, and I was five miles from the nearest railway-station. The prospect had become sombre, and I began to regret that I had allowed the Château de Montesquieu to entice me among these too civilized savages.

The last inn was a little outside the town. A dark man, whose face, even in the feeble light, I could see was deadly pale, was seated outside the door, breathing the freshness that now began to be felt in the evening air. As my previous negotiations had been with women, I was glad to perceive now an innkeeper of the other sex. My experience of the French provinces had taught me that, wherever people are suspicious of strangers whose appearance is not such as they are familiar with, and where the measure of prosperity has been sufficient to produce a cautious disinclination to move out of the daily trodden track, it is far better to deal with men than with women.

The pale-faced man, after looking at me fixedly for a few seconds, said:

'Yes, I have one spare room, and it is at your service.'

I crossed the threshold, and took a seat in the kitchen and general room. The surroundings were not very cheerful; but no other people would have anything to do with me, and therefore my choice of accommodation had to be what is termed Hobson's. After all, it would not be the first time that I had passed the night in a little roadside inn.

The pale man's wife did not look in a very sweet temper at her husband for having put extra work upon her without consulting her, and there was an exceedingly obnoxious boy of about fourteen who sat upon the corner of a table and, with the assurance of a mounted gendarme, put all sorts of questions to me in a voice that would change suddenly from a bark to a bleat. I was seized with such a longing to knock him off his perch that I presently kept my eyes fixed upon the frying-pan so that I might not be tempted beyond my strength. The father was evidently too weak to contend with his horrible offspring. My interest in the man was at once awakened. He told me that he was from the Lot-et-Garonne, where he owned land, and had been a tobacco-planter, until a disease of the spinal marrow compelled him to seek an occupation that required less exertion. Thus he came to be an innkeeper. He had spent much money upon doctors, who had done him little or no good. The only treatment that had given him any relief was la pendaison.

'Hanging!'

'Yes, hanging. I have passed hours hung up by the neck.'

Then he explained the apparatus that is used for stretching the spinal marrow in this manner, and how it differs from the method of hanging that is best known in England. When I learnt what he had undergone in order to get cured, I could understand why he looked so pale and sad. A melancholy Jacques was he, indeed, in appearance, and he was certainly not the most cheerful of hosts whom one might hope to find at the end of a weary day; but I knew that I was in the house of an honest man, who was also brave and patient, while he looked out upon the world through darkening windows.

Before going to bed I had some talk with my host about my adventures at La Brède before I applied to him for a night's lodging. There was actually a sparkle of mirth in his melancholy dark eyes, and his sunken cheeks were puckered up with a sort of smile.

'If you had been dressed in a black coat,' said he, 'like a commis voyageur, they would have all found room for you.'

This was my opinion, too. The Bordelais believe in the respectability of no travelling motives under heaven that are not commercial.

My bedroom that night had much the character of an outhouse or fowlhouse. It was on the ground-floor, and the rafters overhead sloped rapidly towards the exterior wall. A small low window opened upon the garden. The walls were white-washed, but the floors were very black, as all these southern floors are. Upon the single table a heap of raw wool waiting to be spun had been pushed back a little to make room for the doll's washing-basin and towel that had been placed there for me. Besides the bed that had been prepared for me, there was another, which happily was to remain unoccupied that night. The traveller should always be thankful when he has a room, however poor and plain, that for the few hours which he needs for rest he can call his own. If he snores himself, he will sleep through the noise, and have, perhaps, pleasant dreams; but if anybody else snores in the same room, he may lie awake with clenched fists, and be tortured by the foolish desire to throw something.