Read Ebook: Claret and Olives from the Garonne to the Rhone Notes social picturesque and legendary by the way. by Reach Angus B Angus Bethune

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Ebook has 349 lines and 66270 words, and 7 pages

"And now," said the old gentleman, the poodle's proprietor and instructor, "what does Madame Tetard do when Monsieur Tetard comes home late?"

"Ah!" he said, "you are new to our Landes."

I admitted it.

"And these gashes down the trees--these, monsieur, give us the harvest of the Landes."

"The harvest! What harvest?"

"What harvest? Resin, to be sure."

"Ay, resin," said an old fellow with a blouse and a quick eye; "resin, monsieur; the only harvest that man can grow in sand."

"That's a very good description," said the old bloused gentleman. "And then, sir" , "we barrel our crop of the Landes. Yes, indeed, we barrel it, as well as they do the crop of the Medoc."

"Only you wouldn't like to drink it so well," said the Bordeaux man.

Presently we pulled up at a station--a mere shed, with a clearing around it, as there might have been in Texas or Maine. I observed the name--TOHUA-COHOA, and remarked that it did not look like a French one.

"French one!" said he of Bordeaux; "you don't expect to find French in this chaos? No, no; it is some of the gibberish the savages hereabout speak."

And he took a pinch of snuff indignantly and triumphantly. The Bordeaux gentleman winked blandly at me, as if the keen-eyed man was a character to be humoured, and then looked doubtful and unconvinced.

And now, before proceeding further, I may be allowed to describe, with some minuteness, the landscape which will greet the traveller in the Landes. Its mere surface-aspect I have already sketched; but general terms go but a small way towards indicating the dreary grandeurs of that solemn wilderness. Over all its gloom and barrenness--over all its "blasted heaths" and monotonous pine-woods, and sodden morasses, and glaring heaps of shifting sand--there is a strong and pervading sense of loneliness, a grandeur and intensity of desolation, which, as it were, clothes the land with a sad, solemn poetry peculiar to itself. Emerging from black forests of fir, the wanderer may find himself upon a plain, flat as a billiard-table, and apparently boundless as the ocean, clad in one unvaried, unbroken robe of dusky heath. Sometimes stripes and ridges, or great ragged patches of sand, glisten in the fervid sunshine; sometimes belts of scraggy young fir-trees appear rising from the horizon on the left, and fading into the horizon on the right. Occasionally a brighter shade of green, with jungles of willows and coarse water-weeds, giant rushes, and marish-mosses, and tangled masses of dank vegetation, will tell of the unfathomable swamp beneath. Dark veins of muddy water will traverse the flat oozy land, sometimes, perhaps, losing themselves in broad shallow lakes, bordered again by the endless sand-banks and stretches of shadowy pine. The dwellings which dot this dreary, yet, in its way, solemnly poetic landscape, are generally mere isolated huts, separated sometimes by many miles, often by many leagues. Round them the wanderer will descry a miserable field or two, planted with a stunted crop of rye, millet, or maize. The cottages are mouldering heaps of sod and unhewn and unmortared stones, clustered round with ragged sheds composed of masses of tangled bushes, pine stakes, and broadleaved reeds, beneath which cluster, when not seeking their miserable forage in the woods, two or three cows, mere skin and bone, and a score or two of the most abject-looking sheep which ever browsed.

Proceeding through the Landes towards the coast, a long chain of lakes and water-courses, running parallel to the ocean, breaks their uniformity. The country becomes a waste of shallow pools, and of land which is parched in summer and submerged in winter. Running in devious arms and windings through moss and moor and pine, these "lakes of the dismal swamp" form labyrinths of gulfs and morasses which only the most experienced shepherds can safely thread. Here and there a village, or rather bourg, will be seen upon their banks, half hidden in the pine-woods; and a roughly-built fishing-punt or two will be observed floating like the canoe of a savage in the woodland lakes. Sometimes, as in the case of the basin of Arcachon, which will be presently described, these waters are arms of the sea; and the retreating tide leaves scores of square miles of putrid swamp. Sometimes they are mere collections of surface-drainage, accumulating without any means of escape to the ocean, and perilous in the extreme to the dwellers on their shores. For, forming the extreme line of coast, there runs, for near two hundred miles, from the Adour to the Garonne, a range of vast hills of white sand, as fine as though it had been sifted for an hour-glass. Every gale changes the shape of these rolling mountains. A strong wind from the land flings millions of tons of sand per hour into the sea, to be washed up again by the surf, flung on the beach, and in the first Biscay gale blown in whirlwinds inland. A winter hurricane again from the west has filled up with sand square miles of shallow lake, driving the displaced waters inland, dispersing them in gleaming lakes among the pine-woods, flooding, and frequently destroying the scattered hamlets of the people, and burying for ever their fields of millet and rye. I shall presently have occasion to touch upon some disasters of this sort. Meantime, having made the aspect of the Landes familiar to the reader, I pursue the thread of my journey.

"He will remain so for hours, without stirring, and without being wearied," said my fellow-passenger. "It is a way of sitting down in the Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of stockings, ay, and not have an ache in his back. Sometimes they play cards, so, without once coming off their stilts."

"Gaming is their fault--their great fault," meekly acknowledged the blouse.

"Not at all!" said his antagonist. "Cheating is their great fault. A Landes shepherd would cheat the devil with a greasy pack of cards."

We were fast approaching Teste, and had passed two or three clusters of poor huts, and a party of women up to their waists in a sluggish stream washing fleeces, while yellow patches of ripening maize began to recur quicker and quicker, showing that we had reached a comparatively thickly-peopled district, when all at once there burst upon my eyes a glorious-looking prairie of gently undulating land, of the brightest green I ever looked upon. The green of the greenest lawns of England, the green of the softest bogs of Ireland, the green even of the most intensely green patches of the Curragh of Kildare, were brown, and fuzzy, and rusty, compared to this wonderful hue. The land looked like one huge emerald, sparkling in the sun. The brightness, the freshness, the radiance of the tint, was almost supernatural, and the eye, nursed for it, as it were, after our journey over the brown moors and black pines, caught the bright fresh beauty of the colour with rapture.

The Landes man saw my bewilderment. "The green-looking land," he said, "is the flat bottom of part of the bay of Arcachon. It is now dead low-water, and the country people have come down with their carts to fill them with that green slimy seaweed, which makes capital manure; and some of them, perhaps, have brought casks of resin for those ships which principally belong to Bordeaux, Rochelle, and Nantes, and come here and into other bays along the coast for the harvest of the Landes."

The engine whistled. We were at Teste--a shabby, ancient little village, with a deep stream flowing sluggishly around it, and dividing itself into a many-forked delta along the level sand; fishermen's hovels scattered on the beach, brown boats drawn up beneath them, nets drying, a considerable fishy smell pervading the atmosphere, with, beyond again, the black, unvarying mantle of pine-woods. There is a very good hotel at Teste; thanks to its being one of the Bordeaux watering-places; and there, for dinner, was provided red mullets, which would have made the red mullet-loving Duke of Devonshire crazy, as he noted the difference between the fish from the bay of Arcachon and their brethren from the coast of Weymouth.

THE LANDES--THE BAY OF ARCACHON AND ITS FISHERS--THE LEGEND OF CHATEL-MORANT--THE PINE-WOODS--THE RESIN-GATHERER--THE WILD HORSES--THE SURF OF THE BAY OF BISCAY--THE WITCHES OF THE LANDES--POPULAR BELIEFS, AND POPULAR CUSTOMS.

"You can see how fast we're going by the bottom," said the boatman. I leant over the gunwale, and looked down. Oh, the marvellous brightness of that shining sea! I gazed from the boat upon the sand through the water, almost as you might through the air upon the earth from a balloon. Ghost-like fish gleamed in the depths, and their shadows followed them below upon the ribbed sea-sand. Long flowing weeds, like rich green ribbons, waved and streamed in the gently running tidal current. You could see the white pebbles and shells--here a ridge of rocks, there a dark bed of seaweed; and now and then a great flat-fish, for all the world like a burnished pot-lid set in motion--went gleaming along the bottom.

"Well," said I, "so be it; he deserved his fate."

"For many a year after the flood the baron had made," the boatman continued, "you could see, out of a boat, the pointed tops of the towers of the chateau below you, with the weather-cocks still pointing to the west, and the green seaweed hanging to them, like pennons from a ship's vanes."

"But I fear it is not to be seen now."

"Oh! no. Ages and ages ago it rotted and rotted away; but the old men of the village have heard from their fathers that the fishermen only ventured there in calm summer weather and in good daylight; for, in the dark, look you, and when a Biscay wind was blowing, they said they heard the sounding of Chatel-morant's magic horn, and they saw his imp flying above them and wailing like a hurt seabird."

Of course, I was on thorns to hear all the story; and so my boatman recounted a rude, disjointed tale, which I have hitched, legendwise, into the following narrative:--

The Baron Armand de Chatel-morant sat in his dim studio high up in the most seaward tower of the chateau of Chatel-morant. His hair and his beard were white, but his eyes were keen, and his cheeks as ruddy as the eyes and the cheeks of a young man. He had a furnace beside him, with implements of projection, crucibles, and powders. On the table were astrological instruments, and the magic crystal, which his Familiar had given him, and in which--only, however, when the Familiar pleased--the baron could read the future; but, for every reading of the future, the baron was a year older--the Familiar had a year of his life. The baron was clothed in a long furred robe, and he wore red shoes, with peaked toes, as long again as his feet. His face was moody, and clouds went driving along his brow. He took up his instruments, and laid them down, and opened a big book, full of spells and cantrips, and shut it; then he walked about the room; and then he stopped and blew a silver whistle.

Very prompt at the sound came an old man--reverent and sorrowful looking--with a white wand; for he was the seneschal of the chateau of Chatel-morant.

"Your niece," said the baron, "who comes hither from the town of Bordeaux to visit you, and whom I saw but yester even,--has she returned?"

"She went this morning, monseigneur," said the seneschal; "she has preparations to make; for, God save the pretty child! she is to be married on the day of Blessed St. John."

The baron frowned; for he was not an admirer of the saints, being quite, indeed, on the other side of the hedge.

"Say the number of the day, and the name of the month," he replied, angrily; "and do not torment me with that shaveling jargon which they talk in the monastery of Andrew, whom they call St. Andrew at Bordeaux."

The seneschal, who was accustomed to be bullied, particularly upon religious subjects, crossed himself behind his back; for he was a prudent man, and, owing to the absence of mind of the baron, who was always experimentalizing in the black art, managed, one way or other, to pick up so much as to make his place a tolerably profitable one.

"Married!" said the baron; "and to whom?"

"He sails to-day--so; and the maiden's name--your niece's name--what is that?"

"Toinette, so please you, sir."

"You may go."

And go the seneschal did, wondering very much at the uncommon interest his master seemed to be taking in vulgar, sublunary things.

Then Baron Armand de Chatel-morant paced the room a long time in gloomy meditation. At length he sat down again, and said aloud: "There is no doubt of it--I am in love. That face haunts me; Toinette's face is ever floating opposite to me. 'Tis an odd feeling; I was never so before. But, since it is so, I must even have the maiden--she will cheer me--I love her face. I will send to-morrow to Bordeaux, as from her uncle; and when she comes here, by the star of Aldeboran, she stays here, Jacques Fort to the contrary notwithstanding!"

"Wrong--quite wrong!" said a voice.

The baron turned coolly round, and saw, sitting upon the arm of the chair close to him, the figure of a very thin dwarf, with a long, unearthly face, and fingers like hawks' claws. This was the imp--the baron's Familiar.

"How, Klosso!" said Armand; "you come without being called?"

"Yes; but you would have called me soon."

"You know what I am thinking of--of Toinette. I love her--I must have her."

"You will not have her."

"Why so?"

"Because it is so decreed."

"Klosso," said the baron, "I don't believe you. You know the future; but you lie about it when you speak."

"Will you, then," answered the demon, "look into the crystal: that can't lie. Come--it's only another year--give yourself a treat--come!"

"I have given you many years already," said the baron, musing; "look how grey my hair is!"

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