I HAVE A GOAD
THE AUBERGE of Bouchet St. Nicolas was among the least pretentious
I have ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my
journey. Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands.
Imagine a cottage of two stories, with a bench before the door; the
stable and kitchen in a suite, so that Modestine and I could hear
each other dining; furniture of the plainest, earthern floors, a
single bedchamber for travellers, and that without any convenience
but beds. In the kitchen cooking and eating go forward side by
side, and the family sleep at night. Any one who has a fancy to
wash must do so in public at the common table. The food is
sometimes spare; hard fish and omelette have been my portion more
than once; the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to
man; and the visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and
rubbing against your legs, is no impossible accompaniment to
dinner.
But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show
themselves friendly and considerate. As soon as you cross the
doors you cease to be a stranger; and although these peasantry are
rude and forbidding on the highway, they show a tincture of kind
breeding when you share their hearth. At Bouchet, for instance, I
uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais, and asked the host to join me.
He would take but little.
'I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?' he said, 'and I am
capable of leaving you not enough.'
In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own
knife; unless he ask, no other will be supplied: with a glass, a
whang of bread, and an iron fork, the table is completely laid. My
knife was cordially admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the
spring filled him with wonder.
'I should never have guessed that,' he said. 'I would bet,' he
added, weighing it in his hand, 'that this cost you not less than
five francs.'
When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped.
He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly
ignorant. His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew
how to read, although I do not suppose she ever did so. She had a
share of brains and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who
ruled the roast.
'My man knows nothing,' she said, with an angry nod; 'he is like
the beasts.'
And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head. There
was no contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were
accepted loyally, and no more about the matter.
I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady
understood in a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my
book when I got home. 'Whether people harvest or not in such or
such a place; if there were forests; studies of manners; what, for
example, I and the master of the house say to you; the beauties of
Nature, and all that.' And she interrogated me with a look.
'It is just that,' said I.
'You see,' she added to her husband, 'I understood that.'
They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures.
'In the morning,' said the husband, 'I will make you something
better than your cane. Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is
in the proverb - DUR COMME UN ANE; you might beat her insensible
with a cudgel, and yet you would arrive nowhere.'
Something better! I little knew what he was offering.
The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I
will own I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife
and child in the act of mounting into the other. This was my first
experience of the sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly
and extraneous, I pray God it be my last as well. I kept my eyes
to myself, and know nothing of the woman except that she had
beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed by my appearance.
As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to me than to
the pair. A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the single
gentleman who has to blush. But I could not help attributing my
sentiments to the husband, and sought to conciliate his tolerance
with a cup of brandy from my flask. He told me that he was a
cooper of Alais travelling to St. Etienne in search of work, and
that in his spare moments he followed the fatal calling of a maker
of matches. Me he readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant.
I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and
hastened my toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for
madam, the cooper's wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to
explore the neighbourhood of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a
grey, windy, wintry morning; misty clouds flew fast and low; the
wind piped over the naked platform; and the only speck of colour
was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern hills, where the sky
still wore the orange of the dawn.
It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea;
and I had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were
trooping out to the labours of the field by twos and threes, and
all turned round to stare upon the stranger. I had seen them
coming back last night, I saw them going afield again; and there
was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell.
When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady
was in the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her
my compliments upon its beauty.
'Oh no,' said the mother; 'it is not so beautiful as it ought to
be. Look, it is too fine.'
Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical
circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects
of the majority decide the type of beauty.
'And where,' said I, 'is monsieur?'
'The master of the house is upstairs,' she answered, 'making you a
goad.'
Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of
Bouchet St. Nicolas, who introduced me to their use! This plain
wand, with an eighth of an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when
he put it in my hands. Thenceforward Modestine was my slave. A
prick, and she passed the most inviting stable door. A prick, and
she broke forth into a gallant little trotlet that devoured the
miles. It was not a remarkable speed, when all was said; and we
took four hours to cover ten miles at the best of it. But what a
heavenly change since yesterday! No more wielding of the ugly
cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more broadsword
exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. And what although
now and then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse-
coloured wedge-like rump? I should have preferred it otherwise,
indeed; but yesterday's exploits had purged my heart of all
humanity. The perverse little devil, since she would not be taken
with kindness, must even go with pricking.
It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-
legged ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead
solitary all the way to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident
but one. A handsome foal with a bell about his neck came charging
up to us upon a stretch of common, sniffed the air martially as one
about to do great deeds, and suddenly thinking otherwise in his
green young heart, put about and galloped off as he had come, the
bell tinkling in the wind. For a long while afterwards I saw his
noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the note of his bell; and
when I struck the high-road, the song of the telegraph-wires seemed
to continue the same music.
Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded
by rich meadows. They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which
gave the neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely
smell of hay. On the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept
mounting for miles to the horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn
landscape, with black blots of fir-wood and white roads wandering
through the hills. Over all this the clouds shed a uniform and
purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing, exaggerating height and
distance, and throwing into still higher relief the twisted ribbons
of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating
to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and all
that I beheld lay in another county - wild Gevaudan, mountainous,
uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the
wolves.
Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance;
and you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet
with an adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was
on the frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-
memorable BEAST, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career
was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gevaudan and
Vivarais; he ate women and children and 'shepherdesses celebrated
for their beauty'; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at
broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king's
high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the
gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten
thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was
shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small
for that. 'Though I could reach from pole to pole,' sang Alexander
Pope; the Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been
as this wolf, they would have changed the history of man. M. Elie
Berthet has made him the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do
not wish to read again.
I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's
desire that I should visit our Lady of Pradelles, 'who performed
many miracles, although she was of wood'; and before three-quarters
of an hour I was goading Modestine down the steep descent that
leads to Langogne on the Allier. On both sides of the road, in big
dusty fields, farmers were preparing for next spring. Every fifty
yards a yoke of great-necked stolid oxen were patiently haling at
the plough. I saw one of these mild formidable servants of the
glebe, who took a sudden interest in Modestine and me. The furrow
down which he was journeying lay at an angle to the road, and his
head was solidly fixed to the yoke like those of caryatides below a
ponderous cornice; but he screwed round his big honest eyes and
followed us with a ruminating look, until his master bade him turn
the plough and proceed to reascend the field. From all these
furrowing ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a labourer here
and there who was breaking the dry clods with a hoe, the wind
carried away a thin dust like so much smoke. It was a fine, busy,
breathing, rustic landscape; and as I continued to descend, the
highlands of Gevaudan kept mounting in front of me against the sky.
I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the
Allier; so near are these two confluents in their youth. Just at
the bridge of Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to
fall, a lassie of some seven or eight addressed me in the
sacramental phrase, 'D'OU'ST-CE-QUE VOUS VENEZ?' She did it with
so high an air that she set me laughing; and this cut her to the
quick. She was evidently one who reckoned on respect, and stood
looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I crossed the bridge and
entered the county of Gevaudan.
