In the Heart of the Vosges - Matilda Betham-Edwards (mind reading books txt) 📗

in 1755, just sixty years after the great fabulist's death. Nephew of a marquis, himself nephew-in-law of Voltaire, endowed with native wit and gaiety, the young man was a welcome guest at Fernay, and no wonder! His enchanting fables did not see the light till after Voltaire's death, but we will hope that some of them had delighted his host in recitation. Many of us who loved French in early years have a warm corner in our hearts for "Numa Pompilius", but Florian will live as the second fabulist of France, to my own thinking twin of his forerunner.

How full of wisdom, wit and sparkle are these apologues! Take, for instance, the following, which to the best of my ability I have rendered into our mother tongue--


VANITY (LE PETIT CHIEN).


I
Once on a time and far away,
The elephant stood first in might,
He had by many a forest fray
At last usurped the lion's right.
On peace and reign unquestioned bent,
The ruler in his pride of place,
Forthwith to life-long banishment
Doomed members of the lion race.

II
Dispirited, their best laid low,
The vanquished could but yield to fate,
And turn their backs upon the foe
In silence nursing grief and hate.
A poodle neatly cropped and clipped,
With tasselled tail made leonine,
On hearing of the stern rescript,
Straightway set up a piteous whine.

III
"Alas!" he moaned. "Ah, woe is me!
Where, tyrant, shall I shelter find;
Advancing years what will they be,
My home and comforts left behind?"
A spaniel hastened at the cry,
"Come, mate, what's this to-do about?"
"Oh, oh," the other gulped reply,
"For exile we must all set out!"

IV
"Must all?" "No, you are safe, good friend;
The cruel law smites us alone;
Here undisturbed your days may end,
The lions must perforce begone."
"The lions? Brother, pray with these,
What part or lot have such as you?"
"What part, forsooth? You love to tease;
You know I am a lion too."


[Footnote: The first translation appeared with others in _French Men, Women and Books_, 1910. The second was lately issued in the _Westminster Gazette_.]

Here is another, a poem of essential worldly wisdom, to be bracketed with Browning's equally oracular "The Statue and the Bust," fable and poem forming a compendium.


THE FLIGHTY PURPOSE
(LE PAYSAN AND LA RIVIERE).


"I now intend to change my ways"--
Thus Juan said--"No more for me
A round on round of idle days
'Mid soul-debasing company.
I've pleasure woo'd from year to year
As by a siren onward lured,
At last of roystering, once held dear,
I'm as a man of sickness cured."

"Unto the world I bid farewell,
My mind to retrospection give,
Remote as hermit in his cell,
For wisdom and wise friends I'll live."
"Is Thursday's worldling, Friday's sage?
Too good such news," I bantering spoke.
"How oft you've vowed to turn the page,
Each promise vanishing like smoke!"

"And when the start?" "Next week--not this."
"Ah, you but play with words again."
"Nay, do not doubt me; hard it is
To break at once a life-long chain."
Came we unto the riverside,
Where motionless a rustic sate,
His gaze fixed on the flowing tide.
"Ho, mate, why thus so still and squat?"

"Good sirs, bound to yon town am I;
No bridge anear, I sit and sit
Until these waters have run dry,
So that afoot I get to it."
"A living parable behold,
My friend!" quoth I. "Upon the brim
You, too, will gaze until you're old,
But never boldly take a swim!"


As far as I know, no memorial has as yet been raised to the fabulist either at Quissac or at Sauve, but as long as the French language lasts successive generations will keep his memory green. Certain of his fables every little scholar knows by heart.

Associations of other kinds are come upon by travellers bound from Quissac to Le Vigan, that charming little centre of silkworm rearing described by me elsewhere. A few miles from our village lies Ganges, a name for ever famous in the annals of political economy and progress.

"From Ganges", wrote the great Suffolk farmer in July 1787, "to the mountain of rough ground which I crossed" (in the direction of Montdardier), "the ride has been the most interesting which I have taken in France; the efforts of industry the most vigorous, the animation the most lively. An activity has been here that has swept away all difficulties before it and clothed the very rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause; the enjoyment of property must have done it. _Give a man the sure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden_." The italics are my own. When will Arthur Young have his tablet in Westminster Abbey, I wonder?

The department of the Gard offers an anomaly of the greatest historic interest. Here and here only throughout the length and breadth of France villages are found without a Catholic church, communities that have held fast to Protestantism and the right of private judgment from generation to generation during hundreds of years. Elsewhere, in the Cote d'Or, for instance, as I have described in a former work, Protestantism was completely stamped out by the Revocation, whole villages are now ultramontane, having abjured, the alternatives placed before them being confiscation of property, separation of children and parents, banishment, prison and death.

[Footnote: See _Friendly Faces_, chap. xvi.]

The supremacy of the reformed faith may be gathered from the following facts: A few years back, of the six deputies representing this department five were Protestant and the sixth was a Jew. The _Conseil General_ or provincial council numbered twenty-three Protestants as against seventeen Catholics. The seven members of the Board of Hospitals at Nimes, three of the four inspectors of public health, nine of the twelve head-mistresses of girls' schools, twenty-nine of forty rural magistrates, were Protestants.

My host belonged to the same faith, as indeed do most of his class and the great captains of local industry. It is not as in Michelet's fondly-loved St. Georges de Didonne, where only the lowly and the toiler have kept the faith aflame.

But whilst neighbours now live peacefully side by side, a gulf still divides Catholic and Protestant. Although half a millennium has elapsed since the greatest crime of modern history, the two bodies remain apart: French _annexes_ of Alsace-Lorraine and Germans are not more completely divided. Mixed marriages are of rarest occurrence, intercourse limited to the conventional and the obligatory. There are historic curses that defy lustration. St. Bartholomew is one of these. I must now say something about the country-folks. Calls upon our rustic neighbours, long chats with affable housewives, and rounds of farmery, vineyard and field attracted me more than the magnificent panoramas to be obtained from Corconne and other villages within an easy drive.

George Sand has ever been regarded as a poetizer of rural life, an arch-idealist of her humbler country-folks. At Quissac I made more than one acquaintance that might have stepped out of _La petite Fadette_ or _La mare au Diable_.

One old woman might have been "la paisible amie," the tranquil friend, to whom the novelist dedicated a novel. Neat, contented, active and self-respecting, she enjoyed a life-interest in two acres and a cottage, her live stock consisting of a goat, a pig and poultry, her invested capital government stock representing a hundred pounds. Meagre as may seem these resources, she was by no means to be pitied or inclined to pity herself, earning a few francs here and there by charing, selling her little crops, what eggs and chickens she could spare, above all things being perfectly independent.

A charming idyll the great Sand could have found here. The owner of a thirty-acre farm had lately died, leaving it with all he possessed to two adopted children, a young married couple who for years had acted respectively as steward and housekeeper. We are bound to infer that on the one hand there had been affection and gratitude, on the other the same qualities with conscientiousness in business matters. The foster-father was childless and a widower, but, among the humble as well as the rich French, ambition of posthumous remembrance often actuates impersonal bequests. This worthy Jacques Bonhomme might have made an heir of his native village, leaving money for a new school-house or some other public edifice. Very frequently towns and even villages become legatees of the childless, and the worthy man would have been quite sure of a statue, a memorial tablet, or at least of having his name added to a street or square.

Before taking leave of Quissac I must mention one curious fact.

The Proteus of Odyssean story or the King's daughter and the Efreet in the "Second Royal Mendicant's Adventure," could not more easily transform themselves than the French peasant. Husbandman to-day, mechanic on the morrow, at one season he plies the pruning-hook, at another he turns the lathe. This adaptability of the French mind, strange to say, is nowhere seen to greater advantage than in out-of-the-way regions, just where are mental torpidity and unbendable routine. Not one of Millet's blue-bloused countrymen but masters a dozen handicrafts.

Thus, whilst the heraldic insignia of Sauve should be a trident, those of Quissac should be surmounted by an old shoe! In the former place the forked branches of the _Celtis australis_ or nettle tree, _Ulmaceae_, afford a most profitable occupation. From its tripartite boughs are made yearly thousands upon thousands of the three-pronged forks used in agriculture. The wood, whilst very durable, is yielding, and lends itself to manipulation.

In Florian's birthplace folks make a good living out of old boots and shoes! Some native genius discovered that, however well worn footgear may be, valuable bits of leather may remain in the sole. These fragments are preserved, and from them boot heels are made; the _debris_, boots, shoes and slippers, no matter the material, find their way to the soil as manure. But this subject if pursued further would lead to a lane, metaphorically speaking, without a turning, that is to say to a treatise on French rural economy.


VII


AN IMMORTALIZER

In Renan's exquisitely phrased preface to his _Drames Philosophiques_ occurs the following sentence which I render into English _tant bien que mal_: "Side by side are the history