The Discovery of France (17 page)

Misinterpretations were inevitable. Bourgeois observers saw dungy creatures grubbing in fields with their bottoms higher than their heads and, blind to the beauty of robustness, compared them to their own upright, fragrant wives. They found it odd that courting couples expressed affection by punching and throwing stones at one another, and they would have laughed at their terms of endearment. In a rare surviving love note, written on a postcard in the 1900s in almost indecipherable spelling, a Vendée peasant told his fiancée, ‘You’re so fresh and lovely the only thing I can compare you to is fields of young cabbages before the caterpillars have got to them.’
¹⁵

Patriotic observers blamed the apparent mistreatment of women on foreign influences, just as many people in France today imagine that most violence against women is perpetrated by immigrants. In everything they saw, they were hampered by ignorance of daily life in their own land. If Breton women stood while their husbands ate, it was not because they were slaves but because buckwheat crêpes make an even more dismal meal when deposited all at once on the table. And if women spent the evenings working together in a barn, it was
not because they were segregated but because they preferred each other’s company and efficiency. According to the Breton writer Pierre-Jakez Hélias, who grew up among the Bigouden people of Finistère, a woman who walked behind her husband in the street, carrying the bags and wielding an umbrella, was not a servant following her master but a cowherd making sure that the animal stayed on the path instead of wandering off to join its friends at the watering hole.

The Breton peasant Déguignet witnessed scenes all over patriarchal Brittany that suggest quite strongly that not all women were submissive and abused. At the time of year when the fields were busy and ‘the best men were about’, the women played a game called ‘putting the
coz
and the
goaskerez
to the big fellows’. At midday, when the men were asleep, four or five women would find a man on his own, pin him down and stuff his pants with mud or cow dung.

If convention had allowed painters to depict a group of women ‘putting on pressure’, museums of daily life might have a less melancholy air.

*

S
CENES LIKE THESE
are a happy reminder that chance encounters can be more revealing than a thousand statistics and written reports. Unfortunately, nearly all the distant figures mentioned in travellers’ accounts, who might have dispelled false impressions with a few words and gestures, are just dots in the landscape. But sometimes, one of those figures comes close enough to be seen and heard.

A certain nameless woman is known to us only from a brief conversation and a description of her face. But we also know the time
and the place: a long hill near the small town of Dombasle, near the Argonne forest, in the early summer of 1789. This is one of the natural internal frontiers of France, where the Champagne plateau slopes away to Lorraine and slices down towards the valley of the Rhône. The Argonne once divided the lands of one Gallic tribe from those of its neighbours. Later, it marked the western edge of the kingdom of Lotharingia, which was carved out of Charlemagne’s empire by the Treaty of Verdun in 843. Now, at the end of the eighteenth century, parts of the ancient forest have been cleared and drained by glass makers, charcoal burners, sawyers and tilers, but its giant trenches and embankments still form a barrier ten miles wide between France and its enemies in the east.

The woman in question comes from the part of Champagne known as ‘pouilleuse’. Her only education was probably the catechism and a few prayers and legends learned from an old woman who lived on her neighbours’ charity. From the age of seven, she would have looked after the animals on her parents’ small farm. She might be nineteen before she was ready to bear children and pregnant before she was twenty.

Some women never marry. Many live with a man who is a husband in all but name. Weddings and official documents are costly, and a girl can spend ten years in bondage trying to amass a small trousseau of furniture, linen and a few silver coins. Country girls have gone to town and lived in attics, cellars and even cupboards, and returned with a fatherless baby. Some employers send the maid away before the year’s wages are due in the autumn. Pregnant girls are often questioned about the missing father by the magistrate when the pain of labour is likely to produce the truth.

For these and other reasons, she marries, with very little to her name. On her wedding night, the young people of her husband’s village break down the door, in the traditional manner, and make the couple drink mulled wine from a chamber pot and inspect the sheets for signs that the marriage will be blessed. A child is born before the wedding bouquet of thorns and fruit has turned to dust. As the proverb says, ‘Women give birth after three months, but only the first time.’

For the rest of her life, she lives in a low, dark house of white
stone. It has a wide tiled roof and a hawthorn bush to ward off lightning. Outdoors, she wears a full green flannel skirt and a pointy hood. She is more prolific than the fields, which produce a crop of barley or rye only once every two years. Like most women, she tries to limit the effects of her husband’s lovemaking, but only one reliable method exists, and anyone who has come home after dark on the back road by the pond has heard the sad croaking of the Night Washerwomen who are condemned to wash the shrouds and corpses of the children that they killed.

When the local lord increases the rent on the field, she leaves for Verdun and returns with the baby of a bourgeoise. For the next four years, she will be a mother to someone else’s child. If one of her own babies is found at her breast, she will lose the money and her husband will be fined by the courts as much as he could earn in twenty days at harvest time.

One day, walking up the long hill near her home, she sees a gentleman on the road ahead and quickens her step. A stranger’s tale is always welcome. It can be spun out later on in the long evenings when the women sit around shelling peas, carding wool or sewing white dresses for the village fête. The man is well dressed, in the clothes of another country, but travelling on his own without a carriage. He holds the bridle of a mare that clops along the chalky road. The horse is tired and half-blind but taller than the local breed and evidently well treated since the gentleman has dismounted to spare her on the climb.

She walks alongside him to the brow of the hill. From there, the heavy undulations of the Argonne massif roll away to the forests in the west and descend on the other side to the valley of the Meuse and the bridge at Verdun. The latest description of the route, in the
Complete Itinerary of France
(1788), describes the spot: ‘Steep climb. Crossing of the great primitive chain that separates the basins of the sea and the rivers.’

‘A sad country,’ she says, ‘and difficult times.’ The gentleman is pleasantly inquisitive and asks the reasons for her complaint. In the clear Champenois dialect, she explains that her husband owns very little: ‘a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse’. She has seven children, and ‘the cow’s milk helps to make the soup’.

A few weeks before, she would have had little to add, but the command to draw up a list of grievances and the rumours that travel along the road from Paris have made an impression. Recently, she has heard that ‘something is to be done by some great folks for such poor ones, but I don’t know who nor how; but God send us better, for we are crushed by tithes and taxes’.

Her face confirms the truth of what she says in all but one respect. That evening, at Mars-la-Tour, the traveller remembers her face when he writes his account: ‘It speaks, at the first sight, hard and severe labour. I am inclined to think that they work harder than the men.’ ‘This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent and her face so furrowed and hardened by labour, – but she said she was only twenty-eight.’

He dates the entry in his diary: 12 July 1789. Two days later, the Bastille in Paris is stormed by a mob and destroyed. News reaches the Argonne a few days later and the postmaster or a coachman explains what the Bastille is and what it means. The foreign gentleman, Arthur Young, hears the news when he arrives at the inn in Strasbourg on 20 July: ‘The absolute overthrow of the old government!’ ‘It will be a great spectacle for the world to view, in this enlightened age, the representatives of twenty-five millions of people sitting on the construction of a new and better order and fabric of liberty than Europe has yet offered.’

From Paris, where the new National Assembly sits, the ‘great folks’ send out proclamations and the rumours turn into a river of news. There is no longer any need to wait for the mail coach from Paris. The news is shouted from field to field as it was in the days before the road was built. One day, ten miles to the north, the King and Queen are arrested and taken back to Paris. Though the town gates are closed, people on the other side of Verdun hear the incredible report before sunset. Along the road that runs through Dombasle, men and women stand on their doorsteps, eyeing passers-by and comparing them to faces they have seen in almanacs, wondering about signs in the sky.

When the great estates of châteaux and monasteries are sold off, her husband acquires another morsel of land. But ‘citizens’, as they must now be called, are still ‘crushed by tithes and taxes’. A field that might once have been rented from a lord or an abbey is now liable to tax, and, as people say, ‘money is expensive’. Some of their neighbours are poorer as landowners than they were as labourers.

Twenty years later, her husband is dead and her life seems very long. Napoleon’s armies have passed through the Argonne, followed by the Prussians and the Austrians and the hungry Cossacks, and she has fewer children to farm the land. Some have died in battle, others have gone to work in cloth mills in the west. People at the market sometimes talk of change, which usually means that the people in Paris are fighting each other again. But the lord has returned to his château, and the mayor, who owns the biggest vineyard in the region, has founded a dynasty of his own. Some of the common land is closed off and there are regulations about the quantities of wood and dead leaves that can be taken from the forest.

The fields change more than the people. Now, there are potatoes (unknown when she was a child), artichokes for the animals, beetroot, rape and a few vines for money, and clover, which means less time lugging baskets of manure up the long hill. Her children will have luxuries. Her son plays billiards at the cafe in Dombasle and smokes a pipe. Her daughter wears a crinoline dress and spends all day indoors.

One day, in old age, she is sitting in front of her house, staring at a figure with a large black hood pulled over his head. He may be one of the first ethnologists to explore and record the towns and villages of the Argonne, or a photographer from Paris in search of ‘typical’ peasants. A face as eloquent as a landscape appears on the lens. Its furrows will survive the chemical decomposition of the albumen.

When she dies, the bed of straw on which she lay is burned. She is wrapped in a sheet and placed between rough planks that are good only for a coffin. For reasons that no one can remember, her hand is closed over a coin. She is buried in the churchyard where her neighbours will come on All Souls’ Day to picnic and pray for the dead.

The photograph survives. A century later, restored and magnified, she appears in a museum of daily life, representing all her compatriots like a local saint or like a chance encounter on the road.

7

Fairies, Virgins, Gods and Priests

S
OME FRENCH LANDSCAPES
have barely changed in two thousand years. The rosary of lagoons on the Golfe du Lion and the salt delta of the Camargue would not surprise a Roman sailor, though he might find that he had been navigating by the chimneys of a cement factory or a seaside apartment block rather than by the beacon towers of the Massiliotes tribe. Beyond the marshes, east of Arles, the Grande Crau is still the ‘stony plain’ seen by Pliny the Elder, strewn with the giant boulders that Zeus hurled at the enemies of Hercules. Pushing up the valley of the Rhodanus against the Black Boreas (the istral) towards the Cemmenus Mountain (the Cévennes), the geographer Strabo would still find that ‘the olive-planted and fig-bearing country ends, [and that] the vine, as you thus proceed, does not easily bring its fruit to maturity’.

To see even the best-preserved landscape as it appeared to its earlier inhabitants would of course require a complete telepathic transfer. Scanned with the mind of a native, the area perceived as a ‘view’ would be a small world of secret passages and strange but familiar creatures. The perception of space would be vertical rather than horizontal, measured by density rather than distance. The hills on the horizon might be nameless but the immediate environment would be teeming with more places than appear on a modern road map of France.

Some people discovered the land on epic seasonal journeys that followed long-established routes (Chapter Eight), but the earliest voyages of discovery were always undertaken in the little
pays
that rarely extended for more than half a day’s walk in any direction.
Native perceptions of these worlds were often dismissed as superstitious fantasies or cited as proof that the religion of the Druids had never died out. But these primitive beliefs were not the worm-eaten legacy of a prehistoric age, nor were they peculiar to peasants and the countryside. They were the means by which most people discovered, explained and even enjoyed their world.