The Discovery of France (27 page)

Some sub-species probably died out before they were discovered.
Shortly before the Revolution, hunters captured a young lynx near Luz-Saint-Sauveur after killing its mother. Until then, few had suspected that lynxes lived as far south as the Pyrenees. The animals were still being shot in the Vercors in 1820 but disappeared before the end of the nineteenth century. Wild cats were rare by the 1830s, though surprisingly common in the Bois de Boulogne on the edge of Paris. Rhône beavers – and home-grown beaver hats – were on the verge of extinction in 1840.

More cunning and determination were deployed in the eradication of species than in the extermination of Protestants in the Cévennes. Eagle hunters had themselves lowered on plank swings until they were level with the eyrie. A blazing torch disposed of the parent and the eaglets were stuffed into a bag. When Chateaubriand reached the foot of the Mont Cenis pass in 1803, he was offered an orphaned eaglet:

Edible migrating birds were trapped in nets throughout Gascony and Provence. At the end of September, while flocks of doves from Scandinavia and the Jura were heading for the Basque Country, villagers in the Pyrenees were erecting giant poles. In a tiny crow’s nest on top of the tripod of poles, a man scanned the horizon. The other catchers hid behind leafy screens. The man in the crow’s nest held a flat piece of wood carved into the profile of a flying bird of prey. When the flock was a hundred yards away, he hurled the wooden bird into the air: the flock dipped and flew into the nets. The job of killing was left to women, who could exterminate several hundred birds in a few minutes by biting their necks.

In Provence, where songbird stew was a popular delicacy, nightingales and warblers, tied together by the beak, could be bought at market. Birds were thought to devour olives and other crops. Until the public-information campaigns of the mid-nineteenth century, and the law against stealing birds’ eggs and destroying nests (1862), no one seems to have realized that birds ate harmful insects. Some people planted berry bushes at the door so that they could lean out
of the window and kill the birds with a stick. As early as 1764, on a tour through southern France, Tobias Smollett noticed something like an ecological disaster:

Most large wild mammals were doomed, long before the human population increased. Deforestation and hard winters drove huge packs of wolves down from forests and mountains, well into the parts of France that were supposed to have been tamed and civilized. They moved in single file, which made it hard to guess their number from the tracks in the snow. The peninsula formed by the winding Seine between Rouen and Jumièges in Normandy was inundated with wolves in the late summer of 1842: they could be heard from the hills above the industrial city.

Tales of werewolves reflected real fears. In
Madame Bovary
, ‘wolves running in the fields at night’ are one of the reasons why young Emma finds the countryside ‘somewhat less than amusing’. A law passed after the Revolution put a price on every wolf, payable to the hunter on presentation of the animal’s head to the Prefect: twenty livres for a cub, forty for an adult, fifty for a pregnant wolf, and a hundred and fifty for a known man-killer. In the 1880s, more than a thousand wolves were still being killed every year. Groups of parishes organized
battues
, thrashing through the undergrowth with pikes and staves to chase away the wolves and boars. These beats continued even when the threat was past, and they are still important social events: in autumn in the Jura, the entire male population of some villages can be seen posted at regular intervals on a winding hill road, waiting, gun in hand, for the boar to be flushed from the forest.

*

I
N THE MOUNTAINS
, the greatest threat to wild animals was not self-defence or sociability but the human propensity for self-destruction. Chamois hunters clearly suffered from a kind of addiction. ‘A wild and haggard air makes them stand out in a crowd, even when they are out of costume. It is probably this evil physiognomy that makes some superstitious peasants believe them to be sorcerers’ (Saussure). Like the hunters of precious stones and crystals, who scrabbled about in fresh landslides, chamois hunters risked their lives for almost nothing. They started up the mountain after dark, teetered across the groaning glaciers and tried to climb higher than the chamois herds before the sun came up. Some men were gone for days, with just a pocketful of cheese and some bread, drawn further and further into the snowy wastes by the fleeing chamois. Often, the climb was so long and hard that only the skin of the animal could be brought back.

Every year, men fell to their death or perished on the ice. Some were found, years later, perfectly preserved. Most of them expected to die young. Saussure met a hunter from Sixt in Savoy whose father and grandfather had died while hunting and who called his game-bag his ‘shroud’. Two years later, he fell off a precipice. Down in the village, frightened wives tried to stay awake because hunters who died on the mountain were thought to appear in dreams to ask their loved ones for a proper burial.

Some wild animals survived because humans wanted them to remain wild or found them too small and troublesome to be worth taming: the black Camargue bulls, which became more lucrative in the mid-nineteenth century when Napoleon I I I’s empress Eugénie lent her support to Spanish bullfighting, and the small, speedy white horses that lived in herds of thirty or forty in the dune-deserts of the Landes, the salt delta of the Camargue and on the plains near Fréjus.

By 1840, when roads, pine plantations and irrigation channels were eating away at the wilderness, only a few hundred wild horses remained in the Landes. Did the threat of extinction sharpen their wits, or was it simply that the most intelligent survived the longest? A horse who was known to the villagers of the Arcachon Basin as ‘Napoléon’ had spent two years in captivity. He escaped to the land between the sea and the marshes where the fine dune-grass grew and
applied the skills he had learned from humans to a herd of his own. Napoléon’s horses watched for invaders from the heights of the dunes. When the hunters approached, the herd moved to a higher ridge which the domesticated horses, weighed down by riders and slowed by sand, could never climb. When the humans encircled the sandy fortress, the herd arranged itself into a wedge formation, with foals in front and mares behind, and charged downhill towards the weakest point of the circle.

Nothing more is known about this animal resistance movement. Napoléon may have died in the dunes, or he may have ended his life in a city. By the middle of the century, there were more white horses working in the army and pulling taxicabs in Paris than living free in the Landes.

*

T
HESE CHANGES OCCURRED
so quickly that they made no distinct impression on the human population. Rather than dismay at the extinction of species, there was a gradual, creeping disappointment, a dull awareness that wildness had only to be discovered to disappear. In 1910, when the Tour de France first crossed the high Pyrenees, newspaper reporters imagined, half hoping, that marauding bears might affect the outcome of the race by eating some of the riders. The riders flogged themselves across the mountains on rocky roads long since deserted by the bears.
²³
At Nîmes, on the seventh stage of the Tour, a frisky dog caused a serious accident, but the only lethal animal attack came from a jelly-fish during the rest day at Nice.

As animals collectively played a smaller role in human society, individual animal heroes came to the fore. Sympathetic acquaintance with a separate species was replaced by the projection of human traits onto animals. The movement of human beings to towns and cities was mirrored by the exodus of animals to the countryside. In the mid-nineteenth century, for the first time, thousands of people were being born who would almost never see a living cow.

The most famous animal hero produced by this colonization of the animal kingdom was a dog called Barry who worked at the monastery on the Great Saint Bernard Pass. As early as the eighth century, the Saint Bernard dogs had been trained to find travellers who were lost in the fog and snow, which makes their paramedical profession one of the oldest in Europe. All but one were wiped out by an epidemic in 1820. The sole survivor was mated with a breed related to the Pyrenean sheepdog. Unlike most dogs, the Saint Bernards yearned to go outside when a storm was brewing and when drifting snow was reinforcing the grey walls of their fortress. They not only patrolled the pass and sought out helpless travellers, they also took preventive action: they had been known to set off in pursuit of people who passed the monastery and who seemed, in the dogs’ estimation, to be unlikely to complete their journey.

Most engravings show the Saint Bernard dogs carrying a neat little brandy-cask on their collar. In fact, they carried a complete survival kit: a basket of food, a gourd of wine and a bundle of wool ets. They had a precise knowledge of the whole region long before it was accurately mapped by humans and were capable of running for help to the nearest village if the monastery was further away.

Strictly speaking, Barry, whose name means ‘bear’, was Swiss-Italian, but he was born in the French Empire and became a French national hero. He had saved a monk by warning him of an avalanche; he had rescued a small child by persuading it to climb onto his back and carrying it to the monastery; in 1800, he came close to changing the course of European history by refusing to allow Napoleon’s soldiers to pass until they put away their muskets. In 1900, eighty-six years after his death, he was given an impressive memorial at the entrance to the dog cemetery at Asnières-sur-Seine on the edge of Paris. The inscription says, ‘He saved the life of 40 people and was killed by the 41st!’ The story of this forty-first rescue turned him into a canine martyr. One wintry night, an exhausted man was struggling up the mountain when a huge, powerful animal suddenly bounded towards him through the blizzard. The man managed to crack its skull with his stick, and although Barry was taken to the hospice, he died soon after.

This was the legend of Barry the Saint Bernard. In reality, he retired happily to Berne in 1812 and died of old age two years later. To honour his extraordinary career, he was stuffed and given pride of place in Berne Museum where he stood in a glass cabinet filled with stoats and topped with a spread-eagled owl. Later, his skull was modified to make him look more like a modern Saint Bernard, just as his acts were altered to make him as human as possible. Barry had worked in the wild but after his death he became a hero of the pet age. He showed that, like savages and peasants, animals could be trained to accept the moral values of French civilization.

The Dog Cemetery at Asnières-sur-Seine was created in 1899 when a new law allowed animals to be buried ‘a hundred metres from human habitation and under at least one metre of earth’. Barry’s monument now towers above all the Fifis, Kikis and Poopys who provided psychological support rather than milk, warmth and manure. These were humanimals rather than creatures of the untamed land. By then, wealthy French dogs could travel in special railway carriages. In 1902, the Paris depositary for sick animals that had turned into a festering heap of vermin was replaced by a proper hospital on the edge of the city at Gennevilliers. Three years later, the dogs of Paris had their own ambulance. An Anti-Vivisection Society was founded in 1903, and in 1905, one of the proudest symbols of the new relationship between animals and humans appeared in the streets of Paris: dogs wearing special goggles and riding in the passenger seats of automobiles.

*

F
AR FROM THE
dog-fouled streets of modern Paris, something still remains of the world where humans and animals lived in harmonious independence.

Sixty thousand horses, cows and sheep still migrate in spring to the Pyrenees. In autumn, large flocks can be seen flowing down from the Alps towards the plains of Provence. Transhumance – the movement of livestock to summer or winter pastures – is now seen as a precious reminder of a heroic past. Government funding is available for farmers who move their herds and flocks across the land. But today’s
Alpine sheep rarely travel more than five miles downhill. They complete their journey in trucks and often suffer from the sudden change in temperature.

A century ago, some of these journeys lasted for weeks. The length of the journey was determined by the configuration of the land. The high summer pastures of the Jura and the Vosges and the empty plateaux of the Aubrac and the Causses could be reached in a few days from towns and villages. Much longer journeys were made from the southern Landes and northern Spain into the Pyrenees, from Languedoc north into the Cévennes, and from Provence into the Alps.

The main animal watershed was Provence. Ancient routes fanned out from the desert of the Crau like a river system. Some went west to Languedoc, where grassland was rented out after the grape harvest. Others headed up into the Cévennes and the Cantal for more than two hundred miles. Most of the Provençal routes were aimed at the distant Alps: up the Rhône, across the Pont du Gard, then east towards the glaciers of the Oisans; around the north face of Mont Ventoux or up the valley of the Durance towards Gap; east across the wild plains of the Var towards Digne, or further south, within sight of the sea, through Nice and on to Piedmont.