Round my House: notes of rural life in France in peace and war

Front matter

ROUND MY HOUSE. ROUND MY HOUSE NOTES OF RURAL LIFE IN FRANCE IN PEACE AND WAR BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON AUTHOR OF "THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE," " A PAINTER'S CAMP," " THE SYLVAN YEAR," ETC. (^uid potes alibi videre, quod hie non vides? Ec^e cœlum, et terra, et omnia elementa nam ex istis omnia sunt facta.— De Imitations, Lib. I. Cap. XX. SEELEY, JACKSON, AND HALLIDAY, 54, FLEET STREET LONDON. MDCCCLXXVI. The Right of Translation is reserved. WOODFALL AND KINDER, PRINTERS, MILFORD LANE, STRAND, LONDON, W.C.

Preface

. There are two kinds of books about foreign countries, those written by passing travellers and those written by fixed residents. Each of the two kinds has its peculiar merits, and neither of the two can escape its peculiar defects. This book is of the latter species. The fixed resident is certainly the person who ought to write about a foreign country, because, unless he be singularly unobservant, he will know much more about it than the passing traveller, and yet there are peculiar difficulties in his case. Habit, in course of time, makes things seem matters of course to him which would strike the passing tourist as interesting from their strangeness or delightful for their beauty. Every one knows that in course of time we all positively cease to see the pictures and furniture in the room which we constantly inhabit, so that a stranger will have a far livelier sense of their merits and defects than we can possibly have.

This is the great obstacle to writing about what we see con tinually — the freshness of the eye is wanting, it is gone for ever, and cannot be recovered. It is perhaps for this reason that almost all the books which are written on other countries are the result of, at most, a short Preface. VI residence. After a few months in a place we write about it, after many years we feel a disinclination to write, because we know it too well, and yet feel that we ought to know much more before publishing results and conclusions. In many cases there are also reasons of delicacy for not publishing what concerns the manners and customs of a place that one has lived in. Every author is aware that people have a passion for recog nizing themselves and their neighbours in print, a pas sion which goes to the most astonishing lengths, for people will select some character as unlike themselves as possible, and then complain of the unfaithfulness of the portrait.

The author of the present volume, like everybody who has written a novel, has had some experience of this. The one occupation of all his friends and acquaintances appeared to be the recognition of his characters as portraits, and the same character in the novel was detected by the cleverness of several different correspondents as a likeness of several different originals. Some correspondents even went so far as to recognize themselves in the literary picture, to acknow ledge that the satire was deserved, and promise amend ment, although the author had not once thought about them during the composition of his work.* Now, if * I am not sorn' to take this opportunity of observing that this habit of readers is based upon a completely erroneous conception of an author's mental processes. It is quite true that most ficti tious characters have been suggested, in some remote way, to begin with, by a living person, but no author with the least imagination stops at portraiture.

His imagination plays with the first sugges tion and develops from it something entirely different. It is narrated of a certain painter, celebrated for the beauty of his Madonnas, that he had no other model for them than a wrinkled Preface. VII people seek and find portraits of themselves and their neighbours in novels, how much more ready will they not be to discover such portraits in an avowed descrip tion of the manners and customs of the particular locality in which they live ! The author, it is true, might have recourse to certain artifices, not affecting the substantial truth of his descriptions in matters which it concerned his readers to know, and yet shield ing individuals. He might, for example, allowably describe a man so as to put his neighbours on a wrong scent, by making the fictitious person live in a new house when the real person lived in an old one, or by giving him red hair when nature had given him black.

Still, however skilfully this might be done, it would be better not to excite popular curiosity about people whose privacy ought to be respected. This consideration would of itself make a writer hesitate, in certain circumstances, before publishing a book in which there is so much painting from nature as there is in the present volume. It would be wrong in a Frenchman to publish a work of this kind about an English neighbourhood, because his book would be read in the neighbourhood itself, where people would recognize, or fancy that they recognized, the originals of his descriptions. When M. Taine wrote his " Notes on England " he had this inconvenience continually in view. But we may use much greater freedom in describing a French neighbourhood where there are no English residents, when the old man-servant.

This is a very perfect instance of the working of imagination. It needs some suggestions from the world of reality, but a very remote suggestion is enough. Preface. VIII book is addressed to English and American readers only. France is very near to England, but England is as remote from France as some province in the heart of China. A book written in Chinese, or in Egyptian hieroglyphics, or in Babylonian cuneiform characters, would have quite as good a chance of being read in this country " round my house " as a book written in English. It is, therefore, impossible that an)' persons* alluded to in the volume should be identified by any one. The English reader cannot identify them because the originals are unknown to him, and those who know the persons are ignorant of the language in which they are more or less accurately portrayed.

It is as if an English neighbourhood were to be described in Chinese, with the right of translation reserved. The Chinese author might go into detail without hurting anybody's feelings. These observations have appeared necessary because so few English readers are likely to realize the wonderful remoteness of England from rural France, and some might be disposed to accuse me of a want of delicacy, when in reality I have been at great pains so to manage matters that no private person alluded to will ever be identified, whilst if such identification were possible, the worst consequence of it would be to reveal some fact which everybody knows, as, for example, that such a gentleman's establishment consists of one woman-ser vant and two men, or that djeuner is his principal * Except the bishop, but it so happens that I was able to paint him as he is and yet observe the rule of nil nisi bonum without ever thinking about it.

Preface. IX repast. The general impression which the book will produce in England and America will be favourable to my French neighbours, who, whatever may be their faults, have qualities which will bear to be painted truthfully. I offer it as a small contribution to what ought to be the great work of international writers in our time, namely, the work of making different nations understand each other better. CONTENTS.

Chapter I

A tour in search of a house — Requirements for the picturesque and for convenience — Places not good to live in permanently — The French maison de campagne — Provence — The Rhone — Tournon and Tain — A dirty hotel — A wonderful maison de campagne — Vienne — Macon — Snugness and openness in landscape — Character of scenery at Macon — A neat and tidy French house — Town dwellings — Dismal places — The Saone — Voyage in a steamer — Abrupt termination of the voyage — The Saone near Lyons — Coilonges and Fontaines — Costume of the women of La Bresse. It happened a good many years ago that my wite and I set off on a tour in search of a house. I wanted a fine climate, or at least a climate in which I could count upon fine summers, and scenery interesting enough, and sufficiently varied, for a landscape-painter to work happily in it without going very far from his own home.

My wife, on her part, though quite willing to let me have my way in the choice of climate and scenery, had also requirements of her own with regard to house keeping. " We had lived together in a very beautiful but very out-of-the-way place in the Highlands of B House-keeping Difficulties. 2 Scotland, where we were literally twelve miles from a lemon, and forty from the nearest hairdresser ; whilst at certain seasons of the year there was not (in activity at least) such a functionary as a butcher in the whole county. Here we had learned the lesson, which nobody ever does learn except from actual experience, that a too distant retirement from the conveniences of civilized life, far from being favourable to projects of economy (as the inhabitants of large towns sometimes imagine), is on the contrary a cause of incessant expen diture, as unsatisfactory as it is unavoidable, unless, indeed, you choose to submit to the privations of a Highland shepherd, and live upon oatmeal and diseased meat.

I was the more willing to conform to my wife's house-keeping requirements, that I had observed for my own part how a life far from conve niences invades and breaks up the time of the master of the house, how he has always to be looking after details which a lady can scarcely attend to, and has to sacrifice time in frequent journeys to the distant town, all which may be rather pleasant than otherwise for men who are without occupation, but is vexatious in the extreme to the artist or homttic de lettrcs. In a word, the sort of life which we were determined to avoid was what may be called the colonial — that life which is led in its full perfection by the holder of a sheep-run in New Zealand. On the other hand, I had never been able to share the spirit of resignation with which so many landscape-painters submit to pass their days in the streets of cities, without ever seeing a blue or purple hill in the distance, or having any more direct Dominant Features of Scenery. 3 impression of sunset splendours than what is to be gained by observing that the chimney-pots of the opposite houses look somewhat redder than usual.

Nothing in the lives of landscape-painters whose biographies have been written appears to me more pathetic than a sentence in that of Chintreuil, when, in his penniless student days, literally suffering from hunger, he exclaimed, " Oh, if I had but 150 francs to go and live two months in the real country ! " Yet not all " the country " is suitable ground for a landscape-painter, and what is rich in material for one will be barren land for another. Neither is it the place which seems to him the most strikingly beautiful when he is travelling which will be the best for him to live in year after year. There are so many things to be considered in choosing a place for a long residence ! Some places have a strong dominant feature of a special kind, which is very interesting when the coach stops at the wayside inn and you have half an hour to go and look about you, but which would be either indifferent or tiresome to a fixed resident.

The valley of Chamouni, for example, would be a very bad place to choose, because Mont Blanc is far too dominant there ; you cannot get out of its way ; you must either think of hardly anything else in landscape, or else become indifferent to landscape beauty altogether, as the Alpine peasants are. There are natural objects which interfere with the individuality of a painter who lives too near them, and it is as difficult to work independently in their presence as it would be to pursue intellectual labours in the continual presence of some overwhelming B A House in Glen Coe. 4 human potentate, such as the Czar of Russia, for example. Another great objection to a place is, not to be able easily to get out of it. A perfect country is one which, in a day's drive, or half a day's, gives you an entirely new horizon, so that you may feel in a different region and have all the refreshment of a total change of scene within a few miles of your own home.

There are veryr many places in the world where this is quite impossible, some dominant characteristic of the landscape pursues you wherever you go, for thirty or forty miles, and you must undertake a serious journey to get under other influences. There is a house in the middle of Glen Coe, about equally distant from its two extremities, which seems a very undesirable place of residence, for it is only just possible to get out of the glen and come back again in the course of a summer's day, whilst every excursion, in either direction, must of necessity be in the same scenery. So I suppose that on the plateau out of which rises the great white cone of Chimborazo you may travel for many miles, whilst, for any variety of scenery that you get, you might as well remain quietly under the shadow of one cactus, if a cactus gives any shadow.

It is a very amusing, yet at the same time a very fatiguing business, to travel in search of a house, especially when you are not tied down to a limited extent of country. We had the whole of eastern France to explore, south of Sens, and our impression at first was that our only embarrassment would be in having too many delightful residences to choose from, but we soon perceived our error. The house was to be a maison de The " Maison de Campagne." 5 campagne, and the difficulty of finding one to suit our tastes and purse at the same time will be better understood when I have explained what a maison de campagne is. The reader will please observe that I leave the words in the original tongue, without any attempt at translation, and the reason for this is, that a translation would convey quite a wrong idea of the habitation to be de scribed.

Maison de campagne does not mean " country house," nor anything like it. It answers much more to the English shooting or fishing lodge or cottage. It generally belongs to somebody with a moderate income, who lives habitually in a town, but likes to have a little place in the country on his own estate, where he may go and spend a few weeks at a time during the fine weather, and hear the thrushes and the nightin gales, whilst his children may run about in the fields. A very well-to-do Frenchman told me lately, that he was going to build a maison de campagne — a " chiteau," as he laughingly called it — on the most beautiful site on a very beautiful estate which he inherited last year. He has planned it all himself in the most original manner. There is to be a large hall as the general living-room, with cells and cupboards round it, and the hall is to open on a terrace with a glorious view over a rich expanse of country.

The dwelling is not to have more than one story. The owner and deviser will arrange everything exactly according to his own fancy, and not at all in obedience to any kind of fashion or conventionalism, so that every time he goes there he may feel as free from the tyranny of " social pressure " We avoid Provence. 6 as Robinson Crusoe in his castle. This is exactly the Frenchman's idea of the maison de campagne. He thinks of it as a place where life is to be rather rough, where he is to sit on cheap chairs, or a hard form per haps, and sleep anyhow, in a cupboard or on the floor, or at best in a little cell ; but where, as a compensation, he may wear any kind of old clothes, and work in his garden, or roam about in his woods to his heart's con tent. The reader will at once perceive how difficult it is to find a maison de campagne fit to live in all the year round as one's principal or only residence.

There is, indeed, another class of country house — the chateau, which is often roomy enough, though seldom particularly comfortable ; but you will not often find a chateau to let, and when. you do it is likely to be encumbered with land and gardens, which are a source of expense rather than either pleasure or profit. The sort of house we wanted did not belong to either of these categories. We required more space, and better arrangements, than are found usually in the first, and wanted our house to be more compact and less expensive than the second. Our tour began on the line between Paris and the Mediterranean. I did not intend to go so far south as to get into the dreadfully long, arid summers of Pro vence. Avignon, for example, was too far south for our taste, though we knew that neighbourhood well.

All that Provencal country is delightful before the dry heat sets in, and it is a very rich country for an artist, especially if he has a hearty appreciation of old buildings, rugged bits of foreground, and clear mountainous distances ; but in summer it is better to be farther My Rhone Scheme. 7 north. My first plan, therefore, was to choose some locality south of Lyons, yet north of Montelimart, in the immediate neighbourhood of some town upon the Rhone. Of all the French rivers the Rhone is, at the same time, that which is best worth illustrating, and that which has been least exhausted by artists. It was also the river towards which I felt the strongest per sonal attraction, which is of the very utmost importance for the interest of artistic work, as no artist can ever interest others in subjects which do not interest himself* My artistic scheme was, therefore, to have easy access to the whole of the Rhone scenery, and in this I counted much upon the assistance of the rail way line from Lyons to Marseilles, for the railway always keeps within a moderate distance of the river, and so gives access to many points of interest, whilst the interval between one station and another, or be tween any station and the river, could always be easily traversed on foot, or in the common conveyances of the place.

Another great advantage of the railway was, that if I chose to descend the river in a small boat, the railway would take charge of it on my return. Besides this, an artist living close to the Rhone would have the advantage of the Rhone * Amongst the innumerable doctrines about what artists ought to do which are doubtful and uncertain (their uncertainty being proved by the success of artists who disobey them), a few appear to be confirmed by the general experience, and this is one of them. An interesting picture is always a picture of something which the artist has either passionately loved or at least cared about in earnest. But it is not by any means so sure that the converse is also true. The strongest affection for a place will not enable us to paint it in an interesting manner. My R/ione Scheme. 8 steamers, which would stop and land him anywhere at his convenience.

If the reader will kindly enter into this project from the artistic point of view, he will at once perceive how much was involved in it. A landscape-painter may be said — in a peculiar sense, of course, yet to him at least in a very real and intelligible sense — to possess the land he lives in, so far, at least, as he can appreciate its beauty ; just as a student who lives near a public library possesses the library, or at least so much of it as he can use and understand. And the longer I live, the more profoundly am I convinced that this kind of pos session is the truest and most satisfying kind of owner ship ; nay, even that it is the only ownership, which being infinite in its nature, is adequate to our infinite desires. To me, a house by the Rhone, near a railway and steamboat station, meant the possession of the Rhone itself, with all its crags, and castles, and pic turesque old cities, and those leagues of lovely or noble landscape which lie between one city and another.

If the reader will glance at a map of that part of the country through which the Rhone flows, he will find that, for part of its long journey, it passes between the departments of the Ardeche and the Drome. The railway follows it all along, on the left bank, and from this great main line there are now two lines to Grenoble, one from St. Rambert, and the other from the Isere, both in the department of the Drome. Between these two branches, and about fourteen miles north of Valence, there are two little towns exactly opposite each other, with the Rhone flowing between Tournon and Tain. 9 them ; that in the Ardeche is Tournon, that in the Drome is Tain. Now it seemed to me that to live somewhere very near there, would be in the highest degree favourable to certain artistic projects, for I should, at the same time, be close to one of the noblest and most interesting rivers in Europe, and have easy access to the most magnificent mountain scenery, by the help of those lines of railway.

So the first place we went to was Tain ; that, at least, was the station, but we went to the hotel at Tournon, and that hotel must be mentioned here because it had a very important influence on our destiny. If that hotel had been clean, we should have stayed there patiently and explored the country in every direction, the end of which exploration might possibly have been the discovery of some suitable dwelling ; but the hotel was not clean — indeed it was so exceptionally dirty, that it required great courage to stay in it a single night. What floors ! what walls ! what a staircase ! and what servants ! There was space enough, the house was not badly built, there was no especial difficulty about being clean, and as for water, the Rhone flowed swiftly by ; but the place was given over to uncleanliness, as if it were a foretaste of Italy or Spain.

It is scarcely too much to say that the floors inside the house were like the flags in a Manchester street when a fog has saturated the soot ; the walls had not been papered, nor the paint washed for years, and the women were in a state not to be described without an intolerable realism. There was one apron especially — but let me refrain ! It is many years since then, and A House by the Rhone. 10 that apron is now purified. It has passed into a higher state of existence ; it has become paper, perhaps the whitest and smoothest of papers in some rich man's library, in an edition de luxe. Just opposite Tournon rises the world-famous hill of the Hermitage, where the noble wine is grown. As every inch of the ground is of almost fabulous value, the hill-side, which is very steep, has long been arti ficially cut into terraces supported by walls, which spoil its beauty entirely.

Behind Tournon, the road leads up a hill ; we followed it from curiosity, and soon came upon a magnificent view of the course of the Rhone and the snowy Alps of Dauphine. That was a sight to compensate for the ugliness of the vineyards by the river. But there was no house up there, and if there had been one, the situation would have been particu larly inconvenient. After much seeking, we discovered at length a genuine " maison de campagne " on the left bank of the Rhone, and a wonderful little building it was. How miserable it looked ! It had the honour, indeed, of being a detached residence, but this only made it look the more wretched as it stood alone in its desola tion and its nakedness. It was all out of repair, and not a door nor a shutter fitted. I rather think there was a pepper-box turret, which made the owner call it a chateau, and ask an absurd rent ; but the fact is that all the rooms were so small that the whole mansion together would have gone into a good-sized studio.

Then we saw reason to suspect that, during the inun dations which display so much energy on the shores of the Rhone, the lower rooms had the advantage of being Dirty Hotels. 11 under water ; and we observed also that in the heat of summer, which in those parts is sufficiently intense, the inhabitant of the mansion had not a tree big enough to shelter him, but would have to set up an awning, or a big umbrella, like a negro king. In spring he would be disquieted by his neighbour the Rhone ; and in summer he would dwell in the full glare of a southern sun in a desert of burning sand. The mere idea of living in such a place brought on feelings of depression which made the whole neighbourhood seem dreary to us, and we were in such great haste to get out of the dirty hotel that we were rather glad not to have found a dwelling-place.

W7e received an impression that we were too far south for cleanliness ; and this was confirmed by another remarkably unpleasant hotel at Vienne, where the rooms were stifling and dark, and looked out upon a horrible little yard. I confess to being excessively impressionable by the aspect of places — indeed I am so to a degree which far transcends the limits of what is reasonable. The unpleasant southern hotels really had very little to do with our project of residence, for we did not intend to live in them ; yet they discouraged us, and put us almost into low spirits. The dwellings which we had examined seemed to offer sufficient accommodation for a bachelor with one servant and a cat, but as for lodging a family, and finding room for a library and a studio besides, there seemed to be no way of accomplishing it except building.

Still, when I think of that Rhone project, which seemed so magnificently attractive when first indulged in as a dream, I am even yet surprised at the We go to Macon. 12 facility with which it was abandoned. We had ex amined very few places, we had spent very little time in seeking along the river, when we retreated north wards, as fast as the train would carry us, with a sense of relief, as if we had escaped from danger, or at least avoided committing an imprudence. There were three departments, some distance to the north of Lyons, in which we felt much mere at home than in the Ardeche. We had friends in the Cote d'Or, and my wife's father had been connected politically with the departments of Saone-et-Loire and the Doubs, having been a representative for the first and prefect of the second.

It does not require very much to determine a preference amongst places one knows very little about, so this bygone political connection gave us a sort of reason for examining these departments rather more particularly. We began with Macon. Lovers of art will remember it because of Turner's beautiful picture of the vintage there, an admirable ideal work, which does not bear the slightest resemblance to the place. Nobody, however, who knows how Turner worked, how he used nature as a suggestion merely, and not as an original to be copied in sac-simile, will ever be so far misguided as to place the least confidence in him as a topographer, nor will he ever feel disappointed because places are not so poetical as Turner represented them to be. Our impressions here were more encouraging than they had been at Tournon and Vienne.

We had spacious rooms in a rather large and airy hotel over looking the river, the servants were clean and attentive, Mont Blanc from Macon. 13 and we felt ourselves approaching more nearly to the regions of comparative cleanliness. Here, at any rate, were space and air. The broad Saone flowed slowly beneath our windows, with stately regiments of tall poplars on the other side — rather too orderly to be verj7 entertaining to the eye — and beyond the poplars stretched the plain that goes to the foot of the distant mountain lands of Jura and Savoy. The weather was hazy during our stay at Macon, but it added greatly to the glory of the rooms we occupied to believe the lively landlady when she told us that there was a fine view of Mont Blanc from those very windows. If the reader will only bring himself to believe that Mont Blanc is visible from his own window, he will find that this faith communicates a certain grandeur and dignity to his room, which are well worth having, however illusory.