The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  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.

  This was called laka ar c’hoz (putting the muck in), and it did the victim no great harm. But the other trick was worse. In this one, the woman left free would split the end of a thick stick, then with her two hands she would pry it apart the way you open a trap, and fit it onto the organis generationis ex pace per hominis. This was called lakad ar woaskeres (putting on pressure). It was done in full daylight and right out in the fields in front of everyone, in front of gangs of children clapping and screaming with laughter.

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

  *

  SCENES 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’.

  ‘But why, instead of a horse, do not you keep another cow?’

  ‘Oh, my husband could not carry his produce so well without a horse; and asses are little used in the country.’

  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 comparin
g 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

  SOME 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.

  *

  ONE MORNING IN THE late winter of 1858, a fourteen-year-old girl left the dirty, slum-ridden Pyrenean town where she had grown up and set off along the torrential river called the Gave de Pau. Despite her chronic asthma, she walked for ten miles, past slimy limestone caverns, watermills and chapels, a hamlet built by a colony of cagots, and the nail-makers’ forges at Saint-Pé. At last, she came to an ivy-covered bridge. On the other side were a vast grey church and a wood that was occupied by a permanent fair. A noisy, festive crowd was buying cakes and rosaries, singing songs, staring at gaudy pictures of the blessed Virgin, evil Jews and Roman soldiers, and half-listening to gesticulating priests who harangued them in Bearnese. For the girl, the shrine at Bétharram lay at the outer limits of the world. She had just enough time to pray at the shrine, buy a rosary and return home before dark.

  Like the thousands of other pilgrims who went to Bétharram every year – many of them, like the girl, on foot and in rags, but some in gorgeous clothes and carriages – she was hoping for a miracle. Her father had lost an eye while roughening up a millstone with a chisel, and then the new owner of the mill had turned them out. A year before Bernadette’s visit to Bétharram, her father had been accused of stealing two bags of flour. Winter work was hard to find and the family had been forced to move from the district where the cagots once lived, to the medieval prison that was now used to house the indigent. They were cold, hungry and desperate. There were other shrines much closer to home, but the Bétharram Virgin was known to be more potent and prolific than all the others.

  The caves of Bétharram had been a holy site long before cults of the Virgin Mary began to appear in the Pyrenees in the Middle Ages, but its national fame dated from the early sixteenth century, when two shepherds saw a light in some bushes and found the tiny statue of a woman. For the first twenty-two years, the statue had performed more than twenty miracles a year. The name, ‘Beth-Arram’ (‘beautiful branch’), referred to the branch that miraculously appeared when a shepherdess fell into the river. Bernadette Soubirous, the girl who visited the shrine that day in February, was also a shepherdess, and it was reasonable to expect a special favour from the Virgin.

  A few days later, Bernadette, her sister and a friend were gathering firewood and bones by the river between the forest and the town. Here, the water had created a network of caverns and strange stalactitic formations. The caverns were associated with oracles and demons. Carved stones, arrowheads and even human bones had been found there. But they also attracted tourists in search of natural wonders. George Sand had visited them in 1825:

  The entrance to these grottos is admirable. I went ahead on my own and was thrilled to find myself in a magnificent hall supported by enormous masses of rock that looked like Gothic pillars.

  The scenic grottos of Lourdes were a valuable resource for the scruffy little town. Lourdes lay on the pilgrim route to Bétharram and on the tourist route to the spas. The local chemist had been noted in guidebooks since the time of Napoleon for his delicious syrups and chocolate confectionery. But Lourdes’s only other attraction was a gloomy fortress. It had no healing waters to attract wealthy invalids, and its rival, Argelès, had won the battle to become the administrative centre of the region.

  The three girls reached the part of the river where it was joined by a small canal, at the cave called Massabielle, which means ‘Old Rock’. This was common land, where poor people gathered fuel and swineherds brought their pigs. As she was removing her stockings to cross the canal, Bernadette heard a sudden gust of wind coming from the cave. Looking up, a few feet above the entrance, she saw a tiny figure dressed in white. It was no taller than herself (four f
oot seven inches). It wore a blue sash and a yellow rose on each foot. She later described it as ‘uo pétito damisèla’ (in French, une petite demoiselle). The figure reminded her of a twelve-year-old girl she knew who often wore a white dress.

  As usual when a Virgin appeared, there was great excitement in the region. Over the next six weeks, followed by an ever larger crowd, Bernadette saw the demoiselle another seventeen times. She revealed to her the existence of a spring in the cavern floor and told her that a chapel should be built on the spot. On the sixteenth visit, she was persuaded to ask the figure what she was. She told her, in the local dialect, ‘Que soy era immaculada councepciou.’ She had no idea what the mysterious words meant, though she would have heard them when she was taught the catechism. (This was in 1858. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had been proclaimed in 1854 by Pope Pius IX and promulgated in Lourdes in 1855.)

  Some people thought that they knew better than the girl herself what she had seen. The local newspaper called the apparition a ‘lady’, which led some to suppose that the little pauper had been impressed by an elegant tourist or one of the local beauties – perhaps the newspaper editor’s fiancée or the chemist’s wife, who was known as ‘la Belle Chocolatière’ because she bought her clothes in Paris. But Bernadette had a very different creature in mind. Later, she became quite angry when painters and sculptors depicted the tiny, child-like apparition as a tall, well-fed lady in corsets and crinolines, well past puberty and more likely to be at home in a Paris salon than in a damp provincial cave.