I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion,
that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party.
Again, coming from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great
empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the road.
The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking
of his whip. He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet it was
impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the comer of a hill,
the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night. At the time,
people said it was the devil qui s'amusait a faire ca.
I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.
The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of
thing than formerly. 'C'est difficile,' he added, 'a expliquer.'
When we were well up on the moors and the Conductor was trying some
road-metal with the gauge -
'Hark!' said the foreman, 'do you hear nothing?'
We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the
east, brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
'It is the flocks of Vivarais,' said he.
For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
pasture on these grassy plateaux.
Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl,
one spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently
making lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a
panic and put out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a
distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of
the honesty of our intentions.
The Conductor told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled
from him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read
in these uncouth timidities.
The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time.
Houses are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail
of their own fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a
bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even
thus equipped he takes the road with terror. All day the family
sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally
without work or diversion. The father may carve a rude piece of
furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets
in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It is not
for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain
habitations.
