And Perhaps, As He Raises His
Head And Sees The Forest Lying Like A Coast-Line Of Low Hills Along
The Sea-Level Of The Plain, Perhaps Forest And Chateau Hold No
Unsimilar Place In His Affections.
If the chateau was my lord's, the forest was my lord the king's;
neither of them for this poor Jacques.
If he thought to eke out
his meagre way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or
for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole
department, from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was
a high-born lord, down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant
like himself, and wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform.
For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of
fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or
circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be
whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun,
and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where
Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to
market.
And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more
hares and rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to
trample it down. My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid
out seven francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting
it with a silken leash to hang about his shoulder. The hounds have
been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert
in the Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has made a
speciality of the health of hunting-dogs. In the grey dawn the
game was turned and the branch broken by our best piqueur. A rare
day's hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly flourish, sound the
bien-aller with all your lungs. Jacques must stand by, hat in
hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across his
field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not
been. If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows
but he may fall in favour with my lord; who knows but his son may
become the last and least among the servants at his lordship's
kennel - one of the two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at
night among the hounds? {4}
For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only
warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of
sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers
and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some
ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison. In these
dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of
burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and
fluttering pensions drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk
gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, whence,
from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the coming
and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but
an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide
all change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. Often
there was none left alive, when they returned, to show the old
divisions of field from field. And yet, as times went, when the
wolves entered at night into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz
was passing by with a company of demons like himself, even in these
caves and thickets there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.
Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may
have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest,
and noble by old associations. These woods have rung to the horns
of all the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They
have seen Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from
Egypt; Francis I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his
train; and Peter of Russia following his first stag. And so they
are still haunted for the imagination by royal hunts and
progresses, and peopled with the faces of memorable men of yore.
And this distinction is not only in virtue of the pastime of dead
monarchs.
Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of
men, have here left their note, here taken shape in some
significant and dramatic situation. It was hence that Gruise and
his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here,
booted and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met
the Pope beside a woodland cross. Here, on his way to Elba not so
long after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words
of passionate farewell to his soldiers. And here, after Waterloo,
rather than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful
regiments burned that memorial of so much toil and glory on the
Grand Master's table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout
priest consumes the remnants of the Host.
IN THE SEASON
Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
bornage stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain
small and very quiet village. There is but one street, and that,
not long ago, was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between
the doorsteps. As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer the
beginning of the wood, you will arrive at last before an inn where
artists lodge. To the door (for I imagine it to be six o'clock on
some fine summer's even), half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of
people have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and
waiting the omnibus from Melun.
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