They Wear Gaudy Shawls, White Caps With A Gay Ribbon About
The Head, And Sometimes A Black Felt Brigand Hat Above The Cap; And
So They Give The Street Colour And Brightness And A Foreign Air.
A
while ago, when England largely supplied herself from this district
with the lace called torchon, it was not unusual to earn five
francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in
London.
Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever and
industrious work-woman to earn from three to four in the week, or
less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The
tide of prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and
left nobody the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains,
kept the men in idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to
sweethearting and a merry life. From week's end to week's end it
was one continuous gala in Monastier; people spent the day in the
wine-shops, and the drum or the bagpipes led on the bourrees up to
ten at night. Now these dancing days are over. 'Il n'y a plus de
jeunesse,' said Victor the garcon. I hear of no great advance in
what are thought the essentials of morality; but the bourree, with
its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and alert and rustic
figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly remembered as a
custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair shall you
hear a drum discreetly in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company
singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at the
change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence
so much mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves
have not entirely forgiven our country-women; and I think they take
a special pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the
town, called L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were
arrested and driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on
the wall.
From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and
pickpockets have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the
occasion. Every Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to
buy apples, to attend mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of
which there are no fewer than fifty in this little town. Sunday
wear for the men is a green tailcoat of some coarse sort of
drugget, and usually a complete suit to match. I have never set
eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings, there bulges; and
the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned into
a mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday business
with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have
seen a woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before,
wheezing, catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing;
and yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to
seek help, and had the week been twice as long, she would have
waited still. There was a canonical day for consultation; such was
the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study to
conform.
Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in
polite concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or
two hours cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a
gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe. The Courrier (such is the
name of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon and arrive
at Monastier in good on the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier
in good time for a six-o'clock dinner. But the driver dares not
disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and
again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking
the advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous
business of stage-coaching than we are used to see it.
As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill top rises
and falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only
to see new and father ranges behind these. Many little rivers run
from all sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from
Monastier, bears the great name of Loire. The mean level of the
country is a little more than three thousand feet above the sea,
which makes the atmosphere proportionally brisk and wholesome.
There is little timber except pines, and the greater part of the
country lies in moorland pasture. The country is wild and tumbled
rather than commanding; an upland rather than a mountain district;
and the most striking as well as the most agreeable scenery lies
low beside the rivers. There, indeed, you will find many corners
that take the fancy; such as made the English noble choose his
grave by a Swiss streamlet, where nature is at her freshest, and
looks as young as on the seventh morning. Such a place is the
course of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and
thence downwards till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds
singing; a place for lovers to frequent. The name of the river was
perhaps suggested by the sound of its passage over the stones; for
it is a great warbler, and at night, after I was in bed at
Monastier, I could hear it go singing down the valley till I fell
asleep.
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