Folk-Lore Record/Volume 1/The Folk-lore of France
THE FOLK-LORE OF FRANCE.
HE folk-lore of a nation comprehends all the "culture," if the term may be used, that the people has created out of its own resources. The official religion, and the printed or written literature of a people, may have their germs in what was once folk-lore, in the store of ideas and traditions which, as far as our knowledge goes, may be called universal. There is a point at which we lose ourselves in the attempt to trace usages and stories to their source. We cannot even guess how the human fancy first invented these possible seeds of all mythology, the märchen or nursery tales which we heard from our own nurses, which are taken from the mouths of the crones of savage tribes, and which meet us again, transfigured and splendid, in the highest poetry of the German and Celtic races, or are breathed to us "softly, through the flutes of the Grecians." When one investigates the folk-lore of a modern nation like France, one asks (1) how much do the people of the nation retain of the primitive store; (2) how have they handled it, what impress of the peculiar national genius have they lent to ideas which are common to them with the rest of the world? Thus in France it is desirable to study the poetry of the people, the ballads handed from mother to child, without break, from an antiquity in which no one cared to know or remember the name of the author. How much of this treasure of ballads is common to other European peoples, and what again is the peculiar note of French, as distinguished from Romaic, Spanish, Scotch, Danish, German, and other folk-songs? The same question occurs as to märchen or fairy tales. Are the fairy tales of France refined and courtly, as they might be if borrowed from Perrault's and Madame D'Aulnoy's collections, or are they homely, like the Irish and Scotch nursery legends; or grandiose, imaginative, and confused, like the Gaelic stories; or humorous and kindly, like those which Sir G. Dasent translated from the Norse; or savage, like Castren's Samoyede examples; or full of such strange seven-headed monsters as the Slavonic narrators delight in? How many of the old "radicals" or fictitious "formulæ" noted by Von Halm and others remain? What has the native French taste added to or taken away from the märchen as Tartars and Zulus, and modern and ancient Greeks know or knew them? Questions of the same sort present themselves when we think of superstitious beliefs and superstitious ceremonies. How much is borrowed from the Church by the people, what has the people lent to the Church, what remains of the earliest rituals and of the observances of fetishism, of paganism, of solar worship, or of the cult of animals? If we had knowledge and skill enough we might find, in the study of these problems, the spiritual history of the French people. We should see them in their points of contact with other examples of humanity, from the naked Maori to the English peasant. We should be able to say to what extent the people are really impressed by the teaching of the learned classes and the priesthood. We should even know how far the character of the natives of one part of France differs from that of the natives of another district; we should detect the influence of the Provençal and the Teutonic genius, of the Celt and of the Roman. In this place, and with the rather scanty materials at command, it is only possible to sketch a work on French folk-lore.
Superstitious Usages.
In considering the native culture of a people, it is perhaps least unscientific to begin with religion or superstition. The French peasant is religious enough au fond, and politicians are only beginning to teach him to vote against the curé. It is not, however, of the official but of the traditional religion and ritual that we have to think at this moment. The two things, it is true, arc hard to disentangle. Not easily can one determine in every case whether the Church borrowed some rural rite from popular paganism, or whether popular paganism distorted and degraded the ceremony of the Church. For example, when the curé of a little Breton village leads his choristers, in a solemn procession, on Saint Anne's Day, and devoutly burns an old boat, to the prow of which a serpent is made fast, whether is the sacrifice kept up in memory of Saint Anne, or to appease the shadow of some earlier serpentine godhead? It is difficult always to decide, but one may be sure that the ceremonies of Saint John's Eve, at least, have no necessary connection with Saint John. Many English people have seen Jules Breton's picture of the sturdy peasant girls dancing round the smoke and fire,—the fire of which the sacred seeds were handed down by the earliest religion. The night of Saint John is haunted in all the popular songs by young men and maidens straying home from the fires that once were lit to a god no kindlier than Moloch. Some forty years ago a girl was actually burned to death in one of those rondes. The sentiment of the volks-lieder lingers gladly on chance meetings in the midsummer twilight, when the lover sees the beloved on the dim banks of the river, and sings to her—
Superstitions of the usual sort are attached to other great days of the Church. The water that flows from the wells while the bells ring on Easter Day is supposed to have a magical virtue. The sun himself dances on Easter morn, and the golden and scarlet hues of dawn are taken to be the wings of exultant angels. The beliefs connected with the dead are of the ordinary kind. The mattress on which any one dies is to be burned, sometimes at cross-roads; the water in the house must be poured out of pitchers and glasses (as among the Jews), lest the flying soul drown itself. In some places in the department of the Vosges, the ashes of the burned mattress are allowed to lie on the ground all night, and, if in the morning the trace of a footstep is found among them, it is supposed that the dead has returned, perhaps to declare that he is in purgatory, and to demand the prayers of his friends. When one adds to these beliefs the custom of sacrificing a cock when a family takes possession of a new house, it is plain that remains of very early "animistic" and religious ideas survive among the peasantry. As to the superstition about the difficulties which attend the flight of souls, it certainly existed in the South of France in the seventeenth century. Thus in L'Examen de las Supersticius, a theological tract, the penitent is asked whether he has ever removed the roof from a sick man's hut, that the soul might more easily fly away!
An immense number of French superstitious practices differ only in name from those recorded in English books like that of Brand. Call the yule log cosse de Nau, and translate the usages connected with the yule log into French, and you have something very like M. Laisnel de la Salle's first chapter on Fêtes Populaires (Croyances et Legendes du Centre de la France. Paris, 1875). M. de la Salle connects these Christmas rites with the Aryan worship of Agni, but they are human rather than Aryan, and may be found in Peru as well as in Berry. French Christmas carols are pretty enough, and in tone much resemble our own popular ditties of the sacred season. Thus the shepherd sings—
"Colin, au milieu de la nuit
Je vois le soleil qui reluit;
Il semble que tout reverdit."
The soleil may be the Christian or the secular sun, and the feast of the winter solstice with its heathen observances was easily converted into the most solemn festival of the Christian year. The Nöels or Christmas carols make some confusion between the two religions. It is superfluous to add that the dumb animals are supposed to have the power of speech on Christmas eve. As for le bœuf gras, M. de la Salle finds him in Chinese religion no less than in that of Berry. Not race, but the natural allegorical rites with which men celebrate the return of spring, the hope of harvest, the memory of the dead, all the chief events of the solar year, and of mundane life, produce these resemblances in ritual. In France the Church has lent a Christian colour to a dozen survivals of fetishism and nature-worship, and mere primitive custom. The feast of les brandons is still purely rustic,—it is the lustration of the fields. Thus Tibullus says, "Gods of our land, faithful to the ancient rites which our fathers bequeathed to us, we purify our fields, our fruits,—do ye deign to drive all evil from our dwelling; destroy the tares among the wheat," and so forth. The lustration is performed by French peasants on the first Sunday in Lent. Soon after sunset all the people of a village rush through closes, meadows, and vineyards, armed with lighted torches, till hill and plain seem to swarm with will-o'-the-wisps. There are many ditties which are sung at this ceremony.
"Taupes et mulots
Sortez de mes clos,
Ou je vous casse les os."
Now this ceremony is, in conception, magical. Fire and song are to consecrate the crops, and drive away spiritual and mortal forms of evil. The sorcerers of the New Caledonian tribes take similar precautions in the new-sown plots of yam and taro roots. The Romans had the rite, as we have seen, and the thing to notice is, that, while the people of Berry preserve the essence of the primeval ceremony, they have added to the songs, in the mocking spirit of gauloiserie, a satire against the curés. Moles, toads, moths are addressed thus—
"Laissez pousser nos bles
Courez cheux les curés
Dans leurs caves vous auriez
A boire autant qu'à manger."
Here, then, we have a typical instance of the value of the study of folk-lore. You see the element of human sameness, the unchanging character of the peasant's life, the same narrow round of hopes and fears in which men move to-day, as four thousand years ago—men modern and ancient, men savage and men civilised. On the other hand, you see the element of national difference, the mocking, revolutionary spirit of France, as displayed in the satire on the poor curés, whose store, after all, could not support many moles or resist much mildew. Like most rural feasts, that of les brandons ends with a distribution of sacred cakes, like the liba of the Romans, and the cakes of Leviticus ii. 7, and of the Hindoos. Corn and bread seem to have so strongly impressed the early imagination with their mystic significance, that they enter, according to the Père Lafitau, into the marriage service of the Iroquois, as into the sacrament of the Christian. One might occupy the whole space of this article with a mere enumeration of the rural feasts of boughs, of the remnants of the worship of trees, of customs connected with Easter eggs, of the dances in which girls scatter flowers of spring, and chant an ancient ballad burden, whereof the meaning is lost, so that only the words "grand soule, p'tit soule" (great sun, and little sun) can be understood.
One must be content with a reference to M. Laisnel de la Salle's collection of facts (his theories, like all our theories, must be received with hesitation), and to the rural novels of George Sand. There the curious can read about the fées, or fairies; the grande-bête—a shapeless flying terror of the night; the spectres who wash dead men's bodies by moonlight; the were-wolves; and le meneur des loups, a wizard whom the wolves follow in his darkling walks; the herbe qui égare, a herb with powers the reverse of those attributed to the Homeric moly, being a plant of which the fragrance turns the traveller from his path. Here you learn how to guard your health from witchcraft; how to see a vision of your future husband; where "Arthur's hunt" may be met; where the Druid stones dance round the Virgin Mary;—information about all these matters and their ancient analogues M. Laisnel de la Salle has compiled. His book is more interesting than Mélusine, a useful collection of folk-lore edited by MM. Gaidoz and Holland. He studies in a scientific spirit the facts which George Sand observed with romantic curiosity.
French Ballads or Volkslieder.
France is a country which we might expect to be particularly rich in popular songs. The people are not only a singing but a dancing people, and a ballad, as its name implies, was originally a song chanted as an accompaniment of the dance. Even now numbers of rondes are danced by the country people, who accompany themselves with words which, as a rule, have little meaning. Here is a very fair specimen of the ronde:
"A la claire fontaine
Devant le palais du Roi
Il vint trois demoiselles,
Se baigner devant moi
Rossignol n'a pas d'amour
Chantons la nuit et le jour."
Most rondes are as senseless as this; they have always a great deal to say about "three girls to give away," about "three ducks," "three captains," and so forth. They seldom contain more than the germ of a story, in fact they have become childish, and have lost sentiment and significance. The popular muse of France must not be judged by the majority of extant dance-songs. More excellent ballads, mirthful or doleful, still survive from the time when, in default of written or printed literature, the people were their own poets. The ballad-store of France does not contain songs so spirited as Kinmont Willie or Dick of the Cow, or the other narrative poems of border war. The people were not so well off nor so well led as the ancestors of our Roxburghshire and Liddesdale farmers who "rode with the bold Buccleugh." Their chants are the expressions of a race of men always passive, if not always suffering. They made no raids, but raids enough were made on them by the English and the Companies. Of these misfortunes scarcely a trace remains in song, except perhaps in a long ballad which tells how an English king carried off a French maiden, who died, in answer to her prayer, on her bridal night. Again, the French ballads lack the superstitious as well as the adventurous spirit of the songs of Scotland, Denmark, and Greece. There is a Provençal ballad, indeed, on a theme widely known, that of the dead mother who returns to help her children, misused by a harsh stepmother. After seven years she goes back to the grave, the children following in a sad little procession. That apparition seems to me one of the most touching and "gruesome" in all ballad lore.
"'Twas late in the night and the bairns grat,
The mother beneath the mouls heard that,"
"La Damnée.
"C'est d'une fille et d'un garçon,
D'un garçon qui l'a bien aimee.
Mais bientôt sous le vert gazon,
La belle fille est interrée.
"Le garçon fit une priere
A la bonne vierge Marie,
Pour qu'elle lui fasse voir encore
La belle qu'il a tant chérie.
"Il n'a pas fini sa prière
Et voilà la belle arrivée.
Oh! la belle, la belle, où avez vous été
Que vos frâiches couleurs ont si fort changé
"Ce sont les diables et les enfers
Qui ont ainsi rongé mes membres,
Et cela pour un maudit péché
Que nous avons commis ensemble.
"Oh, dites-moi, dites, ma mie,
Ne peut on pas vous soulager,
Avec quelqnes messes à dire
Ou quelques vigiles à chanter?
"Oh! non, mon bel ami, oh! non,
Oh! non, ne m'en faites point dire,
Tant plus prieras ton dieu pour moi
Et tant plus souffrirai martyre.
"Oh, adieu done, adieu, ma mie,
Puis qu'il faut ainsi vous quitter.
A votre soeur Marguerite
N'avez vous rien à envoyer?
"Tu diras à ma soeur Marguerite
Qu'elle ne fasse pas comme moi.
Que jamais elle ne se promène
Sur le soir dans les grands bois."
Except these I have met no French ballads of deep superstitious gloom, and even the last of these seems coarse and creeping when compared to "Clerk Saunders," or to more than one of the Romaic folk-songs about "the dead that ride with speed," about Charon the terrible wrestler, and his gloomy home, whence none may escape. In the popular songs of the modern Greeks you find this wild poetry in its utmost perfection. It is the voice of a natur-volk unspoiled by civilization and yet capable of the highest culture. In France the peasant's fancy is stinted and curbed, yet, even in France, he often tells in his verse the same tale, and uses the same formulae, as the more intensely imaginative Scotch and Dane, as the Spaniard, as the Greek of Thessaly, or of the isles. The sameness of plot in the narrative ballads of European peoples is a very notable thing. It is remarkable, too, that the songs do not use the plots and incidents of the märchen (as a rule), but have a separate set of their own.
What the favourite plots and situations are, I shall try to show from a few French examples. The ballad of John of Tours, or, as it is called in some variants, of Le Roi Renaud, is easily accessible to English readers, for Mr. Rossetti has translated it very admirably. A wounded man returns from the war, and in reply to the caresses of his mother, who tells him that his wife has borne a son, he only asks that his bed may be made. Then follows a second dialogue between the mother and daughter-in-law; the latter hears the preparations for her husband's burial, and her questions are put off with feigned answers. At last the mother cries:
"Ma fille je ne puis le cacher
Le Roi Renaud est décédé!"
The wife dies of grief, or, in other versions, goes into a convent. Now it must be noticed that this ballad, with its three persons, and these couplets of questions and reply, is really a little drama. In the shape of a child's rhyme, it still survives, much mutilated, but recognisable in Scotland.—(Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland.)
Now turn from the puerile sing-song of the Lowlands to Brittany, and you find the lay of the Seigneur Nann, who returns to his wife in evil case, not after a lost battle, but after repelling the love of a fairy. The dialogue between the wife and the mother-in-law follows as a matter of course. (Villemarqué, Barzaz Breiz, i. p. 43.) Brittany thus retains a mark of a famous and very primitive superstition, the belief in the deadly love of the spectral forest women. So wide-spread is this superstition, that a friend of mine declares he has met with it among the savages of New Caledonia, and has known a native who actually died, as he himself said he would, after meeting one of the fairy women of the wild wood. In Le Roi Renaud, then, we have the intermediate form of a popular song. It has not sunk to the decadence of its surviving Scotch form,—it has lost the tragic aberglaube which the Celtic memory preserves. In the villages, where Le Roi Renaud has become Jean Renaud, a wounded soldier, we see, perhaps, the degradation of the legend. The same plot is found in the Venetian folk-song "Conte Anzolin," where the hero is neither wounded in war nor bewitched by a fairy, but simply bitten by a mad dog! I owe these variants to M. de Puymaigre (Chants Populaires dans le Pays Messin), The legend is not found, to my knowledge, in German, Danish, or Romaic popular song, but probably other readers may have met with it in these languages.
The ballad of Germaine (Puymaigre) turns on the most widely spread of all fictitious motives—the motive of the Odyssey—the return of a long-lost husband to his faithful wife, who does not recognize him and dreads imposture. This situation, with features curiously like those of the meeting of Odysseus and Penelope, is found in the folk-lore of China. Penelope, Germaine, and the Chinese lady are all incredulous and demand a sign.
"Loyez, loyez, Germaine,
Pour Dieu, votre mari!
Encor n'y croirais-je pas
Que vous êtes mon mari
On Men vous me direz
Quel jour je fus epousée.
J'ai epousé Germaine
Le matin, le lundi.
Encor ne croirais-je pas
Que vous êtes mon mari,
Ou bien vous me direz,
Ce qui m'est arrivé.
C'est arrivé, Germaine,
Que votre anneau rompit;
En voila la moitié,
Montre la votre aussi.
Ouvrez, ouvrez, Germaine,
Ouvrez à votre ami."
Ὧς ἅρ ἔφη πόσιος πειρωμένη, we might go on, in the words of the scene of recognition in the Odyssey (xxiii. 181). We may be tolerably sure that the return of Odysseus to Penelope was the theme of a rustic lay like Germaine, among the early Achæans, before the author of the Odyssey made it the chief thread in his divine poem. Folksongs indeed are the "wild stock" whence the epic and the artistic lyric sprang. They are far older than the most ancient poetry of Greece, just as the wild white rose represents an earlier type of flowers than the complex blossoms of the garden. In a volume which I have not seen, but which is quoted by M. de Puymaigre, the modern Romaic lay on the return of the husband is printed (Chants Populaires de la Grèce, translated by Marcellus). The motive is found in Tyrolese and German ballads. One may remark, in taking leave of Germaine, that it contains a trait of very primitive hospitality, well known to the student of savage manners. Survivals of that sort are rather rare in French popular songs; here are two verses, however, which might have been taken from a Bulgarian pesma.
Votre amant s'est marié
Avec une Flamande;
Elle n'est pas si riche que vous,
Mais elle est plus puissante.
Elle fait venir le soleil
A minuit dans sa chambre,
Elle fait bouiller la marmite
Sans feu et sans rente.
(Puymaigre, p. 31.) This familiarity with the sun and this magical skill are common enough among Bulgarian girls, if one may trust the ballads in M. Dozon's interesting collection. La Maitresse Captive is the French form of the Gay Goss-hawk in the Border Minstrelsy. A girl pretends to be dead, that she may be carried by her kinsmen to the chapel where she is to meet her lover:
Le fils du roi passant par là
Crie tout haut;—Curés, arrêtez,
C'est ma mie que vous emportez,
Ah, laissez moi la regarder.
Il prit ses ciseaux d'or fin
Et décousit ses draps de lin;
Mais pendant qu'il les décousait
Voilà la belle le reconnait.
There has been a good deal of natural scepticism about the ballads which, like the Gay Goss-hawk, were published by Scott. Either he himself or the people who furnished him with copies often dressed up the fragments, and inserted original lines and couplets. It may be taken for almost certain, however, that when Scott gives us a ballad of which variants exist in French, Danish, and Romaic, the groundwork, at least, of that poem is a genuine portion of the popular store common to the people in all European countries. How the store of legends and of poetical formulæ came to be thus the general inheritance of the peasant it is not now possible to guess. Like the problem of the origin and dispersion of märchen, the mystery must be left to Time, "which discovers all things." Did the Scotch borrow The Bonny Hind (giving that appalling song a tragic gloom it does not possess in France) from L'Épreuve (Puymaigre, pp. 54, 59)? That hypothesis does not account for the presence of the same simple and terrible situation in the Finnish epic the Kalewala. Or shall we say that the popular imagination naturally caught at the most moving yet obvious themes which are everywhere equally powerful to awaken terror and compassion? That theory does not account for the verbal resemblance between Renaud et ses Quatorze Femmes and the Scotch May Colvin, which have their parallels in Breton, Venetian, Piedmontese, German, Wendish, Bohemian, and Servian ballad-poetry.
Are we to say that the legends are based on some historical fact, and spread through Europe from a common centre? To take a more lively example—did we borrow Billy Taylor from the French, or did the French first sing of the betrayed and revengeful maiden?
Derière cheux nous
Y est un capitaine
[Billy Taylor was a fine young fellow,
Full of mirth and full of glee],
Qui tous les jours
M'entretient de ses amours.,
[And his mind he did discover
To a maiden fair and free].
The legend pursues its course. The capitaine loves and rides away, but the lady follows him to the army and provokes him to a duel;
"Ah oui, ah oui,
lis ont bien pris les armes,
Ah oui, ah oui,
Ils ont bien combattu,
Mais la fillette,
Qu'était encor jeunette
Mais la fillette
Mit son amant a mort."
In fact "she shot young Billy Taylor." "And the king, when he came for to hear of it, very much applauded what she had done," but it does not appear that he made her "first lieutenant of the gallant Thunder-bomb."
"Le roi si bon
Y accorda son pardon."
The adventure is said to exist in Sclavonic poetry. Speaking of coincidences, it may be worth noticing that the "Fause Foodrage," the traitor in a Scotch ballad, seems to recur as the Fordresse of a song in which a villain kills his mistress,
"J'ai tué ma pastourelle,
La plus belle fille du pays."
M. Auricoste de Lazarque suggests that " Fordresse," in the lips of German girls, is "an alteration of faux-traitre, words which are often repeated in popular songs and stories."
Before leaving the ballad poetry of France, it may be well to draw attention to the vast number of songs of the army, and of songs about deserters. As in Russia, the conscription has greatly exercised the muse of the people. Another large class of ballads deals with the adventures of pretty shepherdesses, who get the better of adventurous knights. These songs may be derived from the pastourelles of the thirteenth century, of which Bartsch has published a collection; or ancient popular songs of this kind may have given the key-note to the artistic poets who brought pastourelles into fashion. Taking French ballads as a whole, counting rondes, lullabies, marriage-songs, and the songs of the labourers, one finds a good deal of babbling gaiety, some trace of dreary superstition, much love of the spring, and of the songs of birds, scattered memories of the oppression of the ancien régime, and, now and again, an accent of deeper melancholy and weariness of labour. Thus, in the labourer's song:—
Qu'il pleue, qu'il vente, qu'il neige,
Orage on autre temp,
On voit toujours sans cesse
Le laboureur aux champs.
Le pauvre laboureur
N'ayant que deux enfants
Les a mis à la charrue
A l'âge de dix ans.
(Mélusine, col. 458, 459.)
You must not ask this people for the rich sentiment or the patriotic war-song of the Greek mountaineer, for the tragedy that captivates the fancy, and the riding-song that stirs the blood, of the Scot, by the "dowie dene of Yarrow," or by the "wan water" that Buccleugh swam at the head of his horsemen. The French peasant sings little of the deeds of knights and princes, whom he does not love, but is busy with the scanty experience of his own life, his brief years of youth, his long acquaintance with labour, his fear of the final doom,
"Tant plus prieras ton Dieu pour moi
Et tant plus souffrirai martyre."
Popular Tales.
The popular tales of France, the märchen which France shares with most other known peoples, have not yet, so far as I am aware, been collected and published with method and system. For some years the story of Tord-chène, in Les Filles de Feu of Gérard de Nerval, was the only rustic version of a French märchen which I had the fortune to meet with. In the old collections of Perrault and of Madame D'Aulnoy the characters have been attired in court dress, and it is not always possible to tell what the writers have borrowed directly from Italian or Eastern sources, nor to distinguish the literary inventions from the genuine traditions. Even now I am only acquainted with the contes published in Mélusine, and with that very charming book of M. Deulin's, Les Contes du Roi Gambrinus. Now M. Deulin does not conceal the fact that he has told his stories (which at bottom are real traditional tales) in his own way. A most amusing and agreeable way it is; still it is plainly impossible to draw any scientific conclusion from Les Contes du Roi Gambrinus. The märchen in Mélusine, on the other hand, profess to be derived from the lips of the people. The narrators, however, were not, in all cases, quite unsophisticated. You must go, with Mr. Campbell, to Barra, or "where the great peaks look abroad over Skye to the westernmost islands," if you want to get the real article uncorrupted by any memory of literature. From Turkish old women too, from Von Hahn's Albanians, from Castren's Samoyedes, unsophisticated tales may be obtained. From all such natural people, the märchen comes undiluted, but it is easily seen that even Herr Schmidt's Ithacan and Cephalonian story-tellers have heard, however vaguely, and remember, however indistinctly, fragments of the higher mythologies and of artistic fiction. Thus we must not hastily generalise about many of the Breton stories, even though M. Luzel reports them. There is a notable distinction, too, between Breton and French, for which reason I have deliberately avoided much mention of native Breton songs and customs. In the matter of popular tales, however, we are not lucky enough to possess much material that is not Breton, and therefore the paper must be closed with a few remarks on the tales translated and published in Mélusine by M. Luzel. In his Le Lièvre, le Renard, et l'Ours, one easily recognises a form of the common story about "grateful beasts." The peculiarity of the Breton form is its modernism. The characters are named Henri and Hénori, and so on. They go to Paris and England, and they have adventures with rather common-place robbers. There is a touch of the usual spirit of cruel revenge, which is a mark of märchen, in the fiery punishment of the villain with which the story ends. (Mélusine, col. 64.) Les Trois Fils du Roi (Mélusine, col. 65) is a variant of Puss in Boots. Here the successful youngest son has a hump-back, but he is none the less triumphant.
In Jean de l'Ours (Mélusine 110) we have that widely-known character of legend, the man whose father is a bear. The bear occurs in Danish royal pedigrees, and he is a totem or tribal father and friend in North America. Jean de l'Ours is a creature of huge strength, who is aided in his adventures by companions who have magical gifts. One can break mountains, another break oaks, and so forth. This is a very ancient feature in primitive fiction, and its highest artistic form, as manipulated by poets, is to be found in the Greek account of the companions of Jason and the Argonautic expedition. The framers of the cycle of Argo must apparently have amplified and decorated certain data which are found, in a ruder form, among Finns and Samoyeds, as well as in the märchen of the unprogressive peasant class in European countries. A version of Jean de l'Ours is given by M. Deulin in his Contes du Roi Gambrinus, The short fantastic story from Picardy (Mélusine, col. 113) of the humpbacked man who lost his hump, and of the other deformed creature who had the lost hump added to his own protuberance, is known to exist in Japan. Hence arises a controversy; some "story-comparers " hold that the tale is an Aryan one, carried to Japan from the West by traders, soldiers, or missionaries. As the Japanese legend, however, occurs in a chap-book, as a legendary explanation of a Japanese proverb, it seems to have a natural root in the soil. It is easy to see how, human nature being what it is, identical proverbs may thus spring up in nations without being borrowed. Then a tale to explain the proverb is called for, and thus the same story might be found in France and Japan, or in the planet Venus for that matter, if mortals like us inhabit the planet Venus. The ordinary theory about the transmission of Aryan märchen is thwarted by the extreme savagery of certain incidents found in the nursery tales of polished nations. There are the marks of fetishism, magic, and cannibalism in our own nursery legends, and, if these originally came from India, that country must either have been peopled by savages at the time when the stories were invented, or the märchen fell in Europe among savages who corrupted them. This prevalence of savage survivals among märchen, however, is only one of several facts, which I attempted to systematise in an article on Myths and Fairy Tales (Fortnightly Review, May 1872). This is not the place to go more deeply into the evidences. M. Luzel's story of "The Tailor and the Hurricane" is a humorous version of the well-known märchen of the mule that produced gold, and of the stick that automatically beat its master's enemies. When the Tailor goes to the home of the Winds, like Odysseus to the home of Æolus, the Hurricane comes in and as good as says:
I smell the blood of an Englishman;"
or,
"Je sens odeur de Chrétien; il y a un Chrétien ici, et il faut que je le mange.
Had Æschylus any similar Greek story of ogres who smell out man's blood in his mind when he made the Eumenides detect Orestes and cry:
"Ὀσμή βροτείων ἁιμάτων με προσγελᾷ?"
(Eumenides, 244.) Another Breton story, also humorous, and even broad in its gauloiserie, is Les Trois Frères, ou le Chat, le Coq, et l'Echelle. A poor man leaves his three sons no more than a cat, a cock, and a ladder. The eldest carried his cat to such a mouse-ridden country as Dick Whittington found. The owner of the cock discovers a land where (there being no cocks) the king every night sends chariots and horses to bring the dawn. The lad with the ladder makes himself agreeable to the imprisoned wife of a jealous lord, a sort of fabulously innocent Agnes, in a mythical Ecole de Maris. All three sons find fortunes and bonnes fortunes, and the märchen displays a jolly indifference to morality. The long story of Les Trots Filles de Boulanger mixes up the ancient fiction of a queen, who is accused of giving birth to puppies, with the "dancing water" and "singing apple" of the Arabian Nights. In all the popular stories in Mélusine one detects a satiric humour and a kind of worldly wisdom which are the characteristics of French märchen. The fancy of Celts of the Continent is certainly most unlike the wild imagination of the West Highlanders. In their tales (collected by Mr. Campbell) the ancient Celtic genius projects fantastic shapes on a back-ground of mists. You have more than the strangeness of the Mabinogion, you have human fancy in its wildest expression, and withal, a sentiment, a poetry, not unworthy of the ancient bards. There is nothing of all this in the positive, commonplace French and Breton märchen, where fancy is stunted, and incredulous wit thrusts in its word now and then, or priests and popes are introduced hap-hazard among the figures of the earliest fiction.
Looking back on the field of French folk-lore, we seem to detect more of primitive practice and superstitious usage than we have preserved in England. France escaped the full force of the Reformation, and the Catholic Church has always been tolerant of the earlier rites which she sanctified, while Puritanism persecuted even the dances of May Day. In the matter of poetry, French peasants retain little of much value, except the traditional love-songs, which have often a touch of the idyllic sentiment of the Canticles. Both in poetry and story, the peasants of France show the imaginative defects of a people which has been long in contact with the hardest side, the harshest form of civilisation. Hence a somewhat sterile fancy, a certain vulgarity, a mordant humour, and a grain of incredulity. One misses the pleasant spontaneity and good nature of the Norse legends, the intensity of the Scotch ballad, the poetry of Celtic stories.
Bibliography of French Folk-lore.
- Barzaz Breiz, Chants Populaires de la Bretagne, recueillis par M. de la Villemarque. Paris. Franck. 1846.
- Gwerzion Breiz Izel. Chants Populaires de la Basse Bretagne. M. F. Luzel. 1868, 1874.
- Le Revue Celtique. F. Vieweg. Paris.
- Mélusine. Vieweg. Paris, 1877.
- Les Filles de Feu. Gérard de Nerval. Lévy. Paris. Bulletin du Comité de la Langue, de l'Histoire, et des Arts de la France. Poésies Populaires, Instructions du Comité.
- Chants Populaires des Provinces de France. Champfleury. Paris, 1860.
- Chants Populaires de la Provence. Damase-Arbaud. Aix, 1862.
- Moniteur. 1853. March 19, April 23, April 27, June 15. Articles of M. Kathery on French Popular Poetry.
- Romancéro de Champagne. Tarbe. Rheims, 1863, 1864.
- Chants Populaires Recueillis dans le Pays Messin. Par le Comte de Puymaigre. Paris, 1865.
- Chants Populaires de l'Ouest de la France. Bujeaud.
- Croyances et Legendes du Centre de la France. Laisnel de la Salle. Paris, 1875.
- La Mare au Diable.
- Mouny Robin. George Sand. Levy. Paris.
- Les Maitres Sonneurs.
- Normandie Romanesque et Merveilleuse. Mdlle. A. Bosquet. Techener. Paris.