Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/Tours and Mettray
TOURS AND METTRAY.
My dear Mrs. B, my last letter announced my arrival at Tours. This will inform you of all I have seen and done since. After fixing myself in pretty, cheap lodgings, No. 5, Boulevard d’, close to the comfortable Hotel de l’Univers, which was too expensive for my slender purse. I went about sight-seeing, but not à l’Anglaise. I see no sense in making a toil of pleasure and doing one place after another with the indispensable Murray in one’s hand, as a duty to be got over like a schoolboy’s task, that one may play and enjoy oneself afterwards. If I leave some things unseen, I have a clear distinct recollection of the places I do visit, and have derived from them some fresh ideas. Tours is a pleasant bright-looking city, the modern parts full of handsome, well-built edifices, but I do not care for the wide streets and lofty houses. I like to wander in the quaint old streets so full of picturesque nooks and corners. I never wished to be an artist so much as since I came here. What sketches Prout would have made! Here is an old house, all full of cracks and lézardée, to use a French term. Its three projecting garret windows each with its own roof, not merely slanting from the roof of the house, as in old English houses, but resting on two side walls, the size of the window it shelters, give an air of imposing grandeur to it still; it is faced with slates so cut as to resemble the plating of a fish’s scales: a rough balcony decorates its first-floor windows, and a vine festoons the corner of the walls. Every window is full of flowers in Tours; they hang trailing from the open casement of old tumble-down patched buildings, and if you look up a narrow court you are sure to see it draped with the tender green of the vine, or adorned with blossoms of the most brilliant hue. No two houses resemble each other in form, though there is a general resemblance in style—how softly the light lies upon those projecting three-cornered bits of tiling or slating over door or window—what a full, dark shadow is thrown by that quaint old gabled house, projecting so far into the street, and how vividly the green of that vine and the hue of those nasturtiums trailing from the boxes in the open casement contrast with the sombre walls, and the dark little court beside it, and give life and colour to the whole. They are typical and characteristic of France and French people. Here there is nothing mesquin or vulgar about poverty. Labour is a god, and his votaries wreath themselves with flowers. They are not, as in England, ashamed of being honest workmen and workwomen; they do not ape ladies and gentlemen, or wear dirty flowers, tawdry faded dresses, and coats and trousers that have evidently had many possessors. I have seen but one dirty-looking girl, the only creature who has begged of me since I entered France. The men wear blue frocks or blouses, and trousers of the same strong kind of linen. Their shirts arc always clean and white, and though they often wear no stockings, and wooden sabots, in lieu of shoes, there is a general air of bien être and respectability about them sadly wanting to the poor in England. As to the women, how smart and pretty they look with their well-fitting, clean dark gowns, the aprons of all hues with their ample poches, and the faultlessly snowy goffered cap, set so jauntily on the head, and the trim neat shoe and stocking, or grey bottine. They are a perfect picture, and have a gentility of their own far above any cast-off airs and graces. Then they are all so polite and ready to oblige. It only needs a pleasant smile in speaking, and a cordial tone of voice to get all the civility you wish for in France.
I find travelling here very pleasant. I talk to everybody I meet in railway stations and carriages, and am rewarded by obtaining a great deal of useful information as to what is worth seeing, and a great many small civilities which are very valuable at the time. I have made several excursions out of the town; not because it was de rigueur, but because I had a fancy to go. I was much struck in coming along the railway to Tours, by a curious village mostly built in the rock, so I set off to visit it. St. Antoine and St. Paterne, and many others round Tours are hollowed out of the rock, after the tufa stone has been quarried for building purposes. The tufa is very white, and little harder than the sandstone rock on which Nottingham Castle stands. I poked some with my umbrella, and easily made a hole, but it hardens on exposure to the air, retaining its whiteness. I had a very pleasant day at St. Paterne. A little stream ran brawling through meadows bordered with young poplars, which seem the favourite tree hereabouts—on either side the ground was slightly elevated and had been quarried for stone. Some of the caves, I was told, extend a lieue et demi underground, but most are only excavated so as to form dwellings or wine-cellars. Capital cool cellars they must make. I entered several of these cave houses, and talked to their occupants, meeting with all the usual French courtesy. They often contain good-sized rooms—far more comfortable than many of our cottages, and I was told they were cool in summer and not cold or damp in winter. In one of them I saw two good large four-post beds, with blue and white linen curtains. The beds are always clean and good in France. The walls and ceiling are left rough as I have seen granite roughened in England for ornament, but not whitewashed. The outside facing is generally cut so as to resemble an archway in the rock, and this is divided into squares to imitate an arch built of quarried stones. The door is always under this archway and sometimes the window of the principal room. Most of these dwellers in the rock are weavers. They work in the fields in summer, and fine weather; and in winter and bad weather at their looms. The cloth they make is coarse but excellent, and their looms seem of a most primitive and clumsy description, with very heavy treadles like stems of poplar-trees. The working them must be very laborious. The wife of one told me her “man” could earn about thirty sous a day. These cave dwellings have a very picturesque appearance, with their vines growing beside the doors, and their chimneys projecting suddenly out of a copse of young brushwood clothing the hill top that forms the roof above. I took with me a provision of apricots and petits pains. When I grew hungry I went into one of the village inns to refresh myself and asked for a demi-chopine de vin, to wash down my dry bread. There were two or three among the stone-built houses of more consequential appearance in St. Paterne. I read Remy loge à pied et à cheval on one, but I chose that opposite, because I saw a woman at the door. She was very civil; and as I ate my bread and drank my chopine, I talked to her. She too, was getting her dinner. It consisted first of milk curds with bits of bread soaked in it. She asked her daughter, who was hemming by the window, if she would not have some too, and the girl rising, took a spoon, and seating herself at the table, “dipped in her dish.” After the bread and milk and curds were disposed of, the mother lifted up the lid of a long chest that stood against the wall, and took out therefrom some bread and cheese, which she cut with a pocket-knife; the daughter did the same, and all the while they questioned the Anglaise as to what could have brought her so far from home, and especially to St. Paterne, où il n’y avait rien à voir. There was no cloth laid—no sort of preparation for their meal, yet these people were evidently well off for their station, and beyond the kitchen in which we sat, I could see a long room full of rush-bottomed chairs, which I suppose was used on fête days by the villagers, and in the open window before me bloomed a splendid Hibiscus. But oh! there are unmentionable things in which the French of all classes seem as little civilised as our own Irish peasants or the Ojibbeway Indians! One can hardly conceive how such a want of decency and comforts necessary to humanity, can exist along with such natural taste and refinement in other things. It was as well I took provisions with me. “Il n’y a rien à acheter en St. Paterne,” said the village shoemaker’s wife, at whose house I stopped to examine some pretty little models of sabots exhibited in the window, and of whom I inquired where I could buy more fruit, as the heat had made me thirsty. It was even so. Though I saw gardens and fruit-trees all around, I could buy none, while in every little English village one can buy in this season a halfpennyworth of apples or plums. There seems no such thing as a village shop in the general line where hanks of worsted, knitting needles, sweetstuff, and apples tempt the passer by. So far, in all my village walks, I have never been able to buy anything, except that at a café of some pretensions in Neuillé, where I saw, to my amazement, an excellent mahogany billiard-table, they offered me some of the dinner they had left. They had had a good one,—veal aux carottes, with plenty of melted butter over them, stewed peas, and soup full of bits of bread. If they had been warm, I dare say they would have been good, but a half-cold dinner is my aversion, and they had clearly no idea of warming them up for my convenience. A French ménagère is always unwilling to relight the fire when it is once extinguished. This is one of the inconveniences attending living en garni—i. e. in furnished lodgings—in France. You can get anything cooked or water heated, only at stated times in the day. The great mistake English people make in travelling is to expect English customs in a foreign land. The sooner a traveller puts such an expectation out of his or her head the better. You never will get things as they are in England, but you may get different things as good, or even better. You will get, if you are polite to your landlady, a thousand little attentions. If you like flowers, the vase on your table will be constantly filled with gay flowers, and the day before votre départ, you will be, as I have just been, treated with confitures à propos. The said confiture being excellent, I give the receipt. A pound of sugar to one pound of fruit of four different kinds, a quarter of a pound of each, cherries stoned, gooseberries, strawberries, and raspberries.
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Tours.
Another expedition I made was to the famous Colonie Agricole de Mettray, for the reformation and instruction in useful arts of young convicts. It was a most interesting visit. The proper days for visiting the institution are Thursdays and Sundays, which are holidays. Not knowing that, I went on Friday, so that I saw the working of the system. I went by rail to Mettray, and walked from the station to the Colonie, and had, as usual, pleasant fellow-travellers who gave me much information on many subjects. I was told to go to the house of the concierge and ask admittance. I found a French family from Paris there already—father, mother and daughter—signed my name after M. Dufau’s, and there being no one else, we of necessity formed one party. After waiting a few moments, a gentleman came to us and said, that though that was not the day for inspecting the establishment, he would show us over it. It was dinnertime when we arrived, and he took us first into one of the homes, as they are called, to see the boys dine. There he made us observe how money and space were economised by the same apartment, which was lofty and well ventilated, serving at once as a class-room, refectory, and dormitory. The room was divided up its centre by two rows of wooden pillars; between these and the walls, the hammocks in which the boys sleep, are slung at night. Now they were tightly rolled up against the walls, and on shelves above them lay every boy’s trousseau neatly folded up,—his combs and brushes. Everything is done with military precision. The boys marched in to their dinners and took their places at the word of command; at a second order they sat down and fell to. So, in the morning, they all rise at once, dress at once, roll up their hammocks at once. If any one is behind time he is punished by having to wash the vessels of the home. Each home is called a family, and a boy remains in the family in which he is placed until he leaves Mettray. There is generally among them a feeling of fraternity which the conductors seek to develope, and some boys will not play except with their family.
We went over the vacherie, to the pigsties, the garden, and the different workshops or ateliers, and saw chairs, steam-engines, ploughs, turnip-chopping machines, &c., all made by the boys, under the direction of experienced workmen. Nine hundred and forty-three persons reside at Mettray, and it is virtually a colony, producing everything within itself. It has farms; a mill where their produce is ground; a butcher’s abbattoir where the cattle are killed; a brewery, on whose grains the cows to be killed are fattened, when they cease to give milk. The cows are always kept in stalls, and never go out into the fields; but they look sleek and healthy, and they are never allowed to live long. There are tailors and shoemakers on the establishment, and the boys are taught agriculture or a trade at choice. There are also the masts and yards of two vessels, which those destined for the sea, who are generally of Breton parentage, are taught to climb and name. Until they make choice of a trade, the new comers are, for the first two or three months, employed under two or three paysannes in washing the clothes of the inhabitants of the Colonie. Each boy’s food costs rather less than a franc a day. There are several outlying farms where those destined for farm-labourers are taught farming. A desire to enter the army is encouraged, and in order to stimulate their young imaginations, two pictures of Colons who have distinguished themselves by military prowess are suspended in the principal schoolroom; but otherwise, the conductors prefer to bring them up as agriculturists, that they may not return to the towns whence they have come and be exposed to the temptations of renewing their bad acquaintance there. Upon the different homes the name of the founder was inscribed; one was founded by the city of Paris; on another I read “Maison de Mdlle. Marie Emma Hébert.” “It is a young lady who is dead,” said our guide; “her mother founded this house in her memory.” In the chapel we saw lists of the fondateurs, or all who had given cents francs. At the head of the English donations, which I felt glad to see were neither few nor small, was Lord Brougham’s.
“Some of the boys who leave us become fondateurs,” said our conductor, pointing to a line: “See, Manny, Maître Menuisier à Lima, ancien Colon de Mettray, sent out of his savings, two hundred francs, ‘a ses deux mères’—Mettray, and his real mother.”
“C’est touchant, n’est-ce pas?” cried the French lady, turning to me; and I replied, “Yes,” with moistened eyes.
Henri Ardy was another fondateur who sent home, from the Crimea, his savings to the Colony that educated him. He also twice saved his colonel’s life in battle, for which he received a medal, and is one of the two whose portraits hang at the head of the classes to incite other students to distinguish themselves. The other is Richard, who was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for carrying off a flag at Paris, June, 1848.
In frames, round the schoolroom, hang tables containing the name of every Colon educated at Mettray, with his subsequent conduct and position after quitting it, so that there is always, before the eyes of the boys, a prospect of infamy, or the reverse. The manner in which they behave will always be known to their ancient comrades, and in their old home. The obtaining this knowledge costs the establishment a large sum yearly, but it is found useful in inciting the Colons to do well.
It was l’heure de récréation when we returned, and we saw them in their playground gathered in knots upon benches, or exhibiting wonderful agility with a pole suspended by two ropes, called here a trapèze. Then the clarions sounded—the boys formed, like soldiers, in single then in double file, and all marched into school. In winter, school is kept morning and evening; in summer, only once during the hot part of the day.
After this we went to see the garden and the infirmary, which last is superintended by nine nuns from Tours. We saw them also at their prayers in their pretty little chapel and we peeped into their rooms, in each of which we saw a comfortable-looking bed with its white draperies. Above the hospital the conductor made the remark, “a most magnificent glacine;” and a long gallery shaded by its branches, whose windows were all but open now, but which, when closed in winter, formed a warm pleasant walk for the invalids, being almost a greenhouse. There are generally about twenty-four enfans de famille, gentlemen’s children, who are unmanageable, at Mettray. They never see one another, and none but their preceptors ever see them. Their health is preserved by gymnastic exercises, and twice a week they are taken separately out walking. Within, their solitary hours are fully filled up by more lessons than they can possibly get through; and the solitude is found not to make them mad or melancholy.
Two brothers were here once at one time. Neither of them ever saw the other, or heard his name. At chapel they sit behind a curtain where they can hear mass without being seen. Their windows look into the court yard, but no heads were visible. I should think they were so high placed the inmates could not look out. It must be a severe discipline, but we were told it ensured reformation. As to the Colons, they are all sent to Mettray after having been prosecuted and jugés, either for vagrancy or some small delinquency. This is not considered any disgrace, as they are not responsible for their early bad bringing up, and most of them are the children of vicious or extremely poor parents, or have been deserted by their parents. The Judgment is for the purpose of depriving these parents of all rights over them, and consigning them legally to the conductors of Mettray.
Since Mr. Demety founded the Colonie, in 1840, eighty other establishments, in different parts of France, have been founded on the same plan, as it is found the maintaining and educating them, as honest men, costs less to the Government than the retaining them hereafter in prison, and prosecuting them as criminals would do.
We finished our visit by going to a sort of bazaar, where articles of various kinds are sold for the benefit of Mettray, and where M. Dufau purchased an album of views of the Colony, which he observed, afterwards, was dear, but he should regard with pleasure as “Sa petite contribution” towards a “bonne œuvre.” At the gate we all thanked our well-informed conductor, and separated; but, observing I was walking to the railway-station, M. and Madame Dufau kindly offered me the vacant seat in their carriage home, and on reaching Tours I bade adieu, with real regret, to my kind and courteous French acquaintances.