194
ONCE A WEEK.
[Feb. 7, 1863.
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