Drives From a French Farm: I

To MOUNT BEUVRAY.

THE farm from which these drives were taken is situated exactly in the middle of a great basin, the bed of an ancient lake surrounded by hills of various height, the chief of which is Mount Beuvray. According to the Emperor Napoleon III. and other antiquarians, the mount was occupied in the time of Julius Cæsar by a Gaulish place of strength called Bibracte, but according to an opinion which until very recently has been much more generally received, the Bibracte of the Gauls is identical in point of situation with the Roman city of Augustodunum, now known by its abbreviated name of Autun. It is unnecessary to trouble the reader with this quarrel of antiquaries just now, because the details of it will become much more interesting to him when he knows the ground, and something of the people most concerned.

I had lived five years in the middle of the basin of Autun, seeing the Beuvray every day, yet without once ascending it. The distance to the base of the hill was about twenty English miles, and that is a distance often sufficiently considerable to make one postpone a little effort which may be made at any time, and that one always hopes to have time to make in the future. The mount, as it appeared from the farm, was artistically very valuable as a distance ; being remote enough to look blue in many conditions of the atmosphere, and not near enough ever to lose, even on the very clearest days, the mystery which appeals to the imagination. I call it the mount, because that word conveys better to the mind of an Englishman the sort of hill which the Beuvray really is than the word “ mountain ” would. It is a large mamelon surrounded by a number of lower mamelons. It has nothing of the peak or needle-like character, but resembles rather the mass of a great sea-wave, the lines festooning a little from the summit to the mamelons on the sides. In England and Scotland we have hills of the same elevation, which have the true mountain character much more decidedly. The summit of the Beuvray is two thousand six hundred and seventy-eight English feet above the level of the sea, a height sufficient to give you the sublimities of rocky summits in the English lake district or in the Hebrides ; but the Beuvray is simply a large mound, richly wooded to the very top.

I left the farm about four in the afternoon of a bright day near the end of June, and after a brisk drive of about fifteen miles, arrived at a straggling village, where I put up the pony, going forward as a pedestrian, with a knapsack. The road wound about like a mountain stream, to avoid the low hills that are scattered round the base of the Beuvray. The whole of the ground was curved very beautifully, with great groups of magnificent old chestnuts, and there were little woods of slender ash and birch, and sometimes clusters of beeches nestling in the hollows. The country was admirably rich. The corn waved on every little hill, and the bottom of every miniature valley was occupied by a green meadow, watered by tiny streams. There were occasional glimpses of wider scenery in rich compositions. Coming near the foot of the Beuvray, I left the high road and followed a footpath, which after skirting some fields of wheat plunged into the vast forest which covers the slopes of the mountain.

It was already twilight, and nearly dark in the heart of the forest ; but the path or road (for there were wheelmarks upon it) was quite clear of impediments, and there was nothing, even if it had been perfectly dark, to cause any serious anxiety. There are, it is true, both wolves and wild boars in the forest; but, so far as my experience goes, these animals would appear to live in the greatest retirement, for they never trouble anybody except hunters who go to disturb their peace.

The reader very likely wonders what could induce me to climb Mount Beuvray precisely as it was getting dark, it being desirable to have as much daylight as possible, when the purpose of a journey is the enjoyment of vast horizons.

An antiquary well known in these parts, the learned President of the Eduen Society, has for the last three years encamped during the summer months on the summit of the mountain, for the purpose of directing certain excavations, the object of which is to bring to light the Gaulish antiquities of the locality. I was sure of a hospitable welcome at the camp, if once I could find it ; but it was not so certain whether, with the somewhat vague verbal indications which had been given me, I should be able to hit upon it without a guide. When at last I got out of the wood on the summit of the hill, it was only to discover that there was no sign of an encampment in the open space there. The camp was in the forest, then ! It is not easy to find an encampment in a large forest after dark ; but as I knew it to be near the top of the hill, it seemed best to march all round the hill, through the wood, at a distance of about two hundred yards below the plateau. I had a mariner’s compass in my pocket, and a box of matches, so there was no very great danger of being lost, and if the camp should not be discoverable after all, I could pass the night comfortably enough in a large, warm plaid which I carried in my knapsack. There was plenty of gorse, too, and with that and a few branches I could make myself a small refuge almost impenetrable to wind and rain.

In pursuance of my plan, I descended the hill about two hundred yards on the other side, and then struck off at once to the left. In ten minutes I came upon a rude wigwam which was empty, but it gave promise of human habitation, and immediately afterwards I found the camp snugly hidden in a hollow of the wood. The antiquary had a hut for himself and another for his servant, with various little constructions round about for fuel, provisions, etc. He received me with great warmth, and finding that I had eaten nothing for nine hours, proceeded at once to get me a good supper. Amongst other things I had some boiled eggs, and by way of egg-cup, a fragment of the neck of an amphora, which, having lain idle in the earth for two thousand years, was now once more enlisted in the service of mankind. The supper was excellent, and the guest brought with him an appetite worthy of the occasion. The antiquary produced a bottle of more than commonly fine Burgundy, and after the meal was ended his domestic served coffee, — that coffee which France loves and which England knoweth not!

The hut was simply constructed of rough boards, with plenty of shelves. The roof was thatched, and the walls protected with straw,—a useful precaution both against rain and against the extremes of heat and cold. Having had considerable experience of camp life myself in various ways, it interested me to see how my friend, the French antiquary, had made his arrangements. His task had been easier than mine, because he had from the first set up a camp which was frankly permanent, whereas my own camp life had been divided into three phases : first, I had tried a semi-portable camp, or a camp portable with some difficulty, which gradually by the accumulation of things supposed to be necessary to comfort ceased to be portable and became permanent, — its second phase. After that I had a really portable camp, of three tents,discarding wooden huts altogether. The various shades of transition from portability to non-portability and from permanence to portability again had cost me much thought and some money, which the antiquary, by the simplicity of his purpose, had spared. His camp was set up in one spot, and not intended ever to be set up anywhere else, and this allowed him to make better arrangements of all kinds than are ever made in a camp intended to be removed from place to place. For instance, he had a well of the purest spring-water, arched over with stone, and a small stone cellar well supplied with stores of everything that a French cellar usually contains. Then he had separate little sheds or wigwams for wood and other matters, and a wonderfully picturesque little building in the retirement of the forest, the utility of which it may be left to the reader’s sagacity to divine. On the whole, it was one of the bestappointed little camps I had ever seen.

As it was already night when I arrived at the camp, it was useless to go down to the excavations ; but when we had finished drinking our coffee, my host, M. Bulliot, proposed a walk on the crest of the hill to see an effect of moonlight over the plain. The moon had risen since my arrival.

The summit of the Beuvray is unlike the summit of any hill I ever visited. It is an open space of natural lawn, about thirty acres in extent (this is a guess), with broom growing on it in great abundance. In calling it a natural lawn, I mean that where the ground is clear of broom, it is nearly as even as an artificial lawn, and covered with very short grass, the feeling in walking over it being exactly the feeling that one has in walking on a well-kept croquetground,— a sensation which the philosophic reader might perhaps define for himself as the luxury of the feet. Round this open space there is a belt of very ancient trees, chiefly beeches, and just beyond the beeches there is a sudden rise of two or three feet in the lawny ground, and then a steep slope on the other side. This is the innermost Gaulish rampart, that which defended the very summit of the hill.

We walked towards the belt of trees, and having passed through it, found ourselves on the brow of the hill, in a place where the ground was clear of wood, so that the view was uninterrupted. The plains below us stretched away towards the Loire and lost themselves in a gray mist. The moon hung exactly over Mont Blanc, but Mont Blanc was not visible that night. The white dome with all its attendant pinnacles may be seen from the place where we stood, but only on rare occasions, — in the morning or evening, in clear weather, before rain. The distance is a hundred and sixty miles. I have never enjoyed that wonderful and glorious spectacle. The greatest distance from which I ever saw Mont Blanc was a hundred miles, clear ; but I saw it from the level of the plain, and it seemed so wonderfully near and distinct that the additional sixty miles would leave it still gigantic. And consider the advantage of an observatory two thousand feet above the plain ! What you see from the plain is really nothing but the snowy dome, whereas from this high ground something more of the mountain becomes visible, notwithstanding the curve of the earth’s surface.

The reader will, no doubt, fully enter into my feelings, when I confess that a place from which the Alps may be seen five or six times in a year has for me a certain sublimity all the year round which does not belong to it visibly. When you are told that Mont Blanc is there, just before you, and that you would see him distinctly if the veil were removed, your mind invests the landscape which you see with something of the glory of the unseen.

“ Mont Blanc is there” said my friend, the antiquary, “just under the moon, behind that purplish-gray mist”; and suddenly the landscape became grander to my imagination, and the immemorial beeches told me in the whisperings of their leaves how often the rare vision had revealed itself to them, in the centuries of their watching.

There were two or three small lakes in the valleys below us, and one of them was so nearly under the moon that I said : “ Let us go thirty yards to the right, and we shall get its reflection.” The result was one of the most curious effects I ever saw. The outline of the little lake was not distinguishable, but the image of the moon lay in the water as bright as the reality above. The time was exactly midnight, and, from the height we were on, the view seemed visionary and illimitable. It was strange to see the moon in the land below us ; this was the illusion produced by an inability to distinguish the water round the reflection. Presently there came a little breeze upon the lake, and silvered it all over, destroying the moon’s single image to cover all its surface with brightness, and then, of course, we saw the lake’s shores mapped out for us plainly enough.

There is a stone cross on the summit of the Beuvray, dedicated to Saint Martin, who preached there ; and my companion excused himself for a few minutes that he might say his customary prayer. So he went to the foot of the cross, and knelt on the stone before it, and prayed bareheaded, in the silence of the night. I have seen the Catholic worship under very impressive aspects; but rarely, I think, under an aspect more impressive than this. Every night my friend goes to the foot of this rude stone cross, and prays there with no witnesses but the grim old trees and the stars, and no sound to disturb him but the wind as it sweeps across the summit from abyss to abyss.

“ When this cross was dedicated,” said my companion, when his prayer was over, “ Monseigneur Landriot, the present Archbishop of Rheims, performed the ceremony of consecration in the presence of a great concourse of people. After it he preached to them, and for want of a better pulpit got upon a bullock-cart and addressed the multitude thence. The oxen remained yoked during the sermon, the people stood round, the cart was decorated with branches and garlands, and these things, with the peculiarity of the situation, the vast prospects on every side, and the traditions connected with the place, produced an effect which, in its combination of the picturesque with the poetical, I shall remember as long as I live.”

It being already past midnight when we returned to the camp, we deferred historical and antiquarian discussions till the succeeding evening, and were soon asleep in our respective huts. The antiquary had a loaded revolver and a fowling-piece for self-defence in case of nocturnal attack, and the precaution did not seem altogether superfluous, as there had been three cases of assassination in the neighborhood during the fortnight immediately preceding my arrival. In this neighborhood, however, there are few robberies, and no assassinations for purposes of robbery. When a man is murdered the motive to the crime is either vengeance or jealousy, invariably ; and as my friend the antiquary was not a person likely to incur the effects of either of these evil passions, I felt pretty tranquil both about his safety in general and my own whilst I remained his guest He incurred, it is true, a great deal of animosity, and very virulent animosity, but his enemies stabbed with the pen rather than the dagger, and belonged to a class in society whose longing for revenge is satisfied when the victim is made to suffer mentally. Slander is enough to achieve this result, and my host was the most persistently slandered man in the department of Saône-et-Loire.

It is my custom to write every morning until déjeûner, and that under all circumstances, whether on mountaintops or elsewhere ; so I did not stir from the hut during the morning hours. Between ten and eleven a solitary priest made his appearance on the little space of green before the camp, and then came another.

“ Two priests ! ” I thought, and went on with my writing. But on looking up again there were four of them.

“Four priests!” I thought, and resumed my labors. But on looking up again there were six priests.

“A clerical invasion ! ” I said to myself, and the pen trotted on as before.

“ I wonder what these priests are doing ! ” So I looked out of the little window once again. This time there were eight of them ! Fascinated by the spectacle of ever-multiplying black creatures, and marvelling whence they sprang, I continued to gaze, and the pen suspended its toil. Two more priests emerged from the wood, and then came, not a priest, but a gray horse with a cart; and the cart contained provisions, amongst which prudent clerical forethought had not forgotten to include a sufficiency of wine. It was a clerical picnic.

A clerical picnic ! How suggestive of enjoyment is the combination of that adjective with that substantive! To be a priest, a being deprived of domestic joys and consolations, living on narrow means in the solitude of the presbytery, obliged to wear a grave outward demeanor in his village, excluded from die café, from the billiard-table, from the dance, and after months of this perpetual gravity, solitude, compression, to get into a pleasant spot, out of sight and hearing of one’s parishioners, and let human nature have its way for one brief, one merry hour ! — what felicity, save that of the released schoolboy, can be equal to this felicity ?

My host issued from the hut and saluted the holy band. As they had seen me through the window, I presented myself also, and was immediately invited to share the viands in the cart, which were to be spread out in some cool and shady recess, sub tegmine fagi. But it would have been cruel to spoil that feast by the presence of a critical layman, and the cordial invitation was declined.

After déjeûner with the antiquary, I accompanied him to his excavations, which were four or five hundred yards lower down the hill. There were also some interesting excavations close to the camp itself, including part of a Gallo-Roman aqueduct, a Gaulish house, and other structures in fair preservation. At the time of my visit M. Bulliot was employing from twelve to twenty workmen, who were excavating a part of the hill where the houses stood as thickly as they do at Pompeii.

The Gauls, be it remembered, were by no means clever builders. They were, it seems to me, rather surprisingly behindhand in that art, when we consider how respectably they could work in metal. Of course after the Romans had taught them how to build they became clever enough, but their own unaided civilization had not gone far in the way of building when the Romans found them. They took rough stones as they came from the quarry, and set them in clay with the flattest side outwards ; and as such a wall was not very strong of itself, they strengthened it with wooden posts, which were both set up at intervals in front of the wall and used as throughs. In modern works what reminds one most of a Gaulish wall is a sea-jetty with its facing of oak beams and posts, only the jetty is made of incomparably better stone-work. People who have never had the opportunity of examining the rude work of the Gauls for themselves have often very erroneous notions about it ; they give credit to these barbarians for constructive powers far superior to what they really possessed. No Gaulish wall of the pre-Roman times could have lasted till our day if it had not been buried ; the action of the weather alone would have brought it down in a heap.

What I actually saw at these excavations may be very soon described. A narrow street paved with small stones, and about fourteen dwellings close to each other, very rude in construction and not large. Besides these dwellings there were some workshops which contained evidence that they had been used by iron-smiths. This evidence would often have escaped the attention of people not accustomed to look out for such indications. The reader is probably aware that the sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil are in reality minute fragments of red-hot iron, which on cooling remain on the floor of his workshop as small grains of metal. Well, in examining these ancient Gaulish workshops, the explorers are always careful to see whether the soil contains any such indications, and in this way it can not only be shown that in such a place a worker in metal must have labored, but it can be proved in what particular metal. Thus whilst I was present a blacksmith’s forge was discovered, and not far from it the house of a coppersmith or worker in bronze. In the first were found tools, a hammer and pincers, and plenty of iron sparks in the soil ; in the second were found crucibles and metallic residues. The rude pottery of the Gauls is found here in such abundance, that the soil is covered with fragments of it, and only the most perfect or the most rare specimens are preserved. Coins and ornaments are also very frequently met with, and indeed not a single hour passes without a find of some sort.

I have just said that only twelve or fourteen houses were visible at the excavation ; but the reader must not conclude that the discoveries have been confined to what is visible. The owner of the land requires the excavations of one year to be filled and levelled before those of the succeeding year are begun ; and although this may appear at first sight a barbarous sacrifice of curious remains on the altar of self-interest, it is not so barbarous as it looks. The Gauls built without mortar, and their walls would soon be utterly ruined by the mere action of the rain and frost, if they were not protected by burial. To bury them again is consequently the only way to preserve them for the antiquafies of the future, who will know where to find every house, every workshop, every fragment of rampart and other fortification, by the careful map in which the present explorer records, year by year, the progress of his labors.

It is time now to say something more about the explorer himself. He has devoted, for some years past, the whole of his time to the very interesting, but by no means lucrative, occupation of studying Gaulish antiquities. Formerly a partner in the principal wine firm in the neighborhood, he found business less attractive than study, and quitted it to have leisure for bis favorite pursuits. Now, in England and France (I don’t know how it may be in America) it is an invariable law of nature that whenever a gentleman in a provincial town studies anything, unless it be for the purpose of qualifying himself to earn money, he is looked upon with suspicion ; and if he persists in studying, he is called “eccentric”; and if it is known that his studies cost him pecuniary sacrifices, he is said to be “mad.” It is sometimes said that a father cannot contribute more effectually to the happiness of his children, than by imbuing their minds while yet tender with a taste for intellectual pursuits. That depends upon their power to endure solitude and calumny and contempt. The best way to live happily amongst men in provincial towns is to know no more than your neighbors.

Monsieur Bulliot is an inhabitant of Autun, the Augustodunum of the Romans, believed also during many generations to have been the still more ancient Bibracte of the Gauls. For reasons which will be given later, M. Bulliot became convinced that Autun could not be Bibracte, and that the true site of the Gaulish oppidum would be found on the summit of Mount Beuvray. One or two excavations on a small scale having been made successfully, M. Bulliot had the mountain surveyed at his expense and the ancient ramparts traced. The Emperor was persuaded of the truth of M. Bulliot’s views, and openly adopted them in the “ Life of Cæsar,” supplying at the same time funds for the excavations. As the excavations went on, great quantities of things were discovered, proving beyond question that there had been a Gaulish town on the Beuvray, whether it were the one called Bibracte by Cæsar or not.

Now the Autun people were not pleased by the promulgation of these novel theories, which appeared to rob their ancient city of a portion of its great past. They had believed it to be of pre-historic antiquity, a Gaulish place of strength for ages before the arrival of the Cæsars, and now this profane investigator would limit its age to two thousand years. A strong local feeling was aroused against M. Bulliot and his theories, and he became the object of unsparing attack. The public irritation found a mouthpiece in a local writer, who pursued M. Bulliot for years with the utmost virulence and acerbity. Meanwhile the antiquary continued his labors patiently, constantly sending new objects to the museum at St. Germain and accumulating evidence every day. The answer made to this material evidence was as follows : "M. Bulliot says that he finds coins on the Beuvray. The thimblerigger finds what he has put.” It was actually asserted that M. Bulliot buried antiquities on the mountain, that his workmen might dig them up again ; which is just like saying that the Neapolitan antiquaries buried Pompeii on purpose to make a noise in the world by finding it.

One of the commonest resources of the artful calumniator is to send out a rumor that the man he wishes to injure asserts something quite different from his real opinion, something so contrary to reason that even the most ordinary intelligences may perceive its absurdity. The way in which this trick was played, and successfully played, against M. Bulliot is an excellent instance of that kind of warfare. His enemies did not circulate the rumor merely that he placed Bibracte on the Mount Beuvray, but that he placed Augustodunum itself there, which would be as absurd (if any human being were insane enough to advance such a proposition) as it would be to affirm that the Rome of Augustus was built on the Alban Mount. So the bourgeois about Autun, entering its Roman gates whenever they drove into the town, and seeing in their museums many objects which (as they were informed by trustworthy persons) were certainly Roman, and being, further, able to trace for themselves something of the vast circuit of the Roman wall, laughed at M. Bulliot as a pitiable imbecile because he resisted all evidence, and put the Roman city on the top of a lofty hill, a day’s journey to the westward; and even to this day, in spite of all that has been printed on the subject, in the Emperor’s “ Life of Cæsar”and elsewhere, M. Bulliot is credited with this monstrous absurdity. For example, I said a page or two back that a party of ten priests had come to the mount to enjoy a clerical picnic there. After their déjeûner, these gentlemen came down to look at the excavations, and the very first thing that their leader and spokesman said to M. Bulliot was, " And so this is the place where you believe the Roman Augustodunum to have been situated ? ” Of course, when once a confusion of this kind has got into the head of a whole population, there is no getting it out again. The people cannot separate the two ideas of Bibracte, the Gaulish stronghold, and Augustodunum, the great colonial city of the Romans. The two ideas have got associated in their minds, and no power on earth can dissociate them. If Bibracte goes to the top of the Beuvray, Augustodunum must go there too. But is it not the most exquisite of all imaginable tortures for a true student and antiquary to know that such an outrageous misrepresentation of his views is generally received as an accurate account of them ? To say that you are mistaken in what you do affirm is a kind of opposition which every one ought to be prepared to endure patiently; but when people say that you think this silly thing or that silly thing, which you never so much as imagined, and pity you and laugh at you for your supposed opinions, then you have need of all your philosophy to keep your temper from turning sour. It was very interesting to me to observe the effect of so much popular misunderstanding and personal slander on the mind of my host the antiquary. It had not soured or imbittered him, and it had not interrupted his work, or diminished his personal activity ; but it had saddened him and made him more reserved, not with me, but with people in general, than he was intended to be by nature. When a man gets the sort of pay from his neighbors which men usually do get when they make themselves singular by devotion to some branch of study, he is driven back into himself, and is often compelled to bury himself in his own pursuits, as an animal buries itself in its hole, to get out of the way of the hounds.

Life, however, brings its own compensations. The years move towards us, and the coming time brings compensation with it. No one who, in a provincial town, devotes himself to study of any kind can hope to escape from depreciation. If he is talked about at all (and he will be talked about if he makes himself singular by studying anything), the tone of the current gossip about him will infallibly be depreciatory. On the other hand, he will find friends and allies who will have been made indignant by this continual babble of depreciation, and who will be attracted to him far more strongly than if there had been more of it. M. Bulliot has some rather powerful supporters, —the Emperor, the Archbishop of Rheims, and other learned and distinguished personages, — so that he can very well afford to despise the misrepresentations of his fellow-citizens. But every one who has gone through such an experience as his, every one who has been the butt of the idle tongues in a locality for a year or two, comes out of it an altered man. It is not possible to devote one’s self very ardently to the service of one’s fellowcitizens after that; and though the kind encouragement of cultivated people at a distance is no doubt very cheering and very welcome, and a real support in one’s labors, it cannot altogether efface the recollection of perpetual neighborly ill-nature.

No one, however, could bear that with more perfect dignity than M. Bulliot has done. He goes forward with his work in silence, year after year, quietly registering every portable object found, before sending it to the Imperial Museum, and mapping every house in the buried city, as it comes to light for a brief month before its return to the gloom of reinterment. Hitherto, not a single excavation has been prosecuted in vain, but the excavations are costly and therefore slow. It costs two hundred and fifty dollars an acre to bring these antiquities to light, and as no allowance is made by the government, the only help coming in the shape of annual grants from the Emperor’s privy purse, the work may last a good many years yet. When it is done, and the camp removed from the hill, M. Bulliot will bring out a book containing a simple account of what has been discovered, but not replying to his enemies in any more direct way.

I hope, in a succeeding paper, to give the reader further particulars about these diggings and the things found there, and the controversy which has raged here about the Gaulish stronghold of Bibracte. Without tiring the reader with dry antiquarian details, it will be easy, I hope, to put him in possession of all the most interesting facts.