A Farm in Marne

Two or three of the convent sisterhood, with a flock of their young pupils from all parts of Europe and America, accompanied me to my experimental pension at the farm; dubious over the experiment, though they themselves had selected the cleanest and most endurable peasant domicile for it. Frizette, a gray donkey with a shaggy bang, was also in the expedition, drawing the donkey carriage in which delicate children or nuns took rest by turns from walking. One of the minor Sisters walked by Frizette’s head, lifting her purple robe from the roadside weeds. The sun made a halo of her transparent white wool veil. As for Frizette, she walked sedately, as if she were going down into Egypt. The whole journey of a kilometer or two was delicious, across wide sweeps of land, with gray farm buildings showing at intervals.

As we reached Les Buissons our feet paused on the brink of a resplendent valley. I explored that valley afterwards, and found that many of its charms vanished when you came within touch of them. It was like others, ribboned by white roads, bounded by blue wooded and vineyard-covered heights, and inclosed the village of Villevenarde. A vapor like grape-bloom made the most satisfactory veil that ever lent glamour to a landscape. In any weather it was enchanted land.

The farm Les Buissons was well named, thickets growing close around. Pear-trees strewed the ground with fruit, and an enormous walnut-tree stood at the corner of the quadrangle. A farmhouse in the department of Marne is built somewhat like a fortress. This structure of centuries was entirely of stone, with four sides inclosing a court or stable-yard. One side of the square was a high stone wall pierced by an arched gateway. The remaining three sides, one story high, were under a continuous tiled roof, stables, storehouses, and dwelling. Human inmates occupied comparatively little of this solid block of tenement. Near the front door, which opened directly into the peasant’s kitchen, were slits in the wall, ventilating a basement where horses stamped at their feed-racks. The building was on the hillside, so the court sloped downward. Having its own well or pit inside the walls, this farm could once have stood a siege. But when the modern eye discerns its close neighborhood to vast reeking accumulations of manure, the modern stomach prefers water from one of the many springs outside. The farmer himself hoards his stable-heaps with pride; they are the strength of his land. Perhaps in no country except economical France would the traveler see two boys, with baskets, shovels, and brooms, fighting over the same pile of refuse in the street, the victor raking it greedily up with his hands.

We followed madame the farm-wife across the brick-tiled kitchen floor. Her bed stood at one side of the chimney in the spacious place. The joists over our heads were brown with age, and nailed to them were racks on which cheeses ripened in clayettes, or straw platters. There are not many flies in France, but such as exist there devote themselves to odorous cheeses of this variety, made of buttermilk, and known as fromage maigre, fromage passé. At the borders of the Brie country, the familiar flat cakes on the clayettes roused the liveliest anxiety in a lover of Brie. But these cheeses were sold only to the neighboring peasantry at seventy-five centimes a cake ; and many were consumed by the farmer’s own household.

Cheese-racks continued through a long passage, at the end of which were an oven and fireplace for the baking of loaves as large as tubs. Here the horrible cheesy odor made me falter. But the house was so clean, and madame herself was such a rotund picture, cutting bites from a hunk of bread and eating them in her embarrassment as she showed us her best chamber, that I determined not to give up the farm. If you want to learn the truth about anything, you must live with it. And I found that the smell of ripening cheeses could be shut out of the best room. It was her elder son’s, who was serving his time in the army. His desk and books enriched the place: veterinary treatises, which his mother proudly exhibited.

A bargain was made. I was to pay twenty francs a month for room and attendance, and be charged for my table according to its variety and abundance. In her note de madame. therefore, appeared. such items as these, spread over much paper: —

2 œufs 0.20

Crème et fromage à fois 0.80

Côtelette 1.00

Litre de vin blane 0.60

Pain 0.15

Fruits 0.25

Sucre 1.00

her charges being in francs and centimes. For bifteck I was taxed but a franc ; while for madeleinen and confiture which madame brought from Sézanne I was made to pay dearly.

In America, the first thing a housewife of corresponding class puts into her best bedroom is a carpet. In France, such a dirty superfluity is added last, or omitted altogether. I had a tiled floor, a table and some chairs, and a canopied bed with its huge light down sack. The linen sheets and pillowcases were well bleached. There was an open chimney, suspiciously clean and gray ; but I regarded it with favor in view of the nearing September days. Its hearth was never kindled for me, however. There came a time when peremptoriness on my part was met with steady firmness by this excellent soul who signed an acquittance femme Valet. The chimney was a fumer. It would put out eyes and strangle breath. Her son Charles, who was serving his time in the army, had not dared the rigor of this smoke.

I had another disappointment in two gorgeous lamps, gay with fluted paper shades, which stood on the mantel. The farm-wife could not understand a word of English, but a jealous look came into her eyes when one of the convent maids indicated them.

“ Oh, madame, what magnificence ! You can give us parties in your pension, with such lamps as these.”

Later it developed that these virgin lamps — cadeau de mariage from the old baronne with whom she had lived at service in her girlhood, twenty-five years past — were more impotent than the fumer. Tired of bougie light as the autumn darkness increased, I demanded the use of them of madame. At first she had no pétrole. The patron her husband would bring some from Sézanne. Days passed before the patron discharged this errand, though he and his spouse accomplished many another. But one proud evening madame carried forth the lamps, the pétrole being in the house, and my insistence giving her no farther excuse for delay, and came back with the crestfallen look which a French peasant woman can assume when she has circumvented you. The oil would not mount. The oil, in fact, had never mounted. No living eye had ever seen or ever would see those lighted lamps shining from the windows of Les Buissons. Twenty-five years the ornaments had graced her domicile, unused ; and they will probably pass to her children as they were given to her by the old baronne.

Les Buissons was wonderfully still when one rested alone there en pension. Only the chickens broke pastoral quiet. Betwixt sun-soaked uplands and hazy valley life was a dream. The drive and worry of work which exhaust and enrich a western nation had no place here. Afternoon church bells rang tranquilly across the hills.

The farm shepherd, in shirt and trousers, with little knapsack on his back and dog at his heels, led out the flock of fat full-fleeced sheep. Silence was then jangled against by many little bells. He called them with a trill prefacing the call, “ Brebis ! ” At dusk, when I looked down the valley. I saw the shepherd a moving speck, putting his flock in the fold of an adjustable picket fence.

“ Allez coucher ! ” he shouted to the laggards; and when all were in he carried a gate and pounded it into place, the noise of the blows coming up indolently after his hand had struck. A tiny house tilted on wheels was in the field, for the shepherd’s use in lambing-time. He crossed the ploughed ground, coming home through the dusk.

All night pears could be heard spatting on the ground from overladen trees, crowded as all French fruit trees are with fruit. No attempt was made to preserve them for future use. Labor is equally distributed in that land; the French farm-wife is no slave to the products of her farm. She buys her confitures cheaply at the market-town. My table was well furnished with fruit, and a huge pail of baked pears stood ready in the kitchen for anybody. The surplus was abandoned to the hens.

When the children visited me from the convent, they made a leaf basket, and filled it with luscious great blackberries picked from the hedges. I directed madame to make some confiture for me of this fruit sauvage. as she called it. She declined, with both hands raised in protest. Such fruit was only fit for birds. She had never heard of Christians eating it. She expected to see me have a fit after swallowing hedge berries in cream. But when I made her bring out her best sugar and heap it on the fruit in a porcelain vessel, she stood off in disgust and would have nothing to do with the heathen preserving. As long as any of it remained she spoke with contempt — a French peasant’s respectful but honest contempt — of the confiture sauvage.

I had my private table served by the farm-wife in my own room. Her cream and unsalted butter were delicious, but for the hard, dark peasant bread of her own manufacture it was necessary to substitute loaves from Sézanne.

There was neither washing-tub nor ironing-board in this peasant household. Madame labored over her butter and cheese, but she sent her family linen to a blanchisseuse, and wasted no drapery on the common table. Returning from my walks, I sometimes found master, mistress, and domestics at one of the numerous meals with which they supported themselves during the day, sitting on benches at a bare, dark table. They had wine and bread and cheese. There was rarely anything steaming, the peasant stomach not being above cold food. But in the early morning, about four o’clock, wooden shoes might be heard on the kitchen tiles. Then the family gathered to dip their bread in a scalding decoction which they called café au lait, a quantity of boiling milk with a spoonful of coffee extract coloring it. Madame declared that my own coffee, which I made myself about eight, was more like a salad than café au lait. Each morning she brought me a fresh egg. entered regularly on the note de madame. for this café d’Amérique, comme la salade. Having no such thing as a teakettle, she heated the water in a flat, long-legged iron pot. Numbers of these pots, small and large, with mugs, copper and tin vessels, and porcelain-lined dippers and saucepans, hung on the walls: in contrast with the family shoes which stood in a row on a cupboard, neatly blacked, both wood and leather. I had taken the precaution to bring coffee and tea from Paris. She always had a porcelain dipper of cream cooling in a larger vessel of cold water; for, hearing that I wanted cream cold, not boiled, she thought it required chilling.

Madame was a great galloper; many times during my stay putting on her black cap with long ribbon streamers, to ride off with her husband the patron in the cart. At such times my dinner was served late by bougie light ; but she did not fret herself, American fashion. She only explained cheerfully that the fête had deranged her affairs. She had, moreover, a soothing wit, calculated to repress the impatience of one toiling all day in the mysteries of manuscript.

“ I am not fit to render service to you ! ” she would exclaim. “ I can wait on my cows, but I am not fit to wait on you.”

Whenever she forgot anything, the service ties Buissons was to blame. Once an ant crawled on my table-cloth from a dish of fruit, and she swept it away in haste; assuring me, however, that the four mi had excellent taste, — it liked good company. And she lamented when I neglected to set my shoes outside the door for her to clean. The household labors of a peasant woman are manifestly neither various nor exhausting. If she sometimes turns her hand to field work, she has plenty of vitality left for it.

The patron, his younger son, and his hired laborers were busy with hay, using three-tined wooden forks ; the third tine springing at an angle from the handle like a cock’s spur. A mowing-machine and a riding-plough were among implements in sight, but nearly all the tools of this farm were of the Old World. The patron’s best cart, in which his wife took her jaunts, had enormous wheels, rearing the covered box high in air. Horses with bells on their yokes drew loads tandem. the deliberate men walking at the side of moving mountains. The court gateway was tall, to let these wains pass under. Ploughing, harrowing, and mowing might all be seen at once in the same expanse of land. There were no fences, the labor of herders being cheaper. The sower was just what he has been pictured. He scattered seed from a bag at his side with his hand. Seen in the distance, a cloud of white dust moved before him, like the smoke of a censer which he might be swinging. From the edge of deep green woods he walked across bald prairie, the harrow following. And not far away the ploughman shouted all the time at his horses, “ Yoé, hup! hup, yoé ! ” — the language of ploughmen being pretty much the same all over the world. Such continuous talk was necessary, because no lines were used, the direction in which horses were expected to turn being indicated by the cracking of a long whip on that side. They wore no harness, but arched yokes.

The cool light of early September showed on white stubble. The sun went down on that level plain above the hill as it sinks on a Western prairie. It was queer to see a horse’s yoke moving along the edge of the earth against the sky, the animal himself submerged in distance, as the fin of a great fish might move above water.

Though the laborers were astir at four in the morning, they came in from the field at eleven. In the evening they returned at half past seven. Their object seemed to be to work a long day, with four or five stops for eating. There was no hurry, for man lived at his labor in this Old World, and took no risk of dying of it.

As the sky came down to one’s level, a man’s head sometimes swam along the earth’s edge. It was the farteur going his rounds from farm to farm, carrying his knapsack of mail on his back.

The tenant of Les Buissons held the land under a baron of the old noblesse. who was lord of all the farms in that region. The tenant paid two thousand francs for one hundred and eighty arpents, or one hundred and fifty acres.

Twenty cows, large factors on a farm like Les Buissons, were milked at four in the morning, and then turned out for a walk on grassy slopes. At noon they were brought into the stables, to repose themselves, madame explained to me, until their second milking, at five o’clock, when they again promenaded, and returned, to repose until morning.

The peasant, when spoken to, always stood up respectfully, holding his hat in his hand. He had his troubles : the markets were poor, and the roads, perfect as they appeared, were sometimes too icy to travel on in winter. But he had one product from his land unheard of in a western world : this was stone, pounded fine and gathered into oblong piles, ready for highway use. Taken from the hillsides and prepared as opportunity offered, it was a marketable commodity. On afternoons when little else could be done on the farm, the clink of a stone-breaker’s hammer came up the valley.

On Sunday evening madame brought into my room a tall, calm, pretty-faced girl whom she proudly introduced as her grande fille. It was the fiancée of her son Charles. In one year more he would return from the army to be married. The girl’s name was Leah. She had fair hands and a distinguished air compared with her rotund prospective mother-in-law. Village dressmakers are favorite brides in Marne on account of the dowers they are able to accumulate. They go to fêtes, dressed grandly in obsolete Parisian styles, and snare the young men’s hearts and dazzle farmers looking for fine matches for their sons. In the remotest corners of France parents arrange marriages for their children. It is not to be imagined that two young people should be left to their own devices at such a critical time of life. When the minutest points relating to property have been agreed upon, a betrothal takes place, the young man gives the girl a ring, and they try to like each other. Sometimes they fall in love, and the match, for financial reasons, is broken off. This causes trouble. But if aversion instead of attraction develops, they are not usually forced to marry.

“ Oui, je suis fiancée,” Leah told me quite calmly, that I might understand the reason of her visit in the family; and both father and mother showed her every attention, courting her for the absent Charles. The peasant gallantly postponed his labors to carry her borne in the cart Monday morning, while, on her part, she sweetly begged him not to derange his plans : “ Ne dérangez-vous pas, M. Valet.”

By the first of September pink and purple crocuses had begun to spring everywhere, as if the seasons were reversed. Yellow jaunets also shone thick in the grass. Of early mornings, when I looked down the valley, the very towers in the vineyards showed through a haze like * May light, differing from the colder whiteness of the uplands. Every day I had my chair carried to a lovely little place in the woods, where ivy covered the ground, and white birches and oaks made a thick dark shade. It was like a room with a canopy of branches, a path running across it to be lost down the slope.

Mary Hartwell Catherwood.