Chapter III: Manners and Customs of the Country-Side

Whereas England is a country whose land is owned by a comparative few, France is owned by the many. Of its population of forty odd millions there are nearly six million land-owners, almost, it would seem, one to each family.

The plots are small, not more than ten acres, perhaps, on an average, for the peasant landholder; but the degree of cultivation which they have attained is remarkable to one who comes from the far West of America, where only farming on a gigantic scale is pursued.

For a long time the Norman farmer held out against any ideas of progress with regard to machinery. He did not exactly plough with the proverbial crooked limb of Biblical times, but the implement with which he laid out his astonishingly straight furrows was, until recently, an antiquated piece of iron, which he handled in a most laborious manner.

To-day American sowing and reaping machines, or Continental imitations of them, are everywhere making their way, and the laborious, patient work of a former day is now being accomplished much more handily.

The French are great lovers of their land, the Normans in particular. They do not emigrate like the Germans or the Italians, and they are not great travellers, out of their own bailiwick.

The dwellers of the country-side of France are about the richest per capita of any nation on the earth. The enormous Franco-German war debt was promptly paid, and, stowed away in small parcels, there are doubtless hundreds of millions of francs which are never put into circulation.

French farming is carried on most assiduously, and a single plot of land becomes wonderfully productive under the hands of its devoted peasant proprietor.

One is wont to commiserate with the European peasant, who is supposed to be taxed to death, but, as a matter of fact, the French peasant is taxed very little. The recent tax exemptions of French farmers have caused a decrease in the revenue of 25,000,000 francs, and this sum has been saved to the very smallest of taxpayers. Nevertheless, some taxes exist, though they are almost infinitesimal. There are more than 8,000,000 persons who each pay a land tax ranging from ten to twenty sous only; more than 3,000,000 who pay from five to fifteen francs; and more than 2,000,000 land-holders who each pay from twenty to thirty francs per annum. If a farmer pays a rent of 250 francs or under he is untaxed; if he pays eight hundred francs, he is taxed only on a part, but if he pays more than eight hundred francs, he is taxed nine per cent, on the whole sum.

Almost all taxes here are based on incomes or rents. Business property is taxed eight per cent, of the amount for which it is rent, and if it is idle it is not taxed at all. If a store or house burns down the tax on the land stops from that moment, and if a factory stops work its tax stops. Every loom in the silk, cotton, and woollen mills of Normandy--where they are very numerous--pays a tax while it is working; but if it is broken or becomes idle, the tax officials are notified, and the tax is not collectible.

There is money in trees in France; and in Normandy, quite as much as in any other part, one sees those long, regimental rows of poplars which make walled alleys of the great national highways and the banks of rivers as well.

The French appreciate the commercial value of their forests. There are vast woodlands belonging to the government, and private holdings in which the trees are as well cared for as in a city park.

Only matured trees are ever cut in a national forest, and every piece of fallen wood is saved.

Normandy has one of the finest and most celebrated of these great national forests in the forest domain of Lyons, a few miles southeast of Rouen, just north of the ancient district of Vexin.

Some of the trees are a hundred feet high and bare of branches, with only a tassel left on the top. Others are full-limbed, and others are just sprouting new growth on all sides. Poplars are grown for their branches, and are finally cut down for wood or furniture. The branches grow rapidly. They are cut off year after year, put into bundles, and sold to the bakers, to make the hot fires necessary for the crisp crust on the French bread. There is such a demand for them that raising them is one of the chief industries of France. The poplars are planted in places which are good for nothing else; and after five years each will annually produce at least twenty sous in value in mere trimmings. Later on, the trees are thinned out and cut down and sold. Willows are grown in the same way, their sprouts being used for baskets, and the basket-maker is a familiar figure in nearly every town and village in the river valleys of Normandy.

Market-gardening in France is no inconsiderable industry. Not only does it supply the markets at Paris, but a vast product is sent across Channel to help nourish old England; potatoes and onions from Brittany, and cauliflowers, lettuce, radishes, etc., from Normandy, to say nothing of cheese, eggs, and butter, which are usually a product of the same farmyard.

The French have one million acres devoted to gardens and fruits; and, throughout the country, one sees fields of hotbeds and glass frames propped over plants outside the beds. In many places glass bells are used to cover the individual plants, and there are some sections which raise early potatoes under glass for export to London. Apparently, about the only vegetable or fruit crop which Normandy does not export is the cider-apple.

The French study the soil and the sun, and they coax both to work. They feed the crops rather than the land, and in places get three crops a year through intensive cultivation. Near Cherbourg, cabbage is raised early in February. After it is taken off a crop of potatoes is planted, and a third crop comes on in the autumn, and this is on land that has been used for generations without becoming impoverished.

The farming peasant of the Seine valley is in every way a kindly person. He will pose for the artist, does not object to being snap-shotted while at work by the amateur photographer, and will courteously help the automobilist who is in trouble to set himself to rights.

For all this, he wants and expects nothing, save that perhaps he will take a glass of wine or cigar at the nearest public house if there happens to be one near by. An inquiring stranger is not _persona non grata_, and the Norman peasant-farmer is more than glad to stop and discuss the good or bad times, or the state of the crops and the cattle market; his _quid pro quo_ seeming usually to be your opinion about the state of things in the adjoining competing community which may send its products to the same market as he does himself.

Certainly a close-mouthed, ill-natured Norman farmer is a rare thing in the Seine valley, or indeed in any other part of the province. Not so in some other lands, where every civil advance of the stranger is met with a taciturn reply or a miserable whine against a presupposed unjust fate which permits a landholder to expect the tenant to pay rent.

Normandy, where it borders upon the Seine, comes very near being the artists’ ideal sketching-ground. It has all the attributes of the open country, as well as great industrial centres with picturesque chimney-stacks, and possesses a part of the most charming seacoast of France. Etretat and Honfleur are famous, Caudebec-en-Caux, in a way, is one of the reputed paradises for artists, while Les Andelys, Giverny, and La Roche-Guyon are--well, spots which as soon as they shall become popular with tourists will lose much of their charm, which is to-day natural, simple, and characteristically local. Throughout the open country in the Seine valley one may contemplate a succession of farmyards, orchards, and great brown and green patches of cultivated land which will make him envious of the genius of a Daubigny or a Millet.

The great walled farms of Normandy are ever a source of surprise to the stranger and of pride to the occupant, who, like enough, is the fifth of his line; for the peasant-proprietor is a power in the land to-day, as he has been since before the Revolution.

Usually, however, the peasant-proprietor, in Normandy at least, is not of the ambitious order that aspires to more than a small area to work as his own, compared with his apparently more opulent neighbour, who, perhaps, farms his land on shares with the actual land-owner, a practice known throughout France as _métayage_. Besides the two smaller classes of farmers, those who hire or work on shares, or those who own small tracts, there are the large landed proprietors who farm their own land on a scale known as high farming. The three together have made possible the prosperity of the greater part of the France of to-day; and in no other country can such a forcible economic lesson be learned of the power of a country to be self-sustaining.

Before now it has been said that Normandy is monotonous, but this is not true. Writers have compared its angularities, so to speak, with the nicely rounded _contours_ of the South Downs of England; and its sturdy, soil-grown villages with the undeniably picturesque hamlets of Surrey and Sussex. One is characteristic of France and the other of England; but wherein is one more monotonous than the other?

Really, Normandy is one of the most diversified sections in all France, and while quite different, in almost every way, from Brittany, Maine, and Anjou, its neighbours, it forms with them a region where one learns more of the varying conditions which go to make up the life of the nation than in any other parts of France as it is known to-day; for Burgundy and its people are still Burgundian, Provence, Provençal, and the Midi, Spanish--or something very akin to it.

The Normandy of to-day, its people, and their manners and customs, however, breathes the very spirit of history of feudal and even more ancient times, from the days of Rollon, the Dane, down through Norman William and Richard Cœur de Lion, to the times when Normandy finally became attached to the Crown.

“High farming,” as the working of the great estates is called, is, of course, a very different thing from the working of small farms or vegetable gardens. Two and a half acres of land within a half a dozen miles of a city like Havre or Rouen, or even a town like Louviers or Vernon, will support a family of five, if the wife carries the produce to market herself, which she generally does, leaving the men-folks to gossip in a café and to hitch up the mare and the family cart when the day’s trading is finished.

It is only as one reaches the great plain of La Beauce, just across the southern border of Normandy, that one comes upon grain culture on a large scale, though, to be sure, the farm product of Normandy is by no means limited to vegetables. One must not forget the cider-apple and its product, the true wine of the country.

Olivier Basselin, who died in 1419, wrote in old Norman French an “Apologie du Cidre,” which as near as may be is translated as follows:

“Though Frenchmen at our drink may laugh,
And think their taste is wondrous fine,
The Norman cider, which we quaff,
Is quite the equal of his wine,
When down, down, down, it freely goes
And charms the palate as it flows.”

Mere diffusion of property is no indication of the wealth of a nation, but a general prosperity is; and if we except a few departments where the shepherding and grazing of flocks is the principal occupation, there are very few parts of France where one notices any lack of actual necessities.

France was poorest as a nation, and her working classes most prosperous, under Charles-le-Sage. France was richest, and her poor the most miserable, under Louis XIV.

Erasmus in his “Adages” has said: “Open your purse and pay, for you enter a port; pay, for you cross a bridge; pay, for you use a ferry;” and in general and with much elaboration there is still something more than a vestige of feudalism left in the life of to-day. What it was in former times, in France, is no more, but the single-taxer and the socialist--and some strangers from a supposedly freer land--will complain at the octroi, and the tax on matches and tobacco, as if a revenue from some source were not necessary for the conduct of the state. Whatever may first appear to the contrary, France is not overtaxed to-day, and no evidences of oppressive taxation are actually to be seen in the lives of the peasants of the rich hillsides, or the workers of the busy towns of Normandy.

Normandy must always have been a wealthy province; for, in Leopold Delisle’s “Study of the Condition of Agriculture in Normandy in the Middle Ages,” is made the astounding--and authenticated--statement that “the monks of Montdaie fed their pigs on meat.”

Up to within the last half-century, if we are to believe the chroniclers, a Norman peasant might visit any parish in the province and note but little change from the aspect it bore in mediæval times.

In our day this would hardly prove to be the case: what with cream-separators, throbbing, mechanical sowers and reapers, traction-engines, and light-railways, all but the face of nature itself is changed--and in many parts not a little of that.

In some of the depths of Brittany, the heart of the Cantal, or the wastes of Lozère, this may be true. There indeed one might find little changed the wooden-pronged plough and rough flails, and hand labour throughout still continues its round of pastoral life as of yore; but in Normandy and the more prosperous north things have changed greatly, and always for the better.

A bird’s-eye view of the history of the provinces of France furnishes many surprises, as many, if not more, than would a résumé of the affairs of the capital, which has always reflected much more the sentiments of the country-side than has the capital of any other world power.

In spite of the more or less vulgar show of the wealth of the cities, it is in the country that the great prosperity of France lies, and in Normandy this aspect is very much to the fore.

The peasant-proprietor has always been a factor in the life and history of France. True enough, he was often suppressed and doubtless quite miserable at times; but from Martin’s history we learn that the land transfers of the time of even the Crusades were notable for their magnitude.

Between the seigneur and the serf were two classes, known as _tenanciers_ and _mainmortables_. The former could bequeath their lands to their children, while the latter “lived a freeman, but died a serf,” as the saying goes, his heirs being compelled to purchase their right to inherit the land.

Just previous to the Revolution, curious as it may seem, one-third of French territory, according to Arthur Young, belonged to the peasant-proprietor.

In 1789 four millions of French subjects were land-owners, but to-day there are over eight millions, quite a fifth of the population.

Fénélon and La Bruyère drew sombre pictures of the French peasant of a former day; but they must have had in mind individual cases, or at least examples far from representative, taking into consideration the figures above given and the following statements. Foville cites the Commune of Paroz in the Department of the Seine et Marne as showing in 1768, and again more than fifty years later, that the land-holdings corresponded precisely, both in number and extent. In an article in the _Contemporary Review_ (May, 1886) M. Baudrillart gives many more examples in a similar vein. Even during the reign of Louis XIV., when the monarchy and aristocracy were at their height, the farming peasant, in his own right, had begun to prosper.

Bois Guillebert wrote in 1709: “It would be impossible to find here a square foot of ground which does not produce all that it is capable of producing. No man is so poor that he is not decently clothed and who has not plenty of bread and drink.” (Meaning wine or drink made of fruit juices, as, for instance, the cider of Normandy--and, sometimes, an imitation of it known as “Boisson Normand.”)

In 1738 the Abbé St. Pierre wrote: “Almost all day-labourers possess a garden or a plot of ground.”

A half-century later Arthur Young, in turn pessimistic and optimistic, tells of a general prevailing prosperity of all that part of France through which he travelled. He goes particularly into details with regard to Normandy with credit to that province; while with Brittany his estimate is almost the reverse.

Balzac, that great delineator of French character, sets forth, in “Les Paysans,” the somewhat equivocal statement that the time would come, owing to the steady progress of the French peasant, when France would have neither horses nor cattle. In those days it is hardly likely that he anticipated the automobile, so we may infer that he had in mind that every peasant would be his own producer, and would accordingly not need the horse as a beast of burden to carry him and his produce to market.

The population of Normandy is in general of a full-blooded, blond type, with blue eyes, and of a good height. Misery and poverty are quite the exception throughout the farming communities, and the long blue blouse and the black bonnet, which one sees so frequently on the fair days, usually covers a wealth that at first glance is quite undiscernible.

Enter any of the ordinary farmhouses, which you may come across in a day’s travel by road, and you will see preserved many of the usages of olden times.

Your Norman of the old régime will not discard an ancient custom for another merely because it is new--sometimes he won’t even think of it in favour of a better one.

It is the hour for the repast; in the kitchen one sees a long, narrow table covered only with a simple napkin, more often none at all, but scrubbed to such a degree of whiteness as only old oak can attain.

The farmer and his household seat themselves about the table, frequently on a long bench, and the conversation is simply that of the country-side, tempered with occasional rallies as to the state of crops or the weather. There is never a word of outside interest; for as likely as not the old peasant-farmer has never left his native village, giving to his sons or his daughters’ husbands the burden of whatever intercourse may be necessary with the outside world.

In the Cotentin there were, and still are, though they are not built to-day, numerous mud houses and barns, quite like the adobe homes of the Mexican Indians. Some of these structures, in the Cotentin peninsula, before reaching Cherbourg, are of three stories in height, with not a rock in their make-up, being simply straw and mud strung together with beams and rafters.

The earth used for the purpose was a thick brown loam into which straw had been kneaded, after which it was cut into cakes (though not baked, as are bricks) and built into walls by layers simply. The walls are sometimes two feet thick. All the houses need is a periodical coat of whitewash to become as good as new.

France has been commonly thought to be a non-meat-eating nation, but the consumption is steadily rising. Only so late as the reign of Louis-Philippe the consumption per capita was but twenty kilos, but thirty years later it had risen forty per cent.

Lest any one should think that the peasant of Normandy knows not how to eat, let him read Gustave Flaubert’s description of a wedding-breakfast, which, in part, runs as follows:

“It was under the roof of the great wagon-shed that the table was laid. It had upon it four joints of beef, six fricasseed chickens, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and in the middle a whole roasted suckling pig. At the corners were placed brandy in _carafes_ and sweet cider in bottles, and all the glasses on the board were already filled to their limits. There were great dishes of yellow cream which shook at the least shock given the table, and from Yvetot came the cakes and the tarts. A great wedding-cake completed the repast. The base was a sort of temple with porticos, colonnades, and statuettes. On the second layer was a ‘keep’ composed of sweetmeats from Savoy, garnished with almonds, grapes, and oranges, while above the whole was a cupid.”

It has been a commonplace to revile French cooking for a long time, but the custom is going out of fashion.

Perhaps the English and American palate is becoming accustomed to a ragoût of mutton, rabbit garenne, or chicken chasseur, and it no longer looks “messy.” As a matter of fact, it is far more palatable than boiled fowl or the eternal boiled mutton of the average English country hotel.

In France one notes one difference, at any rate, in the country fare. The old-time inn, if it has not wholly disappeared, and there are at least a dozen reminiscent examples in Normandy which prove that it has not,--at Les Andelys and Louviers, for example,--has become more modern in the excellence of its cuisine.

There is the eternal chicken, of course, which is, however, better than eternal boiled mutton; there is a surprising frequency and variety of omelets, but they are excellent. There is always a stew of some sort, but it is not made of left-over scraps of some one else’s dinner, as is popularly supposed; and there is the roast with its salad, which is, of course, the principal dish. The crisp, green, and, above all, _well-dressed_ salad is an infinitely better combination than best English beef and Yorkshire pudding or mutton and dumpling.

In France, too, there is always soup, which is always good--more than can be said for the feeble imitations of England and America. And there are no sticky cloying English puddings or abominable American pies to wind up with. A light, tasty cheese is served throughout Normandy, Petit Bondon, Cœur de la Crême, Pont l’Evêque, or Camembert, and a biscuit which one dips in his wine and munches thoughtfully, as he speculates as to what the price may be for all this, or how it can be done profitably at the price. The cost is not over three francs, and perhaps only two francs, fifty centimes, or even two francs.

It is a curious fact that on the beaten track in Normandy, in the Seine valley for instance,--though not all of its highroads and by-roads are well worn by English-speaking people as yet,--the patron of your hotel thinks nothing of it if you want the regulation Anglo-Saxon ham and eggs for breakfast. He only marvels if you drink _café au lait_ with it, and then top off with jam or marmalade. If it is the former you want, you ask for _confiture_, but if nothing but marmalade will do--by which, in the English-speaking world over, is meant orange marmalade--you ask for “Dundee,” and you will get it, if your inn is in a town above ten thousand inhabitants.

Until recently Englishmen and Americans have had a great contempt for the out-of-door pleasures of the French, but matters have changed considerably during the past decade.

The sport of society is passed over here; horse-racing, golf, tennis, etc., and only such as form a part and parcel of the life of the common people is considered.

The French tendency in physical exercise is toward gymnastics and military drill--not quite to the German extent, but a nearer approach thereto than is found elsewhere. All this makes for a general physical improvement, class for class, throughout France. Fencing is still greatly in vogue, though, of course, it is practised, in its duelling aspect, only in the higher walks of life. When it comes to walking, the endurance of the French inhabitant of the country-side is astonishing. The peasant will trudge slowly thirty, forty, or fifty miles in the round of the clock and think nothing of it. There is not much horseback riding in France, particularly among the poorer classes, though the influence of the army has kept it from dying out entirely.

The French peasant can carry his whole family behind one horse in his light, high-wheeled cart; and, on any market-day, near a large town, you will see a cavalcade of country carts filled with a large proportion of the suburban population, all wending their way, for a dozen, fifteen, or twenty miles round about, to the market-town.

“As a nation,” says Hamerton, “the English are incomparably the finer, but the English industrial system of increasing the concentration in large towns is rapidly diminishing their collective superiority. The French generally are of small stature, so that a man of middle height in England is a tall man in France, and French soldiers in their summer fatigue blouses look to an Englishman like boys.”

Still, though the average Frenchman is short in stature, he is often muscular and capable of bearing great fatigue. His shortness is mainly in his legs, yet he strides vigorously in marching. Sometimes one finds a tall, powerful man in a French village, such as the men of Louis-Napoleon’s famous “Cent Guards,” and more often in Normandy than elsewhere, whereas in Brittany, even the inland country peasant has manifestly the cut of the sailorman whose ranks he mostly fills.