OUR HOME IN AVEYRON.* Tam is a pleasant and honest
book, without any special pretensions to object, arrangement, style, or study. It will be interesting to every one who wishes for a better under-
• Our Home in Areyron : with Studies of Peasant Life and Customs in Areyron and the Lot. By G. Christopher Davies and Mrs. Brongnall. With Illustrations. Edinburgh and London : W. Blackwood and Sons. 1890.
standing of France and French life, particularly among the peasants, whom the author had every opportunity of knowing well.
Mr. Davies—his name is already familiar as the writer of Norfolk Broads and Rivers—went to the South of France to pay a long visit to his brother, who is director of a lead-mine in the mountains of the Aveyron. There he and his sister live a simple and friendly life among the village people, with only, as it seems, two other Englishmen in the neighbourhood. Not far off is the mining town of Decazeville, notorious for its terrible strike, and the savage behaviour of the mining population at that time. But at all times these French miners seem to be dangerous and disagreeable people ; in politics the reddest of the Red ; unreasonable, heathen, and completely animal in all their objects and ways. The life of their directors and over- seers is a risky and adventurous one : even in the much quieter neighbourhood where Mr. Davies's mine is situated, where the miners, though unmanageable enough, are more like children than fiends, no official is ever to be found without his revolver. All this account of French workmen, not given by tourists or theorists, but by those who know them intimately well and from personal experience, is both painful and alarming.
The peasants certainly shine by contrast,—the proprigtaires, as they call themselves, their landed property ranging from two to fifteen acres. Religion has still some slight hold upon them ; their family affections are strong ; they are not abso- lutely cruel to their animals ; they are conservative, though only from caution and selfishness, and though they hate those who are richer than themselves ; they are not perhaps entirely dishonest, though it is always lawful to cheat an Anglais. Nothing would give us greater pleasure than to speak with cordial liking of these picturesque and hard-working people, who by some writers are held up as models ; the more so that we know by experience what excellent specimens are to be found among them. But we have long known also—and Mr. Davies's most fair remarks and moderately coloured pictures are only a confirmation of it—that the French propriaaire, as a general rule, is anything but an ideal human being. These peasants of the Aveyron—and they are supposed to be some of the most prosperous in France, being favoured with a wonderful climate and a wonderful soil—are described by Mr. Davies as dirty, superstitious, quarrelsome, and money-grubbing to the last degree. Thus a comparison much in their favour is very hard indeed on the miners. But it is possible to like the peasants, and to live peaceably among them. Their curious customs are an unfailing source of interest, and the account of them fills some of the pleasantest pages of this book.
Mr. Davies and his fellow-author have done full justice to the beauty of this pays perdu, called so by the French from its difficulty of access. The green torrent of the Lot, with constant weirs and locks and tunnels through the rock, with frequent floods, is bordered by great limestone cliffs green with maidenhair. Over these, little brooks fall wildly in a mist of spray—here and there a village clings to the cliff, and perhaps some ruined chateau towers on the height above. There is all the wildness, strangeness, lonely and stormy beauty of a mountain-country, and the blazing heat and dazzling clearness of the South. The Lot, treacherous as he is lovely, rises in the mountains of the Lozere, the limestone causses of whose marvels so much has been written lately, and running through the departments of the Aveyron and the Lot, flows with other mountain rivers into the Garonne, not very far above Bordeaux. The Lot seems to be a dangerous river to navigate, and the steam-launch which with many adventures conveyed "the director" and his friends up and down, found herself almost alone among the perils of frequent weirs and mismanaged locks. But the English were not to be kept from the water.
They made many charming excursions, and took many photographs, which appear in this book, giving a good idea, as far as they go, of villages, rivers, mountains, processions, women washing, ruined chateaux, peasants' houses. One's own imagination must bring to these grey pictures the colour and light of the South. One very cm-ions place, little visited now by the English, though they crowded there in the Middle Ages, is the pilgrimage church of Rocamadour, where the sword of Roland, Durandal, was brought and treasured after his death. Legend tells that St. Amadour was the same person as Zaccheus. Like so many other saints, he found his way to this country, and chose these rocks on which to build
his hermitage : they were then "inhabited and peopled by ferocious beaks."
To most of the world, we fancy, in spite of books and photo-
graphs, the Aveyron is likely to remain a pays perdu. The
really civilised English tourist would find nothing to do there, and life, under present conditions, almost impossible. But there are a few people—Mr. Davies and his relations are not the first of them—for whom this country, so much farther from England than can be measured by distance, has an irresistible attraction and charm. These people, brought to the Aveyron by some curious chain of circumstances, have been fully con- tent to give up their native country, and to live and die there. It is rather interesting to note Mr. Davies's opinion, which seems to escape him almost accidentally, of the France of to- day compared with the France of former centuries. He is
looking up at the "grim old ruin" of a chateau on a rock :— "So it stands, of the past eloquent ; and looking at the miserable present below us, who can say that there is any improvement in men or manners ? All that can be said is, that the occasional tyranny and misdoing of the few has turned to the constant tyranny and misdoing of the many."
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