Essays of Travel Tale 8 - Forest Notes 1875-6

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Section 8 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. The sleeper box recording is in the public domain.

Chapter 5

Forest Notes, 1875-6.

On the Plain. Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of the Gethenei, where they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau.

Here and there a few gray rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun themselves. Here and there a few apple trees stand together on a knoll. The quaint undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into the distance. The strips blend and disappear, and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire against the sky.

Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes down a swollen orange as it were into the sea.

A blue-clad peasant rides home with a harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his wife and their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain. These people stand and knit up to their shoulders, and their heads, as they stoop over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time against the golden sky. These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means overworked, but somehow you always see in them the historical representative of the surf of yore, and think not so much of present times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days, when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived in Michelet's image like a hare between two furrows.

These very people, now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is they who have been their country's scapegoat for long ages, they who generation after generation have sowed and not reaped, reaped and another has garnered, and who have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their good things in their turn. For the days are gone by when the seigneur ruled and profited. Le seigneur, says the old formula, enferme ces malins comme se porte et gonne du ciel à la terre. Tout est la lui, for et chenu, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, vet en buisson, l'homme qui court, la cloche dont le son a loin roule. Such was his old state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a mere king. And now you may ask yourself where he is, and look round for vestiges of my late lord. And in all the countryside, there is no trace of him, but his forlorn and fallen mansion. At the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a close, full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked roofs and turning veins into the wind and sun.

There is a glad spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade, but no spring shall revive the honor of the place. Old women of the people, little children of the people, saunter and gamble in the walled court, or feed the ducks in the neglected moat.

Plow horses mighty of limb, browse in the long stables.

The dial hand on the clock waits for some better hour.

Out on the plain, or hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, and the spade goes in deep and comes up slowly. Perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at his heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold, which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper, while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night with empty bellies and cold feet. And perhaps as he raises his head and sees the forest line like a coastline of low hills along the sea level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no unsimilar place in his affections.

If the chateau was my lord's, the forest was my lord the king's, neither of them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his meager way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire or for a new roof tree, he found himself face to face with the whole department, from the grand master of the woods and waters, who was a high born lord, down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes or a bandolier by way of uniform. For the first offense by the Salek law, there was a fine of 15 souls, and should a man be taken more than once in fault or circumstances aggravate the color of his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Malone, and I doubt not a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to market.