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From Ocean To Sea
by
Thus you reach Toulouse, a noble city, of which it ill befits a passer-through to speak. Volumes have been written on its antiquities, and volumes on its history; and all of either that my readers need know, they will find in Murray’s hand-book.
At Toulouse–or rather on leaving it to go eastward–you become aware that you have passed into a fresh region. The change has been, of course, gradual: but it has been concealed from you by passing over the chilly dreary uplands of Lannemezan. Now you find yourself at once in Languedoc. You have passed from the Atlantic region into the Mediterranean; from the old highlands of the wild Vascones, into those lowlands of Gallia Narbonensis, reaching from the head-waters of the Garonne to the mouths of the Rhone, which were said to be more Italian than Italy itself.
The peculiarity of the district is its gorgeous colouring. Everywhere, over rich plains, you look away to low craggy banks of limestone, the grey whereof contrasts strongly with the green of the lowland, and with the even richer green of the mulberry orchards; and beyond them again, southward to the now distant snows of the Pyrenees, and northward to the orange downs and purple glens of the Cevennes, all blazing in the blazing sun. Green, grey, orange, purple, and, in the farthest distance, blue as of the heaven itself, make the land one vast rainbow, and fit dwelling-place for its sunny folk, still happy and industrious–once the most cultivated and luxurious people in Europe.
As for their industry, it is hereditary. These lands were, it may be, as richly and carefully tilled in the days of Augustus Caesar as they are now; or rather, as they were at the end of the eighteenth century. For, since then, the delver and sower–for centuries the slave of the Roman, and, for centuries after, the slave of Teutonic or Saracenic conquerors–has become his own master, and his own landlord; and an impulse has been given to industry, which is shown by trim cottages, gay gardens, and fresh olive orchards, pushed up into glens which in a state of nature would starve a goat.
The special culture of the country–more and more special as we run eastward–is that of the mulberry, the almond, and the olive. Along every hill-side, down every glen, lie orchard-rows of the precious pollards. The mulberries are of richest dark velvet green; the almonds, one glory of rose-colour in early spring, are now of a paler and colder green; the olives (as all the world knows) of a dusty grey, which looks all the more desolate in the pruning time of early spring, when half the boughs of the evergreen are cut out, leaving the trees stripped as by a tempest, and are carried home for fire- wood in the quaint little carts, with their solid creaking wheels, drawn by dove-coloured kine. Very ancient are some of these olives, or rather, olive-groups. For when the tree grows old, it splits, and falls asunder, as do often our pollard willows; the bark heals over on the inside of each fragment, and what was one tree becomes many, springing from a single root, and bearing such signs of exceeding age that one can well believe the country tale, how in the olive grounds around Nismes are still fruiting olives which have furnished oil for the fair Roman dames who cooled themselves in the sacred fountain of Nemausa, in the days of the twelve Caesars.
Between the pollard rows are everywhere the rows of vines, or of what will be vines when summer comes, but are now black knobbed and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life save here and there one fat green shoot of leaf and tendril bursting forth from the seemingly dead stick.
One who sees that sight may find a new meaning and beauty in the mystic words, ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches.’ It is not merely the connection between branch and stem, common to all trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathens look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or–after the old Roman fashion, which I believe endures still in these parts– buried as manure at the foot of the parent stem; not merely these, but the seeming death of the vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, of every branch and twig which it had borne the year before, and left unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter’s sleep; and then bursting forth again, by an irresistible inward life, into fresh branches spreading and trailing far and wide, and tossing their golden tendrils to the sun.