We had expected quiet, rural times in this far-away village of St.-LÉger-sous-Beuvray; but I doubt whether we shall get them. The village green in front of the Hotel du Morvan shows signs of unusual animation; it is dotted with carts, which are discharging tent-poles, canvas, golden cars, and other paraphernalia of a country festival; and, surer sign still, through the door of an open shed, I can see hanging, headless and lamentable, the gaping corpse of a fatted calf. Yes! there is his tawny countenance and two mild eyes looking down, like those of a martyred saint, from the cruel hook. The odour of him, wafted in succulent puffs, from the dead-house door, has cheered with a splendid hope half the dogs in the village, and awakened from torpor two ancient hounds, who prowl, almost youthfully, sniffing fragrant memories in the air.

"What is going to happen?" I asked the landlord, who was sharpening tools on a bench.

"'Tis the LouÉe, Monsieur, the hiring that takes place every year. All in the neighbourhood who want farm-hands, or domestic servants, and those who want places, come to-morrow morning and make bargains. And the Directeur of Enfants AssistÉs (Foundlings) is coming, too; he is to stop here at my hotel, and so his children get work."

We were up early the next morning. Only deaf men, or dead ones, sleep through a LouÉe. There came to us in our bedroom, with the sunshine, an indescribable babel of sounds—babble of voices, braying of trumpets, banging of drums. To a Londoner, strange methods of doing business!

We went out into the din and the sunshine to find the transformation complete. All the green was dotted with booths bright with gaudy trinkets of every imaginable colour; shooting galleries, and a hundred other sou-trapping devices. Before every inn had sprung up, as if by magic, a salle de bal, with a real wooden floor, and a little balcony for the musicians. There was a gipsy encampment, too, where, heedless of the din, a Romany sat upon the trunk of a fallen tree, methodically skinning hedgehogs with a knife; while his two small sons were unmethodically currey-combing the yellow pony, and dusting him down with his own tail, cut off and tied to a stick! The door of the caravan opened; there was a glimpse of a woman's arm, and a pailful of slops shot out, sparkling in the sun, to alight where fate might decree. Brown drops splashed up into the hollow eyes of Grandmother, dreaming on a chair by the steps. Meanwhile the peasants went on hiring and being hired; some sealing the bargain with a glass of red wine, in the CafÉ; some, if the maid were comely, with a kiss. Peasants I call them, though, at first sight, this array of black blouses and black squash hats suggests a meeting of nonconformist parsons, rather than farmers of the Morvan. Yet one learns to accept them so, and to enjoy the deep, black shadows that lurk in the folds of the garments. Straw hats are few; but the white caps of the old ladies are there for contrast.

Wearied of the buzzing crowd, the nerve-racking crack of the rifles, we wandered out of the village, and sat by the edge of a ploughed field, where we watched, above a rampart of firs shot with spring greens, the purple mass of dark Beuvray lifting its crested summit into the cloudless sky,—mysterious Beuvray, whence of old, as darkness closed upon their homes, the wondering peasants in the valley, heard, from the mysterious mountain city above their heads, the sound of great gates creaking harshly upon their hinges.

But to-morrow is for Beuvray. To-day we will watch the long stream of peasants coming to the Fair, by the lanes that wind, up and down, among the buttress hills of the mount. They come on foot, in farm carts, on bicycles; but most of them come in little, trim donkey-carts; husband and wife sitting primly side by side, their tanned faces shewing strongly above the silently twitching, brown ears of the "baudet." Here is a family in a donkey-drawn washing-basket, three generations of them, packed like sardines. After dÉjeuner, when the hiring is done, the older ones leave; the turn of the younger is come. Then the fillettes begin to appear—Fifines made fine for the Fair—all cut after the same pattern, with white blouses below much be-ribboned straw hats; each carrying, because of the mid-day sun, a grey jacket lined with light blue. These come tripping from village and hamlet, clinging to each other, with little toddlers holding their hands; all chattering, smiling, sweltering, happy. The fiddlers will be tuning up in the Salles de Bal.

So we followed the maids back to the village, and wandered again among the booths. An old, old lady, beside a not less ancient friend was nursing a tin mug. They were discussing bargains and their budget. "I got this for three sous; et je trouve que c'est bien solide." On that point she was cruelly deceived. But what matter? Thinking makes it so. What a popping of corks comes from the CafÉ!

Bang! Bang!! Bang!! Bang!! Bang!!! The crowd surges toward a compelling din. Before the largest of the tents a half-naked, muscular ruffian stands silent upon a tub; beside him another, clad in shiny velveteens, shouts himself hoarse.

"Gentlemen, you all know that the 'lutte est le premier gymnastique du monde.' Come in then, and see. Our professor challenges all comers. He will wrestle with a great bear. Now for la lutte aux ours! Entrez; we will show you the vÉritable gorille, and the most terrible beast in the world, the Monstre du Pole Nord." And, indeed, above his head was writ in gold letters, the fearsome legend: "Monstre du Pole Nord."

We went in, with other youths and maidens. The baby that followed us, shewing signs of strong emotion, was hastily removed by its mother.

"Up against the canvas, please gentlemen. La sÉance va commencer au milieu!"

We watched while, before the bars that held the four-legged animals, the naked bipeds struggled furiously; clutching, writhing, rolling, till the bare, oily skins were dark with perspiration and sawdust. Their eyes were so full of it, that, between the rounds, they were gouging it out with their knuckles. "Ca y est! Ca y est!" "At it again!"

"Bravo monsieur l'amateur, un petit bravo pour l'amateur"—with arms like telegraph posts—"le plus fort du pays." So it went on—the "lutte aux hommes," the "lutte aux ours."

For a full five minutes the sanded professor leant up against and pushed the furry mass of Jean Pierre, the feebly scratching, tangled bear, who was too bored to be mÉchant. From behind their bars the Monstre Du Pole Nord (a sloth bear) and "le vÉritable gorille" (a Barbary ape) grunted approval of their companion's efforts.

Through the crowded entrance we pushed our way into the largest of the Salles de Bal, bright with lit lamps and coloured ribbons. In a scarlet and green box, with a yellow diamond, slung to the roof of the tent, the fiddlers and viol players, sitting in their shirt-sleeves, squeaked and ground lustily. There was babble of voices and rhythmic scuffle of feet. A young soldier, fair and close-cropped, in uniform, crossed the salle, bowed to my wife, and asked for a dance. A moment's hesitation, and she was whirling round with the others. As he said to her at parting; "You are not in France every day." It was three in the morning before darkness and silence settled down upon St.-LÉger-sous-Beuvray.

The next morning we rode to the Mount by a lane that, undulating, climbs, through pasture, arable, and woodland, among the buttress hills of Beuvray, to the Poirier aux Chiens, a lonely farmhouse, where we left our bicycles. Cyclists are rather worried hereabout by excitable dogs and hysterical sheep; but the former are not dangerous, as they are in Languedoc and other parts of the south of France; and we are happily free to-day from the dangers of two hundred years ago; as when, on the 18th of June, 1718, at nightfall, St. LÉger was visited by a mad wolf from the top of Beuvray, that wounded and disfigured sixteen people, of whom all but one died of hydrophobia. The single exception was a woman, who had only been scratched by the animal's claws. After this incident a Confraternity of St. Hubert was established in connection with the Church, and by the authority of the bishop, for the destruction of wild beasts.[2]

The easiest path by which those who are not familiar with the locality can climb Beuvray, is from the Croix du Rebout, nearly two kilometres beyond the Poirier aux Chiens, at the top of the col, just where the descent begins. Several other paths lead up to it; but as there are more than twenty miles of Gaulish roads intersecting on the tree-clad slopes of the Mount, it is very easy to lose yourself completely, as I did on my first visit; until there was nothing for it but to descend to the road and seek another path. My only consolation for those two hours of wasted energy was that, while lunching beside the forest path, I met, face to face, a red fox ambling jauntily on his way. How we stared at one another; and how I wished that, for once, he could talk.

But, "after all," the reader may ask, "Why climb Beuvray? When you are up there, what is to be seen but a view; and what mean these twenty miles of Gaulish roads through a wilderness of boughs?" To which pertinent question I reply, that in all France there is but one Beuvray.

You will find more romantic peaks in the Alpines of Provence, you will find grander, more striking mountains in volcanic Auvergne; in the Alps you will see summits, clothed in eternal snow, beside which the Mount is but a molehill; but nowhere will you find such a hill as this, whose flanks have echoed to the tramp of CÆsar's legions, whose crest, the council chamber of kings and generals, has flamed through long nights with the beacon fires of a great city. Nowhere else will you find a hill that the centuries have so peopled with dragon and saint, with phantom hound and spectre horseman, and have made as harmonious with legendary poetry and immemorial voices, as nature has made her woods vocal with whispering fern and wandering wind, with the ripple of the brook, and the stir of creeping things in the grass.[3]

For this Beuvray is no other than Bibracte, the Gaulish oppidum that CÆsar speaks of as "Oppido Aeduorum longe maximo et copiosissimo."[4] Tradition, as I have said, had rumoured it for centuries as the site of an ancient city; but many had supposed that Autun was the place referred to, until the researches of M. Bulliot, the Antiquary of Hamerton's delightful work "The Mount," settled the problem once for all. Of the history of the last days of the town I will say something in the next chapter; for the present, let us be content to mount the rocky, rain-washed, Gaulish road that leads up, through interlacing boughs, to the "Grand Hotel des Gaulois," or, in other words, the little house and sheds near the summit, which the antiquary occupied while making his researches and excavations.

The path runs beside many of the most interesting discoveries, though nothing of the remains is to be seen, the owner having stipulated that all "fouilles" should be covered up, a precaution necessary in any event, if the primitive Gaulish homes of stones and wood, with mud for mortar, are ever to be preserved to a later posterity.[5]

After passing the huts, you come, by a grassy woodland path winding up through ferns and bracken, to the terrace on the summit of the hill, now mercifully clear of the ubiquitous trees. Here, on the site of the ancient temple to the Dea Bibracte, one of the many Gaulish gods, M. Bulliot has erected a little chapel in Romanesque style, dedicated to St. Martin. Here, also, is a granite cross, with a carving of St. Martin performing an act of charity at the gate of Amiens; not far away is a memorial to M. Bulliot himself.

Tradition has given much prominence to the doings of St. Martin here, as elsewhere in France, and it seems probable that the saint did visit Bibracte, about the year 377, on his way to Autun. M. Bulliot, and other authorities, agree that he preached on the plateau of Beuvray, possibly from the Pierre de la Wivre; and the legend has it that here he overthrew a pagan temple, arousing thereby such fierce anger among the inhabitants, that he escaped only by a miraculous leap of his ass across the gorge of Malvaux (Mauvaise vallÉe) to the south-west of the Mount, where the animal's hoof-prints are still to be seen. Later I shall give fully a precisely similar legend concerning St. Martin in the valley of Nantoux.

When once we had got our bearings, and accustomed ourselves to the silence and solitude of the spot, we began to feel the charm of the lonely plateau, and to realize its attractions for those who would live close to nature and to the past. When I first visited it, on a bright autumn afternoon, not a leaf was astir upon the golden oaks, not a spray of the bramble trembled, not a rustle was heard among the dead ferns in the grass; only, from far away in the valley below, came the rumble of a cart-wheel, the crack of a sportsman's rifle in the distant woods.

I looked down through the fringing trees. For mile after mile the country lay golden before me, fields rising and falling, till they were lost in the eastern sky. There was little St. LÉger, a toy village among tiny hills; there was the Etang de Poisson, a sapphire set in emeralds, and far away the evening sun flashing upon the spires of Autun Cathedral.[6] The sound of a footstep broke the stillness. A youth was approaching me—a chÉtif, mis-shapen, shaking thing. He gazed on me with drooping jaw, and passed muttering—an idiot wandering through a night-mare world.

Then I, too, began to dream fantastic dreams, and to see spectres of the past, such as—the peasants tell you—still flit over the crest of Beuvray,—a white horse galloping at midnight, a loud voice commanding ghostly legions in Latin; shadowy riders, moving shades of mediÆval knights and barons still climbing the stony paths to this their airy tilting ground. Winged gabble raches passed screaming over my head, and, from afar, baying in deep-mouthed thunder, I heard the hounds of the phantom hunter of Touleur.[7]

But that was a thundery day last autumn, and this is a soft April evening, with a breeze in the leaves, and silver clouds afloat in a blue sky. Moreover, I am not alone.

We wandered back by the path along which we had come, and made our way to the Pierre de la Wivre, a curious, pointed rock rising from the plateau. Its sulphurous yellow colour is due to the lichen with which it is covered. From the green headland, surrounded with holly-bushes, on which it stands, you have magnificent views over rounded, village-dotted hills, whose brown-green upland fields nestle up to the dark forests that crown every summit. Up from the valleys come the shouts of the teamsters urging on the slow, pale oxen.

This Pierre de la Wivre shows signs of man's handling, and has probably been the scene of human sacrifices, and of other ancient religious rites. We asked ourselves whether there may not have been some religious significance in the surrounding belt of holly bushes, since there are indications of a similar belt round the chapel of St. Martin. Perhaps the holly tree was sacred to the Gauls. Sitting upon the stone we recalled the legend as told by Hamerton.[8]

"The peasants believe that the Wivern dwells near it in a hidden cavern guarding its treasure, but that once a year the cavern opens and the Wivern goes out, leaving the treasure unguarded. As to the time of year when this happens the narrators differ. Some say that it is at midnight on Christmas Eve, others fix it for Easter Day during High Mass; in either case it is during Mass, as there is a midnight service at Christmas. The popular legend in its present form goes on to recount how a certain woman, accompanied by her child, went to the stone of the Wivern, instead of going to Mass, intending to take his treasure. She found the cave open, entered, and took as much gold as she could carry, and came out just in time to escape the Wivern on his return. On looking round for her child, she could not find him anywhere. The cavern being now closed again, she knew not what to do, and went in despair to the priest, who told her to go to the place every day and pour milk and honey on the stone till the expiration of twelve months, and then, when the day came for the opening of the cave, to take her treasure back to it undiminished, and she would find her child. So she went day by day without fail, in heat and cold, in fine weather and foul, and poured milk and honey on the stone. At last the day came when the Wivern left the cave, and the mother found her child within, sitting quite unhurt, and in perfect health, with an apple before him on a stone table. So she restored the treasure gladly, and took away her child."

M. Bulliot thinks that the legend was originally one of some Gaulish sacrilege and reparatory oblation, the Gaulish priests requiring a daily offering (perhaps of milk and honey) until certain stolen treasure was restored. The Catholic character of the legend he looks upon as nothing but an aftergrowth; and the apple has, in his opinion, a distinct though undiscoverable significance.

From the Pierre de la Wivre we could see, on the next headland to our left, the ridge of Pierre SalvÉe sharply serrated against the sky. There, half an hour later, we found ourselves rewarded by a glorious sight. Westward we could see extending mile upon mile, ridge after ridge, the glowing mountains of Auvergne, and the valley of the Loire, veiled in a shimmering mist, through whose mysterious wreaths flashed, here and there, in diamond splendour, the sun-touched roof of a humble cottage and the tower of a lordly chateau.[9]

With all the thousand other interesting details concerning Bibracte—the Gaulish roads, the ramparts, the remains, the descriptions and industries of the town, the visits of CÆsar—I have no space to deal here; but I recommend particularly to the reader Hamerton's book, from which I have quoted, and M. Dechelette's handy guide, "L'Oppidum de Bibracte."

We cycled from St. LÉger to Autun, by way of La Grand VerriÈre Monthelon, and the Valley of the Arroux. Monthelon, some seven kilometres from Autun, is a place famous in French Ecclesiastical history. It has, as is common in Burgundian villages, a delightful little Romanesque Church, concerning one of whose curÉs Hamerton tells a good story which I cannot refrain from giving in the original tongue.

This old curÉ, then, was fond of putting Latin into his sermons, a little bit at a time, his own Latin; not of the best. "'Lorsque je paraÎtrai devant Notre Seigneur, il me demandera; 'CurÉ Monthelonius, ubi sunt brebetis meis'—ce qui veut dire; 'CurÉ de Monthelon, oÙ sont me brebis?' Et moi je lui rÉpondrai; 'bÊtes je les ai trouvÉes, bÊtes je les ai laissÉes, et bÊtes elles sont trÈs probablement encore.'"

Can you refrain from reading "The Mount" after that?