Two Summers in Guyenne | Page 6

consciousness of the present lost its
way in sylvan labyrinths by the Dordogne.
At six o'clock the next morning I was walking about the village, and I
entered the little church, already filled with people. It was Sunday, and
this early mass was to be a funeral one. The man for whom the bell was
tolled last night was soon brought in, the coffin swathed in a common
sheet. It was borne up the nave towards the catafalque, the rough
carpentry of which showed how poor the parish was. Following closely

was an old and bent woman with her head wrapped in a black shawl.
She had hardly gone a few steps, when her grief burst out into the most
dismal wailing I had ever heard, and throughout the service her
melancholy cries made other women cover their faces, and tears start
from the eyes of hard-featured, weather-beaten men.
[Illustration: A MOORLAND WIDOW.]
Most of the women present wore the very ugly headgear which is the
most common of all in Auvergne and the Corrèze, namely, a white cap
covered by a straw bonnet something of the coal-scuttle pattern. There
were many communicants at this six o'clock mass, and what struck me
as being the reverse of what one might suppose the right order of things,
was that the women advanced in life wore white veils as they knelt at
the altar rails, while those worn by the young, whose troubles were still
to come, were black. These veils were carried in the hand during the
earlier part of the rite. Throughout a very wide region of Southern
France the custom prevails. The church belonged to different ages.
Upon the exterior of the Romanesque apse were uncouth carvings in
relief of strange animal figures. They were more like lions than any
other beasts, but their outlines were such as children might have drawn.
I returned to the inn. The baker had come back, and was preparing to
heat his oven with dry broom. I learned that he had not only to bake the
bread that he sold, but also the coarser rye loaves which were brought
in by those who had their own flour, but no oven. Three francs was the
charge for my dinner, bed, and breakfast. The score settled and
civilities exchanged, I walked out of Messeix, expecting to strike the
valley of the Dordogne not very far to the south. The landscape was
again that of the moorland. On each side of the long, dusty line called a
road spread the brown turf, spangled with the pea-flowers of the broom
or stained purple with heather. There were no trees, but two wooden
crosses standing against the gray sky looked as high as lofty pines. I
met little bands of peasants hurrying to church, and I reached the
village of Savennes just before the grand messe. Many people were
sitting or standing outside the church--even sitting on the cemetery wall.
When the bell stopped and they entered, literally like a flock of sheep
into a fold, all could not find room inside, so the late-comers sat upon
the ground in the doorway, or as near as they could get to it. As the
people inside knelt or stood, so did they who had been left, not out in

the cold, but in the heat, for the sun had broken through the mist, and
the weather was sultry. As I walked round the church I found women
sitting with open books and rosaries in their hands near the apse, amidst
the yarrow and mulleins of forgotten grave mounds. They were
following the service by the open window. I lingered about the
cemetery reading the quaint inscriptions and noting the poor emblems
upon wooden crosses not yet decayed, picking here and there a wild
flower, and watching the butterflies and bees until the old priest, who
was singing the mass in a voice broken by time, having called upon his
people to 'lift up their hearts,' they answered: 'Habemus ad Dominum.'
I had a simple lunch at a small inn in this village, where I was watched
with much curiosity by an old man in a blouse with a stiff shirt-collar
rising to his ears, and a nightcap with tassel upon his head. The widow
who kept the inn had a son who offered to walk with me as far as some
chapel in the gorge of the Chavannon. We were not long in reaching
the gorge, the view of which from the edge of the plateau was superbly
savage. Descending a very rugged path through the forest that covered
the sides of the deep fissure, save where the stark rock refused to be
clothed, we came to a small chapel, centuries old, under a natural wall
of gneiss, but deep in