Many of these plains which might be covered by villages and made splendidly productive belong to obstinate communes, the authorities of which refuse to sell to those who would develop them, merely to keep the right to pasture cows upon them! On all these useless, unproductive lands is written the word "Incapacity." All soils have some special fertility of their own. Arms and wills are ready; the thing lacking is a sense of duty combined with talent on the part of the government. In France, up to the present time, these upland plains have been sacrificed to the valleys; the government has chosen to give all its help to those regions of country which can take care of themselves.
Most of these luckless uplands are without water, the first essential for production. The mists which ought to fertilize the gray, dead soil by discharging oxygen upon it, sweep across it rapidly, driven by the wind, for want of trees which might arrest them and so obtain their nourishment. Merely to plant trees in such a region would be carrying a gospel to it. Separated from the nearest town or city by a distance as insurmountable to poor folk as though a desert lay between them, with no means of reaching a market for their products (if they produced anything), close to an unexplored forest which supplied them with wood and the uncertain livelihood of poaching, the inhabitants often suffered from hunger during the winters. The soil not being suitable for wheat, and the unfortunate peasantry having neither cattle of any kind nor farming implements, they lived for the most part on chestnuts.
Any one who has studied zoological productions in a museum, or become personally aware of the indescribable depression caused by the brown tones of all European products, will understand how the constant sight of these gray, arid plains must have affected the moral nature of the inhabitants, through the desolate sense of utter barrenness which they present to the eye. There, in those dismal regions, is neither coolness nor brightness, nor shade nor contrast,--none of all those ideas and spectacles of Nature which awaken and rejoice the heart; even a stunted apple-tree would be hailed as a friend.
A country road, recently made, runs through the centre of this great plain, and meets the high-road. Upon it, at a distance of some fifteen miles from the high-road, stands Montegnac, at the foot of a hill, as its name designates, the chief town of a canton or district in the Haute-Vienne. The hill is part of Montegnac, which thus unites a mountainous scenery with that of the plains. This district is a miniature Scotland, with its lowlands and highlands. Behind the hill, at the foot of which lies the village, rises, at a distance of about three miles, the first peak of the Correze mountains. The space between is covered by the great forest of Montegnac, which clothes the hill, extends over the valley, and along the slopes of the mountain (though these are bare in some places), continuing as far as the highway to Aubusson, where it diminishes to a point near a steep embankment on that road. This embankment commands a ravine through which the post-road between Bordeaux and Lyon passes. Travellers, either afoot or in carriages, were often stopped in the depths of this dangerous gorge by highwaymen, whose deeds of violence went unpunished, for the site favored them; they could instantly disappear, by ways known to them alone, into the inaccessible parts of the forest.
Such a region was naturally out of reach of law. No one now travelled through it. Without circulation, neither commerce, industry, exchange of ideas, nor any of the means to wealth, can exist; the material triumphs of civilization are always the result of the application of primitive ideas. Thought is invariably the point of departure and the goal of all social existence. The history of Montegnac is a proof of that axiom of social science. When at last the administration was able to concern itself with the needs and the material prosperity of this region of country, it cut down this strip of forest, and stationed a detachment of gendarmerie near the ravine, which escorted the mail- coaches between the two relays; but, to the shame of the gendarmerie be it said, it was the gospel, and not the sword, the rector Monsieur Bonnet, and not Corporal Chervin, who won a civil victory by changing the morals of a population. This priest, filled with Christian tenderness for the poor, hapless region, attempted to regenerate it, and succeeded in the attempt.
After travelling for about an hour over these plains, alternately stony and dusty, where the partridges flocked in tranquil coveys, their wings whirring with a dull, heavy sound as the carriage came toward them, the Abbe Gabriel, like all other travellers on the same road, saw with satisfaction the roofs of Montegnac in the distance. At the entrance of the village was one of those curious post-relays which are seen only in the remote parts of France. Its sign was an oak board on which some pretentious postilion had carved the words, /Pauste o chevos/, blackening the letters with ink, and then nailing the board by its four corners above the door of a wretched stable in which there were no horses. The door, which was nearly always open, had a plank laid on the soil for its threshold, to protect the stable floor, which was lower than the road, from inundation when it rained. The discouraged traveller could see within worn-out, mildewed, and mended harnesses, certain to break at a plunge of the horses. The horses themselves were hard at work in the fields, or anywhere but in the stable. If by any chance they happen to be in their stalls, they are eating; if they have finished eating, the postilion has gone to see his aunt or his cousin, or is getting in the hay, or else he is asleep; no one can say where he is; the traveller has to wait till he is found, and he never comes till he has finished what he is about.