A FAIR-DAY IN NORMANDY, BY MARTIN DOYLE.

Having a strong desire to procure some of the small compact Norman draught horses for my farm-work, I ventured last year to visit Normandy, for the purpose of making the desired selections. I took with me a young friend, who had been partly educated in France, as my interpreter with the French horse-dealers, and to arrange every particular for me during my intended hasty intercourse with the foreigners. But previously we went for passports to the office in Poland-street, where the Consul filled up the documents without ever looking at our faces, and I believe very incorrectly as to portraiture. “Your profession?” inquired he in French, as he was scribbling down the length of my nose, the colour of my hair and eyes, &c. “Homme de lettres,” responded my companion for me. I nodded my head in acquiescence, without knowing anything about the matter; but I was quite satisfied when my friend explained it afterwards to me, and assured me that Lord Brougham, when Lord Chancellor, had from sheer modesty sunk his rank and other artificial honours on going to Paris, and simply designated himself as “Avocat, et homme de lettres.” “Does not all the world,” said my companion, “know perfectly well that you are, in the first place, one of the props of the Irish Penny Journal?” “Enough,” said I, somewhat tickled by the reference to Lord Brougham; “be it as you please—though I think that, as a farmer going to France merely to buy horses, I might as well have been written down under the useful character of ‘agriculturist.’” My passport, however, was by this time in my pocket, and any alteration in it was out of the question.

I had ascertained that a fair would be held on a particular day at Falaise, and having time enough to make a long journey by land, and much curiosity to see Calais, I determined to go there: we reached that port early in the day.

“Well, then, I am in France,” said I, as we landed from the steamer on the pier; “here I am, actually on the Continent, looking at French soldiers, who won’t shoot me, stab me, nor take me prisoner, and on fishwomen, with kerchiefs tastily arranged on their heads, large ear-rings, and brown faces, and hearing a language altogether strange to me.” After staring about me there for half a day, and eating a very nice dinner in a very grand hotel, fitted up as if there was never any winter in that part of France, we moved onwards in a most extraordinary kind of coach: such a lumbering machine!—less than an entire troop of cavalry appeared to me insufficient to move its prodigious wheels; yet five miserable-looking horses, with dirty half rotten harness, were compelled to pull it along towards Boulogne at the rate of more than four miles an hour.

I know not how it happened—perhaps it was fatigue—possibly a dose of claret, which caused me to fall asleep in the cuppy[1] soon after I had passed the barriers of Calais. Be this as it may, while I was dreaming of home, there was a sudden stop, which aroused me. I could have sworn at the moment that I was upon a dreary part of the road between Wexford and Dungarvan; for, besides the general features of the locality, I saw on the door of a very Irish-like looking public-house, these words—“John Cullen sells beer and brandy.” “Where am I?” said I to myself; “surely not in France.” The matter was explained to me. There are several hundred families of English manufacturers, principally from Nottingham, employed at their trade in Calais and its vicinity; and John Cullen, who says he is a Yorkshireman, and has certainly been for more than twenty years established where he now is, and has married a Frenchwoman, finds it his interest to brew good beer, and to keep a public-house for the entertainment of his neighbours and the operatives of Calais, although the town is three miles distant. But at the moment I was fully impressed with the notion that John Cullen and his house were in the barony of Bargy, or in that of Forth.

As the horses at this place were not disposed to run away with the diligence, and the conductor had no indisposition to a glass of brandy, I contrived to enter John Cullen’s house, which certainly has nothing English about it, and asked for the landlord, who soon appeared—an apparently thoroughbred Irishman, and with a fry of half-bred youngsters at his heels, speaking the oddest jargon that ever man heard. At first I hoped that it might have been the old dialect of the barony of Forth, but I was grievously disappointed. Though John Cullen brews very good beer, which he sends regularly into Calais, and sells very fair brandy, it would be no harm, from what I could learn, if Father Mathew could spare time to make a morning visit to his neighbourhood.

The greater part of the way from Calais to Boulogne is bleak, open, and ill drained, and altogether more of a snipe-shooting country than a farmer would desire to see, with a good deal of wheat, however, here and there, but not in the regularly formed ridges which I had seen in England.

We reached Boulogne that night, and fixed ourselves quietly in an English kind of hotel, after having been well tormented, before we were fairly housed, by emissaries from half a dozen establishments, pressing us in French, English, and German, to patronise their respective employers. We started at five o’clock the next morning from a coach-office very like one of our own in its arrangement of desks, clerks, way-bills, and weighing machines.

On some parts of my journey, as we receded from the coast, the drill husbandry, the garden-like culture, and the open country entirely under tillage, resembled portions of England, especially in those districts where the rural population is confined to villages very distant from each other, and concealed from the road. The French peasants are very early risers; I saw many of them at their various labours at four o’clock in the morning; some women at that hour were leading cows by a string—three very frequently connected together—or a few wretched-looking sheep, to pasture on the margin of the road. The dresses of these people, and the appearance of the sheep, in those spots, informed me very unmistakeably that I was no longer in England. Sometimes, however, an entire flock of sheep met our observation. One of these, under the care of a shepherd, and two dogs which showed remarkable sagacity, we particularly noticed. The sheep, when I caught the first view of them, were huddled together in a fallow field, looking wistfully at, but not presuming to touch, a compartment of luxuriant clover within a few feet of them. The shepherd, leaving one of the dogs with the flock, and having the other at his heels, paced off a square of ten or twelve yards, slightly marking the limits with his foot; he then made a signal to the sentry dog, which at once allowed the sheep to pass on to the clover, while the other dog perambulated the prescribed limits, and prevented them from encroaching a single foot.

As I do not mean to trouble the reader with all the details of my journey, I need only say that I reached in safety the very heart of Normandy; and on the way, while admiring the woods, rivers, meadows, and undulating scenery through which we passed, I perceived a resemblance to the county of Wicklow, and many other well-wooded and fertile parts of Ireland.

I had been unable to reach Falaise the night before the fair, but I was there in time for an early breakfast; and certainly this breakfast was of an extraordinary kind. We had broth well thickened with vegetables; the bouilli from which the juices had been extracted made its appearance as a matter of course, and the whole company took a bit of it. Then came the liver of a sheep fried in oil, a dish of white beans well mashed and buttered, cheese, cider, and (though last not least appropriately to the breakfast table) coffee and boiled milk, with eggs and bread and butter. Many of the company, including some lady-like looking females, dipped their well-buttered bread into their coffee, and swallowed it in this nasty greasy manner with great apparent relish, and several of the party pocketed the lumps or sugar which they did not use with their coffee. But every country has its own fashions; and if people are here put upon an allowance in the article of sugar, and pay for a fixed quantity, why should they not take away that for which they pay, if they please?

I hastened away from the breakfast table to the place where the fair was held, and was surprised at the similarity of the scene before me to those which I have so often witnessed at home. It had nothing of the English character, excepting some wooden drinking-booths and caravans for showmen; there were no smart-looking horse-jockeys, no well-dressed grooms, not a white smock-frock, a laced buskin, a well-trimmed bonnet, nor a neatly appointed tax-cart or gig in view; but a crowd of men generally dressed in blue jackets and trousers and glazed hats, among whom were interspersed some wearing the blue blouse, and a cloth cap or red worsted nightcap, and a great number of women in their striped woollens, and high white linen or muslin coifs—nay some of these (on the heads of the rich farmers’ wives) were of lace, and worth scores of pounds sterling. The whole assemblage (combining with it groups of country fellows mounted on hardy ponies, with here and there a woman en croupe, or independently on a pad, with bags behind and before her, kicking away at the ribs of their horses with their heavy sabots) reminded me of what we see on a market-day in several parts of Ireland. Then, to render the similitude more striking, there were the clamour and jargon of persons buying and selling; and now and then a half drunken fellow singing in the lightness of his heart, or very noisy in argument; but generally courteous, and never daring to strike a blow, and a pedlar selling beads and almanacks amidst a din of oaths and imprecations, and the embarrassments occasioned by the movements of a team of four bullocks and three little horses in single file, dragging each other along with a huge tonneau of cider for the refreshment of the thirsty crowd, on a two-wheeled waggon, in the rear. We had passed this rude and very dirty vehicle, when the roll of a drum startled me. Thinks I to myself, “war is about to commence in earnest,” but it was only the preliminary flourish of a drummer, who immediately afterwards read out a notice that a celebrated dentist was about to appear in his voiture, for the purpose of relieving sufferers from those ailments which, alas! are incidental to us in every stage of life. Having raised his hat from respect to the majesty of the sovereign people, he moved off to an adjacent street, while the great operator himself appeared at hand in a showy kind of cab drawn by two horses (one in the shafts and the other in the outrigger style), with a tawdrily dressed postilion to guide them. Being in haste to reach the open square where the horse fair was held, I had little time for witnessing the operations of the tooth-drawer, who was flourishing his case of instruments in a most attractive way. When he had trapped his victim, he blew a long loud blast upon a horn to intimate that he was going to operate before the crowd, and after keeping the sufferer in an agony of suspense and nervousness, he pulled out one or more teeth with a large nail (sometimes a screw) in the twinkling of an eye, and with a degree of dexterity which I had conceived impossible. I was afterwards told that he had several patients in succession, from whom as they sat backwards in the cab, within view of hundreds of spectators, he extracted teeth at the rate of sixpence each. This practitioner, however, was not without a rival: another dentist was mounted on a high, raw-boned horse, with his case of instruments, and some physic for curing the rheumatism, in a leathern portmanteau strapped upon the pommel of his saddle: his dress was of a military character—his coat being braided like an undress frock; his bridle and saddle of the cavalry form; his headpiece, a forage cap; and his boots and spurs like those of a dragoon in the days of the Duke of Marlborough; a coronet hung from his saddle-bow; and whenever the other dentist sounded his bugle, this man blew from beneath the overhanging cover of thick hair on his upper lip, a longer and a louder strain. But the peculiarity of his style of operating was really striking: instead of dismounting and removing the tooth, he remained steadily in his saddle, examined the mouths of the patients who presented themselves for relief, and from his vantage ground pulled or rather pushed out the diseased grinder. While I was looking on, he poked out three with a hooked nail for one sous, saying, successively, as he drew them in a few seconds (as my companion translated his expressions for me), “Here’s a long one; here’s a longer; and here’s the longest of all.”

A quack doctor in a huge caravan drawn by four horses, appeared next, and apparently with much profitable practice, among the dupes who crowded about him to read his puffs and buy his physic. A pedlar in another part of the place where the crowd was considerable, without coat or waistcoat (the wind was at north-east), and labouring very hard with his hands and lungs, was disposing of coloured cotton handkerchiefs by a sort of auction form. He took a piece from a lot of the same pattern, tied it round his waist or on his head as an indication that the handkerchiefs he was about to put up for sale were of the same sort, and then named a price, lowering the amount, perhaps, from twenty to fourteen sous, until he heard such an amount bid as satisfied him; then with the rapidity of a conjuror he flung the article to the bidder. Another and another purchaser followed as fast as he could unfold and throw the handkerchiefs at their faces, stopping occasionally for a few seconds to receive payments from many customers; then he opened a fresh lot, and thus perpetually exhibited varieties, selling all the time at a rate of rapidity which I had never seen equalled, and which could only occur where every individual in the little crowd is strictly honest.

Little bags of silver and copper were, in the open booths, carelessly slipped into unlocked boxes, from which any clever rogue might easily have helped himself; but such an occurrence is almost unknown in the provincial parts of France. These latter exhibitions were certainly neither English nor Irish.

It would afford no interest to any of my readers to inform them of the number of horses which I purchased, nor of the prices which I paid, nor of the arrangements which I made for sending them to Liverpool. It is enough to tell them that out of the many strings of horses which had been conducted to the fair in the English way by ropes from the head to the tail, and the tail to the head, in succession, and were now drawn up in rank and file under the shade of a wall for inspection, I bought some of those which were most free from the characteristic defects of the Norman horses, and had them safely stabled.

I returned to the scene of gaiety and confusion. There was a young woman there, bare-headed, but decently dressed in the main, playing upon a violin, while her male partner blew a terrible blast upon a bugle at intervals, at the conclusion of each, announcing a grand spectacle for the evening. The female had given a finishing scrape, and in a moment was on the ground, flat upon her back, but fortunately without injury to herself or her fiddle. I looked about and perceived the cause of the disaster: a horse had been pressed forward very rudely through the crowd, with a calf dangling from each of his sides, and one of these coming into violent contact with the fair musician, had thrown her down.

The mode by which those wretched animals had been conveyed to the fair was truly horrible. The four legs of each being bound, a rope connecting the poor creatures together by their tortured limbs was passed over the back of the horse, keeping them in equilibrio, and with the heads hanging downwards in agony, while the ligatures confining the legs by which they were suspended were impressed, by the weight of the body below, into the very bone! Oh, for a Humane Society in France to prevent such monstrous cruelty, taking for their motto the sentiment of her own Montaigne: “even theology enjoins kindness to brute animals; and considering that the same Master has given us our dwelling-place with them, and that they like ourselves are of his family, we should have a fellow feeling for them!”

Attracted by a concourse of children in another spot, I soon found myself standing close to an old woman who was dealing out small thin cakes in a curious kind of manner. Before her was placed what appeared to be a small round table, but with an index, which, after being set in motion by a boy, stopped suddenly, and pointed like the hand of a clock to one of twelve numbers described in a circle. The perpetual invitation was, “Play, play! twelve cakes for a halfpenny;” and the little urchins, preferring the chance of twelve cakes for a halfpenny to the certainty of perhaps only three or four from a regular vender elsewhere, came up in rapid succession and with eager eyes to the game. Joy sparkled in the countenance of the juvenile speculator if the hand pointed to a high number; disappointment lowered upon his brow if a unit or two was the number which fortune assigned to him, while the hearty laugh of the spectators increased the acrimony of his temper.

I tried my own luck, and had one cake for my share, to the unrestrained delight of the little folk.

“Cakes for a halfpenny!” said I to myself. “What a good subject for a moral reflection!”

Here we have the seeds of gambling sown at an early season in the lively soil, and the systematic culture of this baneful and vivacious principle subsequently ensures its establishment in the human heart through the length and breadth of the land; it finds its congenial bed every where, from the child of the poorest mechanic to the grey-headed gamester in the polished societies of higher life. The avaricious principle thus precociously introduced into the youthful heart among the many natural weeds which are but too ready to spring up there, has its own distinctive fruits; and though it may be urged by those who think not deeply on the effects of early impressions on the ductile mind of childhood, that the disappointment which the little gamester experiences in his play of “twelve cakes for a halfpenny” counterbalances (as a trial of temper) the evils arising on the other hand from success in his object, this defence is really untenable in its general points.

In the little party before me I saw the willing and prepared pupils of a higher order of play—of rouge-et-noir, and hazard, and ecarté—by which so many of our own countrymen are infatuated, and sometimes ruined, when they take up their residence in France, heedless of the value of that time and those opportunities for the right use of which they are responsible to the bountiful Giver of them.

We now entered a low kind of café, in which the next scene of the serious drama of “twelve cakes for a sous” was exhibited. In one room was a billiard-table, at which two common-looking fellows were playing, at the rate of threepence an hour for the tables, for a cup of coffee and a glass of brandy. In a corner sat a bloated, half-drunken looking old man in a blouse and nightcap, while his bustling wife discharged all the labours of the establishment.

In walked a burly-looking customer, who ordered a glass of brandy for himself, and another for the landlord Nicole. Immediately afterwards—and this was a daily practice with old Nicole—a game of cards was proposed, which terminated in favour of the customer, who walked off scot free.

In several instances the old man played in this way—double or quits with his customers—for the amount of coffee, wine, cider, or brandy, consumed in his company (he himself copiously partaking of all), and no one seemed without some play for it, to pay for what he had ordered. At several tables there were many parties playing in this way at different rates; and certainly if some of them had seen the contortions of their faces in a mirror, they would have been disgusted with a vice which so agitates the human frame, and unfits for every wise and rational pursuit.

Having only played “spoil-five” and “five-and-forty” in my youth, I neither understood nor wished to learn the game which was played around me. My young friend and I went to our hotel, and there found the chambermaid and the waiter, while they were awaiting our arrival, playing ecarté together on the dinner table for the amount of their morning’s gratuities. “Twelve cakes for a halfpenny!” said I to myself again.

It only remains for me to tell how I got back to England.

I had reached Havre, by the beautiful Seine from Rouen, in the evening, without any particular adventure, and gone to an hotel kept by an Englishman, just as a waiter was cursing an unlucky boy, who had broken a wine-glass, in true English style. I heartily regretted that I had not gone to a French house, in which, if the waiter had cursed for a month in his own language, I should not have understood him.

An accident had happened to the regular steamer for London, and there appeared no chance of my getting off for three days; I was in despair, especially as my horses had preceded me from another port, and I wished to be in Liverpool contemporaneously with their arrival there.

In the course of the night I was informed that a steam-vessel had just arrived in Havre from Gibraltar, with some of the Braganza family on their way to Paris, and that she was going on to London at day-break. I tucked up my portmanteau under my arm, and my young friend and I sallied out to the part of the quay where the steamer lay, in profound darkness and the most perfect silence. “Qui vive?” said a watchman, as he put his lantern to my face and a hand upon my throat, while I was advancing to the gangboard. My companion explained; and as I had the prudence to give a franc to the watchman, he lighted us carefully to the side of the vessel.

Down we groped our way to the cabin; all was darkness there, and every one on board was asleep. The vessel was so full that the steward and his wife were lying on the floor (in a heavy slumber), and directly in my way. I spoke: no one answered. I caught the stewardess by the nose, and could not conceive what it was that I had in my hand. She screamed, and gave her husband a smart blow on the head, thinking that he was the assailant. “Pordonnez,” said I, trying to speak civilly in French, and supposing they could not understand English. “Who the deuce is there?” roared out the steward. “Oh, English,” said I to myself. I explained, and slipped a five-franc piece into the man’s hand, and apologized at the same time to his wife for having pulled her nose instead of the bell-handle.

“The captain is asleep,” said he, “but I shall awake him.” “Good fellow,” said I.

My interpreter and I followed him, and the captain, who had heard the bustle, opened his cabin door. I repeated the purport of my unseasonable visit, telling him, by way of a clincher, that the Irish Penny Journal, to which I contributed by far the best articles (“and which,” said I, “you of course take for the gratification of your passengers”), could not flourish during my absence from home.

“Come on board, both of you,” said he, “if you like, but don’t bother me with any more talk at this unseasonable hour of the night.”

“An Irishman!” thought I to myself.

He banged the door, and I suppose was instantly asleep again.

I was soon in the same condition, and did not awake until we had made considerable progress with the very next tide towards London.