#rustic legends

As I have referenced Gargantua, I must now ask anyone knowledgeable about this matter whether, before the publication of the Book (for this is how, I believe, people referred to that singular, great, and wild literary success of Rabelais during their time), there was not also some popular legend of Gargantua in the provinces which the great satirist might have seized upon, just as Goethe did the legend of Faust and Molière the legend of the Commander’s Statue. Was the phrase the Book used by Rabelais’ contemporary admirers exclusively in order to express their great admiration? Might it not also indicate that a distinction was to be drawn between his brilliant poem and some more obscure legend? The ogres Perrault brought back into fashion are those very same giants whom the knights slaughtered in the Middle Ages. Would Gargantua not be of the same family as them, and would his name not have been noticed by the author of Pantagruel right alongside those other once-famous characters who are now long forgotten for having only existed as the late-night tales of our ancestors? 

In Berry, where no historical traditions have remained in the collective memory of the peasant except as vague myths, we were more than surprised to still encounter there a very precise sort of local recollection of Gargantua quite separate from Rabelais’ poem, although in the same vein. At Montlevic, for example, a small isolated knoll in the plain was formed by the foot of Gargantua. Whilst lost in these clay-rich lands of ours, the giant shook his hoof here, and left a hill in that spot.

And on the Creuse, in the outskirts of Berry, Gargantua was once found [9] astride that vast and magnificent ravine where the river rushes between the bell towers of Pin and Ceaulmont, planting himself in their steep cliff sides. A small boat full of monks drew up to pass between the giant’s legs. Believing it was a trout darting away, he bent down, plucked up the ship in two fingers, and swallowed it whole, finding the monks big and fat but rejecting the boat itself, complaining about the fishbone. 

Anyone who tells you such stories has certainly never read the Book, nor did their ancestors even know of its existence. The name of Rabelais is just as unknown to them as those of Pantagruel and Panurge. Brother Jean des Entomeures, so renowned for his character and for his use of speech, did not achieve widespread popularity amongst them either. These fictional personalities are the work of the poet, but I would still believe that Gargantua is the work of the people and that, like all great artists, Rabelais took his subject matter where he found it.

The superstitions within the villages and cottages of the Creuse region in lower Berry do acknowledge the giants, who, by contrast, occupy little place in the chronicles of the high country. This high country is wide-open and rolling; the low country, which is steep and ravined, is rooted in the same rock which serves as a buttress for the escarpments of the land. Its strangely-shaped stony cliffs of mica and schist might easily resemble gigantic figures, and this fact must be far from laughable to any fisherman who goes out in bad faith to lift their colleagues’ traps at night. It is not the merry Gargantua who appears to him: it is the three men of stone, whom in the daytime he would call the monk’s rocks, and whom he had seen standing motionless alongside the clear water’s edge, without fear.

One night Chauvat, coming back from the low country mill, saw them move, coming down from their huge pedestal and walking along the shore, gesticulating; oh but what horrible gestures, what a terrifying parade they made! They seemed to have neither feet nor legs, and yet they moved faster than the waters of the Creuse, and the pebbles they crushed cried out under their weight. He fled to his house and barricaded himself inside as best he could; but the men of stone had followed him, and as he was an unbeliever who didn’t think of giving himself up to God, the smallest of these colossi leaned his elbow on the gable of the house, flattening it like a pat of butter.

The terrified Chauvat then fled to his barn; but the second of the stone men put his hand on it, splitting it into four as though it were an old Huguenot in the land of Bazaiges.

Chauvat had enough time to save himself, and he sought refuge on the great lock which cuts the river diagonally from one side to the other. There, he believed himself saved; but the three men of stone took this path to return to their usual place on the other bank, and he found himself forced either to stay there or to throw himself into the river, which is very deep on either side of the lock; to run faster than the giants was out of the question.

He made himself very small, not daring to breathe, crouching down on the ground and hoping that those wicked boulders would not see him there. The first passed by; then came the second, who also passed by. Chauvat began to breathe again. Finally there came the third, who was the largest and heaviest by far, and who tried to pass by along with the others. But the road was slippery and the stone man slipped.

Fortunately, Chauvat finally remembered his baptism and made the sign of the cross, asking for the assistance of Heaven. The man of stone stumbled yet did not fall, otherwise the poor fisherman would have been crushed like an eggshell.

The returned are, in this same part of Berry, very frequent guests. Few houses here are not haunted by some soul in pain. That rushing river Creuse, which runs black and rapid in certain deep spots where it flows without any impediment, carries along the plaintive spirits of people who have met their deaths beneath its waves. At night, we hear heartbreaking cries; these are the drowned, who wail and ask for prayers. Elsewhere, it foams and rumbles against the rocks; there, one hears the imprecations of those who are unpardonably damned.

The term le retournant (the returned) carries a similar meaning to revenant. However, some old women will tell you that the souls of those lost to suicide  (those who intentionally drowned) are condemned to the eternal task of tumbling over the large stones that clutter the torrential riverbed. In the middle of a certain waterfall in the Creuse, one of these dark rocks looks so much like a capsized boat that you could easily be fooled from afar. It is an overturned stone: we assure you that it is white on its underside, and also that it was brought there from a long way away by the returned.

These legends undoubtedly hearken back to the tragic memories of disasters caused by the river’s sudden and terrible floods. In 1845, a great deluge of rain swelled the tributaries of the river such that the Creuse, which was itself already a formidable torrent in this region, rose by what is said to be more than one hundred feet, pulling an entire recently-felled forest into its shores. Upon reaching the only bridge in the countryside, this travelling forest stopped for two hours, jammed between the two steep riverbanks, and this mass was subsequently compounded by other masses of roofs, boats, barriers, and general debris of every other kind, and fearless children travelled from one riverbank to the other on dry feet atop this floating mountain above the raging waves. All of a sudden the mountain burst forwards, carrying the bridge that had held it back, and sweeping away everything in its path: houses, herds, crops, and passers-by.

Yet even the memory of this disaster was not enough to fully populate the banks and islets of the terrible river with its sorrowful souls. There is also a faint legend of a clash between salt smugglers and salt-tax collectors, during the time when titled and bourgeois men were moving mules laden with contraband salt along the steep valley paths. The official history of Berry says nothing about this battle. The old peasants heard this story told by their fathers, who got it from their grandfathers. Many people perished there, they say, and were thrown from the rocks into the Creuse. That’s why we hear, on bad nights, unfamiliar voices who cry out over and over again: Salt! Salt! At this cry, all the mules in nearby pastures will run away with their ears down and their tails between their legs, as if the Devil is after them.

In this same region, the belief in the great serpent reawakens from time to time. We don’t mind the thousands of rock-dwelling vipers, which are said to have never harmed anyone; but this serpent, which is forty feet in length and has a head like that of a man, is the one that concerns us. It is probably the same one who ate three prisoners in the Châteaubrun tower dungeon in ancient times. He has shown himself several times since then, and last year, in 1857, the whole countryside was in turmoil because a shepherdess saw him in a bush. More than fifty hunters went out on foot looking for him; but, as usual, he could not be found.

Jeanne was well aware of the bad reputation of these ponds, but Pierre did not want to believe the stories, nor did he care about them. He prevented her from thinking about them, telling her all manner of things, lovely and agreeable to Jeanne’s ears. They were engaged to be married and were just returning from the city, where they had picked out their wedding livery, which is to say, new clothes, ribbons, and lace for their big day. They were out walking together, holding each other by the little finger as is customary for the betrothed, when their feet stepped into mud on the roadway. The day before, a large thunderstorm had swollen the pond, overflowing its banks a bit.

“You’ve gotten me lost,” Jeanne said to her lover. “I don’t think this is the right path.”

“Just wait and I’ll get my bearings,” Pierre replied. “It’s true, the sun has gone down and the reeds are all black, they all look the same. Stay here a little while, and I'll go see how to find our way out.” 

Jeanne was tired; she sat down in the reeds and looked up at the red sky, all speckled, which is to say, it was marbled with yellow and brown, and her thoughts turned sad, although she could not say why. “If it were really nighttime,” she thought, “I wouldn't want to be alone in this awful place where that monk died so long ago. Oh, I hope Pierre won’t make a wrong turn in all this wild grass!” She followed him with her eyes for as long as she could, but then she could not see him anymore, and her poor body began to tremble.

All of a sudden she saw a large flock of wild ducks fly up from one side, making such noise; and then, rising up on tiptoe, she saw Pierre returning, amusing himself by throwing pebbles into the water to rouse the other flocks of birds that filled the ponds as night came descending from the sky.

When Pierre reached her side, he said to her, “We are on the right path, and we’ll be fine except for a little mud. Let me catch my breath a minute; I walked pretty fast, and besides, this isn’t such a bad place to rest.”

“It’s funny you think it’s nice here, Pierre; I don’t like it, and it feels like I’ve been here a long time already. Rest up quickly, because I want to get out of here before nightfall.”

Once Pierre seated himself alongside Jeanne in the reeds, he said to her, 

“My God, Jeanne, time must have dragged on for me, too, while I was out there walking, because it feels like I haven’t kissed you for two years.”

“Don’t say that!” she replied. “You kissed me not even two quarters of an hour ago.”

“Well, then! My darling, where is the harm in that?”

“I’m not saying there is any, since we are getting married!”

“And so let me have one more little kiss now, or seven.”

Jeanne let herself be kissed just once, and said that that was enough. She didn’t see any mischief in it, but she knew that even if country people are permitted to kiss their betrothed while out walking, in front of passers-by, it is neither proper nor honest se dire ses amitiés in secret from the world, and to stay for too long in places where no one goes.

Pierre was a proper young man, just as he should be, which is to say that he knew how to behave in the right way, and was content to let Jeanne keep him at a safe distance, and he didn’t play that game of overstepping his rights little by little only to have the pleasure of receiving a good slap from her from time to time, which is, as everyone knows, the greatest mark of trust and friendship.

And after they bickered in this friendly fashion for a little while, they began to talk about the future, which is still a very exciting topic between two people who are about to spend the rest of their lives together. And there they were, counting and recounting their meagre assets, building themselves a new house and planting a pretty little garden, if only in their minds; for these poor children didn’t have much, and they had to work hard just to keep hold of what they did have.

But now a voice which Pierre could not hear began to speak to Jeanne as though it were Pierre’s, while a voice began to speak to Pierre as though it were Jeanne’s, and yet it was not, and Jeanne did not hear that either. And so they thought they were saying things to each other that they were not, and found themselves on bad terms without really knowing why. Jeanne reproached Pierre for being lazy and for loving the cabaret; Pierre reproached Jeanne for being a coquette and over-valuing gallantry. And so they both started to tear up and pout, not wanting to talk anymore.

The astonishing thing was that when they stopped speaking, and couldn’t even see one another’s lips moving, they both still heard a very muffled voice which sounded like that of a frog or a wild duck when it spoke, and which said the most wicked words in the world.

“What are you doing, you children, sulking instead of taking advantage of the night and your solitude? Are you foolishly waiting for the end of the week in order to love one another freely? What a load of nonsense marriage is! Don’t you know that marriage is just pain, misery, quarrels, worrying about children, and days without bread? Come on, come on, you innocents! You’ll cry the very next day after your wedding, if you don’t fight instead! Can’t you see that when you wanted to talk about your future and your household just now, you couldn’t get along?

Life is foolish and miserable, make no mistake; you’d do well to forget your duties and seek pleasure without constraint. Love each other now, for if you do not take advantage of the moment that presents itself, you will never find it again, and no one will know anything about your partnership except by its blows and its insults, those flowers of youth that sting, and those wild oats!”

Jeanne and Pierre were very afraid. They held hands and clasped each other tight without daring to breathe. Jeanne understood nothing of what the wicked voice said to them. The words passed right through her ears like those of some Devil's Mass spoken in defiance of reason; but Pierre, who knew more, listened despite his fear and understood almost everything.

“This voice is ugly, I agree,” he said. “But its words are not wrong, and if you trust me, Jeanne, you might listen to it too.”

“Whether its words are beastly or beautiful, I don't care,” she replied. “They scare me, although I don't understand them at all; someone is laughing at us because we are all alone, trapped in an unpleasant place. Let's go quickly, my Pierre. This person here, living or dead, wants to do us nothing but harm.”

“No, Jeanne, they wish us well, because they pity the fate that awaits us, and if you’d just understand what they are saying . . .”

And then Pierre, feeling himself possessed by the Devil, wanted to restrain Jeanne, as she wanted to leave, and that evil spirit believed itself for a moment to be the stronger of them.

But the spawn of evil isn’t able to do good Christians as much harm as it wishes. The libertine monk, seeing that Pierre’s conscience had stumbled, was in too much of a hurry to claim his soul. He sang out in his marshy voice, “Come, come, my dear children, there’s no need for candles nor witnesses here. If you need someone to declare you two wed, I can speak the right words. Get down on your knees before me, and you’ll have the blessing of Beelzebub!”

Saying this, the monk appeared, broaching the water with his huge head under its muddy cowl.

“Oh, help!” cried Jeanne. “There’s a big otter, and it’s coming to attack us!”

“No, it won’t,” said Pierre. “I’ll turn it back with my walking-stick.”

But as he leaned over the water to look, he saw the monk's fiery eyes, and then he saw his beard all stuffed full of leeches and frogs, and then his rotting body with its withered legs and its two long arms all dripping with moss and slime, which he was spreading out wide like two wings over the heads of the two lovers in order to consecrate them unto Satan.

But Pierre, although he wasn’t a great coward, was so shocked to see this monk arise and grow ever and ever upwards, as though he wanted to reach the very clouds, that he simply fled screeching like a rusty axle and running like a hare, pulling that poor Jeanne behind him, she who was now more dead than alive, and yet who did not need to be told to leap across those roadways with her feet wet and her hair blowing in the wind.

In fact, they ran so well that they reached their parents’ homes without once turning their heads, and without once taking the time to exchange a single word. They married in all sanctity eight days later, without having listened to the advice of that wicked monk who was, it is said, so embarrassed at having missed his catch that he stayed dormant for a long time before daring to reappear and attempt fishing for Christian souls once more.

The belief in some gruff monk who goes about both threatening and plaintive, knocking on the doors of houses at night and withdrawing at daybreak only with horrible howls, was once only proverbial.

This has long been maintained in almost every province of France. There are many legends of debauched monks, and of priests who broke their vows. There are few presbyteries never haunted by any tormented souls such as these, and, as of the last twenty years, there are few country churches where the spirit of some dead priest has never appeared at dawn to attempt to deliver a great expiatory Mass that he is never able to complete unless he can find a living person of good will who has the courage to answer him with an amen.

I know of several people who have encountered, by the first light of the moon, Father Soupison, nicknamed Démonnet (the Bedeviled), at the Croix-Blanche crossroads, striding off alone, followed by more than thirty wolves.

One night in the forest of Châteauroux, the two men who told me about it saw a large pack of wolves passing through the woods. They were very frightened and so they climbed a tree, from which they saw these animals stop at the door of a woodcutter’s hut. They surrounded it, emitting terrible howls. The woodcutter emerged, spoke to them in an unknown tongue, and walked amongst them, after which they dispersed without doing him any harm.

That was just a peasant story. But two wealthy and educated people, people of great sensibility and skill in business, who lived near a forest in which they often hunted, also swore to me upon their honour that together they had seen an old forest ranger of their acquaintance stop at a remote crossroads and make strange gestures. These two hid to observe him and saw thirteen wolves, an enormous one of which went straight up to their charmer for a pat; he then whistled at the others, as one whistles to dogs, and plunged into the thick of the woods with them. The two witnesses to this strange scene did not dare follow him, and retreated, as surprised as they were frightened.

This was told to me so seriously that I profess to have no opinion on the matter. I was brought up in the countryside and I believed for so long in certain visions which I did not experience myself, but which were observed by all those around me, that even today I cannot quite say where reality ends and where hallucination begins. I know that there are tamers of ferocious beasts. Might there also be charmers of wild animals roaming around freely? Did the two people who told me the previous story dream it simultaneously, or did this alleged sorcerer tame thirteen wolves for his own amusement? What I do firmly believe is that the two narrators saw the exact same thing, and that they swore to it in all sincerity.

In the Morvan, the minstrels are the wolf leaders. They can only learn their music by devoting themselves to the Devil, and their master often beats them and breaks their instruments over their backs when they disobey him. The wolves of that region are also the subjects of Satan; they are not real wolves. The tradition of lycanthropy might have been better preserved there than in Berry.

Fifty years ago, the musette pipers and hurdy-gurdy men of the Black Valley were still sorcerers. They have since shed that bad reputation, but there is still the story of a master bell-ringer of such great talent and Christian conduct that the priest of his parish had him play at the High Mass during the elevation of the Host. He played church music, which was a good part of the musical education of the minstrels of the time, but which the priests rarely allowed them to perform due to their secret practices, which were not what one would call the most Catholic in the world.

This great Julien from Saint-Août was therefore given an exceptional privilege, and when he played the Mass, they said it was marvellous to hear, and the parish took pride in him.

One night, as he was returning from playing three days at a country wedding, he encountered in the heather a little musette bagpipe that was playing all by itself; some say that it was the wind which played it.

Stunned to see these shiny silver pipes moving towards him by its own accord, he stopped in fear. The musette passed beside him as though it didn’t see him, continuing to play so beautifully that Julien had never heard its equal, such that he felt stricken by a sudden jealousy.

And so instead of letting it pass on like a reasonable man, he turned and followed the bagpipes so as to listen to them and memorise the tune they played, which he was annoyed not to recognize.

First he followed it at a distance, and then a little closer, until finally he grew bold enough to leap at it with the desire to catch it, because to see such a good and beautiful instrument without a master was enough to tempt any man who called himself a musician.

But the bagpipes rose up in the air and continued to play, without his being able to reach them, and he returned home very troubled and even very sorrowful. And when they asked him in the following days why he seemed in pain and unwell, he answered: “The night air sounds better than I do; it wasn’t worth learning!”

It was not understood what he meant at first, but then he was heard studying a new music which was unlike the music of anyone else nor anything that he had ever played before; and at night he would go off into the heath all alone, and return at daybreak very tired but playing, better and better, a strange sounding melody that no one else could make sense of.

This was all reported to the priest, who summoned him and said: Julien, I know that the Devil is intent on pursuing and tempting people of your sort; and I am told that you go out alone at night, to places where you have no business being, and that you seem tormented. Take care, Julien; if you start doing bad, you will end badly!

It was a Saturday. The next day was a feast day, there was a High Mass with bells, and Julien had promised to play as he usually did.

However, that morning, the sacristan came to tell the priest that he had seen Julien out on the heath, playing music in an un-Christian way and trailed by more than three hundred wolves, who fled when he approached them.

The priest summoned Julien again and questioned him. Julien shrugged his shoulders and said that the sacristan had been drinking.

And as the sacristan was, in truth, given to drink, these words did not trouble the priest too much, who then began to say and sing the Mass.

Upon the elevation of the Host, Julien began to play his church music; but, although he meant to do it properly, he could not carry the melody, and what he played was none other than the Devil’s own song which the wind had taught him.

This upset the priest, who, three times before consecrating the Host, did shake and stamp his foot in order to silence that wicked plaint; but finally, thinking that God must make Himself known, he raised the Host and said the words of consecration.

At that same moment, Julien’s musette burst in his hands with such a noise as though the Devil itself was escaping it, and he received such a good blow to the stomach that he fell over all apiâni (in a swoon) on the church’s stone floor.

They carried him home, where he fell gravely ill. However, he recovered by the grace of God, and by the words of the priest, who made him renounce his unholy practices, and to whom he confessed to having played for the wolves of the heath. After that, he played in a more Christian way, and let the wolves roam either by themselves or in the company of other cursed pipers.

It is said that they persecuted him for having sold their secret, and that they often beat him in revenge. But he endured their mistreatment in the spirit of penitence, and he had a good ending, teaching the music of the bagpipes to his children and warning them not to seek out more than one ought to know.

Nothing remains there now but charming little streams, pressed and twisted into infinite meanders between the massive blocks. These laughing, fleeting little naiads whisper, in a low voice and at bizarre intervals, mysterious words in an unknown language. Elsewhere, the waters roar, sing, or gurgle. There, they speak but so discreetly that only the attentive ear of the sylvans can understand them. In the holes where their streams flow together, there are sometimes silences; then, when the little cave fills up, the overflow rushes out and reveals, with some hurried words, some kind of secret - I do not know what - that the flowers and grass, excited by the air around them, seem to grab and greet as it passes them by.

In the distance, the waters rush in and get lost under the piled up blocks:

And there, in the depths, 

murmurs a wave,

that no one can see.

On these humid rocks grow plants that are equally foreign to the soil of the region. The ményanthe, that little hyacinth curled and jagged, whose leaves are the same as the clover; the foxglove, sprinkled with black and white, like the granite stone where it prefers to grow; the sun rose (rosea solis); the charming saxifrage, and a variety of ivy with small leaves, which trace graceful arabesques on the grey blocks where it is believed one can read mysterious symbols.

Around this sanctuary, magnificent trees grow, slender beeches and monstrous chestnut trees. It was in one of these undulating woods, sown with loose rocks, like those of the forest of Fontainebleau, that one year I found such splendid vegetation and thick shadows to the point that the sun, even at midday, filtered through the foliage such that it could not penetrate the trunks of the trees and the moss covered ground except in cold tones similar to the greenish light of the moon.

There is not a corner of France where these large rocks do not vividly strike the imagination of the peasant, and when certain legends are linked to them, you can be certain, whatever the hesitation of the antiquarians may be, that the place has been consecrated by the cult of ancient Gaul.

There are also names that, despite the corruption brought by time, have enough meaning to destroy any doubt. There is a certain place in the Brenne region where one finds the well-maintained name of the Druiders. Elsewhere one finds the durders, and in Crevant, the Dorderins. Enormous granite stones sprout at the top of a conical mound. The highest looks like a small mushroom seated on small supports. It could be a trick of nature, but that’s no reason why it couldn’t have been consecrated with sacrifices. Besides, it is called the great Dorderin. As they say, the great altar of the Druids.

A little bit farther, behind an overgrown ravine flooded with water, the parelles rise up. Does this mean pareilles (pair), jumelles (twins) or does the word come from patres just like marses or martes comes from matres (malignant fairy) according to our antiquarians [3]? These parelles or patrelles are two masses, almost identical in volume and height, which stand like two towers on the edge of a natural terrace of fairly extensive development. Their base rests on smaller seats. I found a piece of ironwork there, which gave me a lot to think about. This place is far from any dwelling place and has never seen anything sitting upon the rough edges of its flooded depths. What was a blacksmith’s slag doing under the grass, in this wilderness where even the herds do not go? So there had been a great hearth there, and perhaps a custom of sacrifice? 

I mentioned this place because it is almost unknown. Our stories from Berry only mention it to give it a name and place it hypothetically and vaguely among the Celtic monuments. However, it is of great interest from mineralogical, historical, picturesque, and botanical points of view.

Half a league away we could still see, a few years ago, the trou aux Fades (the Fairy Cave), which the owner of a neighbouring field thought appropriate to bury under the earth, apparently to protect himself from the malignant influences of these martes. It was a dwelling visibly carved out of the rock and made up of two rooms, separated by a sort of open partition. The peasants thought they saw, in a rounded recess, the oven where anchorites had once baked their bread. However, this hermitage had not been consecrated by the stay of good Christian souls. Devotion later took hold, as everywhere else, to establish pilgrimages there and at the very least to install a blessed image. Far from it; this was a bad place where one was careful not to pass. No path was traced in the brambles; the peasants say that the fairies were wild women of old, and that they commanded white she-wolves eat children there.

Why is the ancient fame of the Gallic priestesses, depending on the locality, sometimes disastrous and sometimes benign? We know that there have been different cults, successively victorious one over the other, before and, it is even said, during the Roman occupation. Where the ancient priestesses remained tutelary spirits, we can be sure that the belief was sublime; where they are no more than ferocious ghouls, the cult must have been bloody. The martes, which we named in connection with the fades, are male and female spirits. In the rocks where the Porte-feuille torrent rushes, near Saint-Benoît-de-Sault, they appear in both forms and, whatever sex they belong to, they are equally formidable. The males, they are still busy raising the dolmens and menhirs scattered on the surrounding hills; the females, with their hair flowing down to their heels and their breasts hanging down to the ground, run after the ploughmen who refuse to help with their mysterious work. They beat them and torture them until they abandon their plough and team in broad daylight. A very picturesque waterfall among bizarrely shaped rocks is called the Aire aux Martes [4]. When the waters are low, we can see the stone utensils used in their cooking. Their men set the table, that is to say, they set the dolmen stone on its foundations. As for the women, they try madly, vain and fanciful spirits that they are, to light a fire in the Montgarnaud waterfall and boil their granite pot there. Furious at their constant failure, their cries and imprecations resound. Is this not the figurative story of an overthrown cult, which made vain efforts to rise again?

In the plain of our Fromental, nothing has remained of these symbolic traditions. Only a few isolated stones in the liminal region between limestone and granite are looked at askance by lingering passers-by. These stones take form and make more or less threatening grimaces, depending on whether the curious glances of the disrespectful displease them more or less. It is said that they would speak if they could, and that truly skilled sorcerers, that is to say very learnèd ones, can force the stones to say good evening. But they are so stubborn and narrow-minded that we have never been able to teach them more. Sometimes we pass by them without seeing them; because in reality, they say, the stones are no longer there. They have gone for a walk, and they must quickly travel as far as possible from the path they must take to return to their accustomed place. We do not say whether, like the Breton peulvans (stone pillars), they go to drink at some nearby source of water. There are many who are as stupid as they are wicked, because they sometimes go to the wrong place, and people who see them one evening lying on a barren moor see them again the next day, at the same time, standing in a planted field. They cause damage and brutally break through the fences. But the most prudent thing is not to warn the owner because, apart from the fact that it would be quite impossible for him to remove these immobile lumps, “even if he used twelve pairs of oxen”, it could well be that they would take a fancy to crushing him. Besides, they are condemned to return to their place; if they can’t remember how to find it right away, it's too bad for them: they will wander for a year, if necessary, running on along their edges, which really tires them out, and they are forbidden to rest other than by standing until they have returned to the place where they are permitted to lie down.

We have sometimes seen these stones called pierres-caillasses or pierres-sottes (foolish stones). These are really cavernous limestones, whose numerous and irregular holes easily give one the idea of monstrous figures. When the road inspectors come across one within their reach, they break them up and they get what they deserve.

We want to too, although these poor stones have never done us any harm. However, it is assured that if we do not hurry to break them apart and use them, they will leave the side of the road where they have been placed and they will stand, at night, right in the middle of the road, causing horses to be killed and carriages to overturn. The moral is: the valet should not lie down and fall asleep in his cart.

As for you, strong minds, who ask why a large stone is in this hedgerow or at the edge of that ditch, if you are answered with a mysterious air: Oh! it’s not going to stay there! Know what this means and don’t amuse yourself by looking at it: you could put it in a bad mood against you and find it the next day in your garden, right in the middle of your melon bells or your flowerbeds. 

In the last century, a gentleman from Berry named Jean de la Selle lived in a castle deep in the woods of Villemort. The country, sad and wild, becomes a little livelier at the edge of the forest, where the ground, dry and flat and planted with oaks, slopes down to the meadows; these are flooded by a series of small ponds which are nowadays rather badly maintained.

At the time of our tale, water already filled the meadows of M. de la Selle, the good gentleman not having much money with which to clean up his land. He had a fairly large area, but of poor quality and little yield.

Nevertheless, he lived happily, thanks to his modest tastes and wise and cheerful character. His neighbours sought him out for his good humour, great sense, and patience in the hunt. The peasants of his estate and the surrounding lands considered him a man of extraordinary kindness and rare delicacy. It was said that rather than do the slightest harm to a neighbour, whomever he was, M. de la Selle would rather have the shirt torn off his back and his horse snatched from between his legs.

It just so happened that one evening, M. de la Selle, having gone to the Berthenoux Fair to sell a pair of oxen, was coming back along the edge of the woods, escorted by his tenant farmer, the great Luneau - a fine man with a knowing air - and he was carrying, on the thin backside of his grey mare, a sum of six hundred livres in large, flat bills bearing the likeness of Louis XIV. This was the price of the cattle sold.

Being the good country gentleman that he was, M. de la Selle had dined beneath the leafy boughs of the trees, and, as he did not like to drink alone, he made the great Luneau sit before him, and poured himself the vintage wine unsparingly in order to set an example and to put Luneau at ease. He poured so much that the wine, the heat, the day’s fatigue, and, above all, the rhythmic trot of his grey mare put M. de la Selle to sleep atop his horse, and he arrived home without really knowing how long it had been or which way they had gone. It had been Luneau's job to lead them, and Luneau had led them well, for they arrived safe and sound; not a hair on their horses was wet. M. de la Salle was not quite drunk. In his life, he had never been seen out of his senses. As soon as he arrived, he told his valet to take the valise of money to his room. He then had a very reasonable conversation with the great Luneau, bid him goodnight, and went to sleep without even looking for his bed. But the next day, as soon as he opened his valise to take out his money, he found nothing but large stones, and, after searching in vain, was forced to admit that it had been stolen.

The great Luneau, sent for and consulted, swore upon his chrism and his baptism, that he had seen the money well-counted and placed into the valise, which he had loaded and secured himself on the mare’s backside. He also swore on his faith and his law that he had not gone the length of a horse away from his master all the time they had been on the main road. But he confessed that once they had entered the forest, he had felt a little sluggish, and had been able to sleep atop his beast for about a quarter of an hour. He had found himself all of a sudden near the Gâgne-aux-Demoiselles, and, from that moment on, had not slept or seen another Christian soul.

“Come now,” said M. de la Selle, “some thief will be laughing at us. It is more my fault than yours, my poor Luneau, though neither of us has anything to brag about. I am the only one who suffers, since you did not share in the sale of the cattle; I can bear the brunt of this, even if the whole thing bothers me. That will teach me not to fall asleep on horseback again!”

Luneau tried in vain to cast his suspicions off onto some poachers active in the area.

“No, no,” said the kind country gentleman, “I do not want to accuse anybody. All the people of that area are honest. Let's not talk about it anymore; I've gotten what I deserve.”

“But perhaps you are rather angry with me, Master…”

“For having slept? No, my friend; if I had entrusted the valise to you, I am sure you would have stayed awake. I have only myself to blame, and well, I don’t intend to punish myself too hard. It's bad enough to have lost the money, let us save our good mood and appetite.”

“If you trust me, though, Master, you would have the Gâgne-aux-Demoiselles searched.”

“The Gâgne-aux-Demoiselles is a grassy pit half a league long; it would be no small project to stir up all that mud, and besides, what would we find? My thief will not have been so stupid as to sow my money there!”

“Say what you like, Master, but perhaps the thief is not what you think!”

“Ah! Ah! My dear Luneau, you too believe that the demoiselles are malicious spirits who enjoy playing evil tricks!”

“I don't know about that, Master, but I do know that, being there one morning with my father, before daylight, we saw them as I see you now; and that, returning home quite frightened, we had neither hats nor caps on our heads, nor shoes on our feet, nor knives in our pockets. Come now, they are clever! They seem to run away, but, without touching you, they take all that they can and must use it, for it is never found. If I were you, I would have the whole swamp drained. Your meadow would be better off, and the demoiselles would soon be flushed out; for every man of good sense knows they do not like dry land, and that they fly from pool to pool, from pond to pond, as the fog on which they feed fades away.”

“Luneau, my friend,” responded M. de la Selle, “draining the swamp would certainly be good for the meadow. But besides the fact that it would take the six hundred livres I lost, I would still think twice before dislodging the demoiselles. It's not that I believe in them, exactly, having never seen them, nor any farfadet  or creature of the sort; but my father believed in them a little, and my grandmother absolutely did. When we spoke of them, my father would say, ‘Leave the demoiselles alone; they have never done harm to myself or anyone else,’ and my grandmother would say, ‘Never torment or ward off the demoiselles; their presence good for the land, and their protection brings good luck to a family.’”

“Nevertheless,” said the great Luneau, “they have not saved you from thieves!”

About ten years after this adventure, M. de la Selle was returning from the same Berthenoux Fair, bringing back on the same grey mare - now very old, but still trotting without a stumble - an equivalent sum to that which had been so oddly stolen from him. This time, he was alone, the great Luneau having died some months ago; and our gentleman did not sleep on horseback, having forsworn once and for all that unfortunate habit.

Once he was at the edge of the woods, along the Gâgne-aux-Demoiselles, which is situated at the top of a rather high bank and covered in bushes, old trees, and tall, wild grass, M. de la Selle was taken with sadness in remembering his poor tenant farmer, whose absence he felt keenly, though the man’s son, Jacques, tall and slim like his father, and like his father fine and sensible, seemed to be doing all he could to replace him. But one does not replace old friends, and M. de la Selle was himself getting old. He had dark thoughts; but his good conscience soon dispelled them, and he began to whistle a hunting tune, telling himself that, when it came to his life and death, all would be as God wanted.

When he was about halfway across the marsh, he was surprised to see a white shape, which he had until then taken for a wisp of those vapours which hang over still waters, move around and then leap up and fly away, tearing through the branches. A second, more solid shape came out of the reeds and followed the first, stretching out like a floating web; then a third, then another and another; and, as they passed in front of Monsieur de la Selle, they evidently became the enormous figures they really were - pale, dressed in long skirts, with whitish hair dragging rather than fluttering behind them - that he could not but know these were the phantoms about which he had been told in his childhood. Then, forgetting that his grandmother had warned him to pretend he did not see them, he began to greet them like the well-bred man he was. He greeted them all, and when it came to the seventh, who was the tallest and most solid, he couldn't help saying, “My lady, I am your servant.”

The words had not quite left his mouth when the tall demoiselle appeared in the saddle behind him, embracing him with arms as cold as dawn, and the old grey mare, terrified, took off galloping, carrying M. de la Selle through the swamp.

Although greatly surprised, the good gentleman did not yet lose his head. “By the soul of my father,” he thought, “I have never done any harm, and no spirit can do any unto me.” He supported his mount and forced her out of the mud in which she was struggling, while the grand’demoiselle seemed to try to hold her back and grind her in the marsh.

M. de la Selle had pistols in his holsters, and it occurred to him to use them; but, considering that he was dealing with a supernatural being, and remembering, too, that his parents had cautioned him not to offend the demoiselles of the water, he simply said, “Really, my lady, you must let me go on my way, for I have not crossed your path to upset you; if I have greeted you, it is out of politeness, not mockery. If you wish for prayers or masses, make your desire known, and, on the faith of a gentleman, you shall have them!”

Then, M. de la Selle heard, above his head, a strange voice saying: “Say three masses for the soul of the great Luneau and go in peace!”

Immediately the phantom figure vanished, the grey mare became docile again, and M. de la Selle returned home unimpeded.

He thought then that he had had a vision; nevertheless, he had the three masses said in Luneau’s honour. But how great was his surprise when he opened his valise and found, in addition to the money he had received at the fair, six hundred livres in flat bills, bearing the likeness of the late king!

It was often said that the great Luneau, repentant in his last hours, had entrusted Jacques with the restitution of the money he had stolen, and that Jacques, so as not to sully the memory of his father, had made the demoiselles seem responsible for it… M. de la Selle never allowed a word against the integrity of the deceased, and when one spoke disrespectfully of the matter in his presence, he was bound to say: “Man cannot explain everything. It is better for us to believe than to reproach.”

Foreword

We should find some name for this nameless poem of the universal fabulous or marvellous, whose origins date back to the appearance of mankind on Earth and whose versions, multiplied by infinity, express the poetic imagination of every age and of every people.

The chapter on rustic legends, about the spirits and visions of the night would, in itself, be an immense work. In what corner of the Earth could one escape the popular imagination (which is never anything other than an indistinct or altered form of collective memory), safe from these dark apparitions of evil spirits who chase before them the weeping larval wraiths of their innumerable victims? Where peace now reigns, war, pestilence, or despair will have passed by before, and most terribly so, over the history of mankind. The growing wheat has its foot in human flesh, the dust of which has fattened our furrows. Everything under our feet is ruination, blood, and wreckage, and the world of fantasy, which either ignites or stupefies the minds of the peasantry, is an unpublished history of times gone by. When we want to trace back the root origins of a story, we will find them within some truncated or distorted legend, where we are rarely able to identify a proven fact consecrated by official history.

The peasant is therefore, one could say, the only historian from prehistoric times that remains with us still. Honour and success to those who dedicate themselves to the search for the marvellous traditions of each hamlet which, when collected or grouped, and when compared with one another and minutely dissected, could perhaps cast a great light onto that deep night of the primitive ages.

But it would be the work and the journey of a lifetime even just to explore this in France. The peasant still remembers the tales of his grandmother, but getting him to speak becomes more difficult every day. He knows that whomever is interviewing him is no longer a believer, and he begins to feel a sort of pride, which is certainly estimable, in refusing to serve as curiosity’s plaything. On the other hand, one cannot warn researchers enough that there are also innumerable versions of the same legend, and that each bell tower, each family, and each cottage has its own. Rustic poetry, like rustic music, has as many composers as there are individuals.

I love the marvellous too much to be anything other than a professional idiot. Besides, I must not forget that I am writing the text of a collection devoted to a selection of legends collected on site, and I will strive to collect, along with memories from my youth, some of the stories which define certain fantastic motifs common to all of France. It is in a corner of Berry, in which I have spent my life, that I will be forced to set my legends, because it is there and not elsewhere that I encountered them. They do not have the great poetry of Breton song, where the genius and the faith of old Gaul left a clearer imprint than it did anywhere else. With us, these reminiscences are more vague and more veiled. The marvellous, in our central provinces, is more analogous to that of Normandy, of which an erudite, patient, and conscientious woman has painted a perfect portrait [1].

However, the Gallic spirit bequeathed its features to all of our rustic traditions, as well as a colour which is re-encountered everywhere in France; a mixture of terror and irony, an extraordinary inventive oddness joined with naïve symbolism attesting to the need for true morality within delirious fantasy.

Berry, covered with the ancient debris of mysterious ages past, tombs, dolmens, menhirs (standing stones), and mardelles (pit-houses) [2], seems to have preserved within its legends some memories which predate the Druidic cult: perhaps those of the Cabeiri gods, which our antiquarians place prior to the appearance of the Kimris people on our shore. The sacrifice of human victims seems to hover like a horrible memory in certain visions. Walking cadavers, mutilated phantoms, headless men, and arms or legs without bodies populate our moors and our old abandoned pathways.

And then come the more orderly superstitions of the Middle Ages, still hideous, but more intentionally turned towards the burlesque; impossible animals whose grimacing figures twist within the sculptures of Roman and Gothic churches, who continue to roam alive and howling around cemeteries and within ruins. The souls of the dead knock upon the doors of the houses of the living. The Sabbath of personified vices and strange imps passes whistling within the storm cloud. The entire past is re-animated and all of the beings which Death has dissolved, even the animals, recover their voices, their movements, and their appearances; the furniture, fashioned by men as well as violently destroyed by them, straightens up and creaks upon its worm-eaten feet. Even the stones rise up and speak to the frightened passer-by; the night-birds sing out to men in dreadful tones, as does the hour of death, always reaping and always passing by, yet which seems to never be the end of anything on the face of the Earth thanks to this belief in the certainty that all beings and all things must protest against nothingness, and, taking refuge in the region of the marvellous, illuminate the night with sinister lights or populate the emptiness with floating figures and mysterious words.

George SAND

Whomever wishes to do serious scholarly work on central Gaul should consult the excellent work of M. Raynal, the historian of Berry, the text of Les Esquisses Pittoresques (Picturesque sketches) by M. de La Tremblays and M. de La Villegille, and the research by M. Laisnel de La Salle into certain curious local phrases, etc.

We often hear the beating of the night washers echoing in the silence around deserted ponds. This is a trick. It is only a kind of frog that makes this formidable noise. It’s so sad to make this childish discovery and to lose hope that those terrible sorceresses might appear, twisting their filthy rags in the misty November night, in the pale light of a crescent moon reflected on the water.

Yet, I was excited by a sincere and rather frightening account of this subject.

A friend of mine, a man of more wit than sense I must admit, and yet, of an enlightened and cultivated mind, but I must still confess, inclined to leave his reason in the jar; he is very brave in the face of real things, but easy to impress and nurtured from childhood on country legends, had two encounters with the washerwomen which he only recounted with reluctance and with an expression on his face that sent a chill through his audience.

One evening, around eleven o'clock, on an enchanting trail that snakes around and bounds forth, so to speak, on the rippled side of the Urmont ravine, he saw an old woman washing and twisting clothes in silence at the edge of a spring.

Although this pretty spring is infamous, he saw nothing supernatural there and said to this old woman: "You are doing the washing very late, mother!" 

She did not answer. He thought she was deaf and approached her. The moon was bright and the spring shone like a mirror. He then saw the features of the old woman more distinctly: she was a total stranger to him and he was astonished because, in his life as a farmer, hunter and loafer about the countryside, there was no face unknown to him for several leagues around. Here is what he told me of his impressions of this singularly strange washerwoman:

“I didn't think of the legend until I’d lost sight of the woman. I didn't even think about it until I came across her. I didn't believe it and didn’t feel any suspicion when approaching her. But as soon as I was near her, her silence, her indifference to the approach of a passer-by, gave her the appearance of a being absolutely foreign to our kind. If old age deprived her of hearing and sight, how had she come from afar all alone, at this unusual hour, to do the wash at this frozen spring where she worked with so much strength and energy? It was at least noteworthy; but what surprised me even more was what I felt within myself. I had no feeling of fear, rather, I felt loathing, an invincible disgust. I went on my way without so much as turning her head. It wasn’t until I got home that I thought of the washhouse witches, and I honestly admit that then I was very scared. Nothing in the world could have made me decide to retrace my steps.”

Another time, the same friend passed by the Thevet ponds around two in the morning. He came from Linières, where he assures us that he had neither eaten nor drunk anything, a circumstance that I cannot guarantee. He was alone in his horse cart, followed by his dog. His horse was tired so he dismounted as they went uphill and he found himself at the side of the road, near a ditch where three women were washing, beating, and twisting something vigorously, without saying a word. His dog suddenly pressed close to him without barking. He passed by without looking too closely. But no sooner had he taken a few steps than he heard someone walking behind him and the moon cast a very long shadow at his feet. He turned and saw one of the women following him. The other two came at some distance, as if to support the first.

“This time,” he said, “I thought of the cursed washerwomen, but I felt differently than the first time. These women were so tall, and the one who followed me closely had the proportions, the face and the gait of a man, that I did not doubt for a moment that I was dealing with malicious village jokers, ill-intentioned perhaps. I had a good stick in my hand. I turned around and said: ‘What do you want?’

I didn’t get an answer and, as I was not being attacked and had no reason to attack them myself, I was forced to return to my cart, which was quite far in front of me, with this disagreeable being at my heels. It didn't say anything to me and seemed to take pleasure in keeping me under suspense. I was still holding my stick, ready to break its jaw at the slightest touch. And so I arrived at my cart with my cowardly dog, ​​who didn't say a word and jumped in with me. I then turned and - although until then I had heard footsteps over mine and seen a shadow walking beside me - I saw no one. About thirty paces behind I could just make out - in the place where I had seen them washing - the three great devils jumping, dancing and writhing around like mad on the edge of the ditch. Their silence, contrasted with this distorted leaping, made them even more strange and distressing to see.”

If one tried, after this tale, to ask the narrator for more details or to make him understand that he had been the plaything of a hallucination, he would shake his head and say: “Let us talk about something else. I just like to think I am not crazy.” And these words, uttered with sadness, imposed silence on everyone.

There is no pond or spring that is not haunted, either by night washerwomen or by other more or less unfortunate spirits. A few of these ghosts are quite bizarre. In my childhood, I was always afraid to walk past a certain ditch where you saw white feet. Those fantastic stories which cannot explain the nature of the beings which they depict, which remain vague and incomplete, are those that strike the imagination hardest. It was said these white feet walked along the ditch at certain hours of the night; they were women's feet, lean and bare, with a bit of a white dress or long shirt that ceaselessly floated and fluttered. It moved fast in a zigzag and if we said, “I see you! Don’t you want to save yourself?” it would run so fast we didn't know where it had gone. When no one said anything, it moved in front of you; but no matter how hard one tried to see above the ankle, it was impossible. It had no legs, no body, no head, nothing but feet. I could not say what it was about these feet that made them terrifying; but I would not have wanted to see them. Not for anything in the world.

In other places, there are night spinners whose spinning wheels can be heard in whatever room you are in. Sometimes you can even see their hands. In our home, I heard about a night grinder, who pounded hemp outside the doors of certain houses, making rhythmic pounding noises but in an unnatural way. She had to be left alone, and if she persisted in coming back several nights in a row, you had to put an old scythe blade across the tool that she used to make all that noise. She would amuse herself for a while, trying to crush the blade, then she would be disgusted by it, throw it at the door and never come back.

And then there were the peillerouse (the ragged ones) of the night, who stood under the guenillière. Peille is an old French word meaning ragged; this is why the church porch, where the beggars stand in rags during services, is called by a similar name.

This one peillerouse accosted passers-by and asked them for alms. We had to be careful not to give her anything, otherwise she would grow tall and strong. As weak as she seemed, she would beat you up. A man named Simon Richard, who lived in the old priest’s house and who suspected some mischief towards him on the part of the village girls, tried to flirt with her. He was left for dead. I saw him on his side the next day, all battered and scratched up, indeed. He swore he had only dealt with a little old woman “who looked a hundred years old, but who had the fist of three and a half men.”

We tried in vain to make him believe that he had been dealing with a fellow stronger than himself, who, in disguise, took revenge for some bad trick in his own way. He was strong and bold, even quarrelsome and vindictive. Yet he left the parish as soon as he was up and never returned, saying he feared neither man nor woman. But he did fear people who are not of this world and who do not have Christian-made bodies.