NATURE 
THURSDAY, MAY 23, 1912. 
PICTURESQUE SAVOY. 
Costumes, Traditions, and Songs of Savoy. By 
Estella Canziani. Illustrated with fifty repro- 
ductions of pictures by the author, and with 
many line drawings. Pp. xiii+-180. (London: 
Chatto and Windus, 1911.) Price 21s. net. 
ERE is a book which should give pleasure to 
many. It appeals to the general reader 
who wishes to be told in an entertaining manner 
of journeyings in little-known places, or to look 
on charming colour reproductions of picturesque 
costumes, personal ornaments, and beautiful land- 
scapes. It also appeals to many groups of 
specialists by its representations of wood carvings, 
seals, coins, and coats of arms, by its music re- 
membered from olden times,and by its abundance 
of legends, customs, and folk-songs. We have 
vivid accounts of mountaineers, laborious, home- 
loving, honest, and frugal, who generously com- 
bine to make up a neighbour’s loss by fire or by 
death in his herd, help him to tile his new house, 
and divide amongst themselves the outdoor work 
for his widow. The people fear crowds and towns, 
though not the loneliness of their mountain soli- 
tudes. Their houses are wooden stables with 
straw-coloured earthen floors, which they share 
with their animals. Their furniture consists of a 
few primitive chairs, beds of straw and rags in 
rough wooden boxes raised on tall legs, and a 
water tub and a hay box for the cattle. The food 
is as rude as the hovel. The midday meal at an 
inn may be boiled cabbage, black bread, and wine, 
and the staple fare is black bread, milk, and soup, 
with a little rice. Pigs killed, dried, and salted 
once a year furnish an occasional and unattractive 
dish, and mutton (of extraordinary toughness) is 
an exceptional treat. 
In these widely different surroundings we 
find not a few beliefs and practices familiar 
in our own British Isles. The pigs must 
be killed under the waxing, and not under the 
waning, moon. ‘The saint’ of Dieublanc village 
hangs his cloak on the sunbeams, as did St. Brigit 
of Kildare. The Bacchu-ber dance (pp. 74-5) 
closely resembles the complicated sword-dances 
which Mr. Cecil Sharp has found still lingering 
near Flamborough and elsewhere. The homeward 
way of the newly-married was once barred by a 
cart or plank until drink-money was paid, just as 
and why it was barred with a rope in rural Eng: 
land. The future of a bride (whether elle portcra 
la culotte) is judged by her success in leaping a 
stream, as it was once in northern England by 
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jumping the “petting stone.” Still more curious 
is it to meet in Savoy (p. 128) the tale of the 
cat that, overhearing that “Doldrum is dead,” 
dashes off to claim the succession as King of 
the Cats. 
But most of the beliefs and practices are unlike 
our own. If the baying of dogs at midnight 
foretells death, as to ourselves, the hooting of owls 
is a sign, not of disaster, but of a birth. Moun- 
tains, glaciers, torrents, and especially caves, are 
the homes of evil spirits, but lakes and river 
sources of good spirits. The damned are confined 
in desolate places and beneath glaciers, whence 
they can cut their way up to Paradise by labour- 
ing for countless nights till cockcrow with the 
ineffective aid of a pin, and peasants still cut out 
steps to aid this labour of the lost. The Mer de 
Glace and the lake of Aigueblette each cover 
fertile lands destroyed on account of the inhospit- 
ality of their inhabitants. On stormy nights the 
witches and fays play ball with a baby, which they 
toss to one another and over the great fire in the 
midst of their circle, and their victim is ever after 
distorted and ailing, ‘“‘and only cares for the com- 
pany of snakes.’’ The Devil is watchful, and picks 
off at once the red flowers which bloom on the 
mountain fern on St. John’s Night, and confer 
invisibility. Sometimes, however, he comes by 
the worst, as when a saint seized him in the fora 
of a bear, and forced him to draw the materials 
for a monastery in the place of the oxen previously 
destroyed by him. The art of making Chartreuse, 
by the way, is said to have been filched from the 
Devil by a monk who stole into the secret grotto 
where the Arch Enemy was making liqueurs. 
God’s lightning warns of the coming of the Devil’s 
thunder, so that one has time to avert evil by 
signing the cross. 
But there is no end to the legends—of hidden 
treasures, lake serpents, ghosts, and animal- 
guardians of ruins and ancient castles—and the 
book contains much other interesting matter. We 
are present with the author at festas, where the 
“bidder,” dressed up in colours, beats his drum 
and clashes his cymbals, and then turns somer- 
saults, as he leads churchwards the peasants in 
their most gorgeous garments. We sympathise 
with her vain attempts to hurry the postcart, and 
we learn the social customs of the valleys. The 
lover knows without speech the failure of his 
courtship if oats are dropped into his pockets, or 
the burnt ends of the firebrands turned towards 
him, or if he is invited to sit near the logs piled 
beside the fire. As a funeral passes all doors and 
windows are shut to prevent entry of the freed soul 
of the dead, and the white gloves worn by the 
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