Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France

by Jacqueline Yallop

  But that’s all in my head, of course. The pigs charge towards me, entirely un-melancholy. I drop the wire from two of the posts near the ash tree and immediately Big Pig is striding out of the enclosure, head high, snout twitching; Little Pig passes him, runs ahead. They’re eager, excited. There’s none of the wariness of the first move; there’s no fear in crossing the line of the fence. They want to be out and about. The chance to explore is a thrill.

  It’s all I can do to keep up with them, rattling the bucket. But they’re not much interested in my stash of grain and chestnuts, nor even in what’s on offer on the verges and in the hedges. They browse the winter pickings nonchalantly, more curious about the experience than the food. We progress at a brisk trot. They know they’re going somewhere; that’s enough. Big Pig hardly pauses, falling into a steady pace; Little Pig can’t help being distracted sometimes but catches up, follows. And so we go: the path from La Graudie, the left turn on to the lane, past the stone cross that marks the track to the Mas de Maury. Do they pause here? Remember? If they do, it’s fleeting.

  There’s a long stretch of lane from here to Solange’s farm, uphill, bending, thick hawthorn hedges on one side and open fields on the other. This is new territory. After a moment, Big Pig stops to sniff, holds his head still to listen; he seems satisfied that everything’s as it should be, and we go on. The procession is more intermittent now. I have to haul Little Pig from the ditch by stuffing the bucket under his nose. Big Pig tacks across the lane right on the bend, his trotters clipping on the worn tarmac, and I have to call him back towards the verge. Just before the entrance to Solange’s farm, they both slow, linger: they seem weary. It’s a long walk on new ground for fattened pigs.

  Solange hears us as we pass, straightens from her work in the garden, waves. I wave back. There’s only a field’s length to go now, and then we’ll be off the lane, safe from any traffic. There’s the rumble of a tractor somewhere, but distant. We’re progressing more slowly. Big Pig has his nose close to the bucket which swings at my side; Little Pig is dawdling, dropping back. He has his eyes to the ground, his ears flopping over. Even the puff of floury dust as I shake the grain hardly causes him to lift his head. This is quite different to the sharp, clippity-clip pace of the spring walk when we brought the young pigs to La Graudie. It’s not only more pedestrian, but somehow, too, more solemn. It’s the beginning of an ending, after all. It’s shadowed by the knowledge of loss to come: a parting from Big Pig and Little Pig; perhaps, in a year or so, the leaving of this place and this life. It’s not a sad walk – surely a walk with pigs can never really be sad – but it’s a sedate, thoughtful one.

  We’ve taken down some of the wooden railings that surround the back garden so that the pigs can come straight through from the lane. We cross the grass close to the pond. Mo is standing at the ground-floor window of the house; he starts barking as soon as he sees us. Both pigs respond to this: they’re looking round for their friend, sniffing hard, suddenly curious again. They cut away across the open ground, heading towards the house. Little Pig makes it as far as the gravelly terrace but is confounded by the odd surface and the abrupt proximity of high walls; he continues to listen out for Mo, but from a standstill, and when I go to him and place my hand on his neck, he turns with me and allows me to draw him back on to the grass where Big Pig has begun to graze.

  When I close the fence around their new enclosure, the pigs stare at me in disbelief. Is that it? Is the outing over? What are they doing here? They plant themselves resolutely at the wire, unmoving. I step over and walk behind them to the shelter, talk to them, pull out some straw and show them the feeding trough, but their protest continues. They’re not used to such a small space, nor to such openness. There’s the protection from the wall, but no trees of any size and certainly nothing like the sloping woods at La Graudie. I get the distinct impression that they’re disgruntled. They want to go home.

  Almost as soon as we move the pigs to the garden, the rain begins. I can’t remember it raining ever before for any length of time in December; December is cold, bright, clear. Always. But this, quite clearly, is rain.

  It means a delay to our plans. We can’t kill pigs in this. There’s good reason why stories and pictures of slaughter day tend to be snowy, frosty at least: traditionally, as for us, the task required the natural refrigeration of the coldest weather, since if temperatures were too high the meat would not chill properly, and there wouldn’t be enough time for processing hams and bacon and sausages. Pig-killing days were the dark, bitter, short days of midwinter. Look, for example, at Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig, painted in the middle of the seventeenth century by David Teniers the Younger. The killing is going on almost out of sight in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting, the animal obscured by the gathering of the extended family. The focus is on the freezing dusk: snow lying thickly on the village and fields, and more promised by the ominous clouds; the pond iced up so completely that boys are skating on it. The houses are dark: there is no flicker of a fire (although thick smoke pours from the chimney), nothing comforting; the palette is cool, the landscape stretching away greyly to the bare distance. This is winter at its harshest, when signs of spring are a long way off and every daily chore is made harder by cold hands.

  The tough, dirty, meticulous work of processing pig meat was more taxing in cold weather – it demands dexterity and energy and stamina, all easily drained by freezing temperatures – but the celebration which followed was, like other seasonal feasts, a bright moment in the bleak monotony of midwinter: here was the anticipation brought on by the smell of meat cooking; the joy of a job well done; the comfort of knowing you would not starve this year. But we’re edging towards Christmas. At this rate, our pig-killing feast threatens to crash into Christmas lunch. We watch the rain disconsolately as it puddles on the grass and fills the pond to overflowing. The hens congregate under the table-tennis table and sulk. I walk with Mo down to the Mas de Maury and find the well there gushing over, the water running in quick rivulets down to the lake, a pair of mallards paddling on the path. Not pig-killing weather, not at all.

  Big Pig and Little Pig make the most of their new pen. They find sunflower seeds in abundance, pumpkin seeds, roots, wintry stalks. But in such a small space, with two grown pigs trampling and rummaging and the rain steadily falling, the clay soil of the vegetable patch quickly becomes mud. A lot of mud. Thick, heavy mud. There are soon pits and hollows around the shelter that fill with water, unintended wallows. Along the perimeter where the pigs loiter, hopeful, there is a slosh of sticky ground. Plant roots hold the soil firm in places, but the pigs are eating these, or digging through them, and bit by bit the entire area gives way to mire. When I step over the electric fence my wellies sink immediately; the clay holds them so tightly that I’m thoroughly stuck. It’s takes a great deal of yanking to pull myself free with a slurp, only to get stuck again as I go forward. For the pigs, the problem is the same. Their trotters slide deep into the mud. They move heavily, with great effort, sucked into the ground at every step. They’re accustomed to the friable dry soil of the woods, running up the slope, moving freely. This glutinous mess is a misery.

  There’s nowhere solid to put the food trough. The bedding straw is damp. The shelter lurches under the weight of water. The fence posts skew in the mud. We can’t keep the pigs here much longer in these conditions, but while it’s raining we can’t kill them either. We’ll have to wait. We watch the weather forecast anxiously. Will it turn colder? Soon? Little Pig glares at me accusingly, mired up to his knees. Just beyond the pen, the grassy garden must look like a haven of firmer ground and grazing, but this is death row now, there are no concessions. The pigs remain in the mud.

  And just as the rain eases and the temperature drops, a chill wind bringing crisp air from the mountains, a packet of knives arrives in the post. There’s a small weighty cleaver and a clever butcher’s knife with a slight blade, turned up at the end, for delicate work. Both are so sharp
that even resting them gently against my hand lifts away a light sliver of skin. There’s a longer knife with a wider blade, a kitchen knife, for basic work on cutting up joints. And then there’s the knife we’ll use to kill the pigs. When I take it from its box I’m astounded by its size and weight: it has a long, heavy blade, at least twice as long as a kitchen knife. It’s bulky, unwieldy. When I try it out, it swishes through the air. It is, as far as I can see, a sword.

  The size of the knife brings home the size of the task. A big knife to kill a big animal. A weapon of power: accurate, brutal. I have never wielded such a knife, never had any need to. It’s too big to carve a Sunday joint or slice a pumpkin or cut through rhubarb stalks. I replace it in its box, afraid of it.

  Lives moving towards deaths; stories working towards conclusions. Narratives playing out, inevitably. The pigs, of course, know none of this. They’re not interested. They heave through the mud, sticky pigs, the clay coating their hair thickly, like a beauty treatment of some sort. I can’t see them from the house but I can hear them, grumbling, tussling, not able to settle under these new conditions where every step is an insult. Do they wonder why their luck has changed? Do they have some kind of animal presentiment of where it all might lead?

  But perhaps there’s a happy ending. It’s not impossible. We all like happy endings, after all. And for the first black pig of our tale, Nicholson’s pig, things are looking up. Just when I’d lost all trace of him, when he’d disappeared from sight and must be presumed bacon, I find a report from a London newspaper which brings him back into the spotlight. January 1787: ‘the Learned Pig of Charing Cross is one of the rarer monsters of France,’14 it declares delightedly. ‘It has fed its owners fat through Calais, Boulogne, Montreuil, &c., &c.’ For a moment I’m taken aback by this unexpected expansion of the pig’s horizons. A metropolitan career seems one thing, but an international one quite another. I check again. But it seems true enough. A British pig in France. On the eve of revolution, at the very moment English frigates are fighting French ships off the coast of Brittany, our performing black pig has crossed the Channel in search of new admirers. I can’t find any accounts of how he got there; I can only imagine the discomfort of the crossing, the waistcoated pig back on a boat in a January swell, but there’s no doubt that he’s here all right, being ‘fed fat’ by new audiences, spelling out strange words in an entirely new language, telling French time, counting francs and sous.

  I read more, astounded by the bravado of the pig’s timing. Nicholson perhaps thinks himself above, or below, political matters: he perhaps does not care for talk of war. He’s making money from the pig, and that might seem enough. But whether he likes it or not – whether he knows it or not – revolutionary politics is fanning the flames of stardom. By the later 1780s, there’s an edginess to life in France, discontent and uncertainty, anger. Much of the anger is directed at first at the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, but in time it’s the King himself who becomes the focus of popular fury, and how better to bring the godlike Louis XVI down to earth than to reimagine him as a pig? In the years running up to his execution in January 1793 thousands of caricatures appeared showing Louis as a pig, or sometimes as a hybrid monster,15 half man and half hog. Deformed. Bestial. The cartoons revelled in the very worst of ‘pigness’, emphasizing dirt and squalor, showing the Louis-pig defecating, wallowing, vomiting. The aim was to make him grotesque and despicable. A popular stamp, for example, showed him crawling along through the sewer of royal life while being defecated on from above. The once sacred body of the King was being roundly rejected, trashed. Pig pamphlets, pig cartoons, pig prints, pig stamps: pigs everywhere, and loaded with meaning, a visible expression of revolution.

  How timely, then, for our black pig to embark on a French career. ‘Calais, Boulogne, Montreuil, &c., &c.’ say the papers. This is a well-trodden route, the same route taken by Arthur Young, an agriculturalist whose travel writing became enormously popular for its social and political observations. His first visit to France, like the pig’s, was in 1787 and the news reports seem to have enjoyed the idea that the learned writer and the learned pig tracked each other, road for road, from Calais to Boulogne to Montreuil. But I’m struck by the way these accounts seem to fade away without conclusion, drifting into a vague &c., &c. Etc., etc.: leaving us to fill the gaps. In fact, the London journalists are being shy. Many English men and women are fearful of the French, terrified in case the taste for revolution finds its way across the Channel, eager to keep a distance, and the papers don’t want to turn popular opinion against their favourite pig. So they’re careful to suggest that the pig is dawdling in the coastal towns of Normandy, perhaps taking some sea air, hugging close to his British roots in a landscape which Young praises for ‘strongly resembling England’.16 But Montreuil is only a few kilometres from the centre of Paris. And so, &c., &c., what the papers are glossing over is that Nicholson and his pig are progressing to the heart of things, to the seat of power both royal and revolutionary. In a January of unrest, of wintry discontent and tense grumblings, the performing pig is making a name for himself in the capital. Is he pandering to the perfumed elite or rousing the revolutionaries? It’s likely that at this time his audience is a strange mix of the rich and the raucous, as it had been in London, and of course, you can’t start a revolution with an itinerant pig – but I’m fascinated by the knowledge that shortly after our Learned Pig’s successful performances, pictures of Louis begin to appear as a hairy black pig. An erudite pig and a pig-king, both entertaining the crowds.

  By summer of 1787, Nicholson has brought his pig back to Britain. They tour again: Retford, Newark, Lincoln, Stamford. They make a foray into Scotland, performing to great acclaim at the Grassmarket in Edinburgh. The pig, the papers claim, has made more money in its distinguished career than any of the period’s most acclaimed actors or actresses; it’s a genuine star, welcome everywhere, fêted, fawned upon, loved. A national treasure, perhaps. But by the end of 1788, the picture begins to look bleak again. The pig loses his grip on the headlines, fades in and out like a Cheshire-cat grin, and in November, the bad news finally comes: worn out by its labours, the pig has died. Old black pig. Too decrepit and weary. I find several reports of the pig’s death and, worse still, perhaps, one of the papers notes that Nicholson, too, has succumbed to the effect of his heroic endeavours and has been shut away in an Edinburgh asylum to end his days with the insane: ‘Too much learning, we suppose, had driven the pig mad, and so he bit his master.’17

  But can that be it? The reports seem strange to me, and confused. Has the pig died, or gone mad? Why would Nicholson be confined as a lunatic just for being bitten by his star performer? Or has the pig, finally fed up, attacked Nicholson and paid the price for its pique? I root around for more information, for something more, a happy ending. Perhaps because I know it’s the last days for Big Pig and Little Pig, pacing the squelchy pen until the weather turns cold, I’m un-willing to leave the story unfinished. I’ve followed this dapper eighteenth-century pig, this fashionable phenomenon, from Belfast to Dublin, across the sea to Chester, over the Pennines to Scarborough, to country fair and city theatre, to revolutionary France and back again; I’ve seen Bisset killed in defence of his pig and Nicholson revelling in riches. I can’t leave it here, uncertain and sad. There must be more.

  With my own pigs’ story dwindling to a close like a dark December afternoon, I’m increasingly desperate to keep this one going. I want just a hint of life, a glimpse of a future. And at last, in a batch of old news reports, here it is. A year after its supposed death and Nicholson’s incarceration in an Edinburgh madhouse, the Learned Pig makes the papers again. Alive. A number of accounts in October and November 1789 agree that the pig is topping the bill in Hereford, Monmouth and Abergavenny, performing as well as ever on a journey along the Welsh–English border – on his return from an arduous tour of France. Not dead, then, not mad, but, in the summer of 1789, back with the French: ‘from his frequent interviews with the Fre
nch patriots, he is almost enabled to hold a discourse upon the Feudal System, the Rights of Kings and the Destruction of the Bastille,’ one newspaper claims. July 1789: the fall of the Bastille, one of the most iconic moments of European history. I feel an odd buzz of excitement. Can it be true that Nicholson and his pig were counting cards in a French theatre at the moment the Paris fortress fell to the crowd?

  There seems little doubt that it’s the same pig. If something had really happened to the original black pig, back in Edinburgh, at the end of the previous year, Nicholson would not have had time to train another to take its place. Besides, the papers are adamant that this is the one and only Learned Pig that for four years or more has ‘afforded such amusement in most parts of England’. They’ve followed his story this far every step of the way, like diligent drovers, and they probably know the unforgettable wise pig when they see it. It seems certain that it’s our black pig back from the dead and, better still, tangled up with one of the great events of revolution. There will, in time, be other performing pigs. There will be imitators and successors, more sapient hogs, more ambitious owners, more attention and controversy. But this, for now, is the original pig, Bisset’s pig, sagely bringing out its tricks in a France of crisis and insurrection.

  After this, there are no more reports. After a balmy autumn in the Welsh Marches, the pig finally disappears. But this seems to me like a good enough place for him to end. I’m content with this. I imagine the old black pig picking its way through rural France during a season of riots and unrest, making its final appearances in Paris during a summer frenzy of protest, standing onstage with its worn-out antics while the world reconfigures about it. The usual audiences falling away; new ones taking their place. Everyone drawn in, everyone fascinated by a pig that can read minds from a set of alphabet cards even when the city is a place of violence and chaos. What a highpoint on which to finish; what a long and gruelling journey; what a remarkable expedition for a pig. It seems only right that a quiet walk in the Welsh hills should follow, a return to ancient drovers’ paths, to peaceful lanes and untroubled country crowds. The poor, weary, old pig has been performing for over five years; it’s been attacked, whipped, prodded, shouted at and harassed; it’s been hot and baffled and thin. Can it have a happy ending? Is this one: a stroll through the cool shadows of a Welsh market town? Will this do?