I was soon on the road, nibbling a cake of chocolate and seriously
occupied with a case of conscience. Was I to pay for my night's lodging?
I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas in the shape of ants, there
was no water in the room, the very dawn had neglected to call me in the
morning. I might have missed a train, had there been any in the
neighbourhood to catch. Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my
entertainment; and I decided I should not pay unless I met a beggar.

The valley looked even lovelier by morning; and soon the road descended
to the level of the river. Here, in a place where many straight and
prosperous chestnuts stood together, making an aisle upon a swarded
terrace, I made my morning toilette in the water of the Tarn. It was
marvelously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by
magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for
cleanliness. To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble
among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the
imagination takes no share in such a cleansing. I went on with a light
and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced.

Suddenly up came an old woman, who point-blank demanded alms.

"Good," thought I; "here comes the waiter with the bill."

And I paid for my night's lodging on the spot. Take it how you please,
but this was the first and the last beggar that I met with during all my
tour.

A step or two farther I was overtaken by an old man in a brown nightcap,
clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with a faint excited smile. A little girl
followed him, driving two sheep and a goat; but she kept in our wake,
while the old man walked beside me and talked about the morning and the
valley. It was not much past six; and for healthy people who have slept
enough that is an hour of expansion and of open and trustful talk.

"_Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?_" he said at length.

I asked him what Seigneur he meant; but he only repeated the question
with more emphasis and a look in his eyes denoting hope and interest.

"Ah," said I, pointing upwards, "I understand you now. Yes, I know Him;
He is the best of acquaintances."

The old man said he was delighted. "Hold," he added, striking his bosom;
"it makes me happy here." There were a few who knew the Lord in these
valleys, he went on to tell me; not many, but a few. "Many are called,"
he quoted, "and few chosen."

"My father," said I, "it is not easy to say who know the Lord; and it
is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics, and even those who
worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him; for He has made all."

I did not know I was so good a preacher.

The old man assured me he thought as I did, and repeated his expressions
of pleasure at meeting me. "We are so few," he said. "They call us
Moravians here; but down in the Department of Gard, where there are also
a good number, they are called Derbists, after an English pastor."

I began to understand that I was figuring, in questionable taste, as a
member of some sect to me unknown; but I was more pleased with the
pleasure of my companion than embarrassed by my own equivocal position.
Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference; and
especially in these high matters, where we have all a sufficient
assurance that, whoever may be in the wrong, we ourselves are not
completely in the right. The truth is much talked about; but this old
man in a brown nightcap showed himself so simple, sweet and friendly,
that I am not unwilling to profess myself his convert. He was, as a
matter of fact, a Plymouth Brother. Of what that involves in the way of
doctrine I have no idea nor the time to inform myself; but I know right
well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome world, the children of
one Father, striving in many essential points to do and to become the
same. And although it was somewhat in a mistake that he shook hands with
me so often and showed himself so ready to receive my words, that was a
mistake of the truth-finding sort. For charity begins blindfold; and
only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a
settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our
fellow-men. If I deceived this good old man, in the like manner I would
willingly go on to deceive others. And if ever at length, out of our
separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common
house, I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth
Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again.

Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down
upon a hamlet by the Tarn. It was but a humble place, called La Vernède,
with less than a dozen houses, and a Protestant chapel on a knoll. Here
he dwelt; and here, at the inn, I ordered my breakfast. The inn was kept
by an agreeable young man, a stone-breaker on the road, and his sister, a
pretty and engaging girl. The village schoolmaster dropped in to speak
with the stranger. And these were all Protestants--a fact which pleased
me more than I should have expected; and, what pleased me still more,
they seemed all upright and simple people. The Plymouth Brother hung
round me with a sort of yearning interest, and returned at least thrice
to make sure I was enjoying my meal. His behaviour touched me deeply at
the time, and even now moves me in recollection. He feared to intrude,
but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he
seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand.

When all the rest had drifted off to their day's work, I sat for near
half an hour with the young mistress of the house, who talked pleasantly
over her seam of the chestnut harvest, and the beauties of the Tarn, and
old family affections, broken up when young folk go from home, yet still
subsisting. Hers, I am sure, was a sweet nature, with a country
plainness and much delicacy underneath; and he who takes her to his
heart will doubtless be a fortunate young man.

The valley below La Vernède pleased me more and more as I went forward.
Now the hills approached from either hand, naked and crumbling, and
walled in the river between cliffs; and now the valley widened and
became green. The road led me past the old castle of Miral on a steep;
past a battlemented monastery, long since broken up and turned into a
church and parsonage; and past a cluster of black roofs, the village of
Cocurès, sitting among vineyards and meadows and orchards thick with red
apples, and where, along the highway, they were knocking down walnuts
from the roadside trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets. The
hills, however much the vale might open, were still tall and bare, with
cliffy battlements and here and there a pointed summit; and the Tarn
still rattled through the stones with a mountain noise. I had been led,
by bagmen of a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a horrific country
after the heart of Byron; but to my Scottish eyes it seemed smiling and
plentiful, as the weather still gave an impression of high summer to my
Scottish body; although the chestnuts were already picked out by the
autumn, and the poplars, that here began to mingle with them, had turned
into pale gold against the approach of winter.

There was something in this landscape, smiling although wild, that
explained to me the spirit of the Southern Covenanters. Those who took
to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had all gloomy and
bedevilled thoughts; for once that they received God's comfort they
would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and
supporting visions. They dealt much more in blood, both given and taken;
yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their records. With a light
conscience, they pursued their life in these rough times and
circumstances. The soul of Séguier, let us not forget, was like a
garden. They knew they were on God's side, with a knowledge that has no
parallel among the Scots; for the Scots, although they might be certain
of the cause, could never rest confident of the person.

"We flew," says one old Camisard, "when we heard the sound of
psalm-singing, we flew as if with wings. We felt within us an animating
ardour, a transporting desire. The feeling cannot be expressed in words.
It is a thing that must have been experienced to be understood. However
weary we might be, we thought no more of our weariness, and grew light
so soon as the psalms fell upon our ears."

The valley of the Tarn and the people whom I met at La Vernède not only
explain to me this passage, but the twenty years of suffering which
those, who were so stiff and so bloody when once they betook themselves
to war, endured with the meekness of children and the constancy of
saints and peasants.




FLORAC


On a branch of the Tarn stands Florac, the seat of a sub-prefecture with
an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and a
live fountain welling from the hill. It is notable, besides, for
handsome women, and as one of the two capitals, Alais being the other,
of the country of the Camisards.

The landlord of the inn took me, after I had eaten, to an adjoining
café, where I, or rather my journey, became the topic of the afternoon.
Every one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the sub-prefectorial
map was fetched from the sub-prefecture itself, and much thumbed among
coffee-cups and glasses of liqueur. Most of these kind advisers were
Protestant, though I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled
in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory
still subsisted of the religious war. Among the hills of the south-west,
by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse,
serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great
persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded.
But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these
old doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the
King's Arms at Wigtown, it is not likely that the talk would run on
Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had
not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these Cévenols were proud of
their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic;
its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a
race has had but one adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and
pardon some prolixity of reference. They told me the country was still
full of legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's
descendants--not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins
or nephews--who were still prosperous people in the scene of the
boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old
combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth
century, in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the
great-grandchildren were peaceably ditching.

Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit
me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed an hour or
two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and
the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in
politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as I did from such a
babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as Monastier, when I learned that
the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an
exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated.
Black Camisard and White Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon,
Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all
been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their
hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy
years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in
mutual toleration and mild amity of life. But the race of man, like that
indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its own;
the years and seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single man awakens
from the passions of a day. We judge our ancestors from a more divine
position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we
can see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show
of right.

I have never thought it easy to be just, and find it daily even harder
than I thought. I own I met these Protestants with delight and a sense
of coming home. I was accustomed to speak their language, in another and
deeper sense of the word than that which distinguishes between French
and English; for the true Babel is a divergence upon morals. And hence I
could hold more free communication with the Protestants, and judge them
more justly, than the Catholics. Father Apollinaris may pair off with my
mountain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and devout old men; yet I ask
myself if I had as ready a feeling for the virtues of the Trappist; or,
had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so warmly to the dissenter
of La Vernède. With the first I was on terms of mere forbearance; but
with the other, although only on a misunderstanding and by keeping on
selected points, it was still possible to hold converse and exchange
some honest thoughts. In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome
even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out
of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity
without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or
God.




IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE


On Tuesday, 1st October, we left Florac late in the afternoon, a tired
donkey and tired donkey-driver. A little way up the Tarnon, a covered
bridge of wood introduced us into the valley of the Mimente. Steep rocky
red mountains overhung the stream; great oaks and chestnuts grew upon
the slopes or in stony terraces; here and there was a red field of
millet or a few apple trees studded with red apples; and the road passed
hard by two black hamlets, one with an old castle atop to please the
heart of the tourist.

It was difficult here again to find a spot fit for my encampment. Even
under the oaks and chestnuts the ground had not only a very rapid slope,
but was heaped with loose stones; and where there was no timber the
hills descended to the stream in a red precipice tufted with heather.
The sun had left the highest peak in front of me, and the valley was
full of the lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they recalled the flocks
into the stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the
roadway in an angle of the river. Thither I descended, and, tying
Modestine provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the
neighbourhood. A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at
a little distance grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other;
and the darkness was rising steadily like an exhalation. I approached a
great oak which grew in the meadow, hard by the river's brink; when to
my disgust the voices of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a house
round the angle on the other bank. I had half a mind to pack and be gone
again, but the growing darkness moved me to remain. I had only to make
no noise until the night was fairly come, and trust to the dawn to call
me early in the morning. But it was hard to be annoyed by neighbours in
such a great hotel.

A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. Before I had fed Modestine and
arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the
others were beginning dimly to appear. I slipped down to the river,
which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with
a good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so
near a house. The moon, which I had seen a pallid crescent all
afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray
fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying. The oak rose before
me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set
in the face of the night. No one knows the stars who has not slept, as
the French happily put it, _à la belle étoile_. He may know all their
names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone
concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The
greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are
themselves the most classical of poets. These same far-away worlds,
sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like a diamond dust upon the
sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or Cavalier, when, in the words
of the latter, they had "no other tent but the sky, and no other bed
than my mother earth."

All night a strong wind blew up the valley, and the acorns fell
pattering over me from the oak. Yet on this first night of October, the
air was as mild as May, and I slept with the fur thrown back.

I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more
than any wolf. A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported by the
sense of duty. If you kill a wolf, you meet with encouragement and
praise; but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the
domestic affections come clamouring round you for redress. At the end
of a fagging day, the sharp, cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a
keen annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary
and respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of
the clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and it he were
not amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from travelling
afoot. I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway,
or sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them.

I was wakened next morning (Wednesday, October 2nd) by the same dog--for
I knew his bark--making a charge down the bank, and then, seeing me sit
up, retreating again with great alacrity. The stars were not yet quite
extinguished. The heaven was of that enchanting mild grey-blue of the
early morn. A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the
hillside were outlined sharply against the sky. The wind had veered more
to the north, and no longer reached me in the glen; but as I was going
on with my preparations, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the
hill-top; and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with
gold. In these high regions of the air the sun was already shining as at
noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same
thing all night long. For it is always daylight in the fields of space.

As I began to go up the valley, a draught of wind came down it out of
the seat of the sunrise, although the clouds continued to run overhead
in an almost contrary direction. A few steps farther, and I saw a whole
hillside gilded with the sun; and still a little beyond, between two
peaks, a centre of dazzling brilliancy appeared floating in the sky, and
I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the
kernel of our system.

I met but one human being that forenoon, a dark military-looking
wayfarer, who carried a game-bag on a baldric; but he made a remark that
seems worthy of record. For when I asked him if he were Protestant or
Catholic--

"Oh," said he, "I make no shame of my religion. I am a Catholic."

He made no shame of it! The phrase is a piece of natural statistics; for
it is the language of one in a minority. I thought with a smile of
Bâvile and his dragoons, and how you may ride rough-shod over a religion
for a century, and leave it only the more lively for the friction.
Ireland is still Catholic; the Cevennes still Protestant. It is not a
basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a regiment of
horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts. Outdoor
rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown a
long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at
night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has,
in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and
amicable relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother,
he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic;
it is the poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history
of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has
appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the
ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds
and dogma by authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of
trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and
will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a
man is not a woman, or a woman not a man. For he could not vary from his
faith, unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a
strict and not a conventional meaning, change his mind.




THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY


I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the
hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon
in the clear air by many rocky peaks. The road along the Mimente is yet
new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first
cart arrived at Cassagnas. But although it lay thus apart from the
current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the
history of France. Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the
five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and
arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves
gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the
same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were
brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons,
Chabrier and Tavan, and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood.

Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the
oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas. This
was the band of Spirit Séguier; men who had joined their voices with his
in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the
Cevennes. Séguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc,
whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole
army of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart,
who admitted people to the sacrament, or refused them, by "intentively
viewing every man" between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures
off by rote. And this was surely happy; since in a surprise in August
1703, he lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible. It is only
strange that they were not surprised more often and more effectually;
for this legion of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war,
and camped without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God
for whom they fought. This is a token, not only of their faith, but of
the trackless country where they harboured. M. de Caladon, taking a
stroll one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he
might have walked into "a flock of sheep in a plain," and found some
asleep and some awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no
recommendation to insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond "his
faculty of singing psalms"; and even the prophet Salomon "took him into
a particular friendship." Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic
troop subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but
sacraments and ecstasies.

People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been
saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy
than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of
Rimmon. When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, "convinced by the
uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than
sympathy," granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was
still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed,
one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic. It is
that of a Catholic _curé_ in revolt, who has taken to his bosom a
schoolmistress. And his conduct, it is worth noting, is disapproved by
the Protestant villagers.

"It is a bad idea for a man," said one, "to go back from his
engagements."

The villagers whom I saw seemed intelligent after a countrified fashion,
and were all plain and dignified in manner. As a Protestant myself, I
was well looked upon, and my acquaintance with history gained me
further respect. For we had something not unlike a religious
controversy at table, a gendarme and a merchant with whom I dined being
both strangers to the place, and Catholics. The young men of the house
stood round and supported me; and the whole discussion was tolerantly
conducted, and surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and
contentious differences of Scotland. The merchant, indeed, grew a little
warm, and was far less pleased than some others with my historical
acquirements. But the gendarme was mighty easy over it all.

"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said he; and the remark was
generally applauded.

That was not the opinion of the priest and soldier at Our Lady of the
Snows. But this is a different race; and perhaps the same
great-heartedness that upheld them to resist, now enables them to differ
in a kind spirit. For courage respects courage; but where a faith has
been trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population. The true
work of Bruce and Wallace was the union of the nations; not that they
should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but
that, when the time came, they might unite with self-respect.

The merchant was much interested in my journey, and thought it dangerous
to sleep afield.

"There are the wolves," said he; "and then it is known you are an
Englishman. The English have always long purses, and it might very well
enter into some one's head to deal you an ill blow some night."

I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate
judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in the
arrangement of life. Life itself, I submitted, was a far too risky
business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth
regard. "Something," said I, "might burst in your inside any day of the
week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked in your room
with three turns of the key."

"_Cependant_," said he, "_coucher dehors_!"

"God," said I, "is everywhere."

"_Cependant, coucher dehors!_" he repeated, and his voice was eloquent
of terror.

He was the only person, in all my voyage, who saw anything hardy in so
simple a proceeding; although many considered it superfluous. Only one,
on the other hand, professed much delight in the idea; and that was my
Plymouth Brother, who cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred
sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy alehouse, "Now I see that
you know the Lord!"

The merchant asked me for one of my cards as I was leaving, for he said
I should be something to talk of in the future, and desired me to make a
note of his request and reason; a desire with which I have thus
complied.

A little after two I struck across the Mimente, and took a rugged path
southward up a hillside covered with loose stones and tufts of heather.
At the top, as is the habit of the country, the path disappeared; and I
left my she-ass munching heather, and went forward alone to seek a road.

I was now on the separation of two vast watersheds; behind me all the
streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me was
the basin of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozère, you can see in clear
weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons; and perhaps from here the
soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley
Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge
as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five
legions camped all round it and almost within view--Salomon and Joani to
the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien had
finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cevennes, which
lasted all through October and November, 1703, and during which four
hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe,
utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked
forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land. Time and man's
activity have now repaired these ruins; Cassagnas is once more roofed
and sending up domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens, in low and
leafy corners, many a prosperous farmer returns, when the day's work is
done, to his children and bright hearth. And still it was perhaps the
wildest view of all my journey. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of
hills ran surging southward, channeled and sculptured by the winter
streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts, and here and there
breaking out into a coronal of cliffs. The sun, which was still far from
setting, sent a drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but the
valleys were already plunged in a profound and quiet shadow.

A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a black
cap of liberty, as if in honour of his nearness to the grave, directed
me to the road for St. Germain de Calberte. There was something solemn
in the isolation of this infirm and ancient creature. Where he dwelt,
how he got upon this high ridge, or how he proposed to get down again,
were more than I could fancy. Not far off upon my right was the famous
Plan de Font Morte, where Poul with his Armenian sabre slashed down the
Camisards of Séguier. This, methought, might be some Rip van Winkle of
the war, who had lost his comrades, fleeing before Poul, and wandered
ever since upon the mountains. It might be news to him that Cavalier had
surrendered, or Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an
olive. And while I was thus working on my fancy, I heard him hailing in
broken tones, and saw him waving me to come back with one of his two
sticks. I had already got some way past him; but, leaving Modestine once
more, retraced my steps.

Alas, it was a very commonplace affair. The old gentleman had forgot to
ask the pedlar what he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect.

I told him sternly, "Nothing."

"Nothing?" cried he.

I repeated "Nothing," and made off.

It's odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became as inexplicable to the
old man as he had been to me.

The road lay under chestnuts, and though I saw a hamlet or two below me
in the vale, and many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it was a very
solitary march all afternoon; and the evening began early underneath the
trees. But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless
ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and a _bel amoureux_, her
handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and
answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like
Pippa in the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told
her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives
and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again
into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which
makes the world a garden; and "hope, which comes to all," outwears the
accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and
death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and
grateful to believe!

We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless
dust. The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while
upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I
issued ourselves into her light. I had emptied out my brandy at Florac,
for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous
and scented Volnay; and now I drank to the moon's sacred majesty upon
the road. It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth
unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury. Even Modestine
was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her
little hoofs as to a livelier measure. The road wound and descended
swiftly among masses of chestnuts. Hot dust rose from our feet and
flowed away. Our two shadows--mine deformed with the knapsack, hers
comically bestridden by the pack--now lay before us clearly outlined on
the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went off into the ghostly
distance, and sailed along the mountain like clouds. From time to time a
warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all the chestnuts dangling
their bunches of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering
music, and the shadows danced in tune. And next moment the breeze had
gone by, and in all the valley nothing moved except our travelling feet.
On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs and gullies of the mountain
were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone
house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the
huge field of sad nocturnal colouring.

At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the
moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great
darkness, until another turning shot me without preparation into St.
Germain de Calberte. The place was asleep and silent, and buried in
opaque night. Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon
the road to show me that I was come among men's habitations. The two
last gossips of the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me
to the inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was
already out, and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an
hour later, and I must have gone supperless to roost.




THE LAST DAY


When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing
of cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the
clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth
on a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It was still
early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows,
encouraged me to be out and look round me.

St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about. At
the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was
inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine
were Catholic; and it took the _curé_ seventeen September days to go
from house to house on horseback for a census. But the place itself,
although capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies
terraced across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts. The
Protestant chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town
is the quaint old Catholic church.

It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library
and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking
to lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and
hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with
two-and-fifty wounds, to be interred. Clad in his priestly robes, he was
laid out in state in the church. The _curé_, taking his text from Second
Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, "And Amasa wallowed in his
blood in the highway," preached a rousing sermon, and exhorted his
brethren to die each at his post, like their unhappy and illustrious
superior. In the midst of this eloquence there came a breeze that
Spirit Séguier was near at hand; and behold! all the assembly took to
their horses' heels, some east, some west, and the _curé_ himself as far
as Alais.

Strange was the position of this little Catholic metropolis, a
thimbleful of Rome, in such a wild and contrary neighbourhood. On the
one hand, the legion of Salomon overlooked it from Cassagnas; on the
other, it was cut off from assistance by the legion of Roland at Mialet.
The _curé_, Louvrelenil, although he took a panic at the arch-priest's
funeral, and so hurriedly decamped to Alais, stood well by his isolated
pulpit, and thence uttered fulminations against the crimes of the
Protestants. Salomon besieged the village for an hour and a half, but
was beaten back. The militiamen, on guard before the _curé's_ door,
could be heard, in the black hours, singing Protestant psalms and
holding friendly talk with the insurgents. And in the morning, although
not a shot had been fired, there would not be a round of powder in their
flasks. Where was it gone? All handed over to the Camisards for a
consideration. Untrusty guardians for an isolated priest!

That these continual stirs were once busy in St. Germain de Calberte,
the imagination with difficulty receives; all is now so quiet, the pulse
of human life now beats so low and still in this hamlet of the
mountains. Boys followed me a great way off, like a timid sort of
lion-hunters; and people turned round to have a second look, or came out
of their houses, as I went by. My passage was the first event, you would
have fancied, since the Camisards. There was nothing rude or forward in
this observation; it was but a pleased and wondering scrutiny, like that
of oxen or the human infant; yet it wearied my spirits, and soon drove
me from the street.

I took refuge on the terraces, which are here greenly carpeted with
sward, and tried to imitate with a pencil the inimitable attitudes of
the chestnuts as they bear up their canopy of leaves. Ever and again a
little wind went by, and the nuts dropped all around me, with a light
and dull sound, upon the sward. The noise was as of a thin fall of
great hailstones; but there went with it a cheerful human sentiment of
an approaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their gains. Looking up,
I could see the brown nut peering through the husk, which was already
gaping; and between the stems the eye embraced an amphitheatre of hill,
sunlit and green with leaves.

I have not often enjoyed a place more deeply. I moved in an atmosphere
of pleasure, and felt light and quiet and content. But perhaps it was
not the place alone that so disposed my spirit. Perhaps some one was
thinking of me in another country; or perhaps some thought of my own had
come and gone unnoticed, and yet done me good. For some thoughts, which
sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan
their features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways,
should but ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go
again for ever. Was it Apollo, or Mercury, or Love with folded wings?
Who shall say? But we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace
and pleasure in our hearts.

I dined with a pair of Catholics. They agreed in the condemnation of a
young man, a Catholic, who had married a Protestant girl and gone over
to the religion of his wife. A Protestant born they could understand and
respect: indeed, they seemed to be of the mind of an old Catholic woman,
who told me that same day there was no difference between the two sects,
save that "wrong was more wrong for the Catholic," who had more light
and guidance; but this of a man's desertion filled them with contempt.

"It's a bad idea for a man to change," said one.

It may have been accidental, but you see how this phrase pursued me; and
for myself, I believe it is the current philosophy in these parts. I
have some difficulty in imagining a better. It's not only a great flight
of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for
heaven's sake; but the odds are--nay, and the hope is--that, with all
this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a
hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to those who do so, for the
wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or
weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a
sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who
can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind. And I think I
should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for other
words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other communions.

The phylloxera was in the neighbourhood; and instead of wine we drank at
dinner a more economical juice of the grape--La Parisienne, they call
it. It is made by putting the fruit whole into a cask with water; one by
one the berries ferment and burst; what is drunk during the day is
supplied at night in water; so, with ever another pitcher from the well,
and ever another grape exploding and giving out its strength, one cask
of Parisienne may last a family till spring. It is, as the reader will
anticipate, a feeble beverage, but very pleasant to the taste.

What with dinner and coffee, it was long past three before I left St.
Germain de Calberte. I went down beside the Gardon of Mialet, a great
glaring watercourse devoid of water, and through St. Etienne de Vallée
Française, or Val Francesque, as they used to call it; and towards
evening began to ascend the hill of St. Pierre. It was a long and steep
ascent. Behind me an empty carriage returning to St. Jean du Gard kept
hard upon my tracks, and near the summit overtook me. The driver, like
the rest of the world, was sure I was a pedlar; but, unlike others, he
was sure of what I had to sell. He had noticed the blue wool which hung
out of my pack at either end; and from this he had decided, beyond my
power to alter his decision, that I dealt in blue wool collars, such as
decorate the neck of the French draught-horse.

I had hurried to the topmost powers of Modestine, for I dearly desired
to see the view upon the other side before the day had faded. But it was
night when I reached the summit; the moon was riding high and clear; and
only a few grey streaks of twilight lingered in the west. A yawning
valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my
feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky. There was
Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet. And Castanet, not only as an
active undertaking leader, deserves some mention among Camisards; for
there is a spray of rose among his laurel; and he showed how, even in a
public tragedy, love will have its way. In the high tide of war he
married, in his mountain citadel, a young and pretty lass called
Mariette. There were great rejoicings; and the bridegroom released
five-and-twenty prisoners in honour of the glad event. Seven months
afterwards, Mariette, the Princess of the Cevennes, as they called her
in derision, fell into the hands of the authorities, where it was like
to have gone hard with her. But Castanet was a man of execution, and
loved his wife. He fell on Valleraugue, and got a lady there for a
hostage; and for the first and last time in that war there was an
exchange of prisoners. Their daughter, pledge of some starry night upon
Mount Aigoal, has left descendants to this day.

Modestine and I--it was our last meal together--had a snack upon the top
of St. Pierre, I on a heap of stones, she standing by me in the
moonlight and decorously eating bread out of my hand. The poor brute
would eat more heartily in this manner; for she had a sort of affection
for me, which I was soon to betray.

It was a long descent upon St. Jean du Gard, and we met no one but a
carter, visible afar off by the glint of the moon on his extinguished
lantern.

Before ten o'clock we had got in and were at supper; fifteen miles and a
stiff hill in little beyond six hours!




FAREWELL, MODESTINE!


On examination, on the morning of October 3rd, Modestine was pronounced
unfit for travel. She would need at least two days' repose, according to
the ostler; but I was now eager to reach Alais for my letters; and,
being in a civilized country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell my
lady friend and be off by the diligence that afternoon. Our yesterday's
march, with the testimony of the driver who had pursued us up the long
hill of St. Pierre, spread a favourable notion of my donkey's
capabilities. Intending purchasers were aware of an unrivaled
opportunity. Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before
noon, after a desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for
five-and-thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought
freedom into the bargain.

St. Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant. The maire, a
Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself
characteristic of the country. The young women of the Cevennes profit by
the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as
governesses into England; and here was one, a native of Mialet,
struggling with English circulars from two different agencies in London.
I gave what help I could; and volunteered some advice, which struck me
as being excellent.

One thing more I note. The phylloxera has ravaged the vineyards in this
neighbourhood; and in the early morning, under some chestnuts by the
river, I found a party of men working with a cider-press. I could not at
first make out what they were after, and asked one fellow to explain.

"Making cider," he said. "_Oui, c'est comme ça. Comme dans le nord!_"

There was a ring of sarcasm in his voice: the country was going to the
devil.

It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through
a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement.
I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but
now she was gone,

                   "And O!
    The difference to me!"

For twelve days we had been fast companions; we had travelled upwards of
a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and
jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road.
After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in
manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had
come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was
patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably
small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her
own. Farewell, and if for ever--

Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my
turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a
stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to
yield to my emotion.




A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE

A FRAGMENT

1879

    _Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of
    "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes"_


Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the
ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and
it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of some
architectural pretensions, the seat of an archpriest and several vicars.
It stands on the side of a hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen
miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue the
diligence in winter. The road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes
through the town from end to end in a single narrow street; there you
may see the fountain where women fill their pitchers; there also some
old houses with carved doors and pediments and ornamental work in iron.
For Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital,
where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter; and
there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent,
who found means to ruin himself by high living in this village on the
hills. He certainly has claims to be considered the most remarkable
spendthrift on record. How he set about it, in a place where there are
no luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to
little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son,
ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and
so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the history of
centralization in France. Not until the latter had got into the train
was the work of Richelieu complete.

It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in the streets by groups of
five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from one group to
another. Now and then you will hear one woman clattering off prayers for
the edification of the others at their work. They wear gaudy shawls,
white caps with a gay ribbon about the head, and sometimes a black felt
brigand hat above the cap; and so they give the street colour and
brightness and a foreign air. A while ago, when England largely supplied
herself from this district with the lace called _torchon_, it was not
unusual to earn five francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth
a pound in London. Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever
and industrious workwoman to earn from three to four in the week, or
less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of
prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody
the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in
idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweethearting and a
merry life. From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in
Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the
bagpipes led on the _bourrées_ up to ten at night. Now these dancing
days are over. "_Il n'y a plus de jeunesse,_" said Victor the garçon. I
hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality;
but the _bourrée_, with its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and
alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly
remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair
shall you hear a drum discreetly rattling in a wine-shop or perhaps one
of the company singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at
the change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence so
much mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves have not
entirely forgiven our countrywomen; and I think they take a special
pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called
L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and
driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on the wall.