TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVANNES


By Robert Louis Stevenson


My Dear Sidney Colvin, 

The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and 
fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the 
end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of 
this world - all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the best that we find 
in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds 
many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of 
life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and, when we are alone, we are only 
nearer to the absent. 
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of 
him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, 
assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude dropped for them in every 
corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet 
though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of 
addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is 
not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride 
that I sign myself affectionately yours, R.L.S. 



CONTENTS

VELAY
The Donkey, the Pack, and the Pack-saddle
The Green Donkey-driver
I Have a Goad

UPPER GEVAUDAN
A Camp in the Dark
Cheylard and Luc

OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
Father Apollinaris
The Monks
The Boarders

UPPER GEVAUDAN (continued)
Across the Goulet
A Night among the Pines

THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
Across the Lozere
Pont de Montvert
In the Valley of the Tarn
Florac
In the Valley of the Mimente
The Heart of the Country
The Last Day
Farewell Modestine!




Velay 

Many are the mighty things, and nought is more mighty than man.
..... He masters by his devices the tenant of the fields. -Sophocles. 

Who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? - Job. 


The Donkey, The Pack, And The Pack-Saddle 

In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley 
fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier is 
notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of language, 
and for unparalleled political dissension. There are adherents of each of 
the four French parties - Legitimists, Orleanists, Imperialists, and 
Republicans - in this little mountain-town; and they all hate, loathe, 
decry, and calumniate each other. Except for business purposes, or to give 
each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have laid aside even the 
civility of speech. 'Tis a mere mountain Poland. In the midst of this 
Babylon I found myself a rallying point; everyone was anxious to be kind 
and helpful to the stranger. This was not merely from the natural 
hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise with which I was 
regarded as a man living of his own free will in Le Monastier, when he 
might just as well have lived anywhere else in this big world; it arose a 
good deal from my projected excursion southward through the Cevennes. A 
traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto unheard of in that district. I 
was looked upon with contempt, like a man who should project a journey to 
the moon, but yet with a respectful interest, like one setting forth for 
the inclement Pole. All were ready to help in my preparations; a crowd of 
sympathisers supported me at the critical moment of a bargain; not a step 
was taken but was heralded by glasses round and celebrated by a dinner or a 
breakfast. 
It was already hard upon October before I was ready to set forth, and at 
the high altitudes over which my road lay there was no Indian summer to be 
looked for. I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have the 
means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more harassing 
to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by dusk, and the 
hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned sure by those who 
trudge on foot. A tent, above all for a solitary traveller, is troublesome 
to pitch, and troublesome to strike again; and even on the march it forms a 
conspicuous feature in your baggage. A sleeping-sack, on the other hand, is 
always ready - you have only to get into it; it serves a double purpose - a 
bed by night, a portmanteau by day; and it does not advertise your 
intention of camping out to every curious passer-by. This is a huge point. 
If a camp is not secret, it is but a troubled resting-place; you become a 
public character; the convivial rustic visits your bedside after an early 
supper; and you must sleep with one eye open, and be up before the day. I 
decided on a sleeping-sack; and after repeated visits to Le Puy, and a deal 
of high living for myself and my advisers, a sleeping-sack was designed, 
constructed, and triumphantly brought home. 
This child of my invention was nearly six feet square, exclusive of two 
triangular flaps to serve as a pillow by night and as the top and bottom of 
the sack by day. I call it 'the sack,' but it was never a sack by more than 
courtesy; only a sort of long roll or sausage, green waterproof cart-cloth 
without and blue sheep's fur within. It was commodious as a valise, warm 
and dry for a bed. There was luxurious turning room for one; and at a pinch 
the thing might serve for two. I could bury myself in it up to the neck; 
for my head I trusted to a fur cap, with a hood to fold down over my ears 
and a band to pass under my nose like a respirator; and in case of heavy 
rain I proposed to make myself a little tent, or tentlet, with my 
waterproof coat, three stones, and a bent branch. 
It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on my 
own, merely human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast of burden. Now, 
a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, 
of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive to be left alone, so 
that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow galley-slave; a dangerous 
road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's an uncertain and exacting 
ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager. What I required 
was something cheap and small and hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful 
temper; and all these requisites pointed to a donkey. 
There dwelt an old man in Monastier, of rather unsound intellect according 
to some, much followed by street-boys, and known to fame as Father Adam. 
Father Adam had a cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive she-ass, not much 
bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a 
determined under-jaw. There was something neat and high-bred, a quakerish 
elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on the spot. Our first 
interview was in Monastier market-place. To prove her good temper, one 
child after another was set upon her back to ride, and one after another 
went head over heels into the air; until a want of confidence began to 
reign in youthful bosoms, and the experiment was discontinued from a dearth 
of subjects. I was already backed by a deputation of my friends; but as if 
this were not enough, all the buyers and sellers came round and helped me 
in the bargain; and the ass and I and Father Adam were the centre of a 
hubbub for near half an hour. At length she passed into my service for the 
consideration of sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy. The sack had 
already cost eighty francs and two glasses of beer; so that Modestine, as I 
instantly baptised her, was upon all accounts the cheaper article. Indeed, 
that was as it should be; for she was only an appurtenance of my mattress, 
or self-acting bedstead on four castors. 
I had a last interview with Father Adam in a billiard-room at the witching 
hour of dawn, when I administered the brandy. He professed himself greatly 
touched by the separation, and declared he had often bought white bread for 
the donkey when he had been content with black bread for himself; but this, 
according to the best authorities, must have been a flight of fancy. He had 
a name in the village for brutally misusing the ass; yet it is certain that 
he shed a tear, and the tear made a clean mark down one cheek. 
By the advice of a fallacious local saddler, a leather pad was made for me 
with rings to fasten on my bundle; and I thoughtfully completed my kit and 
arranged my toilette. By way of armoury and utensils, I took a revolver, a 
little spirit-lamp and pan, a lantern and some half-penny candles, a jack-
knife and a large leather flask. The main cargo consisted of two entire 
changes of warm clothing - besides my travelling wear of country velveteen, 
pilot-coat, and knitted spencer - some books, and my railway-rug, which, 
being also in the form of a bag, made me a double castle for cold nights. 
The permanent larder was represented by cakes of chocolate and tins of 
Bologna sausage. All this, except what I carried about my person, was 
easily stowed into the sheepskin bag; and by good fortune I threw in my 
empty knapsack, rather for convenience of carriage than from any thought 
that I should want it on my journey. For more immediate needs I took a leg 
of cold mutton, a bottle of Beaujolais, an empty bottle to carry milk, an 
egg-beater, and a considerable quantity of black bread and white, like 
Father Adam, for myself and donkey, only in my scheme of things the 
destinations were reversed. 
Monastrians, of all shades of thought in politics, had agreed in 
threatening me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death in 
many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the nocturnal 
practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my attention. Yet in 
these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left out. Like Christian, 
it was from my pack I suffered by the way. Before telling my own mishaps, 
let me in two words relate the lesson of my experience. If the pack is well 
strapped at the ends, and hung at full length - not doubled, for your life 
- across the pack-saddle, the traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly 
not fit, such is the imperfection of our transitory life; it will assuredly 
topple and tend to overset; but there are stones on every roadside, and a 
man soon learns the art of correcting any tendency to overbalance with a 
well-adjusted stone. 
On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we began 
to load the donkey; and ten minutes after, my hopes were in the dust. The 
pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment. I returned it to 
its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that the street 
outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on and 
listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it would be 
more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads; and, at any 
rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a deal of freedom. 
I had a common donkey pack-saddle - a barde, as they call it - fitted upon 
Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects. The doubled sack, my 
pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my waistcoat), a great 
bar of black bread, and an open basket containing the white bread, the 
mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together in a very elaborate 
system of knots, and I looked on the result with fatuous content. In such a 
monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the donkey's shoulders, with nothing 
below to balance, on a brand-new pack-saddle that had not yet been worn to 
fit the animal, and fastened with brand-new girths that might be expected 
to stretch and slacken by the way, even a very careless traveller should 
have seen disaster brewing. That elaborate system of knots, again, was the 
work of too many sympathisers to be very artfully designed. It is true they 
tightened the cords with a will; as many as three at a time would have a 
foot against Modestine's quarters, and be hauling with clenched teeth; but 
I learned afterwards that one thoughtful person, without any exercise of 
force, can make a more solid job than half-a-dozen heated and enthusiastic 
grooms. I was then but a novice; even after the misadventure of the pad 
nothing could disturb my security, and I went forth from the stable-door as 
an ox goeth to the slaughter. 


The Green Donkey-Driver 

The bell of Monastier was just striking nine as I got quit of these 
preliminary troubles and descended the hill through the common. As long as 
I was within sight of the windows, a secret shame and the fear of some 
laughable defeat withheld me from tampering with Modestine. She tripped 
along upon her four small hoofs with a sober daintiness of gait; from time 
to time she shook her ears or her tail; and she looked so small under the 
bundle that my mind misgave me. We got across the ford without difficulty - 
there was no doubt about the matter, she was docility itself - and once on 
the other bank, where the road begins to mount through pine-woods, I took 
in my right hand the unhallowed staff, and with a quaking spirit applied it 
to the donkey. Modestine brisked up her pace for perhaps three steps, and 
then relapsed into her former minuet. Another application had the same 
effect, and so with the third. I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and 
it goes against my conscience to lay my hand rudely on a female. I 
desisted, and looked her all over from head to foot; the poor brute's knees 
were trembling and her breathing was distressed; it was plain that she 
could go no faster on a hill. God forbid, thought I, that I should 
brutalise this innocent creature; let her go at her own pace, and let me 
patiently follow. 
What that pace was, there is no word mean enough to describe; it was 
something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it 
kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five 
minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of 
the leg. And yet I had to keep close at hand and measure my advance exactly 
upon hers; for if I dropped a few yards into the rear, or went on a few 
yards ahead, Modestine came instantly to a halt and began to browse. The 
thought that this was to last from here to Alais nearly broke my heart. Of 
all conceivable journeys, this promised to be the most tedious. I tried to 
tell myself it was a lovely day; I tried to charm my foreboding spirit with 
tobacco; but I had a vision ever present to me of the long, long roads, up 
hill and down dale, and a pair of figures ever infinitesimally moving, foot 
by foot, a yard to the minute, and, like things enchanted in a nightmare, 
approaching no nearer to the goal. 
In the meantime there came up behind us a tall peasant, perhaps forty years 
of age, of an ironical snuffy countenance, and arrayed in the green tail-
coat of the country. He overtook us hand over hand, and stopped to consider 
our pitiful advance. 
'Your donkey,' says he, 'is very old?' 
I told him, I believed not. 
Then, he supposed, we had come far. 
I told him, we had but newly left Monastier. 
'Et vous marchez comme Áa!' cried he; and, throwing back his head, he 
laughed long and heartily. I watched him, half prepared to feel offended, 
until he had satisfied his mirth; and then, 'You must have no pity on these 
animals,' said he; and, plucking a switch out of a thicket, he began to 
lace Modestine about the stern-works, uttering a cry. The rogue pricked up 
her ears and broke into a good round pace, which she kept up without 
flagging, and without exhibiting the least symptom of distress, as long as 
the peasant kept beside us. Her former panting and shaking had been, I 
regret to say, a piece of comedy. 
My deus ex machina, before he left me, supplied some excellent, if 
inhumane, advice; presented me with the switch, which he declared she would 
feel more tenderly than my cane; and finally taught me the true cry or 
masonic word of donkey-drivers, 'Proot!' All the time, he regarded me with 
a comical, incredulous air, which was embarrassing to confront; and smiled 
over my donkey-driving, as I might have smiled over his orthography, or his 
green tail-coat. But it was not my turn for the moment. 
I was proud of my new lore, and thought I had learned the art to 
perfection. And certainly Modestine did wonders for the rest of the fore-
noon, and I had a breathing space to look about me. It was Sabbath; the 
mountain-fields were all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came down 
through St. Martin de Frugeres, the church was crowded to the door, there 
were people kneeling without upon the steps, and the sound of the priest's 
chanting came forth out of the dim interior. It gave me a home feeling on 
the spot; for I am a countryman of the Sabbath, so to speak, and all 
Sabbath observances, like a Scottish accent, strike in me mixed feelings, 
grateful and the reverse. It is only a traveller, hurrying by like a person 
from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and beauty of the 
great ascetic feast. The sight of the resting country does his spirit good. 
There is something better than music in the wide unusual silence; and it 
disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound of a little river or the 
warmth of sunlight. 
In this pleasant humour I came down the hill to where Goudet stands in a 
green end of a valley, with Chateau Beaufort opposite upon a rocky steep, 
and the stream, as clear as crystal, lying in a deep pool between them. 
Above and below, you may hear it wimpling over the stones, an amiable 
stripling of a river, which it seems absurd to call the Loire. On all 
sides, Goudet is shut in by mountains; rocky footpaths, practicable at best 
for donkeys, join it to the outer world of France; and the men and women 
drink and swear, in their green corner, or look up at the snow-clad peaks 
in winter from the threshold of their homes, in an isolation, you would 
think, like that of Homer's Cyclops. But it is not so; the postman reaches 
Goudet with the letter-bag; the aspiring youth of Goudet are within a day's 
walk of the railway at Le Puy; and here in the inn you may find an engraved 
portrait of the host's nephew, Regis Senac, 'Professor of Fencing and 
Champion of the two Americas,' a distinction gained by him, along with the 
sum of five hundred dollars, at Tammany Hall, New York, on the 10th April 
1876. 
I hurried over my midday meal, and was early forth again. But, alas, as we 
climbed the interminable hill upon the other side, 'Proot!' seemed to have 
lost its virtue. I prooted like a lion, I prooted mellifluously like a 
sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor intimidated. She 
held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would move her, and that only 
for a second. I must follow at her heels, incessantly be-labouring. A 
moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she relapsed into her own private 
gait. I think I never heard of any one in as mean a situation. I must reach 
the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to camp, before sundown, and, to have 
even a hope of this, I must instantly maltreat this uncomplaining animal. 
The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once, when I looked at her, she had 
a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who formerly loaded me 
with kindness; and this increased my horror of my cruelty. 
To make matters worse, we encountered another donkey, ranging at will upon 
the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman. He and 
Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and beat 
down their young romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado. If the 
other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would have 
fallen upon me tooth and hoof; and this was a kind of consolation - he was 
plainly unworthy of Modestine's affection. But the incident saddened me, as 
did everything that spoke of my donkey's sex. 
It was blazing hot up the valley, windless, with vehement sun upon my 
shoulders; and I had to labour so consistently with my stick that the sweat 
ran into my eyes. Every five minutes, too, the pack, the basket, and the 
pilot-coat would take an ugly slew to one side or the other; and I had to 
stop Modestine, just when I had got her to a tolerable pace of about two 
miles an hour, to tug, push, shoulder, and readjust the load. And at last, 
in the village of Ussel, saddle and all, the whole hypothec turned round 
and grovelled in the dust below the donkey's belly. She, none better 
pleased, incontinently drew up and seemed to smile; and a party of one man, 
two women, and two children came up, and, standing round me in a half-
circle, encouraged her by their example. 
I had the devil's own trouble to get the thing righted; and the instant I 
had done so, without hesitation, it toppled and fell down upon the other 
side. Judge if I was hot! And yet not a hand was offered to assist me. The 
man, indeed, told me I ought to have a package of a different shape. I 
suggested, if he knew nothing better to the point in my predicament, he 
might hold his tongue. And the good-natured dog agreed with me smilingly. 
It was the most despicable fix. I must plainly content myself with the pack 
for Modestine, and take the following items for my own share of the 
portage: a cane, a quart-flask, a pilot-jacket heavily weighted in the 
pockets, two pounds of black bread, and an open basket full of meats and 
bottles. I believe I may say I am not devoid of greatness of soul; for I 
did not recoil from this infamous burden. I disposed it, Heaven knows how, 
so as to be mildly portable, and then proceeded to steer Modestine through 
the village. She tried, as was indeed her invariable habit, to enter every 
house and every courtyard in the whole length; and, encumbered as I was, 
without a hand to help myself, no words can render an idea of my 
difficulties. A priest, with six or seven others, was examining a church in 
process of repair, and he and his acolytes laughed loudly as they saw my 
plight. 
I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with 
adversity in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with 
penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon me. 
God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But oh, what 
a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it! 
A little out of the village, Modestine, filled with the demon, set her 
heart upon a by-road, and positively refused to leave it. I dropped all my 
bundles, and, I am ashamed to say, struck the poor sinner twice across the 
face. It was pitiful to see her lift her head with shut eyes, as if waiting 
for another blow. I came very near crying; but I did a wiser thing than 
that, and sat squarely down by the roadside to consider my situation under 
the cheerful influence of tobacco and a nip of brandy. Modestine, in the 
meanwhile, munched some black bread with a contrite hypocritical air. It 
was plain that I must make a sacrifice to the gods of shipwreck. I threw 
away the empty bottle destined to carry milk; I threw away my own white 
bread, and, disdaining to act by general average, kept the black bread for 
Modestine; lastly, I threw away the cold leg of mutton and the egg-whisk, 
although this last was dear to my heart. Thus I found room for everything 
in the basket, and even stowed the boating-coat on the top. By means of an 
end of cord I slung it under one arm; and although the cord cut my 
shoulder, and the jacket hung almost to the ground, it was with a heart 
greatly lightened that I set forth again. 
I had now an arm free to thrash Modestine, and cruelly I chastised her. If 
I were to reach the lakeside before dark, she must bestir her little shanks 
to some tune. Already the sun had gone down into a windy-looking mist; and 
although there were still a few streaks of gold far off to the east on the 
hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold and grey about our onward path. 
An infinity of little country by-roads led hither and thither among the 
fields. It was the most pointless labyrinth. I could see my destination 
overhead, or rather the peak that dominates it; but choose as I pleased, 
the roads always ended by turning away from it, and sneaking back towards 
the valley, or northward along the margin of the hills. The failing light, 
the waning colour, the naked, unhomely, stony country through which I was 
travelling, threw me into some despondency. I promise you, the stick was 
not idle; I think every decent step that Modestine took must have cost me 
at least two emphatic blows. There was not another sound in the 
neighbourhood but that of my unwearying bastinado. 
Suddenly, in the midst of my toils, the load once more bit the dust, and, 
as by enchantment, all the cords were simultaneously loosened, and the road 
scattered with my dear possessions. The packing was to begin again from the 
beginning; and as I had to invent a new and better system, I do not doubt 
but I lost half an hour. It began to be dusk in earnest as I reached a 
wilderness of turf and stones. It had the air of being a road which should 
lead everywhere at the same time; and I was falling into something not 
unlike despair when I saw two figures stalking towards me over the stones. 
They walked one behind the other like tramps, but their pace was 
remarkable. The son led the way, a tall, ill-made, sombre, Scottish-looking 
man; the mother followed, all in her Sunday's best, with an elegantly 
embroidered ribbon to her cap, and a new felt hat atop, and proffering, as 
she strode along with kilted petticoats, a string of obscene and 
blasphemous oaths. 
I hailed the son, and asked him my direction. He pointed loosely west and 
north-west, muttered an inaudible comment, and, without slackening his pace 
for an instant, stalked on, as he was going, right athwart my path. The 
mother followed without so much as raising her head. I shouted and shouted 
after them, but they continued to scale the hillside, and turned a deaf ear 
to my outcries. At last, leaving Modestine by herself, I was constrained to 
run after them, hailing the while. They stopped as I drew near, the mother 
still cursing; and I could see she was a handsome, motherly, respectable-
looking woman. The son once more answered me roughly and inaudibly, and was 
for setting out again. But this time I simply collared the mother, who was 
nearest me, and, apologising for my violence, declared that I could not let 
them go until they had put me on my road. They were neither of them 
offended - rather mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow 
them; and then the mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an 
hour. I replied, in the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go 
herself. She told me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a half's 
road before her. And then, without salutation, the pair strode forward 
again up the hillside in the gathering dusk. 
I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp 
ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The view, looking 
back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad. Mount Mezenc and the peaks 
beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a cold glitter in 
the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen together into one 
broad wash of shadow, except here and there the outline of a wooded sugar-
loaf in black, here and there a white irregular patch to represent a 
cultivated farm, and here and there a blot where the Loire, the Gazeille, 
or the Laussonne wandered in a gorge. 
Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld a 
village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the 
neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout. The road smoked 
in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the fields; and a 
pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all, dashed past me at 
a hammering trot from the canton where they had been to church and market. 
I asked one of the children where I was. At Bouchet St. Nicolas, he told 
me. Thither, about a mile south of my destination, and on the other side of 
a respectable summit, had these confused roads and treacherous peasantry 
conducted me. My shoulder was cut, so that it hurt sharply; my arm ached 
like toothache from perpetual beating; I gave up the lake and my design to 
camp, and asked for the auberge. 



I Have A Goad 

The auberge of Bouchet St. Nicolas was among the least pretentious I have 
ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey. Indeed, it 
was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of two stories, 
with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a suite, so that 
Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture of the plainest, 
earthern floors, a single bedchamber for travellers, and that without any 
convenience but beds. In the kitchen cooking and eating go forward side by 
side, and the family sleep at night. Any one who has a fancy to wash must 
do so in public at the common table. The food is sometimes spare; hard fish 
and omelette have been my portion more than once; the wine is of the 
smallest, the brandy abominable to man; and the visit of a fat sow, 
grouting under the table and rubbing against your legs, is no impossible 
accompaniment to dinner. 
But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show themselves 
friendly and considerate. As soon as you cross the doors you cease to be a 
stranger; and although these peasantry are rude and forbidding on the 
highway, they show a tincture of kind breeding when you share their hearth. 
At Bouchet, for instance, I uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais, and asked the 
host to join me. He would take but little. 
'I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?' he said, 'and I am capable of 
leaving you not enough.' 
In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own knife; 
unless he ask, no other will be supplied: with a glass, a whang of bread, 
and an iron fork, the table is completely laid. My knife was cordially 
admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the spring filled him with wonder. 
'I should never have guessed that,' he said. 'I would bet,' he added, 
weighing it in his hand, 'that this cost you not less than five francs.' 
When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped. 
He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly 
ignorant. His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how to 
read, although I do not suppose she ever did so. She had a share of brains 
and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast. 
'My man knows nothing,' she said, with an angry nod; 'he is like the 
beasts.' 
And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head. There was no 
contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were accepted loyally, 
and no more about the matter. 
I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood in a 
moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got home. 
'Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there were 
forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of the 
house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that.' And she 
interrogated me with a look. 
'It is just that,' said I. 
'You see,' she added to her husband, 'I understood that.' 
They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures. 
'In the morning,' said the husband, 'I will make you something better than 
your cane. Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is in the proverb - dur 
comme un ane; you might beat her insensible with a cudgel, and yet you 
would arrive nowhere.' 
Something better! I little knew what he was offering. 
The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own I 
was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the act 
of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of the sort; and 
if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray God it be my 
last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of the woman 
except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed by my 
appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to me than 
to the pair. A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the single 
gentleman who has to blush. But I could not help attributing my sentiments 
to the husband, and sought to conciliate his tolerance with a cup of brandy 
from my flask. He told me that he was a cooper of Alais travelling to St. 
Etienne in search of work, and that in his spare moments he followed the 
fatal calling of a maker of matches. Me he readily enough divined to be a 
brandy merchant. 
I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my 
toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's 
wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood of 
Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty clouds 
flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and the only 
speck of colour was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern hills, where 
the sky still wore the orange of the dawn. 
It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I had 
to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were trooping out to the 
labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to stare upon 
the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw them going 
afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell. 
When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in the 
kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my compliments upon 
its beauty. 
'Oh no,' said the mother; 'it is not so beautiful as it ought to be. Look, 
it is too fine.' 
Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical 
circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of the 
majority decide the type of beauty. 
'And where,' said I, 'is monsieur?' 
'The master of the house is upstairs,' she answered, 'making you a goad.' 
Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet St. 
Nicolas, who introduced me to their use! This plain wand, with an eighth of 
an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when he put it in my hands. 
Thenceforward Modestine was my slave. A prick, and she passed the most 
inviting stable door. A prick, and she broke forth into a gallant little 
trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not a remarkable speed, when all 
was said; and we took four hours to cover ten miles at the best of it. But 
what a heavenly change since yesterday! No more wielding of the ugly 
cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more broadsword exercise, 
but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. And what although now and then a drop 
of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse-coloured wedge-like rump? I 
should have preferred it otherwise, indeed; but yesterday's exploits had 
purged my heart of all humanity. The perverse little devil, since she would 
not be taken with kindness, must even go with pricking. 
It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-legged 
ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the way 
to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident but one. A handsome foal with a 
bell about his neck came charging up to us upon a stretch of common, 
sniffed the air martially as one about to do great deeds, and suddenly 
thinking otherwise in his green young heart, put about and galloped off as 
he had come, the bell tinkling in the wind. For a long while afterwards I 
saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the note of his bell; and 
when I struck the high-road, the song of the telegraph-wires seemed to 
continue the same music. 
Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by rich 
meadows. They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the 
neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay. On the 
opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the 
horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of fir-wood 
and white roads wandering through the hills. Over all this the clouds shed 
a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing, exaggerating 
height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief the twisted 
ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating to 
a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and all that I beheld 
lay in another county - wild Gevaudan, mountainous, uncultivated, and but 
recently disforested from terror of the wolves. 
Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance; and you 
may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an 
adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the frontiers 
of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST, the Napoleon 
Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten months at free 
quarters in Gevaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and 
'shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty'; he pursued armed horsemen; he 
has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the 
king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. 
He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were 
offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, 
behold! a common wolf, and even small for that. 'Though I could reach from 
pole to pole,' sang Alexander Pope; the Little Corporal shook Europe; and 
if all wolves had been as this wolf, they would have changed the history of 
man. M. Elie Berthet has made him the hero of a novel, which I have read, 
and do not wish to read again. 
I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's desire that I 
should visit our Lady of Pradelles, 'who performed many miracles, although 
she was of wood'; and before three-quarters of an hour I was goading 
Modestine down the steep descent that leads to Langogne on the Allier. On 
both sides of the road, in big dusty fields, farmers were preparing for 
next spring. Every fifty yards a yoke of great-necked stolid oxen were 
patiently haling at the plough. I saw one of these mild formidable servants 
of the glebe, who took a sudden interest in Modestine and me. The furrow 
down which he was journeying lay at an angle to the road, and his head was 
solidly fixed to the yoke like those of caryatids below a ponderous 
cornice; but he screwed round his big honest eyes and followed us with a 
ruminating look, until his master bade him turn the plough and proceed to 
reascend the field. From all these furrowing ploughshares, from the feet of 
oxen, from a labourer here and there who was breaking the dry clods with a 
hoe, the wind carried away a thin dust like so much smoke. It was a fine, 
busy, breathing, rustic landscape; and as I continued to descend, the 
highlands of Gevaudan kept mounting in front of me against the sky. 
I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the Allier; so 
near are these two confluents in their youth. Just at the bridge of 
Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to fall, a lassie of some 
seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, 'D'ou'st-ce-que vous 
venez?' She did it with so high an air that she set me laughing; and this 
cut her to the quick. She was evidently one who reckoned on respect, and 
stood looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I crossed the bridge and 
entered the county of Gevaudan. 


Upper Gevaudan 

The way also here was very wearisome through dirt and slabbiness; nor was 
there on all this ground so much as one inn or victualling-house wherein to 
refresh the feebler sort. - Pilgrim's Progress.


A Camp In The Dark 

The next day (Tuesday, September 24th), it was two o'clock in the afternoon 
before I got my journal written up and my knapsack repaired, for I was 
determined to carry my knapsack in the future and have no more ado with 
baskets; and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le Cheylard l'Eveque, a 
place on the borders of the forest of Mercoire. A man, I was told, should 
walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought it scarce too ambitious to 
suppose that a man encumbered with a donkey might cover the same distance 
in four hours. 
All the way up the long hill from Langogne it rained and hailed 
alternately; the wind kept freshening steadily, although slowly; plentiful 
hurrying clouds - some dragging veils of straight rain-shower, others 
massed and luminous as though promising snow - careered out of the north 
and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated basin of the 
Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen, and such-like sights of the 
country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines, woods of birch all 
jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few naked cottages and 
bleak fields, - these were the characters of the country. Hill and valley 
followed valley and hill; the little green and stony cattle-tracks wandered 
in and out of one another, split into three or four, died away in marshy 
hollows, and began again sporadically on hillsides or at the borders of a 
wood. 
There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make a 
passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth of 
tracks. It must have been about four when I struck Sagnerousse, and went on 
my way rejoicing in a sure point of departure. Two hours afterwards, the 
dusk rapidly falling, in a lull of the wind, I issued from a fir-wood where 
I had long been wandering, and found, not the looked-for village, but 
another marish bottom among rough-and-tumble hills. For some time past I 
had heard the ringing of cattle-bells ahead; and now, as I came out of the 
skirts of the wood, I saw near upon a dozen cows and perhaps as many more 
black figures, which I conjectured to be children, although the mist had 
almost unrecognisably exaggerated their forms. These were all silently 
following each other round and round in a circle, now taking hands, now 
breaking up with chains and reverences. A dance of children appeals to very 
innocent and lively thoughts; but, at nightfall on the marshes, the thing 
was eerie and fantastic to behold. Even I, who am well enough read in 
Herbert Spencer, felt a sort of silence fall for an instant on my mind. The 
next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship 
through the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as 
before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute 
became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle 
was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the steering 
I had in me to keep even a decently straight course through a single field. 
While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and cattle 
began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained behind. From these I 
sought direction on my path. The peasantry in general were but little 
disposed to counsel a wayfarer. One old devil simply retired into his 
house, and barricaded the door on my approach; and I might beat and shout 
myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear. Another, having given me a direction 
which, as I found afterwards, I had misunderstood, complacently watched me 
going wrong without adding a sign. He did not care a stalk of parsley if I 
wandered all night upon the hills! As for these two girls, they were a pair 
of impudent sly sluts, with not a thought but mischief. One put out her 
tongue at me, the other bade me follow the cows; and they both giggled and 
jogged each other's elbows. The Beast of Gevaudan ate about a hundred 
children of this district; I began to think of him with sympathy. 
Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into another wood 
and upon a well-marked road. It grew darker and darker. Modestine, suddenly 
beginning to smell mischief, bettered the pace of her own accord, and from 
that time forward gave me no trouble. It was the first sign of intelligence 
I had occasion to remark in her. At the same time, the wind freshened into 
half a gale, and another heavy discharge of rain came flying up out of the 
north. At the other side of the wood I sighted some red windows in the 
dusk. This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three houses on a hillside, near a 
wood of birches. Here I found a delightful old man, who came a little way 
with me in the rain to put me safely on the road for Cheylard. He would 
hear of no reward; but shook his hands above his head almost as if in 
menace, and refused volubly and shrilly, in unmitigated patois. 
All seemed right at last. My thoughts began to turn upon dinner and a 
fireside, and my heart was agreeably softened in my bosom. Alas, and I was 
on the brink of new and greater miseries! Suddenly, at a single swoop, the 
night fell. I have been abroad in many a black night, but never in a 
blacker. A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of the track where it was well 
beaten, a certain fleecy density, or night within night, for a tree, - this 
was all that I could discriminate. The sky was simply darkness overhead; 
even the flying clouds pursued their way invisibly to human eyesight. I 
could not distinguish my hand at arm's-length from the track, nor my goad, 
at the same distance, from the meadows or the sky. 
Soon the road that I was following split, after the fashion of the country, 
into three or four in a piece of rocky meadow. Since Modestine had shown 
such a fancy for beaten roads, I tried her instinct in this predicament. 
But the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from the name; in half 
a minute she was clambering round and round among some boulders, as lost a 
donkey as you would wish to see. I should have camped long before had I 
been properly provided; but as this was to be so short a stage, I had 
brought no wine, no bread for myself, and little over a pound for my lady 
friend. Add to this, that I and Modestine were both handsomely wetted by 
the showers. But now, if I could have found some water, I should have 
camped at once in spite of all. Water, however, being entirely absent, 
except in the form of rain, I determined to return to Fouzilhic, and ask a 
guide a little farther on my way - 'a little farther lend thy guiding 
hand.' 
The thing was easy to decide, hard to accomplish. In this sensible roaring 
blackness I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind. To this I 
set my face; the road had disappeared, and I went across country, now in 
marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable to Modestine, until I came 
once more in sight of some red windows. This time they were differently 
disposed. It was not Fouzilhic, but Fouzilhac, a hamlet little distant from 
the other in space, but worlds away in the spirit of its inhabitants. I 
tied Modestine to a gate, and groped forward, stumbling among rocks, 
plunging mid-leg in bog, until I gained the entrance of the village. In the 
first lighted house there was a woman who would not open to me. She could 
do nothing, she cried to me through the door, being alone and lame; but if 
I would apply at the next house, there was a man who could help me if he 
had a mind. 
They came to the next door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and 
brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man was not ill-
looking, but had a shifty smile. He leaned against the door post, and heard 
me state my case. All I asked was a guide as far as Cheylard. 
'C'est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir,' said he. 
I told him that was just my reason for requiring help. 
'I understand that,' said he, looking uncomfortable; 'mais - c'est - de la 
peine.' 
I was willing to pay, I said. He shook his head. I rose as high as ten 
francs; but he continued to shake his head. 'Name your own price, then,' 
said I. 
'Ce n'est pas Áa,' he said at length, and with evident difficulty; 'but I 
am not going to cross the door - mais je ne sortirai pas de la porte.' 
I grew a little warm, and asked him what he proposed that I should do. 
'Where are you going beyond Cheylard?' he asked by way of answer. 
'That is no affair of yours,' I returned, for I was not going to indulge 
his bestial curiosity; 'it changes nothing in my present predicament.' 
'C'est vrai, ca,' he acknowledged, with a laugh; 'oui, c'est vrai. Et d'ou 
venez-vous?' 
A better man than I might have felt nettled. 
'Oh,' said I, 'I am not going to answer any of your questions, so you may 
spare yourself the trouble of putting them. I am late enough already; I 
want help. If you will not guide me yourself, at least help me to find some 
one else who will.' 
'Hold on,' he cried suddenly. 'Was it not you who passed in the meadow 
while it was still day?' 
'Yes, yes,' said the girl, whom I had not hitherto recognised; 'it was 
monsieur; I told him to follow the cow.' 
'As for you, mademoiselle,' said I, 'you are a farceuse.' 
'And,' added the man, 'what the devil have you done to be still here?' 
What the devil, indeed! But there I was. 
'The great thing,' said I, 'is to make an end of it'; and once more 
proposed that he should help me to find a guide. 
'C'est que,' he said again, 'c'est que - il fait noir.' 
'Very well,' said I; 'take one of your lanterns.' 
'No,' he cried, drawing a thought backward, and again intrenching himself 
behind one of his former phrases; 'I will not cross the door.' 
I looked at him. I saw unaffected terror struggling on his face with 
unaffected shame; he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with his 
tongue, like a detected schoolboy. I drew a brief picture of my state, and 
asked him what I was to do. 
'I don't know,' he said; 'I will not cross the door.' 
Here was the Beast of Gevaudan, and no mistake. 
'Sir,' said I, with my most commanding manners, 'you are a coward.' 
And with that I turned my back upon the family party, who hastened to 
retire within their fortifications; and the famous door was closed again, 
but not till I had overheard the sound of laughter. Filia barbara pater 
barbarior. Let me say it in the plural: the Beasts of Gevaudan. 
The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and I ploughed distressfully among 
stones and rubbish-heaps. All the other houses in the village were both 
dark and silent; and though I knocked at here and there a door, my knocking 
was unanswered. It was a bad business; I gave up Fouzilhac with my curses. 
The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising, began to dry 
my coat and trousers. 'Very well,' thought I, 'water or no water, I must 
camp.' But the first thing was to return to Modestine. I am pretty sure I 
was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and if it had not been 
for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I once more stumbled, I 
might have still been groping for her at the dawn. My next business was to 
gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was cold as well as boisterous. 
How, in this well-wooded district, I should have been so long in finding 
one, is another of the insoluble mysteries of this day's adventures; but I 
will take my oath that I put near an hour to the discovery. 
At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing the 
road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I call it a cave 
without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like entering a 
dungeon. I felt about until my hand encountered a stout branch, and to this 
I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding donkey. Then I lowered my 
pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of the road, and unbuckled the 
straps. I knew well enough where the lantern was; but where were the 
candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled articles, and, while I was 
thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit-lamp. Salvation! This would 
serve my turn as well. The wind roared unwearyingly among the trees; I 
could hear the boughs tossing and the leaves churning through half a mile 
of forest; yet the scene of my encampment was not only as black as the pit, 
but admirably sheltered. At the second match the wick caught flame. The 
light was both livid and shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and 
doubled the darkness of the surrounding night. 
I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the black 
bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the morning. Then I 
gathered what I should want within reach, took off my wet boots and 
gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my knapsack for a 
pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my limbs into the 
interior, and buckled myself in like a bambino. I opened a tin of Bologna 
sausage and broke a cake of chocolate, and that was all I had to eat. It 
may sound offensive, but I ate them together, bite by bite, by way of bread 
and meat. All I had to wash down this revolting mixture was neat brandy: a 
revolting beverage in itself. But I was rare and hungry; ate well, and 
smoked one of the best cigarettes in my experience. Then I put a stone in 
my straw hat, pulled the flap of my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my 
revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled well down among the sheepskins. 
I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster 
than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a 
stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped 
between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind among the 
trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a 
steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and 
burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over 
with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night after night, in my own 
bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this perturbing concert of the 
wind among the woods; but whether it was a difference in the trees, or the 
lie of the ground, or because I was myself outside and in the midst of it, 
the fact remains that the wind sang to a different tune among these woods 
of Gevaudan. I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual 
possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last 
waking effort was to listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state 
was one of wonder at the foreign clamour in my ears. 
Twice in the course of the dark hours - once when a stone galled me 
underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing 
angry, pawed and stamped upon the road - I was recalled for a brief while 
to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge of 
the foliage against the sky. When I awoke for the third time (Wednesday, 
September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light, the mother of the 
dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the ribbon of the road; 
and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied to a beech, and standing 
half across the path in an attitude of inimitable patience. I closed my 
eyes again, and set to thinking over the experience of the night. I was 
surprised to find how easy and pleasant it had been, even in this 
tempestuous weather. The stone which annoyed me would not have been there, 
had I not been forced to camp blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt 
no other inconvenience, except when my feet encountered the lantern or the 
second volume of Peyrat's Pastors of the Desert among the mixed contents of 
my sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened 
with unusually lightsome and clear sensations. 
With that, I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and, 
breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see in 
what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with a 
mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I have been 
after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as 
befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a 
random woodside nook in Gevaudan - not knowing north from south, as strange 
to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland castaway - 
was to find a fraction of my day-dreams realised. I was on the skirts of a 
little wood of birch, sprinkled with a few beeches; behind, it adjoined 
another wood of fir; and in front, it broke up and went down in open order 
into a shallow and meadowy dale. All around there were bare hilltops, some 
near, some far away, as the perspective closed or opened, but none 
apparently much higher than the rest. The wind huddled the trees. The 
golden specks of autumn in the birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky 
was full of strings and shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, 
and turning about an axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through 
heaven. It was wild weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, 
swallowed a mouthful of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold 
should have time to disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this 
done, and had made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was 
tiptoe on the threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the 
lane, before the sun, still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some 
cloud mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky. 
The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I buttoned 
myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind with all 
men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more in front of 
me. Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had escorted me so 
far the night before, running out of his house at sight of me, with hands 
upraised in horror. 
'My poor boy!' he cried, 'what does this mean?' 
I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a 
mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the man 
of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind. 
'This time, at least,' said he, 'there shall be no mistake.' 
And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile, and 
until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had hunted 
for so long. 


Cheylard And Luc 

Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken ends 
of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open places 
heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine to Our 
Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this, upon a 
rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley. What went ye out 
for to see? thought I to myself. But the place had a life of its own. I 
found a board, commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for the past 
year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering church. In 
1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight francs ten 
centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of the Faith.' Some of this, I 
could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land. Cheylard scrapes 
together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh; while Balquhidder 
and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. Thus, to the high 
entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with evangelists, like 
schoolboys bickering in the snow. 
The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not 
ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes, the 
plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest. There 
were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at the stair-
foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be forthcoming. I 
was kindly received by these good folk. They were much interested in my 
misadventure. The wood in which I had slept belonged to them; the man of 
Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and counselled me warmly to 
summon him at law - 'because I might have died.' The good wife was horror-
stricken to see me drink over a pint of uncreamed milk. 
'You will do yourself an evil,' she said. 'Permit me to boil it for you.' 
After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an 
infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a 
bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry, 
and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest daughter 
let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my convenience. Here I 
wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an omelette before I left. The 
table was thick with dust; for, as they explained, it was not used except 
in winter weather. I had a clear look up the vent, through brown 
agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to the sky; and whenever a handful 
of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my legs were scorched by the blaze. 
The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge 
Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. 'You will have to 
change this package,' said he; 'it ought to be in two parts, and then you 
might have double the weight.' 
I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto 
created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two. 
'It fatigues her, however,' said the innkeeper; 'it fatigues her greatly on 
the march. Look.' 
Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside, 
and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started, and 
I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to love 
Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some 
misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my beast 
of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had given proof 
of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but aggravated by flashes 
of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I own this new discovery 
seemed another point against her. What the devil was the good of a she-ass 
if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few necessaries? I saw the end 
of the fable rapidly approaching, when I should have to carry Modestine. 
Aesop was the man to know the world! I assure you I set out with heavy 
thoughts upon my short day's march. 
It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the 
way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so 
rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc; 
and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the 
world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, 
naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life. A road 
and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the road was 
marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow. 
Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my 
much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go 
anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to 
move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down 
off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot 
and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more 
preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked 
for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing 
north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose 
the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about 
the future? 
I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this 
season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round it 
on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to peaks 
alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was black or 
ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which pricked 
up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a tall white 
statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed fifty quintals, 
and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through this sorry landscape 
trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal size, which came down 
to join it through a broad nude valley in Vivarais. The weather had 
somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in squadron; but the fierce wind 
still hunted them through heaven, and cast great ungainly splashes of 
shadow and sunlight over the scene. 
Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill and 
river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the old 
castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But the inn 
was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung with clean 
checked curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four yards 
long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its array of 
chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very model of what a kitchen 
ought to be - a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or noblemen in 
disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a handsome, silent, 
dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun. Even the public 
bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal tables and benches, 
where fifty might have dined, set out as for a harvest-home, and the three 
box-beds along the wall. In one of these, lying on straw and covered with a 
pair of table-napkins, did I do penance all night long in goose-flesh and 
chattering teeth, and sigh, from time to time as I awakened, for my 
sheepskin sack and the lee of some great wood. 


Our Lady Of The Snows

								'I Behold
The House, The Brotherhood austere -
 And What Am I, That I Am Here?' 
							-- Matthew Arnold. 


Father Apollinaris 

Next morning (Thursday, 20th September) I took the road in a new order. The 
sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the saddle, a 
green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging out of either 
end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and, as I began to see, 
it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low. But it was not without a 
pang that I had so decided. For although I had purchased a new cord, and 
made all as fast as I was able, I was yet jealously uneasy lest the flaps 
should tumble out and scatter my effects along the line of march. 
My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais and 
Gevaudan. The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more naked, if 
anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former had a 
monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges and died 
out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of 
fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and here and there 
were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of 
railway in Gevaudan, although there are many proposals afoot and surveys 
being made, and even, as they tell me, a station standing ready built in 
Mende. A year or two hence and this may be another world. The desert is 
beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn the sonnet into 
patois: 'Mountains and vales and floods, heard YE that whistle?' 
At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and follow 
a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the modern 
Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange destination, 
the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. The sun came out as I left 
the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a fine wild landscape to 
the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire, closed the view, and 
between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery, craggy, the sun glittering on 
veins of rock, the underwood clambering in the hollows, as rude as God made 
them at the first. There was not a sign of man's hand in all the prospect; 
and indeed not a trace of his passage, save where generation after 
generation had walked in twisted footpaths, in and out among the beeches, 
and up and down upon the channelled slopes. The mists, which had hitherto 
beset me, were now broken into clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly 
in the sun. I drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, 
upon a scene of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite 
form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like 
the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence 
coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life. 
But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and 
inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the 
neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the 
outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a white 
statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed the 
traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward, and 
pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in my 
secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence. 
I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a bell, 
and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the sound. I 
have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror than the 
monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a Protestant 
education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold on me from 
head to foot - slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did not stop in my 
advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have passed a bourne 
unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For there, upon the 
narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a mediaeval friar, 
fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my childhood I used to 
study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler - enchanting prints, full of wood and 
field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a county, for the imagination 
to go a-travelling in; and here, sure enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's 
heroes. He was robed in white like any spectre, and the hood falling back, 
in the instancy of his contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald 
and yellow as a skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand 
years, and all the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up 
with the farmer's harrow. 
I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a person 
who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I doffed my 
cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded back, and 
cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was I? An 
Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then? 
'No,' I said, 'a Scotsman.' 
A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me all 
over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as a boy 
might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned with disgust 
that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might get a meal, 
perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and it turned out 
that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew landscapes and was 
going to write a book, he changed his manner of thinking as to my reception 
(for I fear they respect persons even in a Trappist monastery), and told me 
I must be sure to ask for the Father Prior, and state my case to him in 
full. On second thoughts he determined to go down with me himself; he 
thought he could manage for me better. Might he say that I was a 
geographer? 
No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not. 
'Very well, then' (with disappointment), 'an author.' 
It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all priests 
long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed of the state 
of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked me eagerly after Dr. 
Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued ever since to pray 
night and morning. 
'I thought he was very near the truth,' he said; 'and he will reach it yet; 
there is so much virtue in prayer.' 
He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but pleasure 
in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the subject, the 
good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he found I was not, or 
not after his way, he glossed it over with great good-will. 
The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had made 
with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a corner, and 
showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond the wood. At the 
same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We were hard upon the 
monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's name) stopped 
me. 
'I must not speak to you down there,' he said. 'Ask for the Brother Porter, 
and all will be well. But try to see me as you go out again through the 
wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed to have made your 
acquaintance.' 
And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out 
twice, 'I must not speak, I must not speak!' he ran away in front of me, 
and disappeared into the monastery door. 
I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my 
terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be alike? 
I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as Modestine, 
who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would permit. It was the 
first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had not shown an indecent 
haste to enter. I summoned the place in form, though with a quaking heart. 
Father Michael, the Father-Hospitaller, and a pair of brown-robed brothers 
came to the gate and spoke with me a while. I think my sack was the great 
attraction; it had already beguiled the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had 
charged me on my life to show it to the Father Prior, But whether it was my 
address, or the sack, or the idea speedily published among that part of the 
brotherhood who attend on strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I 
found no difficulty as to my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman 
to the stables, and I and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows. 


The Monks 

Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of thirty-
five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to stay me 
until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he listened to my 
prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air, like a spirit with 
a thing of clay. And truly, when I remember that I descanted principally on 
my appetite, and that it must have been by that time more than eighteen 
hours since Father Michael had so much as broken bread, I can well 
understand that he would find an earthly savour in my conversation. But his 
manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious; and I find I have a 
lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past. 
The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery 
garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and 
beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue of 
the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it four-square, bleak, 
as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other features than 
a belfry and a pair of slated gables. Brothers in white, brothers in brown, 
passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I first came out, three 
hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their prayers. A naked hill 
commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood commands it on the 
other. It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off and on from October to 
May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if they stood in Eden, with a 
climate like heaven's, the buildings themselves would offer the same wintry 
and cheerless aspect; and for my part, on this wild September day, before I 
was called to dinner, I felt chilly in and out. 
When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty conversable 
Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the liberty to speak), 
led me to a little room in that part of the building which is set apart for 
MM. Les retraitants. It was clean and whitewashed, and furnished with 
strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust of the late Pope, the Imitation in 
French, a book of religious meditations, and the Life of Elizabeth Seton, 
evangelist, it would appear, of North America and of New England in 
particular. As far as my experience goes, there is a fair field for some 
more evangelisation in these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should 
like to give him a reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he 
dwells; but perhaps he knows all that already, and much more; and perhaps 
he and Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in 
the everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory of the 
room, hung a set of regulations for MM. les retraitants: what services they 
should attend, when they were to tell their beads or meditate, and when 
they were to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable N.B.: Le temps 
libre est employe a l'examen de conscience, a la confession, a faire de 
bonnes resolutions, etc.' To make good resolutions, indeed! You might talk 
as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head. 
I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned. An English 
boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I professed my 
willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of 
fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing on 
his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the ecclesiastical 
shako. He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent of nuns in Belgium, 
and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw an English newspaper; 
he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it like a native, there was 
not much chance of conversation where he dwelt. With this, he was a man 
eminently sociable, greedy of news, and simple-minded like a child. If I 
was pleased to have a guide about the monastery, he was no less delighted 
to see an English face and hear an English tongue. 
He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries, 
Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels. Thence he led me to the cloisters, 
into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the brothers' gowns and 
broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his religious name upon a board 
- names full of legendary suavity and interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, 
Raphael, or Pacifique; into the library, where were all the works of 
Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the Odes et Ballades, if you please, and 
even Moliere, to say nothing of innumerable fathers and a great variety of 
local and general historians. Thence my good Irishman took me round the 
workshops, where brothers bake bread, and make cartwheels, and take 
photographs; where one superintends a collection of curiosities, and 
another a gallery of rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an 
occupation of his own choice, apart from his religious duties and the 
general labours of the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he has a 
voice and ear, and join in the hay-making if he has a hand to stir; but in 
his private hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what 
he likes. Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature; 
while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot 
employs himself in binding books. It is not so long since this Abbot was 
consecrated, by the way; and on that occasion, by a special grace, his 
mother was permitted to enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of 
consecration. A proud day for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes 
you glad to think they let her in. 
In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren fell 
in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if we had 
been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to ask of 
them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands, almost like 
that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual negative signs, 
and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain air of contrition, as 
of a man who was steering very close to evil. 
The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals a 
day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins somewhere 
in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat but once in 
the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon, twelve hours after 
they have begun the toil and vigil of the day. Their meals are scanty, but 
even of these they eat sparingly; and though each is allowed a small carafe 
of wine, many refrain from this indulgence. Without doubt, the most of 
mankind grossly overeat themselves; our meals serve not only for support, 
but as a hearty and natural diversion from the labour of life. Yet, though 
excess may be hurtful, I should have thought this Trappist regimen 
defective. And I am astonished, as I look back, at the freshness of face 
and cheerfulness of manner of all whom I beheld. A happier nor a healthier 
company I should scarce suppose that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, 
on this bleak upland, and with the incessant occupation of the monks, life 
is of an uncertain tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of 
the Snows. This, at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, 
they must live healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh 
and high in colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an 
unusual brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the 
general impression of vivacity and strength. 
Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can 
only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a note, in 
the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the curt 
speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to speak 
little. The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers were all 
brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the monastery, it was 
easier to begin than to break off a conversation. With the exception of 
Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed themselves full of 
kind and healthy interest in all sorts of subjects - in politics, in 
voyages, in my sleeping-sack - and not without a certain pleasure in the 
sound of their own voices. 
As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they bear 
their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view of 
mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion of 
women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay 
phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian character; and 
seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily dispersed. 
With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the 
neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go association that can be 
formed among defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to triumph; 
the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, are abandoned after an 
interview of ten minutes, and the arts and sciences, and professional male 
jollity, deserted at once for two sweet eyes and a caressing accent. And 
next after this, the tongue is the great divider. 
I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious rule; 
but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals to me as 
a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper goes upon the bell, 
and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter, till eight, the 
hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided among different 
occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example, hurries from his 
hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the refectory, all day long: 
every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to perform; from two, when he 
rises in the dark, till eight, when he returns to receive the comfortable 
gift of sleep, he is upon his feet and occupied with manifold and changing 
business. I know many persons, worth several thousands in the year, who are 
not so fortunate in the disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would 
not the note of the monastery bell, dividing the day into manageable 
portions, bring peace of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of 
hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to 
mismanage life in our own dull and foolish manner. 
From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's 
existence. A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and 
strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could not 
find that many were discouraged. In the photographer's studio, which 
figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the 
portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot. This was 
one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and 
drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of 
Algiers. Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before 
deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to finish 
his novitiate. 
This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the Trappist 
sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as he has 
prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when the 
Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried him in 
his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual chantings, 
joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated belfry, and 
proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has gone to God. 
At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the 
gallery to hear compline and Salve Regina, with which the Cistercians bring 
every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances which 
strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public offices of 
Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the surroundings, 
spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed chapel, the hooded 
figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded and revealed, the 
strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the sight of cowled heads 
bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant beating of the bell, breaking 
in to show that the last office was over and the hour of sleep had come; 
and when I remember, I am not surprised that I made my escape into the 
court with somewhat whirling fancies, and stood like a man bewildered in 
the windy starry night. 
But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth Seton's 
memoirs - a dull work - the cold and the raving of the wind among the pines 
(for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins the woods) 
disposed me readily to slumber. I was wakened at black midnight, as it 
seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the first stroke upon 
the bell. All the brothers were then hurrying to the chapel; the dead in 
life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning the uncomforted labours 
of their day. The dead in life - there was a chill reflection. And the 
words of a French song came back into my memory, telling of the best of our 
mixed existence: 

'Que T'as De Belles Filles,
		Girofle!
		Girofla!
Que T'as De Belles Filles,
L'amour les comptera!' 

And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to 
love. 



The Boarders 

But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows. At 
this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone in 
the public part of the monastery. This itself is hard by the gate, with a 
small dining-room on the ground-floor and a whole corridor of cells similar 
to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for a regular 
retraitant; but it was somewhere between three and five francs a day, and I 
think most probably the first. Chance visitors like myself might give what 
they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing was demanded. I may mention 
that when I was going away, Father Michael refused twenty francs as 
excessive. I explained the reasoning which led me to offer him so much; but 
even then, from a curious point of honour, he would not accept it with his 
own hand. 'I have no right to refuse for the monastery,' he explained, 'but 
I should prefer if you would give it to one of the brothers.' 
I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two other 
guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that morning 
from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of solitude and 
prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour and circular 
wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he had been impeded 
by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy portrait of him, 
striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted cassock, through the bleak 
hills of Gevaudan. The other was a short, grizzling, thick-set man, from 
forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed with a knitted spencer, and the red 
ribbon of a decoration in his button-hole. This last was a hard person to 
classify. He was an old soldier, who had seen service and risen to the rank 
of commandant; and he retained some of the brisk decisive manners of the 
camp. On the other hand, as soon as his resignation was accepted, he had 
come to Our Lady of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a brief experience 
of its ways, had decided to remain as a novice. Already the new life was 
beginning to modify his appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the 
quiet and smiling air of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer 
nor a Trappist, but partook of the character of each. And certainly here 
was a man in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and 
trumpets, he was in the act of passing into this still country bordering on 
the grave, where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like 
phantoms, communicate by signs. 
At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in France, 
to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on the example 
of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the example of 
Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured me of their sympathy with 
all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness of contemporary 
feeling. 
'Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely 
agree,' said I, 'but he flies up at you in a temper.' 
They both declared that such a state of things was anti-Christian. 
While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a word 
in praise of Gambetta's moderation. The old soldier's countenance was 
instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat the 
table like a naughty child. 
'Comment, monsieur?' he shouted. 'Comment? Gambetta moderate? Will you dare 
to justify these words?' 
But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk. And suddenly, in 
the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on 
his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a 
flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word. 
It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th), that 
this couple found out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled them by some 
admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it was only by 
a point-blank question that the truth came out. I had been tolerantly used 
both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father Michael; and the good 
Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious weakness, had only patted me 
upon the shoulder and said, 'You must be a Catholic and come to heaven.' 
But I was now among a different sect of orthodox. These two men were bitter 
and upright and narrow, like the worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my 
heart, I fancy they were worse. The priest snorted aloud like a battle-
horse. 
'Et vous pretendez mourir dans cette espece de croyance?' he demanded; and 
there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his 
accent. 
I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing. 
But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude. 'No, no,' he cried; 
'you must change. You have come here, God has led you here, and you must 
embrace the opportunity.' 
I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I was 
speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men circumstantially 
divorced from the kind and homely ties of life. 
'Your father and mother?' cried the priest. 'Very well; you will convert 
them in their turn when you go home.' 
I think I see my father's face! I would rather tackle the Gaetulian lion in 
his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family theologian. 
But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my 
conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the 
people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during 1877, 
was being gallantly pursued against myself. It was an odd but most 
effective proselytising. They never sought to convince me in argument, 
where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that I 
was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on the 
point of time. Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of the 
Snows, now was the appointed hour. 
'Do not be withheld by false shame,' observed the priest, for my 
encouragement. 
For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has 
never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this or 
that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to praise 
or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus created was 
both unfair and painful. I committed my second fault in tact, and tried to 
plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and we were all drawing 
near by different sides to the same kind and undiscriminating Friend and 
Father. That, as it seems to lay spirits, would be the only gospel worthy 
of the name. But different men think differently; and this revolutionary 
aspiration brought down the priest with all the terrors of the law. He 
launched into harrowing details of hell. The damned, he said - on the 
authority of a little book which he had read not a week before, and which, 
to add conviction to conviction, he had fully intended to bring along with 
him in his pocket - were to occupy the same attitude through all eternity 
in the midst of dismal tortures. And as he thus expatiated, he grew in 
nobility of aspect with his enthusiasm. 
As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since the 
Abbot was from home, and lay my case immediately before him. 
'C'est mon conseil comme ancien militaire,' observed the commandant; 'Et 
celui de monsieur comme pretre.' 
'Oui,' added the cure, sententiously nodding; 'comme ancien militaire - et 
comme pretre.' 
At this moment, whilst I was somewhat embarrassed how to answer, in came 
one of the monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, and with an 
Italian accent, who threw himself at once into the contention, but in a 
milder and more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these pleasant 
brethren. Look at him, he said. The rule was very hard; he would have 
dearly liked to stay in his own country, Italy - it was well known how 
beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy; but then there were no Trappists in 
Italy; and he had a soul to save; and here he was. 
I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a cheerful Indian critic has dubbed 
me, 'a faddling hedonist,' for this description of the brother's motives 
gave me somewhat of a shock. I should have preferred to think he had chosen 
the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior purposes; and this shows 
how profoundly I was out of sympathy with these good Trappists, even when I 
was doing my best to sympathise. But to the cure the argument seemed 
decisive. 
'Hear that!' he cried. 'And I have seen a marquis here, a marquis, a 
marquis' - he repeated the holy word three times over - 'and other persons 
high in society; and generals. And here, at your side, is this gentleman, 
who has been so many years in armies - decorated, an old warrior. And here 
he is, ready to dedicate himself to God.' 
I was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed that I pled cold feet, and 
made my escape from the apartment. It was a furious windy morning, with a 
sky much cleared, and long and potent intervals of sunshine; and I wandered 
until dinner in the wild country towards the east, sorely staggered and 
beaten upon by the gale, but rewarded with some striking views. 
At dinner the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and on 
this occasion still more distastefully to me. The priest asked me many 
questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received my 
replies with a kind of ecclesiastical titter. 
'Your sect,' he said once; 'for I think you will admit it would be doing it 
too much honour to call it a religion.' 
'As you please, monsieur,' said I. 'La parole est a vous.' 
At length I grew annoyed beyond endurance; and although he was on his own 
ground and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, and so holding a claim 
upon my toleration, I could not avoid a protest against this uncivil usage. 
He was sadly discountenanced. 
'I assure you.' he said, 'I have no inclination to laugh in my heart. I 
have no other feeling but interest in your soul.' 
And there ended my conversion. Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver; 
but a country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long may he tread Gevaudan 
with his kilted skirts - a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his 
parishioners in death! I daresay he would beat bravely through a snowstorm 
where his duty called him; and it is not always the most faithful believer 
who makes the cunningest apostle.

 
Upper Gevaudan (continued) 


	The bed was made, the room was fit,
	 By punctual eve the stars were lit;
	 The air was still, the water ran;
	 No need there was for maid or man,
	 When we put up, my ass and I,
	 At God's green caravanserai. 
							-- Old Play. 


Across The Goulet 

The wind fell during dinner, and the sky remained clear; so it was under 
better auspices that I loaded Modestine before the monastery gate. My Irish 
friend accompanied me so far on the way. As we came through the wood, there 
was Pere Apollinaris hauling his barrow; and he too quitted his labours to 
go with me for perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand between both of his 
in front of him. I parted first from one and then from the other with 
unfeigned regret, but yet with the glee of the traveller who shakes off the 
dust of one stage before hurrying forth upon another. Then Modestine and I 
mounted the course of the Allier, which here led us back into Gevaudan 
towards its sources in the forest of Mercoire. It was but an inconsiderable 
burn before we left its guidance. Thence, over a hill, our way lay through 
a naked plateau, until we reached Chasserades at sundown. 
The company in the inn kitchen that night were all men employed in survey 
for one of the projected railways. They were intelligent and conversible, 
and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until the state of the 
clock frightened us to rest. There were four beds in the little upstairs 
room; and we slept six. But I had a bed to myself, and persuaded them to 
leave the window open. 
'He, bourgeois; il est cinq heures!' was the cry that wakened me in the 
morning (Saturday, September 28th). The room was full of a transparent 
darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the five different 
nightcaps on the pillows. But out of the window the dawn was growing ruddy 
in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about to flood the plateau. 
The hour was inspiriting; and there seemed a promise of calm weather, which 
was perfectly fulfilled. I was soon under way with Modestine. The road lay 
for a while over the plateau, and then descended through a precipitous 
village into the valley of the Chassezac. This stream ran among green 
meadows, well hidden from the world by its steep banks; the broom was in 
flower, and here and there was a hamlet sending up its smoke. 
At last the path crossed the Chassezac upon a bridge, and, forsaking this 
deep hollow, set itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet. It wound up 
through Lestampes by upland fields and woods of beech and birch, and with 
every corner brought me into an acquaintance with some new interest. Even 
in the gully of the Chassezac my ear had been struck by a noise like that 
of a great bass bell ringing at the distance of many miles; but this, as I 
continued to mount and draw nearer to it, seemed to change in character, 
and I found at length that it came from some one leading flocks afield to 
the note of a rural horn. The narrow street of Lestampes stood full of 
sheep, from wall to wall - black sheep and white, bleating with one accord 
like the birds in spring, and each one accompanying himself upon the sheep-
bell round his neck. It made a pathetic concert, all in treble. A little 
higher, and I passed a pair of men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of 
them was singing the music of a bourree. Still further, and when I was 
already threading the birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to 
my ears, and along with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate 
and plaintive air from one of the upland villages. I pictured to myself 
some grizzled, apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a 
garden in the clear autumn sunshine. All these beautiful and interesting 
sounds filled my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me 
that, once past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into the 
garden of the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with rains and 
winds and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended here; and 
this was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and more 
beautiful. 
There are other degrees of feyness, as of punishment, besides the capital; 
and I was now led by my good spirits into an adventure which I relate in 
the interest of future donkey-drivers. The road zigzagged so widely on the 
hillside, that I chose a short cut by map and compass, and struck through 
the dwarf woods to catch the road again upon a higher level. It was my one 
serious conflict with Modestine. She would none of my short cut; she turned 
in my face; she backed, she reared; she, whom I had hitherto imagined to be 
dumb, actually brayed with a loud hoarse flourish, like a cock crowing for 
the dawn. I plied the goad with one hand; with the other, so steep was the 
ascent, I had to hold on the pack-saddle. Half-a-dozen times she was nearly 
over backwards on the top of me; half-a-dozen times, from sheer weariness 
of spirit, I was nearly giving it up, and leading her down again to follow 
the road. But I took the thing as a wager, and fought it through. I was 
surprised, as I went on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-
drops falling on my hand, and more than once looked up in wonder at the 
cloudless sky. But it was only sweat which came dropping from my brow. 
Over the summit of the Goulet there was no marked road - only upright 
stones posted from space to space to guide the drovers. The turf underfoot 
was springy and well scented. I had no company but a lark or two, and met 
but one bullock-cart between Lestampes and Bleymard. In front of me I saw a 
shallow valley, and beyond that the range of the Lozere, sparsely wooded 
and well enough modelled in the flanks, but straight and dull in outline. 
There was scarce a sign of culture; only about Bleymard, the white high-
road from Villefort to Mende traversed a range of meadows, set with spiry 
poplars, and sounding from side to side with the bells of flocks and herds.

 
A Night Among The Pines 

From Bleymard after dinner, although it was already late, I set out to 
scale a portion of the Lozere. An ill-marked stony drove-road guided me 
forward; and I met nearly half-a-dozen bullock-carts descending from the 
woods, each laden with a whole pine-tree for the winter's firing. At the 
top of the woods, which do not climb very high upon this cold ridge, I 
struck leftward by a path among the pines, until I hit on a dell of green 
turf, where a streamlet made a little spout over some stones to serve me 
for a water-tap. 'In a more sacred or sequestered bower... nor nymph nor 
faunus haunted.' The trees were not old, but they grew thickly round the 
glade: there was no outlook, except north-eastward upon distant hill-tops, 
or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment felt secure and private 
like a room. By the time I had made my arrangements and fed Modestine, the 
day was already beginning to decline. I buckled myself to the knees into my 
sack and made a hearty meal; and as soon as the sun went down, I pulled my 
cap over my eyes and fell asleep. 
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it 
passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are 
marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal 
death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and 
living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear 
Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns 
and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in 
houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, 
and all the outdoor world are on their feet. It is then that the cock first 
crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a cheerful watchman 
speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break 
their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among the ferns; and 
houseless men, who have lain down with the fowls, open their dim eyes and 
behold the beauty of the night. 
At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these 
sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life? Do the stars rain down an 
influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our resting 
bodies? Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest read in 
these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purpose of this nightly 
resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the thing takes 
place; and neither know nor inquire further. And at least it is a pleasant 
incident. We are disturbed in our slumber only, like the luxurious 
Montaigne, 'that we may the better and more sensibly relish it.' We have a 
moment to look upon the stars. And there is a special pleasure for some 
minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with all outdoor 
creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have escaped out of the Bastille of 
civilisation, and are become, for the time being, a mere kindly animal and 
a sheep of Nature's flock. 
When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was 
standing by me half full of water. I emptied it at a draught; and feeling 
broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to make a 
cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but not frosty. 
A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around me the black fir-
points stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness of the pack-saddle, 
I could see Modestine walking round and round at the length of her tether; 
I could hear her steadily munching at the sward; but there was not another 
sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones. I 
lay lazily smoking and studying the colour of the sky, as we call the void 
of space, from where it showed a reddish grey behind the pines to where it 
showed a glossy blue-black between the stars. As if to be more like a 
pedlar, I wear a silver ring. This I could see faintly shining as I raised 
or lowered the cigarette; and at each whiff the inside of my hand was 
illuminated, and became for a second the highest light in the landscape. 
A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down 
the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was 
being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn at 
Chasserades and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal 
prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and pass-keys and close 
rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of myself, nor 
felt more independent of material aids. The outer world, from which we 
cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night 
after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the 
fields, where God keeps an open house. I thought I had rediscovered one of 
those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political 
economists: at the least, I had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And 
yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange 
lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not 
moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even 
than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And 
to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most 
complete and free. 
As I thus lay, between content and longing, a faint noise stole towards me 
through the pines. I thought, at first, it was the crowing of cocks or the 
barking of dogs at some very distant farm; but steadily and gradually it 
took articulate shape in my ears, until I became aware that a passenger was 
going by upon the high-road in the valley, and singing loudly as he went. 
There was more of good-will than grace in his performance; but he trolled 
with ample lungs; and the sound of his voice took hold upon the hillside 
and set the air shaking in the leafy glens. I have heard people passing by 
night in sleeping cities; some of them sang; one, I remember, played loudly 
on the bagpipes. I have heard the rattle of a cart or carriage spring up 
suddenly after hours of stillness, and pass, for some minutes, within the 
range of my hearing as I lay abed. There is a romance about all who are 
abroad in the black hours, and with something of a thrill we try to guess 
their business. But here the romance was double: first, this glad 
passenger, lit internally with wine, who sent up his voice in music through 
the night; and then I, on the other hand, buckled into my sack, and smoking 
alone in the pine-woods between four and five thousand feet towards the 
stars. 
When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many of the stars had 
disappeared; only the stronger companions of the night still burned visibly 
overhead; and away towards the east I saw a faint haze of light upon the 
horizon, such as had been the Milky Way when I was last awake. Day was at 
hand. I lit my lantern, and by its glow-worm light put on my boots and 
gaiters; then I broke up some bread for Modestine, filled my can at the 
water-tap, and lit my spirit-lamp to boil myself some chocolate. The blue 
darkness lay long in the glade where I had so sweetly slumbered; but soon 
there was a broad streak of orange melting into gold along the mountain-
tops of Vivarais. A solemn glee possessed my mind at this gradual and 
lovely coming in of day. I heard the runnel with delight; I looked round me 
for something beautiful and unexpected; but the still black pine-trees, the 
hollow glade, the munching ass, remained unchanged in figure. Nothing had 
altered but the light, and that, indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and 
of breathing peace, and moved me to a strange exhilaration. 
I drank my water-chocolate, which was hot if it was not rich, and strolled 
here and there, and up and down about the glade. While I was thus delaying, 
a gush of steady wind, as long as a heavy sigh, poured direct out of the 
quarter of the morning. It was cold, and set me sneezing. The trees near at 
hand tossed their black plumes in its passage; and I could see the thin 
distant spires of pine along the edge of the hill rock slightly to and fro 
against the golden east. Ten minutes after, the sunlight spread at a gallop 
along the hillside, scattering shadows and sparkles, and the day had come 
completely. 
I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent that lay before 
me; but I had something on my mind. It was only a fancy; yet a fancy will 
sometimes be importunate. I had been most hospitably received and 
punctually served in my green caravanserai. The room was airy, the water 
excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment. I say nothing of the 
tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of the view which I commanded 
from the windows; but I felt I was in some one's debt for all this liberal 
entertainment. And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing way, to leave 
pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I had left enough for my 
night's lodging. I trust they did not fall to some rich and churlish 
drover. 


The Country Of The Camisards 

	We travelled in the print of olden wars;
		 Yet all the land was green; 
		And love we found, and peace,
 		Where fire and war had been.
 	They pass and smile, the children of the sword -
		 No more the sword they wield;
	And O, how deep the corn Along the battlefield!										-- W. P. 
Bannatyne. 


Across The Lozere 

The track that I had followed in the evening soon died out, and I continued 
to follow over a bald turf ascent a row of stone pillars, such as had 
conducted me across the Goulet. It was already warm. I tied my jacket on 
the pack, and walked in my knitted waistcoat. Modestine herself was in high 
spirits, and broke of her own accord, for the first time in my experience, 
into a jolting trot that set the oats swashing in the pocket of my coat. 
The view, back upon the northern Gevaudan, extended with every step; scarce 
a tree, scarce a house, appeared upon the fields of wild hill that ran 
north, east, and west, all blue and gold in the haze and sunlight of the 
morning. A multitude of little birds kept sweeping and twittering about my 
path; they perched on the stone pillars, they pecked and strutted on the 
turf, and I saw them circle in volleys in the blue air, and show, from time 
to time, translucent flickering wings between the sun and me. 
Almost from the first moment of my march, a faint large noise, like a 
distant surf, had filled my ears. Sometimes I was tempted to think it the 
voice of a neighbouring waterfall, and sometimes a subjective result of the 
utter stillness of the hill. But as I continued to advance, the noise 
increased, and became like the hissing of an enormous tea-urn, and at the 
same time breaths of cool air began to reach me from the direction of the 
summit. At length I understood. It was blowing stiffly from the south upon 
the other slope of the Lozere, and every step that I took I was drawing 
nearer to the wind. 
Although it had been long desired, it was quite unexpectedly at last that 
my eyes rose above the summit. A step that seemed no way more decisive than 
many other steps that had preceded it - and, 'like stout Cortez when, with 
eagle eyes, he stared on the Pacific,' I took possession, in my own name, 
of a new quarter of the world. For behold, instead of the gross turf 
rampart I had been mounting for so long, a view into the hazy air of 
heaven, and a land of intricate blue hills below my feet. 
The Lozere lies nearly east and west, cutting Gevaudan into two unequal 
parts; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then 
standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea, 
and in clear weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the 
Mediterranean Sea. I have spoken with people who either pretended or 
believed that they had seen, from the Pie de Finiels, white ships sailing 
by Montpellier and Cette. Behind was the upland northern country through 
which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood, without much 
grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little beside wolves. But 
in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new Gevaudan, rich, 
picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. Speaking largely, I was in 
the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey; but there is a strict 
and local sense in which only this confused and shaggy country at my feet 
has any title to the name, and in this sense the peasantry employ the word. 
These are the Cevennes with an emphasis: the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In 
that undecipherable labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a war of wild 
beasts, raged for two years between the Grand Monarch with all his troops 
and marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand Protestant mountaineers 
upon the other. A hundred and eighty years ago, the Camisards held a 
station even on the Lozere, where I stood; they had an organisation, 
arsenals, a military and religious hierarchy; their affairs were 'the 
discourse of every coffee-house' in London; England sent fleets in their 
support; their leaders prophesied and murdered; with colours and drums, and 
the singing of old French psalms, their bands sometimes affronted daylight, 
marched before walled cities, and dispersed the generals of the king; and 
sometimes at night, or in masquerade, possessed themselves of strong 
castles, and avenged treachery upon their allies and cruelty upon their 
foes. There, a hundred and eighty years ago, was the chivalrous Roland, 
'Count and Lord Roland, generalissimo of the Protestants in France,' grave, 
silent, imperious, pock-marked ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his 
wanderings out of love. There was Cavalier, a baker's apprentice with a 
genius for war, elected brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die at 
fifty-five the English governor of Jersey. There again was Castanet, a 
partisan leader in a voluminous peruke and with a taste for controversial 
divinity. Strange generals, who moved apart to take counsel with the God of 
Hosts, and fled or offered battle, set sentinels or slept in an unguarded 
camp, as the Spirit whispered to their hearts! And there, to follow these 
and other leaders, was the rank and file of prophets and disciples, bold, 
patient, indefatigable, hardy to run upon the mountains, cheering their 
rough life with psalms, eager to fight, eager to pray, listening devoutly 
to the oracles of brain-sick children, and mystically putting a grain of 
wheat among the pewter balls with which they charged their muskets. 
I had travelled hitherto through a dull district, and in the track of 
nothing more notable than the child-eating beast of Gevaudan, the Napoleon 
Bonaparte of wolves. But now I was to go down into the scene of a romantic 
chapter - or, better, a romantic footnote in the history of the world. What 
was left of all this bygone dust and heroism? I was told that Protestantism 
still survived in this head seat of Protestant resistance; so much the 
priest himself had told me in the monastery parlour. But I had yet to learn 
if it were a bare survival, or a lively and generous tradition. Again, if 
in the northern Cevennes the people are narrow in religious judgements, and 
more filled with zeal than charity, what was I to look for in this land of 
persecution and reprisal - in a land where the tyranny of the Church 
produced the Camisard rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the 
Catholic peasantry into legalised revolt upon the other side, so that 
Camisard and Florentin skulked for each other's lives among the mountains? 
Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the series 
of stone pillars came abruptly to an end; and only a little below, a sort 
of track appeared and began to go down a break-neck slope, turning like a 
corkscrew as it went. It led into a valley between falling hills, stubbly 
with rocks like a reaped field of corn, and floored farther down with green 
meadows. I followed the track with precipitation; the steepness of the 
slope, the continual agile turning of the line of the descent, and the old 
unwearied hope of finding something new in a new country, all conspired to 
lend me wings. Yet a little lower and a stream began, collecting itself 
together out of many fountains, and soon making a glad noise among the 
hills. Sometimes it would cross the track in a bit of waterfall, with a 
pool, in which Modestine refreshed her feet. 
The whole descent is like a dream to me, so rapidly was it accomplished. I 
had scarcely left the summit ere the valley had closed round my path, and 
the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere. The track 
became a road, and went up and down in easy undulations. I passed cabin 
after cabin, but all seemed deserted; and I saw not a human creature, nor 
heard any sound except that of the stream. I was, however, in a different 
country from the day before. The stony skeleton of the world was here 
vigorously displayed to sun and air. The slopes were steep and changeful. 
Oak-trees clung along the hills, well grown, wealthy in leaf, and touched 
by the autumn with strong and luminous colours. Here and there another 
stream would fall in from the right or the left, down a gorge of snow-white 
and tumultuary boulders. The river in the bottom (for it was rapidly 
growing a river, collecting on all hands as it trotted on its way) here 
foamed a while in desperate rapids, and there lay in pools of the most 
enchanting sea-green shot with watery browns. As far as I have gone, I have 
never seen a river of so changeful and delicate a hue; crystal was not more 
clear, the meadows were not by half so green; and at every pool I saw I 
felt a thrill of longing to be out of these hot, dusty, and material 
garments, and bathe my naked body in the mountain air and water. All the 
time as I went on I never forgot it was the Sabbath; the stillness was a 
perpetual reminder; and I heard in spirit the church-bells clamouring all 
over Europe, and the psalms of a thousand churches. 
At length a human sound struck upon my ear - a cry strangely modulated 
between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a little 
urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and dwarfed to 
almost comical smallness by the distance. But the rogue had picked me out 
as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood, driving Modestine; 
and he made me the compliments of the new country in this tremulous high-
pitched salutation. And as all noises are lovely and natural at a 
sufficient distance, this also, coming through so much clean hill air and 
crossing all the green valley, sounded pleasant to my ear, and seemed a 
thing rustic, like the oaks or the river. 
A little after, the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at Pont 
de Montvert of bloody memory.


Pont De Montvert 

One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I 
remember rightly, the Protestant temple; but this was but the type of other 
novelties. A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a town in England from a town 
in France, or even in Scotland. At Carlisle you can see you are in the one 
country; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, you are as sure that you are in 
the other. I should find it difficult to tell in what particulars Pont de 
Montvert differed from Monastier or Langogne, or even Bleymard; but the 
difference existed, and spoke eloquently to the eyes. The place, with its 
houses, its lanes, its glaring river-bed, wore an indescribable air of the 
South. 
All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in the public-house, as all had 
been Sabbath peace among the mountains. There must have been near a score 
of us at dinner by eleven before noon; and after I had eaten and drunken, 
and sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many more came dropping in one 
after another, or by twos and threes. In crossing the Lozere I had not only 
come among new natural features, but moved into the territory of a 
different race. These people, as they hurriedly despatched their viands in 
an intricate sword-play of knives, questioned and answered me with a degree 
of intelligence which excelled all that I had met, except among the railway 
folk at Chasserades. They had open telling faces, and were lively both in 
speech and manner. They not only entered thoroughly into the spirit of my 
little trip, but more than one declared, if he were rich enough, he would 
like to set forth on such another. 
Even physically there was a pleasant change. I had not seen a pretty woman 
since I left Monastier, and there but one. Now of the three who sat down 
with me to dinner, one was certainly not beautiful - a poor timid thing of 
forty, quite troubled at this roaring table d'hote, whom I squired and 
helped to wine, and pledged and tried generally to encourage, with quite a 
contrary effect; but the other two, both married, were both more handsome 
than the average of women. And Clarisse? What shall I say of Clarisse? She 
waited the table with a heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; 
her great grey eyes were steeped in amorous languor; her features, although 
fleshy, were of an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her 
nostril spoke of dainty pride; her cheek fell into strange and interesting 
lines. It was a face capable of strong emotion, and, with training, it 
offered the promise of delicate sentiment. It seemed pitiful to see so good 
a model left to country admirers and a country way of thought. Beauty 
should at least have touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a 
weight that lay upon it, it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on an 
elegance, learns a gait and a carriage of the head, and, in a moment, patet 
dea. Before I left I assured Clarisse of my hearty admiration. She took it 
like milk, without embarrassment or wonder, merely looking at me steadily 
with her great eyes; and I own the result upon myself was some confusion. 
If Clarisse could read English, I should not dare to add that her figure 
was unworthy of her face. Hers was a case for stays; but that may perhaps 
grow better as she gets up in years. 
Pont de Montvert, or Greenhill Bridge, as we might say at home, is a place 
memorable in the story of the Camisards. It was here that the war broke 
out; here that those southern Covenanters slew their Archbishop Sharp. The 
persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthusiasm on the other, are 
almost equally difficult to understand in these quiet modern days, and with 
our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs. The Protestants were one and all 
beside their right minds with zeal and sorrow. They were all prophets and 
prophetesses. Children at the breast would exhort their parents to good 
works. 'A child of fifteen months at Quissac spoke from its mother's arms, 
agitated and sobbing, distinctly and with a loud voice.' Marshal Villars 
has seen a town where all the women 'seemed possessed by the devil,' and 
had trembling fits, and uttered prophecies publicly upon the streets. A 
prophetess of Vivarais was hanged at Montpellier because blood flowed from 
her eyes and nose, and she declared that she was weeping tears of blood for 
the misfortunes of the Protestants. And it was not only women and children. 
Stalwart dangerous fellows, used to swing the sickle or to wield the forest 
axe, were likewise shaken with strange paroxysms, and spoke oracles with 
sobs and streaming tears. A persecution unsurpassed in violence had lasted 
near a score of years, and this was the result upon the persecuted; 
hanging, burning, breaking on the wheel, had been in vain; the dragoons had 
left their hoof-marks over all the countryside; there were men rowing in 
the galleys, and women pining in the prisons of the Church; and not a 
thought was changed in the heart of any upright Protestant. 
Now the head and forefront of the persecution - after Lamoignon de Bavile - 
FranÁois de Langlade du Chayla (pronounce Cheila), Archpriest of the 
Cevennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house in 
which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert. He was a 
conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a 
pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the 
moderation of which he is capable. A missionary in his youth in China, he 
there suffered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only succoured and brought 
back to life by the charity of a pariah. We must suppose the pariah devoid 
of second-sight, and not purposely malicious in this act. Such an 
experience, it might be thought, would have cured a man of the desire to 
persecute; but the human spirit is a thing strangely put together; and, 
having been a Christian martyr, Du Chayla became a Christian persecutor. 
The Work of the Propagation of the Faith went roundly forward in his hands. 
His house in Pont de Montvert served him as a prison. There he closed the 
hands of his prisoners upon live coal, and plucked out the hairs of their 
beards, to convince them that they were deceived in their opinions. And yet 
had not he himself tried and proved the inefficacy of these carnal 
arguments among the Buddhists in China? 
Not only was life made intolerable in Languedoc, but flight was rigidly 
forbidden. One Massip, a muleteer, and well acquainted with the mountain-
paths, had already guided several troops of fugitives in safety to Geneva; 
and on him, with another convoy, consisting mostly of women dressed as men, 
Du Chayla, in an evil hour for himself, laid his hands. The Sunday 
following, there was a conventicle of Protestants in the woods of Altefage 
upon Mount Bouges; where there stood up one Seguier - Spirit Seguier, as 
his companions called him - a wool-carder, tall, black-faced, and 
toothless, but a man full of prophecy. He declared, in the name of God, 
that the time for submission had gone by, and they must betake themselves 
to arms for the deliverance of their brethren and the destruction of the 
priests. 
The next night, 24th July 1702, a sound disturbed the Inspector of Missions 
as he sat in his prison-house at Pont de Montvert: the voices of many men 
upraised in psalmody drew nearer and nearer through the town. It was ten at 
night; he had his court about him, priests, soldiers, and servants, to the 
number of twelve or fifteen; and now dreading the insolence of a 
conventicle below his very windows, he ordered forth his soldiers to 
report. But the psalm-singers were already at his door, fifty strong, led 
by the inspired Seguier, and breathing death. To their summons, the 
archpriest made answer like a stout old persecutor, and bade his garrison 
fire upon the mob. One Camisard (for, according to some, it was in this 
night's work that they came by the name) fell at this discharge: his 
comrades burst in the door with hatchets and a beam of wood, overran the 
lower story of the house, set free the prisoners, and finding one of them 
in the vine, a sort of Scavenger's Daughter of the place and period, 
redoubled in fury against Du Chayla, and sought by repeated assaults to 
carry the upper floors. But he, on his side, had given absolution to his 
men, and they bravely held the staircase. 
'Children of God,' cried the prophet, 'hold your hands. Let us burn the 
house, with the priest and the satellites of Baal.' 
The fire caught readily. Out of an upper window Du Chayla and his men 
lowered themselves into the garden by means of knotted sheets; some escaped 
across the river under the bullets of the insurgents; but the archpriest 
himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only crawl into the hedge. What 
were his reflections as this second martyrdom drew near? A poor, brave, 
besotted, hateful man, who had done his duty resolutely according to his 
light both in the Cevennes and China. He found at least one telling word to 
say in his defence; for when the roof fell in and the upbursting flames 
discovered his retreat, and they came and dragged him to the public place 
of the town, raging and calling him damned - 'If I be damned,' said he, 
'why should you also damn yourselves?' 
Here was a good reason for the last; but in the course of his inspectorship 
he had given many stronger which all told in a contrary direction; and 
these he was now to hear. One by one, Seguier first, the Camisards drew 
near and stabbed him. 'This,' they said, 'is for my father broken on the 
wheel. This for my brother in the galleys. That for my mother or my sister 
imprisoned in your cursed convents.' Each gave his blow and his reason; and 
then all kneeled and sang psalms around the body till the dawn. With the 
dawn, still singing, they defiled away towards Frugeres, farther up the 
Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance, leaving Du Chayla's prison-house in 
ruins, and his body pierced with two-and-fifty wounds upon the public 
place. 
'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems as 
if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon the 
Tarn. But the story does not end, even so far as concerns Pont de Montvert, 
with the departure of the Camisards. The career of Seguier was brief and 
bloody. Two more priests and a whole family at Ladeveze, from the father to 
the servants, fell by his hand or by his orders; and yet he was but a day 
or two at large, and restrained all the time by the presence of the 
soldiery. Taken at length by a famous soldier of fortune, Captain Poul, he 
appeared unmoved before his judges. 
'Your name?' they asked. 
'Pierre Seguier.' 
'Why are you called Spirit?' 
'Because the Spirit of the Lord is with me.' 
'Your domicile?' 
'Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven.' 
'Have you no remorse for your crimes?' 
'I have committed none. My soul is like a garden full of shelter and of 
fountains.' 
At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, he had his right hand stricken 
from his body, and was burned alive. And his soul was like a garden? So 
perhaps was the soul of Du Chayla, the Christian martyr. And perhaps if you 
could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our own composure might 
seem little less surprising. 
Du Chayla's house still stands, with a new roof, beside one of the bridges 
of the town; and if you are curious you may see the terrace-garden into 
which he dropped. 


In The Valley Of The Tarn 

A new road leads from Pont de Montvert to Florac by the valley of the Tarn; 
a smooth sandy ledge, it runs about half-way between the summit of the 
cliffs and the river in the bottom of the valley; and I went in and out, as 
I followed it, from bays of shadow into promontories of afternoon sun. This 
was a pass like that of Killiecrankie; a deep turning gully in the hills, 
with the Tarn making a wonderful hoarse uproar far below, and craggy 
summits standing in the sunshine high above. A thin fringe of ash-trees ran 
about the hill-tops, like ivy on a ruin; but on the lower slopes, and far 
up every glen, the Spanish chestnut-trees stood each four-square to heaven 
under its tented foliage. Some were planted, each on its own terrace no 
larger than a bed; some, trusting in their roots, found strength to grow 
and prosper and be straight and large upon the rapid slopes of the valley; 
others, where there was a margin to the river, stood marshalled in a line 
and mighty like cedars of Lebanon. Yet even where they grew most thickly 
they were not to be thought of as a wood, but as a herd of stalwart 
individuals; and the dome of each tree stood forth separate and large, and 
as it were a little hill, from among the domes of its companions. They gave 
forth a faint sweet perfume which pervaded the air of the afternoon; autumn 
had put tints of gold and tarnish in the green; and the sun so shone 
through and kindled the broad foliage, that each chestnut was relieved 
against another, not in shadow, but in light. A humble sketcher here laid 
down his pencil in despair. 
I wish I could convey a notion of the growth of these noble trees; of how 
they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping foliage 
like the willow; of how they stand on upright fluted columns like the 
pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered bole can 
put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon the ruins of 
the old. Thus they partake of the nature of many different trees; and even 
their prickly top-knots, seen near at hand against the sky, have a certain 
palm-like air that impresses the imagination. But their individuality, 
although compounded of so many elements, is but the richer and the more 
original. And to look down upon a level filled with these knolls of 
foliage, or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts cluster 'like 
herded elephants' upon the spur of a mountain, is to rise to higher 
thoughts of the powers that are in Nature. 
Between Modestine's laggard humour and the beauty of the scene, we made 
little progress all that afternoon; and at last finding the sun, although 
still far from setting, was already beginning to desert the narrow valley 
of the Tarn, I began to cast about for a place to camp in. This was not 
easy to find; the terraces were too narrow, and the ground, where it was 
unterraced, was usually too steep for a man to lie upon. I should have 
slipped all night, and awakened towards morning with my feet or my head in 
the river. 
After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet above the road, a little 
plateau large enough to hold my sack, and securely parapeted by the trunk 
of an aged and enormous chestnut. Thither, with infinite trouble, I goaded 
and kicked the reluctant Modestine, and there I hastened to unload her. 
There was only room for myself upon the plateau, and I had to go nearly as 
high again before I found so much as standing-room for the ass. It was on a 
heap of rolling stones, on an artificial terrace, certainly not five feet 
square in all. Here I tied her to a chestnut, and having given her corn and 
bread and made a pile of chestnut-leaves, of which I found her greedy, I 
descended once more to my own encampment. 
The position was unpleasantly exposed. One or two carts went by upon the 
road; and as long as daylight lasted I concealed myself, for all the world 
like a hunted Camisard, behind my fortification of vast chestnut trunk; for 
I was passionately afraid of discovery and the visit of jocular persons in 
the night. Moreover, I saw that I must be early awake; for these chestnut 
gardens had been the scene of industry no further gone than on the day 
before. The slope was strewn with lopped branches, and here and there a 
great package of leaves was propped against a trunk; for even the leaves 
are serviceable, and the peasants use them in winter by way of fodder for 
their animals. I picked a meal in fear and trembling, half lying down to 
hide myself from the road; and I daresay I was as much concerned as if I 
had been a scout from Joani's band above upon the Lozere, or from Salomon's 
across the Tarn, in the old times of psalm-singing and blood. Or, indeed, 
perhaps more; for the Camisards had a remarkable confidence in God; and a 
tale comes back into my memory of how the Count of Gevaudan, riding with a 
party of dragoons and a notary at his saddlebow to enforce the oath of 
fidelity in all the country hamlets, entered a valley in the woods, and 
found Cavalier and his men at dinner, gaily seated on the grass, and their 
hats crowned with box-tree garlands, while fifteen women washed their linen 
in the stream. Such was a field festival in 1703; at that date Antony 
Watteau would be painting similar subjects. 
This was a very different camp from that of the night before in the cool 
and silent pine-woods. It was warm and even stifling in the valley. The 
shrill song of frogs, like the tremolo note of a whistle with a pea in it, 
rang up from the river-side before the sun was down. In the growing dusk, 
faint rustlings began to run to and fro among the fallen leaves; from time 
to time a faint chirping or cheeping noise would fall upon my ear; and from 
time to time I thought I could see the movement of something swift and 
indistinct between the chestnuts. A profusion of large ants swarmed upon 
the ground; bats whisked by, and mosquitoes droned overhead. The long 
boughs with their bunches of leaves hung against the sky like garlands; and 
those immediately above and around me had somewhat the air of a trellis 
which should have been wrecked and half overthrown in a gale of wind. 
Sleep for a long time fled my eyelids; and just as I was beginning to feel 
quiet stealing over my limbs, and settling densely on my mind, a noise at 
my head startled me broad awake again, and, I will frankly confess it, 
brought my heart into my mouth. 
It was such a noise as a person would make scratching loudly with a finger-
nail; it came from under the knapsack which served me for a pillow, and it 
was thrice repeated before I had time to sit up and turn about. Nothing was 
to be seen, nothing more was to be heard, but a few of these mysterious 
rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment of the river and 
the frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut gardens are infested by 
rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping were probably all due to these; but 
the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, and I had to compose myself for 
sleep, as best I could, in wondering uncertainty about my neighbours. 
I was wakened in the grey of the morning (Monday, 30th September) by the 
sound of foot-steps not far off upon the stones, and opening my eyes, I 
beheld a peasant going by among the chestnuts by a footpath that I had not 
hitherto observed. He turned his head neither to the right nor to the left, 
and disappeared in a few strides among the foliage. Here was an escape! But 
it was plainly more than time to be moving. The peasantry were abroad; 
scarce less terrible to me in my nondescript position than the soldiers of 
Captain Poul to an undaunted Camisard. I fed Modestine with what haste I 
could; but as I was returning to my sack, I saw a man and a boy come down 
the hillside in a direction crossing mine. They unintelligibly hailed me, 
and I replied with inarticulate but cheerful sounds, and hurried forward to 
get into my gaiters. 
The pair, who seemed to be father and son, came slowly up to the plateau, 
and stood close beside me for some time in silence. The bed was open, and I 
saw with regret my revolver lying patently disclosed on the blue wool. At 
last, after they had looked me all over, and the silence had grown 
laughably embarrassing, the man demanded in what seemed unfriendly tones: 
'You have slept here?' 
'Yes,' said I. 'As you see.' 
'Why?' he asked. 
'My faith,' I answered lightly, 'I was tired.' 
He next inquired where I was going and what I had had for dinner; and then, 
without the least transition, 'C'est bien,' he added, 'come along.' And he 
and his son, without another word, turned off to the next chestnut-tree but 
one, which they set to pruning. The thing had passed of more simply than I 
hoped. He was a grave, respectable man; and his unfriendly voice did not 
imply that he thought he was speaking to a criminal, but merely to an 
inferior. 
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 marvellously 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 Vernede, 
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 Vernede 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 Cocures, 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 
Seguier, 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 Vernede 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 cafe, 
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 Cevenols 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 a 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 
Vernede. 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, a la belle 
etoile. 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 if 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 Bavile 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 dogmas 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 Seguier; men who had joined their voices with his in the 
68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the Archpriest of the Cevennes. 
Seguier, 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 cure 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 someone'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 into 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 Lozere, 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, channelled 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 hilltops, 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 Seguier. 
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 highroad 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, 3rd 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 cock-crows, 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 cure 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 cure, 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 Seguier was near at hand; 
and behold! all the assembly took to their horses' heels, some east, some 
west, and the cure 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 cure Louvrelenil, 
although he took a panic at the archpriest'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 cure'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 someone 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 is 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 Vallee 
FranÁaise, 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 civilised 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 unrivalled 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 Áa. 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 oh! 
	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.

The End.