Part 2

Along this road, where on our right the terraces climbed upward to the naked basalt, and on the other side of the valley, now flooded with a pale yellow sunset that picked out vividly children at play tending a scanty herd of cattle on the hillside, our donkey driver of old had some of his bitterest experiences with that thrawn jade Modestine. We, fortunate in our more docile mounts, made excellent progress to Ussel, after walking a good two miles on foot. The road beyond that town was lively with bullock wagons, heavily freighted with timber, and carts, mostly drawn by oxen, filled with women returning from the market at Costaros, a little town on the highway between Le Puy and Pradelles; bullocks and people--the former to our embarrassment--being greatly interested in the wheel-travellers of these seldom cycled roads.

When we arrived at Costaros, a town that is drab and dismal beyond words, the evening was wearing out under a leaden sky, promising the stragglers from the market good use for their bulky umbrellas, and we had still eight kilometres of rough country roads between us and the lake. Stevenson, in his heart-breaking struggles with the wayward ass, must have crossed the highway in the dark some little distance south of Costaros to have arrived at the village of Bouchet St. Nicolas, two miles beyond the lake; and as we urged forward in the rain, which now fell pitilessly and turned the darkling mountains into phantom masses smoking with mist, we could appreciate to the full the satisfaction with which he abandoned his quest of the lake and spent his first night snug at the inn of Bouchet. As we wheeled through the mud into the large village of Cayres no straggler appeared in the streets, that steamed like the back of a perspiring horse; but a carpenter at work in a windy shed assured us that the chalet on the shore of the lake had opened for the season, and in our dripping state we pressed thither uphill, feeling that two miles more in the rain could not worsen our condition. It was a weird and moving experience--the ghostly woods on the hillside, the tuneless tinkle of bells on unseen sheep, the hissing noise of our wheels on the moist earth--and our delight was great when we heard the lapse of water on our left. For nearly a mile the latter part of the road lay through a pine forest, where the ground had scarcely suffered from the rain, but the way was dark as in a tunnel, and glimpses of the lake between the trees showed the water almost vivid as steel by contrast.

VI.

"I had been told," says R. L. S., "that the neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout." He travelled in the days before the _Syndicat d'Initiative du Velay_, which I shall ever bless for its chalet by the Lac du Bouchet, whose lighted windows two weary pilgrims descried that night with joy unspeakable. Our arrival was the cause of no small commotion to the good folk who kept this two-storied wooden hostel. We were their first visitors of the season, and it was clear they hailed us with delight, despite the lateness of our arrival. Candles were soon alight in the dining-room upstairs, a fire of pine logs crackling in the open hearth, the housemaid briskly laying the table, the mistress bustling in the kitchen, doors banging cheerily in the dark night as the master went and came between outhouses, fetching food and firing for which our coming had suddenly raised the need. Our bedrooms opened off the dining-room, and were well if plainly furnished, the floors being sanded, and we had soon made shift to change our sodden garments as well as the limited resources of wheelmen's baggage would allow. Above all was the ceaseless noise of the lake, that seemed to lend a keener edge to the chilly air.

We could scarcely believe it was the middle of June in the sunny south of France as we sat there shivering before the spluttering logs in a room "suitable for bandits or noblemen in disguise." But a deep sense of comfort was supplied by the savoury smells that issued from the lower regions of the house. Our blessings on the head of the landlady and the whole French nation of cooks were sincere, as we regaled ourselves with an excellent meal of perch, omelet, mutton chops, raisins, almonds, cheese, lemonade and coffee. Imagine yourself arriving after nine o'clock at night at a lonely inn anywhere in the British Isles and faring thus! Moreover, the tenants of the chalet--the two women especially--were the most welcome of gossips, and the elder had a gift of dry humour that must have served her well in so wet a season. For three weeks it had rained steadily, she said, and she feared it was nothing short of the end of the world. When we told her that we had come from Le Monastier by way of St. Martin and Goudet, she was highly amused, and the younger, a rosy-faced wench, laughed heartily at the thought of anybody visiting such places. The lake of Bouchet--ah, that was another matter! Lakes were few in France, and this one well worth seeing. There were many lakes in Scotland! This was news to them, and they wondered why we had come so far to see this of Bouchet,--as we did ourselves when next morning we surveyed a tiny sheet of water almost circular, no more than two miles in circumference and quite featureless. It is simply the crater of an ancient volcano, and receives its water from some underground springs, there being no obvious source of supply. The lake, at an altitude of 4,000 feet, is higher than the surrounding country.

VII.

When we awoke in the morning and made ready for our departure the room was filled with the smoke of burning faggots, as though a censer had been swung in it by some early-rising acolyte; and the fire was again a welcome evidence of the landlady's thoughtfulness, for the outlook was grey and the early morning air bit shrewdly as the tooth of winter. Had the day promised better, we should have struck south from the lake to Bouchet St. Nicolas, at whose inn Stevenson uncorked a bottle of Beaujolais, inviting his host to join him in drinking it; and the innkeeper would take little, saying, "I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?--and I am capable of leaving you not enough." But the way thither is no better than a bullock-track, and several miles of similar road lie between Bouchet and the highway; so with a lowering sky ominous of more rain, and the knowledge that for three weeks the country had been soaking, we determined not to risk the bullock-track, and retraced our path to Costaros, passing on the way numerous ox wagons laden with timber.

The whole countryside was sweet with the morning incense of the faggot fires burning on many a cottage hearth. We overtook several young people driving cattle out to the pasture lands, and noting that without exception they carried umbrellas, our hopes of a good day were not high. But by the time we had reached the Gendarmerie, that stands at the crest of the hill on the high road out of Costaros, and were chatting with one of the officers whom we found idling at the door, the wind was rising and heaped masses of sombre clouds were being driven before it across the sky, though in their passage they disclosed no cheering hints of the blue behind. The gendarme admitted that the rising wind might be a good sign, but he was not very hopeful, and seemed to be more interested in meeting two travellers from a country he had never heard of than in discussing the weather. There are parts of France, especially Normandy and Brittany, where, to confess oneself a Scotsman is to be assured of a heartier welcome than would be accorded to one who came from England; but Stevenson's boast that "the happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotsman" counts for little in these highlands of the south, where few of the village-folk have ever heard of Scotland.

The road south of Costaros even on a bright summer day must appear bleak and cheerless, and that morning our chief desire was to move along it as quickly as we could. Yet, as we advanced, the scene was not without elements of beauty, and the mists that veiled the distant mountains gradually lifting, produced a transformation entirely pleasing, while ere long there were great and welcome rifts in the grey above, and patches of blue sky heartened us on our way. By the time we had reached the hamlet of La Sauvetat the sun was peeping out fitfully, and on our right it suddenly flooded with amber light a meadow, yellow with marigolds, where cows were pasturing, attended by a small girl who was playing at skipping-rope.

VIII.

We had again joined the track of R. L. S., where, now armed with a goad, he drove his donkey. "The perverse little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must even go with pricking." We had but to sit in our saddles, and wheel rapidly down the long and exhilarating descent to Pradelles, a very tumbledown village with a great shabby square lying at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. The town occupies a little corrie on the hillside, and the ground slopes quickly on the west to the river Allier, beyond which the country rises again in mighty undulations as far as the eye can reach. For all its slanternness--perhaps, in some degree, because of that--Pradelles is a place of interest, perched here at an altitude of 3,800 feet above sea-level.

More than any other place we saw in our journey, this old mountain town wears an unmistakable "foreign" appearance, and one walks its streets with the feeling that one is moving cautiously along the sloping roof of a house. Among its tumbledown buildings it still possesses fragments of considerable historic value, such as its ancient hospice, and a gateway from the top of which a village heroine killed some Huguenot heroes by throwing a stone at them while they were leading an assault against its walls. In the church of Nôtre Dame this episode in the history of the town is commemorated by a mural painting in vivid colours, the stone which the devout Catholic maiden is hurling at the devoted heads of the besiegers being large enough to warrant the assistance of a steam crane. The interior of the church is very quaint and unusual, and I am sorry that Stevenson did not yield to the urging of the landlady of the inn to visit Our Lady of Pradelles, "who performed many miracles, although she was of wood," for his impressions of the church could not have failed to be peculiarly piquant. The miraculous image of the virgin is a wooden doll, dressed in lace and set on the high altar. Pilgrims come in large numbers to its shrine every fifteenth of August; and one of the spirited paintings on the wall depicts the rescue of the idol from a burning of the church which, I should guess, took place about the time of the Revolution. Evidently the rescuers of Our Lady were not prepared to submit her to the crucial test a sister image at Le Puy survived--"burning for thirty-six hours without being consumed." Many and unfamiliar saints look down at us from the walls, and at the west end there is a loft such as might be seen in some of the very old Scottish churches, occupied at the time of our visit by a group of women, members no doubt of some pious confraternity.

R. L. S. has some picturesque notes on "The Beast of Gévaudan," whose trail he first struck at Pradelles; for we were now in the wild and uncultivated country of Gévaudan, "but recently disforested from terror of the wolves," whose grizzly exploits in the way of eating women and children seem to have engaged the imagination of our traveller. If the wolves have gone, they have left in their stead a flourishing progeny of wolf-like curs, who infest the highways and byways in extraordinary numbers, to the embarrassment of the wheelman.

IX.

From Pradelles to Langogne is a long and deep descent, and while walking our machines down an unrideable path, a young woman on a terrace near the road came forward to greet us, tripping unexpectedly over the tether of a goat, and landing softly and naturally on the ground, where after her moment's surprise she smilingly asked, "_Où allez vous promener?_" more usually our bucolic greeting than "_D'où 'st-ce-que vous venez?_" the latter "sacramental phrase," on which Stevenson remarks, being possibly suggested in his case by the odd appearance of the traveller and his beast of burden.

The bridge across the Allier at Langogne, where Stevenson met the "lassie of some seven or eight" who demanded whence he came, is now a crazy ruin, and a serviceable modern structure spans the river some little distance to the west of it. Near this place he camped for the night. He furnishes no information about his stay at Langogne, where, I should judge, he slept at one of the inns. The town must have altered greatly since he rested there, as it is now on the railway line to Villefort, and a considerable trade in coal seems to be carried on. It is also a popular summer resort, though one is at a loss to account for its attractions to holiday makers. Its church dates from the tenth century, and contains in a little chapel on the right, below the level of the nave, the image of Nôtre Dame de Tout-Pouvoir, which our landlady at the Cheval Blanc assured us was _très vénérée_, and the housemaid who conducted us thither took advantage of the occasion to tell her beads before the statue, keeping a roving eye on us as we wandered about the church.

X.

Stevenson's track now lay somewhat to the west of the course of the Allier, as he made for the little village of Cheylard l'Evêque, on the borders of the Forest of Mercoire, and in this stage of his journey he was more than usually faithful to his ideal of travel: "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." There was no need for his quitting the highway, since his further objective lay due south through the pleasant valley of the Allier. But his diversion among the by-ways was rich in adventure, and furnished him with material for perhaps his best chapter, "A Camp in the Dark." He had the good fortune to lose his way after nightfall, and to be forced to camp in a wood of pines in happy ignorance of his whereabouts. When next morning he did reach Cheylard he was fain to confess that "it seemed little worthy of all this searching." With a less keen appetite for losing ourselves in a maze of muddy bullock-tracks, we pressed forward through the fresh green valley to Luc, and here rejoined the path of our adventurer once more. We had the road almost to ourselves, and among the few wayfarers I recall was a travelling knife-grinder, whom we passed near Luc engaged in the agreeable task of preparing his dinner, the first course of which, _potage au pain_, was simmering in a sooty pot over a fire of twigs. A nation of gourmets, verily, when the humblest among them can thus maintain the national art in the hedges.

"Why anyone should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much inventing spirit can suppose." Thus our vagabond. But journeying at a more genial season of the year, we found the neighbourhood of Luc not devoid of beauty. The valley of the Allier is here broken into wide and picturesque gorges, and in many ways the scenery is reminiscent of Glen Coe, where Alan Breck and David Balfour dodged the redcoats. But late in September it would bear a very different aspect, and Stevenson tells us that "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." There is now a railway station at Luc, the line running near the road all the way to La Bastide and as we continued southward that sunny June day, it was only the shrill noise of the crickets and the unusual quilt work of the diligently husbanded hillsides that told us we were not looking on a Perthshire landscape. In a sweet corner of the valley lies La Bastide, a drowsy little town despite its long connection with the railway, which existed even at the time of Stevenson's visit.

Here, he tells us, "I was directed to leave the river, and follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the modern Ardèche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows." Thither we shall follow his steps, more closely than usual, as the road is too steep to admit of our cycling. For some distance the route lies through a great forest of pines, but when the crest of the hill is gained a far-reaching prospect greets the eye. "The sun came out as I left the shelter of a pine wood," writes R. L. S., "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 in 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." Only when the snow comes down and mantles these abundant hills would this description not apply. It is a perfect picture of what we saw. Presently we noted with no small satisfaction the white statue of the Virgin, which, standing by the highway at a point where a side road strikes northward through the pines, "directed the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows." He describes the pine wood as "a young plantation," but in the intervening years the trees have grown into a mighty forest, dark and mysterious, and the statue of Our Lady was so overshadowed by branches rich with cones, that it was impossible to get a satisfactory photograph of it. "Here, then," he continues, "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." On our equally secular cycles we followed the same track, the roadway being dotted on each side with bundles of faggots gathered by the silent monks, probably for the use of the poor.

XI.

"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," says Stevenson, as he recalls the feeling produced within him by the clanging of a bell at the monastery while he was not yet in sight of it. No bells clanged as we descended the road which Father Apollinaris was still in the act of making when Stevenson encountered him. We emerged at length from the shelter of the trees into a wide hollow of land, from which on every side the hills rose up, and where on our right were the outer walls of the monastery, plain plastered buildings, with little barred windows on the ground floor and a row without bars on the second story. On our left was a large saw-mill, where steam saws were giving shrill advertisement of their use. Several monks were among the workers at the mill, and a brown-coated figure was walking along the road that opened on our left beyond the timber sheds to some large white buildings which, as we afterwards learned, comprised the farm belonging to the monastery. The first impression was not exactly to touch one's feeling for romance. Trappists in the timber trade suggests a heading for a "snippet" periodical, and if the monks were silent, here at least were noises that smote unpleasantly on the ear.

The buildings of Our Lady of the Snows are quite devoid of any architectural beauty. They are set four-square in the hollow, and the hills trend gently upward on every side richly clad with trees, for the monks have reforested much of the surrounding land, which is the property of the fraternity. The south side is occupied by a long, two-storied building, which contains the main entrance--a plain, whitewashed, barn-like structure--and buildings of a similar type adjoin it east and west, while the north side of the quadrangle is filled by the more pretentious masonry of the church, the chapter-house, and other religious offices, though even here the essential note of the architecture is austerity, the clock-tower being devoid of decoration and purely utilitarian.

When endeavouring to photograph the buildings while the sun shone, an old man with a very red face, a very white beard and a very dirty white blouse came along, leaning feebly on his stick. He was delighted on being asked to become part of the picture, and begged me to wait a moment while he fixed on his left arm his _plaque_, whereon I read in brazen letters, "Gardien de la Propriété." This aged and infirm defender of the monastic estates was as proud of his _plaque_ as if it had been a medal won in war. There must be few attacks upon the property of the monastery, which he informed me extended as far as we could see in this windswept hollow of the hills, if our friend of the snowy beard and ruddy face stood for its defence! We were cheered to learn from him that there would be no difficulty in visiting the monastery, and if we wished we might be able to pass the night there. This we desired most heartily for various reasons, but chiefly because it was now close on six in the evening, and days are short in these latitudes.

XII.