Part 4

XVII.

"We shall set out at five in the morning," I said to the landlady before going upstairs, and the engineer signalled to us as we left the room the outstretched fingers of his right hand twice; wherein he proved something of a prophet, for it was nearer ten o'clock than five before we determined to risk the mountain journey, the sky being clear in parts and the rain clouds scudding before a high wind, that promised a comparatively dry day.

On the bridge across the Lot at Bleymard we were hailed by a man in labouring clothes, who smiled broadly and said, "Me speak Engleesh." As we had not met a single Frenchman between Orleans and this spot who pretended to have any knowledge of our native tongue, we tarried to have speech with this cheery-faced fellow, whose white teeth shone through a reedy black moustache. But his lingual claims did not bear inspection. Beyond saying that he had visited London and Liverpool, and knew what "shake hands" meant, and that English tobacco was better worth smoking than the French trash--a hint which I accepted by presenting my pouch--he could not go in our island speech; and so we had to continue our chat in French that was bad on both sides, his accent resembling a Yorkshireman's English, and mine--let us say an Englishman's French. He was certain we should have no more rain, as the wind was in the north, and if it kept dry to twelve o'clock we could depend on a good day. The weather prophet is the same in all lands, and we had not left him half an hour when we were sheltering from a sudden downpour.

For some miles we had to plod upward on foot in a wild and rocky gorge, with the merest trickle of water below. Yet every corner where a few square feet of clover could be coaxed into life had been cultivated by the dogged peasants, and patches were growing at heights where one would have thought it difficult to climb without the ropes of an Alpinist. Many of these mountain plots were miles away from any dwelling, a fact that conveys some idea of the barren nature of the country.

The tiny hamlet of Malavieille, about half-way up the mountain side, is the highest point permanently inhabited. It is a mere handful of dark-grey houses, covered on slates and walls with a vivid yellow fungus. Here the upland fields were densely spread with violets, narcissi and hyacinths, and a few dun cows were browsing contentedly on this fragrant fare, while a boy who attended them stood on his head kicking his heels merrily in the sunshine. He came up as we passed, staring at us stolidly; and when we asked if the snakes, of which we had just encountered two about three feet long, were dangerous, he answered, "_Pas bien_," and more than that we could not get him to say, though he walked beside us for a time eyeing curiously our bicycles.

XVIII.

When we had come within sight of the Baraque de Secours, we had reached a sort of table-land reaching east and west for some miles. Eastward lay the pine woods where our vagabond spent one of his most tranquil nights as described in his chapter, "A Night Among the Pines." It was there that, awaking in the morning, he beheld the daybreak along the mountain-tops of Vivarais--"a solemn glee possessed my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day." And it was there, too, that out of thankfulness for his night's rest he laid on the turf as he went along pieces of money, "until I had left enough for my night's lodging." Some of it may be there to this day, for there is small human commerce at this altitude, a shepherd or two being the only folk we saw until we arrived at the shelter which we had seen for more than half an hour while we cycled arduously toward it.

The baraque is a plain two-storied building, with a rough stone wall and porch enclosing a muddy yard. It stands at a height of over five thousand feet, being thus fully five hundred feet higher than Ben Nevis. To the west the Lozère swells upward, a great treeless waste, to its highest point, the Pic de Finiels, 5,600 feet above sea-level; while a splendid mass of volcanic origin uprears its craggy head some little distance to the south-east. "The view, back upon the northern Gévaudan," says Stevenson, writing of what he saw as he passed near this point, "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." And then in a little, when he began the descent towards the valley of the Tarn, he says: "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." As he makes no mention of the baraque, I venture to suppose that it had not then been built, for one so eager of new experience would not have missed the opportunity of resting on his way at this high-set hostel. A dead sheep--one of several we had seen on the mountain--lay on the road by the gate, and propping our bicycles near it, we picked our way through the mud and knocked at the door.

A gruff voice bade us enter. We stepped into a smoky room, with an earthern floor, containing a rough wooden table and two rude benches, and in a corner a small round table, a few chairs and a plain wooden dresser. The mouth that had emitted a very gutteral "_Ongtray_" belonged to a man of small stature but brigandish appearance, who was seated at the smaller table eating industriously. We asked for lemonade and biscuits, but the fellow stared at the words and spoke in a patois that was Greek to me. But when I explained more sententiously that we desired something to eat and drink, he disappeared up a wooden stair, and we knew that a bottle of atrocious red wine, which we would welcome as so much vinegar, would be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the man's wife--a fair-haired little woman with cheeks like red apples, dressed in the universal black of the French country-wife--came in, leading a youngster by the hand. I repeated to her our wants, which she immediately proceeded to meet by breaking four eggs into a pan, the shells being dropped on the floor, and lo! an omelet was well on the way by the time her husband in his sabots came clattering down the stairs with the undesired wine, a few drops of which we used to colour the clear cold water we took in our tumblers from a pipe that ran ceaselessly into a basin set in the wall of the room that backed to the rising land.

There is one respect in which the Cevennols have progressed since Stevenson went among them. He writes: "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." Not so had we found it in any of the inns we visited, all had risen to the dignity of knives and forks; but here at this house in the wilds our table was laid precisely as Stevenson describes, and the bread being hard, it was a temptation to break it across the knee like a piece of wood. We had almost finished our meal when, after some whisperings between the man and woman, the fellow dived into his pockets and produced a great clasp knife, which he opened and handed to us.

While we sat and carried on a somewhat faltering conversation--for both man and woman spoke the dialect of Languedoc and were superbly ignorant--two men entered of the same brigandish type as the landlord, and, speaking better French, proffered their services as guides if we desired to scale the Pic de Finiels. This we had no desire to do, especially when they were frank enough to state that the view from the top was of very little interest. But they urged us to see the magnificent view over the entire range of the Cevennes from the more westerly peak, the Signal des Laubies. This, however, would have taken us some two hours, and we had a long way to travel that day. We were curious to know whether the baraque was tenanted in winter, and one of the guides told us that during the winter the whole of the uplands around us lay deep in snow, the roads being quite impassable. This shelter was only open from the beginning of June to the end of September, when its keepers retired downhill again to Malavieille. R. L. S. crossed the mountain on the second last day in September, so that the snows would soon be lying on his track. When we resumed our journey again we were once or twice beguiled into thinking that we saw some of the snows of yester year lying among the grey and lichened rocks, but a nearer approach turned the drifts into flocks of sheep, which the sombre background rendered snowy white by contrast.

XIX.

We went forward into the country of the Camisards along a well-made road which gangs of labourers were leisurely repairing. So good are these mountain roads, and so diligently tended, that one is inclined to think they are used chiefly for the transit of stones to keep them in repair. That on which we travelled has been made since Modestine and her driver footed it through this same valley. In less than a mile from the baraque it begins to sweep swiftly downward. Stevenson thus describes his descent: "A sort of track appeared and began to go down a breakneck slope, turning like a corkscrew as it went. It led into a valley through 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 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 closed round my path, and the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere."

If his descent was thus, how much more so ours on our whirling wheels? We encountered numerous cattle-drovers, whose herds spread themselves across the path and rendered our progress somewhat perilous, as neither hedge nor stone stood between us and the abyss. There is but little population in the valley, and that centred in two small hamlets, though we observed a number of deserted cabins which Stevenson also notes. The river, too, as it nears the larger Tarn was all his magic pen had pictured; here it "foamed awhile 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."

Our road brought us at length to Pont de Montvert "of bloody memory," which lies in a green and rocky hollow among the hills. To Stevenson "the place, with its houses, its lanes, its glaring river-bed, wore an indescribable air of the south." Why so, he was unable to say; as he justly observes, it would be difficult to tell in what particulars it differed from Monastier or Langogne or even Bleymard. One of the first buildings that the traveller encounters is the little Protestant temple perched on the rocky bank of the river, and perhaps it was again the Protestant education of R. L. S. that led him to note a higher degree of intelligence among the inhabitants than he had found in the purely Catholic villages. For my part, with the best will to mark the difference, I found little to choose between the Catholic and Camisard townships, unless it were a more obvious effort after cleanliness in some of the latter.

XX.

Pont de Montvert is memorable as the place where the Covenanters of France struck the first blow against their Romish persecutors; here they "slew their Archbishop Sharpe." The Protestant pastor, a fresh-faced man about sixty, with a short white beard, and wearing no outward symbol of office, but dressed in an ordinary jacket suit and cloth cap, we found in his home in a building by the river-side near the bridge. Directly across the rock-strewn course was the Hôtel des Cevennes, where Stevenson sat at the "roaring table d'hôte," and was pleased to find three of the women passably good-looking, that being more than an average for any town in the Highlands of France. Our pastor--his wife and golden-haired daughter also--was more interested in discussing Stevenson's travels than the religious condition of his district, a subject on which my companion, pastor from "the Celtic fringe," was athirst for information.

To my various questions regarding the position of the Reformed Church I received the barest answers; there was no glowing enthusiasm _chez le pasteur_ for the Camisards who a stone's-throw from where we sat stabbed with many superfluous thrusts the Archpriest Du Chayla, their most brutal persecutor. But Stevenson and his donkey--ah, that was another matter! He knew all about them to the year, the day, the hour of their quaint and curious visit; he was himself only two years established in his charge at the time. And Clarisse! We knew, of course, what Stevenson had said of her? Would we care to see her photograph? She was now married, and settled in another town with a considerable family growing around her. One felt that after a quarter of a century, and with a family thrown in, Stevenson would have resolutely refused to look on the counterfeit presentment of Clarisse. But, less scrupulous, we chose to see her portrait, and the pastor was good enough to present me with a copy, as he possessed several which he had procured three years before when ordering one for an Englishman who had gone over the trail of R. L. S. The _carte_ shows the table-maid of the hotel as still possessing some of the featural charms so minutely and faithfully noted by our author.

"What shall I say of Clarisse?" he writes. "She waited the table with a heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; her great grey eyes were steeped in amorous langour; her features, although fleshy, were of an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her nostrils 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.... 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."

When I look again at the photograph, I fear that even this hope for her who was "left to country admirers and a country way of thought," has not been fulfilled.

The pastor came with us to point out Du Chayla's house, which stands on the river side westward of his own, the spire of the modern Catholic church showing above the roof. Perhaps it was only natural that he should look upon so familiar an object without any show of emotion, though my fellow-traveller set it down to the cold Christless teaching of the _Eglise libérale_, to which section of the French Reformed Church Pont de Montvert is attached. In that three-storied house, with its underground dungeons and stout-walled garden trending down to the river, the Archpriest carried on "the Propagation of the Faith" by such ungentle methods as plucking out the hairs of the beard, enclosing the hands of his Protestant prisoners upon live coal, "to convince them," as R. L. S. quaintly observes, "that they were deceived in their opinions." On the 24th July, 1702, led by their "prophet" Séguier, a band of some fifty Camisards attacked the house of the Archpriest, to which they at length set fire, and thus forced Du Chayla and his military guard to attempt escape. The Archpriest, in lowering himself from an upper window by means of knotted sheets, fell and broke his leg, and there in the garden, where a woman was to-day hanging out shabby clothes to dry, the Covenanters had their vengeance of stabs. "'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." Save for a new roof, the building remains much as it was two hundred years ago.

XXI.

The road, for close on two miles out of Pont de Montvert, goes uphill past the Catholic church--the town being now about equally divided in the matter of religion--and then it is a long and gentle descent to Florac. In no respect has the road changed since Stevenson wrote of it, nor is there any likelihood that it will be altered ere the crack of doom. "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 far above."

The slopes of the valley have been terraced almost to the sky-line, not for baby-fields of wheat, but to furnish ground for chestnut trees, that clothe the hills with rich and sombre foliage, and give forth "a faint, sweet perfume," which tinctures the air with balsamic breath. R. L. S. goes into raptures over these chestnuts;--"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 useful shoots, and begin a new life upon the ruins of the old.... And to look down upon a level filled with these knolls of foliage, or to see a clan of old, unconquerable chestnuts clustered 'like herded elephants' upon the spur of a mountain, is to rise to higher thoughts of the powers that are in Nature." It was on a terrace and under one of these trees that he camped for the night, having to scramble up some sixty feet above the place he had selected for himself, which was as high as that from the road, before he could find another terrace with space enough for his donkey. He was awakened in the morning by peasants coming to prune the trees, and after going down to the river for his morning toilet--"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"--he went on his way "with a light and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced."

Some little way from where he had slept he foregathered with an old man in a brown nightcap, "clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with a faint, excited smile," who said to him after a while, "_Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?_" The old fellow was delighted when the donkey-driver answered, "Yes, I know Him; He is the best of acquaintances," and together they journeyed on, discussing the spiritual condition of the country-folk. "Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came upon a hamlet by the Tarn. It was but a humble place, called La Vernède, with less than a dozen houses, and a Protestant chapel on a knoll. Here he dwelt, and here at the inn I ordered my breakfast. The inn was kept by an agreeable young man, a stonebreaker on the road, and his sister, a pretty and engaging girl."

We found this little hamlet even smaller than we expected, some half-dozen houses and a tiny place of worship, the whole lying below the level of the main road, so that one could have thrown a stone on their roofs, well-tilled fields and meadows stretching down to the river. A _cantonnier_ who was busy breaking stones by the roadway helped us to identify the place, and was proud to confess himself a Protestant, in common with the little handful of his fellow-villagers. The country grows richer and more fruitful as we approach Florac, passing on our way the old castle of Miral and a picturesque church compounded of an ancient battlemented monastery and some modern buildings with a tall tower.

The influence of a country on its people suggested to R. L. S. an interesting comparison as he journeyed through "this landscape, smiling although wild." "Those who took to the hills for conscience sake in Scotland had all gloomy and bedevilled thoughts," he writes; "for once that they received God's comfort, they would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and supporting visions.... With a light conscience, they pursued their life in these rough times and circumstances. The soul of Séguier, let us not forget, was like a garden. They knew they were on God's side, with a knowledge that has no parallel among the Scots; for the Scots, although they might be certain of the cause, could never rest confident of the person." A singularly inapposite comparison. It was not in pleasant valleys such as these, or in cosy little towns like Pont de Montvert, that the Camisards fought out their war with "His Most Christian Majesty Louis, King of France and Brittany," but on the bare and rocky plateaus westward of the Cevennes, and on such mountain-tops as the Lozère. Stevenson had never seen the Causse Méjan or the Causse du Larzac, to the southward of the region through which he travelled, or he would have realised that their conditions were even less likely to foster "bright and supporting visions" in the Camisards than those of the mountain-hunted Scots, though much better from a strategic point of view.

XXII.