THE LAND OF FERDINAND FABRE
Ferdinand Fabre—His novels—Biography—The uncle—Discouragement—Les
Courbezon—Bédarieux—Ruined by a strike—Hérault—The
Population—Iberians—Ligurians—Umbranici—The Gauls—Chestnuts—The
Beaters—Ballad of the Chestnut-tree—The Séchoire—Fêtes in
Hérault—Carotat at Béziers—Pepezuc—The Ass of Gignac—Roquefort
Cheese—Le Bousquet d'Orbe—Lamalou—N. Dame de Capimont—Extinction
of the hermits—Villemagne—Gorge of the Héric—S. Gervais—The church
spire—The inhabitants of the Highland and of the Lowland—The
Pillard.
The number of readers of the novels of Ferdinand Fabre in England
is but few, I fear; but those few recognise in him one of the most
graceful and delightful of writers. His novels may be divided into two
categories: those that deal with his reminiscences of early life in the
Cévennes about Bédarieux, and those in which he combats the intrigues
of the Jesuits, "they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly
women laden with sins"; or who meddle with and thwart the good work
of the simple country and town curés, acting as spies for Rome on the
bishops and the parochial clergy.
To the first class belong—I mention only the best—_Les Courbezon_,
_Julien Savignac_, _Mon Oncle Célestin_, _Barnabé_, _Monsieur Jean_,
and _Xavière_. To the latter a series—_La Paroisse du Jugement
Dernier_, _Le Calvaire de Mme. Fuster_, _Le Couvent de la Falosque
Bergonnier_, _L'Hospice des Enfants Assistés_; and the purely clerical
romances, _Lucifer_ and _l'Abbé Tigranne_.
The delicacy of touch, the exquisite delineation of character among the
peasantry of the Cévennes, and the beautiful descriptions of scenery
and bird life in the first category make these stories essential to a
knowledge of the country I am describing in this chapter, and no one
should visit it without having read at least some of them. Ferdinand
Fabre was born in 1830 at Bédarieux, and was the son of an architect.
After having spent his first school years in his native place, he was
committed to his uncle, the curé of Camplong, and he remained with him
for two years. These years left an indelible impression on his mind.
The happy life in the country, the habits of the villagers, the ways
of the birds, the bald causses, and the chestnut woods of the valleys;
above all, the kind, simple-minded old uncle, and the grumbling,
economising, but tender-hearted old housekeeper, filled the young heart
so full, that it was Fabre's delight in mature life to pour forth his
reminiscences of those two happy years. The uncle and the housekeeper
recur again and again, the former either as the Abbé Courbezon, the
Curé Fulcran, or Mon Oncle Célestin.
On leaving Camplong, Ferdinand entered the Petit Seminaire at S. Pons,
and thence passed in due time to the Grand Seminaire at Montpellier. It
was there that he made those experiences of clerical life that he has
given forth in the remarkable novel, _l'Abbé Tigranne_, remarkable if
only in this particular, that it is a novel without a woman in it. This
story represents the conflict of an ultramontane bishop imposed on the
diocese with his clergy, who are Gallican-minded.
Not feeling a vocation for the priesthood, Fabre went to Paris,
and was at first a lawyer's clerk, but was soon left to his own
resources. There he published his first literary venture, _Feuilles de
Lierre_, 1853, which attracted little notice, and, disheartened, with
enfeebled health, he returned to the south. Then he began to write
stories concerning scenes and personages with which he was intimate.
He produced _Les Courbezon_ in 1862, and this "caught on" at once.
The charm of style, the sweetness of mind it displayed, the keenness
of insight into character, and the daintiness of description caused
the literary world to realise that a writer of extraordinary merit
had risen as a star on the horizon. _Les Courbezon_ was crowned by
the Académie. Next year, 1863, appeared _Julien Savignac_, a study
of a mind affected with incipient insanity. The tale is powerful
and painful. _Le Chevrier_ was produced in 1868, a disappointing
performance, but, with the curious perversity that characterises many
an author, preferred by Fabre to his other works; and as it did not
obtain success as a novel, he converted it into a drama, which was
also a failure. _Barnabé_, an excellent study of a class of men now
completely passed away, appeared in 1875. Fabre died in Paris on 11
February, 1898.
Bédarieux is, or rather was, a busy manufacturing town, with forges
and glass works, indebted for its coal to the neighbouring mines of
Grassensac. But a few years ago a strike took place. The ironmasters
and glassmasters could not meet the demands of the men, and forges and
factories have since been closed, and the population has dwindled to
nearly half what it was. This also has seriously affected the miners of
Grassensac.
Bédarieux is on the Orb at the confluence into it of the Courbezon.
The station is three-quarters of a mile from the town. There is nothing
of interest in the place itself, except the church of S. Alexandre
of the fifteenth century, and that not remarkable. For a centre of
excursions it is good, but preferable is Lamalou-les-Bains, where are
excellent hotels; but Bédarieux must be tarried at for a few nights
if Rochefort, Lunas, and Boussagues are to be visited, or much time
will be lost in the trains. Bédarieux is the station of bifurcation of
three lines from the main trunk from Clermont to Béziers, and any one
who has had experience of French lines will know that as often as not
this implies a tedious halt, perhaps of an hour, at the station where a
change has to be made.
The nature of the mountains through and by which flows the Orb differs
greatly from that of the schisty Cévennes—the Cévennes proper—and the
limestone of the causses and of the garigues. They are a ripple rather
than a billow, and being sheltered from the north winds by the high
range at their back form a sort of natural hothouse, in which the
sweetest fruits of a southern clime ripen readily, where the spring
comes earliest and the autumn sun lingers longest.
In the Languedoc plain, in Roussillon, even to Perpignan, the icy
blasts from the Cévennes are dreaded. The olives, the planes, the
mulberries are bent, leaning towards the south, permanently given this
incline under the influence of these cruel winds. They scourge Béziers
and Montpellier as with a cat-o'-nine-tails dipped in water that has
been frozen. But these winds pass over Bédarieux and the valley of the
Orb to expend their violence elsewhere. Here in the upper reaches of
the Orb the vine, the fig, the olive, the pomegranate, the almond, the
nettle-tree luxuriate, untortured, unnipped.
Villages are many, clustering as so many sets of beehives in every warm
and sheltered nook that faces the sun, and has a mountain wall at its
back.
And it is precisely here, where least wanted, that a prodigal nature
lavishes heating material in beds of anthracite and other coal.
"The peasants of the low hills of the Monts d'Orb are less
accessible to superstition than those of the highlands, but they
have less character and veritable greatness. The sun has not only
heated their land, it has also sucked up from their brains all
those vapours full of poetry that make of the men of the causses a
type original and picturesque. Between the inhabitant of Servier,
who never sowed a seed, and he of Camplong, who gets fuddled on
new wine, the distance is immeasurable, and yet they are parted by
nothing more than the granite mass of Bataillo."
This is what Fabre says of the natives. There are two types not due to
difference of blood, but of surroundings and of occupations. We are now
in the department of Hérault, of Lower Languedoc, and I may be allowed
a few words on the mixture of peoples of diverse origin that have been
fused together into a homogeneous race.
From a period before history began, this country was inhabited by
populations of diverse origins, habits, and language, drawn thither by
the delicious climate, its natural resources, or simply by the chance
of migration. One fact characterises the establishment of the tribes
or nationalities in these parts; so far as we can judge, it was their
attitude towards the people who preceded them. If some of them swept
away the indigenous race, more often they planted themselves beside
the earlier population peaceably and fused with them. Most of these
invaders seem to have possessed gentle manners, and were not goaded on
by the passion for extermination, for which there was no provocation
or need, as the land was wide and rich enough to sustain all. This
mode of colonisation had the result of filling Lower Languedoc with
very heterogeneous inhabitants, the complexity of which explains the
apparent contradictions of early writers. But on one point these
writers are unanimous: the variety of races or mixtures that occupied
the land in Gallia Narbonensis. In the first century before Christ,
Cicero notices this; and in the fourth century after Christ, Ausonius
sang: "Who can record all thy ports, thy mountains and thy lakes, who
the diversity of thy peoples, their vestures and their languages?"
The most ancient inhabitants recorded were the Iberians, who extended
their domination over the Spanish peninsula and to the Rhône on the
east, which formed the boundary between them and the Ligurians. But
at a time difficult to determine these latter crossed the river and
invaded the territories of the Iberians. But instead of expelling the
conquered peoples, the Ligurians, having an aptitude for absorption,
mingled with those whom they had subdued and formed the mixed race
of the Iberian-Ligurian. There was, however, already in the land
a third nation, that of the Umbranici, apparently the same as the
Umbrians of Northern Italy. They have left their name at Ambrussum,
now Pont-Ambroise, on the Vidourle. Twenty-three inscriptions remain,
mostly in Gard, in an unknown tongue, but written in Greek characters,
that bears an affinity alike to the Ossian and Umbrian language in
Italy.
The Greek trade of Marseilles spread through the land. At Murviel, a
cyclopean enclosure, not many miles from Montpellier, have been found
Greek coins of Marseilles.
In the fourth century before the Christian era a new ethnic element
came to add to what already existed. The Gauls appeared in the land.
A branch of this stock was that of the Volci. These established
themselves between the Rhône and the Garonne, and extended their
authority over the Ibero-Ligurians. These new arrivals seem to have
treated the conquered much as the Ligurians had the Iberians. They
established themselves peaceably among them or alongside of them. This
was the more easy, for, as Strabo says, though the Gauls belonged to a
wholly different stock, yet they resembled the Ligurians in their mode
of life.
Their dominion was not for long—not for more than two centuries—for in
B.C. 121 their country was conquered by the Romans.
Such, then, is the origin of the population of Lower Languedoc, and
explains the diverse origin of the names of rivers, mountains and
towns, some Iberic, some Celtic, some Latin, some of undiscoverable
derivation, given perhaps by the Umbrian colony.
The staple of life in the Cévennes, mainly in the southern portion, is
not corn, but the chestnut. That is why we see this tree everywhere,
old and twisted, but sturdy still, young and vigorous when recently
planted. But unhappily a malady has broken out among them, the cause of
which has not been discovered with certainty, nor has any remedy been
found efficacious. In some years the leaves fall in September, and the
fruit comes to nothing, reducing the people to a condition almost of
famine. In order to preserve the nuts through the winter and spring and
prevent the sprouting, they are subjected to desiccation in _clèdes_
that may be seen as a part of the outbuildings of every farmhouse and
of many cottages.
The Spanish chestnut is a beautiful tree. It was indigenous in England.
A few years ago I was draining a field by the river, and cut down to
glacial clay nearly nine feet below the surface, and lying on this was
a huge tree, black as ebony. With great labour I had it removed to
the sawmill, thinking it to have been black bog oak. It was Spanish
chestnut, and since then others have been found in the same valley.
It seems willing to grow anywhere. The peasants build up terraces no
larger than a doormat, and it grows there. But where there is plenty of
soil it will grow much more vigorously than on a ledge of rock.
"I wish," said R. L. Stevenson, "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 as 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 this 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 spurs of a mountain, is to rise to higher
thoughts of the powers that are in Nature."
I believe that the reason why we have so few old chestnuts in England,
why we have not woods of them, is that the rabbit dearly loves its
sweet bark when young. In planting chestnuts they must be protected by
wire, or every one will be pealed in early spring by these wretched
rodents. The beating of the trees and the gathering of the fallen
chestnuts is a great festival among the Cevenol, as is the vintage in
the plains. I will give an account of the beginning of the gathering in
from the pen of Ferdinand Fabre. I must premise that the mountaineers
from the bald causses come down to the zone where the precious tree
grows and hire themselves out as beaters and gatherers. A body of men,
mostly young, arrive in a village waving branches, and is met by the
old people in the street.
"Our old men and women, very attached to the Fête of the Chestnuts
which brightened their youthful years, had quitted the fireside
and had advanced to the first house of the village. There they
drew up in file, ranged against the south wall. From one end
of the line to the other the features were grave with wrinkles
and furrows, softened on some by their white hair. Warped,
bowed, shivering, they looked ahead with glassy eyes kindled
with curiosity. The young folk of the mountain were about to
pass by and they desired to see them, and in seeing them revive
recollections of their own young days, and warm themselves thereat.
"At the first house the arrivals halted; then waving their boughs
in salutation, asked altogether, 'Good folk, how go the chestnuts
this year?' 'Very well, children,' replied the old people. Then
a little woman, aged eighty-five, detached herself from her nook
in the wall and advanced towards the beaters. 'You have not
forgotten, friends, the Complaint of the Chestnut Tree?' 'To be
sure, the Complaint of the Chestnut Tree,' cried all.
"From the midst of the grove of boughs carried in their hands, and
which seemed suddenly to have taken root in the soil of the road,
rose the _Complainte_ (ballad), so popular among the Cevenols of
the south, and which, like most of their popular songs, express
their toil, their sweat, their sighs of hunger at last assuaged by
labour.
"Quand le châtaignier est planté
Il monte, monte, monte!
Quand le châtaignier est planté
Nous buvons largement à sa santé.
Quand le châtaignier est en fleur,
Belle, belle, belle!
Quand le châtaignier est en fleur,
Le pays prend son odeur.
Quand le châtaignier a grainé,
Il graine, graine, graine!
Quand le châtaignier a grainé,
Chacun danse dans son pré.
Quand les châtaignes nous avons,
Bonnes, bonnes, bonnes!
Quand les châtaignes nous avons,
Nous les mangeons, puis nous mourons.
"After the fourth couplet the ballad was interrupted. Our Cevenols
raised their boughs, brandished the leaves, and made therewith the
sign of the cross.
'On your knees!' said the old woman, extending her hand. The
beaters knelt at once. Then, all at once, from a thousand sturdy
breasts young for the most part, rolled forth the final verse of
the Complainte du Châtaignier. It was as grand, as beautiful, as
sublime as any psalm, any hymn I have heard in any church.
"Cévennes pleins de rochers,
Hautes, hautes, hautes!
Cévennes pleins de rochers,
Faites nous forts et religieux."
When the chestnuts have been gathered, then in November they are dried
in _séchoirs_. These are small square structures with a door and window
on one side, and on the other three or more long narrow loopholes,
called in the country _carézéïros_, that are never closed. A fire of
coals is lighted and kept burning incessantly in the drying-house, and
the smoke passes through shelves on which the chestnuts are laid, in
stages, and escapes by the loopholes. To any one unaccustomed to the
atmosphere in these _séchoirs_, it is hard to endure the smoke, and
one stands the risk of being asphyxiated. Nevertheless the peasants
spend two months in the year in these habitations, amidst cobwebs and
soot, swarming with mice and rats, and the smoke at once acrid and
moist, for in drying the chestnuts exude a greenish fluid that falls
in a rain from the shelves. The natives do not seem to mind the dirt
and smell of these horrible holes. Moreover, if there be in a village
any one suffering from phthisis, at the end of autumn the patient is
taken by the relations in his or her bed, and this is deposited in a
corner of the _séchoir_. The sick person is not allowed to leave the
drying-house, and it is a singular phenomenon that not infrequently,
under the influence of the heat and the sulphurous smoke, the
tuberculosis is arrested, and the sufferer lives on for many long years.
It is economy that drives the peasants to live in the drying-houses. As
they are forced to light fires for the chestnuts, they extinguish those
on their hearths in the farm-houses. Why have two fires going when one
will suffice? So the peasant bids his wife and children cook their soup
at the brazier in the _séchoir_. And he himself, driven under shelter
by the rain and cold, brings to the common hearth his hatchet and long
strips of wild chestnut, of which he fashions hoops for barrels or
baskets for the collectors of olives. Through the two months from the
Jour des Morts to Christmas Eve the _séchoir_ is the village centre; to
it flock the poorest members of the commune, who have no drying-houses
of their own.
The fêtes in Hérault are often very curious, and evidently date from an
early period, and are reminiscences of paganism.
For instance, the Carotat at Béziers on Ascension Day has nothing
Christian about it. Till 1878, on the eve, the servants of the Consuls
were wont to parade the town with music going before them, and knock at
the doors of houses asking for contributions. They were followed by a
clumsy wooden structure covered with hide to represent a camel; and all
largesses received were put into the mouth of the beast.
Next day, to the sound of cannon and bells, the Corporation assembled
in three ranks, led by the Provost bearing a cake decked out with
ribbons and attached to his left arm, attended by a servant carrying
a basket of bread, followed by the camel. This fête is dead. But
what does survive at Béziers and at Montpellier and elsewhere is the
Danse des Treilles at the fête called Roumarin. The young people, in
their gala dresses and adorned with bunches of rosemary, carry hoops
similarly decorated, with which they perform the evolutions of a
graceful ballet in which there are seven figures; and the bystanders
pelt them with violets. At Montpellier the dance is considered to be
a commemoration of the marriage of Peter II. of Aragon to Marie de
Montpellier, June 15th, 1204.[13]
At Béziers no public festival formerly took place without a preliminary
visit to Pepezuc, a mutilated white marble statue with the head
knocked off and replaced by one of common stone. It is obviously a
representation of a Roman emperor, perhaps of Augustus. It stood on a
fluted column, and on the base is inscribed P.P.E.S.V. But the common
story was that it represented a gallant officer who had driven out the
English from the town, of which they had obtained possession. Pepezuc
was wont to be dressed up and decorated with flowers. That is stopped,
as the statue has been removed to the town museum.
The Ass of Gignac continues to be fêted. The town was besieged by
the Saracens. One night, after a hard day's fighting, the defenders,
wearied out, had gone to sleep, when an ass brayed long and loud. His
master had forgotten to feed him, and this he resented. The man awoke,
for the braying of an ass would rouse the Seven Sleepers, and he saw
that the enemy was escalading the walls. He roused the garrison, and
they succeeded in hurling back the ladders. However, the deliverance
was temporary, for a few days later the town was captured and burnt. In
gratitude for what the ass had done, the people of Gignac instituted an
annual commemoration, in which they march a figure of an ass through
the street to the sound of fife and tabor. Then in reminiscence of the
fight a contest takes place in a field called Le Senibelet, in which
one duellist wears a huge helmet, preserved in the town hall, to
represent the Christian warrior, whilst the adversary has a turban on
his head. They fight with sticks of the _garrigou_, that grows on the
otherwise barren limestone, till the Mussulman drops with exhaustion,
when the victor is divested of his helmet and conducted in triumph to
the house where the ass is supposed to have brayed.
A visit should certainly be made to Roquefort, where the famous cheese
is made from ewe's milk. The town is built not only against, but into
a rock of limestone that has been riddled with caves natural and
artificially bored to serve as cellars, in which the cheese is kept
at an even temperature, and is supposed then to attain its special
flavour. The cheese is, however, not all made there; it is brought
there from the Larzac, that maintains enormous flocks of sheep, and
indeed from throughout the arrondissement of Ste. Affrique. The cheeses
are conveyed to Roquefort, there to mature. The blue mould in them is
not, however, due to natural mildew in the cheese, but to mildewed
crumbs of bread blown into the curd in process of formation. The
cheeses are ranged on stages of wooden boards by over nine hundred
girls in short petticoats, called _cabanières_, whose special duty it
is to attend to the cheeses. They are clean, good-natured, happy-faced
lasses, who marry early, usually at sixteen. It is extraordinary if one
is still unmarried at nineteen.
[Illustration: CHEESEMAKERS, ROQUEFORT]
I have described the making of the cheese in my _Deserts of Central
France_. The natural caves in Roquefort number twenty-three, and there
are thirty-four in all. The rocks in part of the town overhang the
houses.
At Lunas, commanded by the escarpments of the Pioch, there is not
much more to be seen than the ruins of a castle and a church partly
Romanesque. Le Bousquet d'Orb occupies a picturesque situation, on a
mamelon in the midst of a basin. On the highest terrace the church
stands up boldly. This is a place with mines of coal and copper.
Boussagues is a very ancient village, once a town enclosed within
walls, and possessing two churches and two castles. The town has
retained its medieval physiognomy—and its smells.
The train from Bédarieux to Lamalou follows the Orb, that flows through
a green and smiling plain. Properly the Orb should pursue its further
course due south, but a low range of hills obstructs the way, and the
river is forced to turn abruptly round and flow due west. The hills to
the south rise; on a lofty isolated height above green forest gleams
white a pilgrimage chapel. We pass on to Lamalou, where every comfort
may be obtained.
Lamalou is picturesquely situated in a narrow lateral valley of the
Orb, in the midst of the buttresses of the Espinouse, or rather of the
Caroux, that links the Cévennes proper to the Montaigne Noire. This
thermal station is growing in importance, the waters being thought
specially and peculiarly beneficial in spinal troubles, above all in
cases of S. Vitus's Dance. In winter it has but 900 inhabitants, but
in summer arrive 10,000 visitors, and a special train-de-luxe starts
twice a week from Paris for Lamalou, enabling the journey to be made in
fifteen hours.
A favourite walk is to N. D. de Capimont, which occupies from two
hours to two and a half. This is a little chapel on the height above
the village, with a hermitage attached. There is no hermit there now.
The last died five years ago. He was found dead in his cell, some days
apparently after that he had expired. He was the last, and there are
not likely to be any successors to an Order that was by no means an
element of good in the country. Ferdinand Fabre has given a graphic
account of the hermits in _Barnabé_, and also in _Mon Oncle Célestin_.
"I am in despair," says he. "Letters from the South inform me that
one by one the hermitages are being closed; that the hermits,
knapsack on back, are quitting their solitary chapels, and that
they do not return. Did the order for their suppression issue from
the Prefecture or from the Episcopal Palace? It is supposed from
both simultaneously. What a pity! O how the picturesqueness of our
South will be the poorer thereby."
The hermits, calling themselves Free Brothers of S. Francis, were a
begging fraternity; they rambled about the country selling sacred
pictures, rosaries, and other religious trifles; they frequented the
fairs and the taverns, and neither ate nor drank in moderation, and
their morals were not irreproachable. But they served a purpose. They
attended to the solitary chapels, and made ample provision for the
pilgrims who visited these shrines.
"Mon Dieu!" says Fabre; "I know well enough that the Free Brothers
of S. Francis, as they loved to entitle themselves, had allowed
themselves a good deal of freedom, more than was decorous. For
instance, it was not particularly edifying at Bédarieux on a
market-day to see the hermits from the mountains round about leave
the tavern of the Golden Grapes staggering, jolting against one
another, shouting, and at nightfall describing ridiculous zigzags
as they went on their way straying along the roads leading to
their solitary dwellings.
"But as these monastically habited gentry in no way scandalised
the population of the South, who never confounded the occupants
of the hermitages with the curés of the parishes, why sweep away
these fantastic figures, who, without any religious character,
recruited from the farms, never educated in seminaries, peasants
at bottom, in no way priests, capable, when required, to give a
helping hand with the pruning-knife in the vineyard or with the
pole among the olives, or the sickle among the corn. Alas! they
had their weaknesses, and these weaknesses worked their ruin."
At the French Revolution the Free Brothers of S. Francis did not creep
into their shells and hide their heads there—they knew better than
that. Though not even in minor orders, they did something smack of the
clerical, and might be sent _à la lanterne_. So they doffed the brown
habit and donned the blouse, went to farmers and served them till the
tyranny was over-passed. In 1806 the curés of the parishes were glad
to find any pious laymen who would keep the chapels clean and serve at
Mass on the days when pilgrims streamed to them. The men thus installed
assumed a Franciscan snuff-coloured habit, and called themselves,
without other justification, Brethren of S. Francis.
When he was a child, Fabre says, there were six hermitages in the upper
valley of the Orb. Now most of the chapels are falling to decay, as
there is no one authorised to look after them. But N. D. de Capimont
is still in considerable repute, and is frequented by crowds on the
Feast of the Assumption. A curious old town, situated high, may be
visited from either Lamalou or Bédarieux. This is Villemagne, with a
ruined abbey and mint. The abbey was founded by Charlemagne in 780.
The church of the parish is dedicated to S. Majan, and is a vast
building; the choir alone was erected in the fourteenth century. It
contains a curious altar of the sixth century, now used as a bénitier.
The old church of S. Gregory, of the thirteenth century, long used as a
granary, has been restored. The old town is full of ancient buildings,
in narrow streets, and is very curious.
But the finest excursion of all is that to the gorge of Héric. For this
it is advisable to take the train to Colombières and walk thence, or
drive from Lamalou. The station of Trivalle is close to the entrance
of the gorge, but from that side it can rarely be ascended, as the
path built up against the precipice is often broken down and not
repaired. But from the other side the ascent is easily made. The view
up the ravine to the needle rocks of granite above is hardly to be
surpassed for beauty of colour and form. The sides are precipitous
for 900 feet. By the path one can reach the village of Héric, lost
at the extremity of this tremendous ravine, and by this is its only
means of communication with the outer world; and so dangerous is the
path that there is a saying in the country that no inhabitant of
Héric dies in his bed. What I have said before I repeat here. None of
the gorges in the Cévennes resemble one another; they have not even
a family likeness, for the Caroux from which the stream descends,
and into the bowels of which this gorge is cleft, is of granite; and
what resemblance can there be between granite and basalt or dolomitic
limestone? When I visited the ravine, snow powdered the silvery-grey
needles at the head and lay in the laps. So seen, the picture of that
ravine is indelibly impressed on my memory as one of surpassing savage
beauty.
S. Gervais is a picturesque little town situated at the junction of
the Casselouvres and the Mare, that takes its rise in the Signal de
l'Espinouse, 3,380 feet. Its church has the peculiarity of the spire
being a grove of trees and a bed of wallflowers that have rooted
themselves in the stonework and been allowed to grow there unmolested.
The town, notwithstanding that it preserves many relics of the Middle
Ages and a general aspect that is venerable, is but modern compared
with the older town, now abandoned, that was built on a jagged rock,
its ruins mingling with the rock and scarce distinguishable from it.
The more modern town is planted on a hillock standing by itself; the
streets are narrow, scrambling up the side of the hill, and the houses
are dingy, dirty, and dilapidated. The still more modern town lies
below the hill. There is an intermittent spring in the side of the
Hôtel Soulié. At Saint Gervais at fair time may be noted the contrast
that exists between the inhabitant of the sun-baked, semi-tropical
lower land, rich in oil, honey, and wine, and the mountaineer who
descends there to sell his cattle. Those who live in the sheltered
valleys are clothed in stout broadcloth and serge, or bottle-green
velvet. They arrive at a fair or market, noisy, sprightly, their mules
laden with corn and fruit. On the other hand, the inhabitant of the
heights of the Espinouse or Larzac is grave, reserved, uncommunicative,
clothed in a garment of coarse cloth called _grisaoud_, followed by
interminable flocks of sheep, goats, and oxen.
At Bédarieux—
"They trade, they chaffer over almonds, olives, honey, cocoons,
wheat, the produce of a sunny nature; at Saint Gervais is a cattle
market, and is of a graver character, for though a man can
dispose lightly of the fruits of the earth that he has tilled,
of the tree he has planted, it is not without a pang that the
shepherd can separate himself from the beast he has nourished.
Between the pastor and his flock do there not exist, moreover,
mutual sentiments of affection, even of love, that defy all
psychology?"
But the market is not one of cattle and corn only, it is of human
beings as well, for hither come the shepherds to hire boys to attend
during the year on the sheep and herds of swine. These lads are
locally called _pillards_, and the token that one has been engaged is
that the shepherd buys the boy a pair of new sabots out of his own
money, a sort of investiture in the pastoral office. These lads and
the shepherds lead a lonely life in the mountains. The boys are not
unkindly treated, for the Cevenol, if rough and silent, has a gentle
and kindly heart. But what a life for a growing boy in wild nature,
among mountains and shrubs, birds of all kinds, and creeping things
innumerable, and at night with the stars shining above his head with
a sharpness and intensity as though they stabbed him to the heart,
but left an exquisite pain behind. He learns to know the signs of the
times, the winds, the voices of nature, to distinguish one bird's note
from another, and to ascertain the virtues of the aromatic herbs on the
limestone causse. The life may be hard, but it is healthy both to body
and mind and soul.
FOOTNOTE:
[13] Ferd. Troubat: _Danse des Treilles_. Toulouse, 1900.