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 Wigton, 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.