observe its general proportions, and, indeed, it can only be seen to
advantage from one or other of the neighbouring heights. But it is a
building that, in almost any position, would still be remarkable, as
it is a striking example of Romanesque architecture. The great porch
is reached by a splendid flight of steps, sixty in number, where in
the second week of August each year pilgrims come in their thousands
to kneel and worship the Black Virgin, the chief glory of the town in
the eyes of its inhabitants. The builders of the cathedral have
striven to combine dignity and austerity, and the impression which
the outside of the building makes upon the visitor is strangely at
variance with the flummery that surrounds the worship of the Black
Virgin within. One feels that the men who back in the twelfth century
reared these massive walls and built this beautiful cloister had not
their lives dominated by a cheap and ugly wooden doll such as their
fellows of to-day bow down before. We found the sacristan a young man
of most amiable disposition; so friendly indeed that on one of our
subsequent visits, and during the office of High Mass, when he was
attending upon the celebrant, he nodded familiarly to us on
recognising us among the congregation. If the truth must be told, we
were more interested in the contents of the sacristy than in the
cathedral itself. Here were stored many rare and beautiful examples of
ancient wood-carving, picture frames, missals, altar vessels, and,
above all, a manuscript Bible of the ninth century. This
last-mentioned we were shown only on condition that we would tell no
one in the town. Then opening a great oaken cupboard, he produced
first a brass monstrance, similar to the usual receptacle for the
consecrated wafer of the Eucharist, but containing instead behind the
little glass disc a tiny morsel of white feather sewn to a bit of
cloth.
"This," said he, "is a piece of the wing of the angel who visited Joan
of Arc."
"Indeed," I remarked, with every evidence of surprise, "and who got
hold of the feather first?"
"The mother of Joan," he replied, as though he were giving the name of
his tailor; and he proceeded to describe with much circumstance and
detail the wonderful things that had been done by this bit of feather.
"It is, M'sieu, an object of the greatest veneration, and has
attracted pilgrims from far parts of France. It has cured the most
terrible diseases; it has brought riches to those who were poor; it
has brought children to barren women,"--and many other wonders I have
forgotten.
[Illustration: MARKET DAY AT LE PUY, SHOWING TYPES OF THE AUVERNGATS]
[Illustration: LACEMAKERS AT LE PUY]
In a very similar setting he showed us a tiny thorn. "This, M'sieu, is
a thorn from the crown that Jesus wore on the Cross," and while we
were still gazing upon the sacred relic he produced a small box sealed
with red wax and having a glass lid, behind which was preserved a good
six inches of "the true Cross." I thought of a Frenchman whom I had
met at an hotel recently--an unbelieving fellow--who said that there
was as much wood of "the true Cross" preserved in the churches of
France as would make a veritable ladder into heaven. Most wonderful of
all, the sacristan dived his hand into a sort of cotton bag, and
produced a Turkish slipper, worn and battered, but probably no more
than fifty years old. The good man handled the thing as if it had
been a cheap American shoe he was offering for sale. Then looking us
boldly in the face, he said, "_Voici, le soulier de la Sainte
Vierge_." The shoe of the holy Virgin! One did one's best to be
overcome with emotion, but I claim no success in that effort. The
ecclesiastical showman drew our attention to the pure Oriental
character of the workmanship of the sacred slipper, but I declare
frankly that it was not until the Protestant pastor of the town
mentioned the fact next day that I realised that the shoe was "a No.
9!" Among the other contents of the sacristy we noted two maces, one
of elaborate design richly ornamented in silver, and the other of
plain wood only slightly carved. We were told they were carried in
funeral processions, "the ornamental one for people of good family and
the plain one for common folk." Oh, land of liberty, equality,
fraternity!
After exhibiting to us the costly vestments of the bishops, canons,
and other dignitaries of the church, the sacristan came with us to
point out the far-famed Black Virgin of the cathedral, which a first
inspection of the interior had failed to reveal to us. We now found it
to be a small and ugly image fixed above the high altar. It was hardly
bigger than a child's doll, and was dressed in a little coat of rich
brocade. From the middle of the idol a smaller head, presumably that
of the Holy Child, projected through the cloth, and this, like the
head of the larger figure, wore a heavy crown of bright gilt. I do not
pretend to remember one tithe of the miracles attributed to this most
venerated object by our good friend, but I know at least that he
assured me it had burned for thirty-six hours during the Revolution
without being consumed, and had thrice been thrown by sacrilegious
hands into the river Borne, only to reappear mysteriously in its place
over the altar. This story does not run on all fours with the curt
description of the image given by M. Paul Joanne in his guide to the
Cevennes--"an imitation of the old Madonna destroyed in the
Revolution." It is eminently a case in which "you pays your money and
you takes your choice." I reckoned the entertainment provided by the
sacristan cheap at a franc.
IV.
Enough, perhaps, has been indicated to give some idea of the
superstitious character of the people of Le Puy. Nowhere in France
have I found so many evidences of mediæval superstition; the Black
Virgin is throned supreme in the minds of the people, and, unlike most
French communities--if we except the priest-ridden peasantry of
Brittany--the men-folk of Le Puy seem to be as devoted as their women
to the church. The black coats of the clergy swarm in street and
alley. In the town itself there are many institutions packed with
young priests, and some little way out, on the banks of the Borne,
there is a training school as large as a military barracks, with the
pale faces of black-gowned youths peeping from many windows. Almost
every conceivable type of priest is to be encountered here, from the
gaunt, ascetic enthusiast to the fat and ruby-nosed Friar Tuck. The
people of the southern highlands, like the old-fashioned folk of
Scotland, have had for generations a passion to see at least one of
their family in the priesthood, apart very often from any
consideration of fitness, moral or intellectual. Here, as I should
judge, is the reason for one's seeing so many coarse and ignorant
faces among the priests of Le Puy.
The gigantic figure of the Virgin crowning the rock of Corneille,
behind the cathedral, is reached by a long and toilsome pathway, but
the view from the top--for the statue is hollow, and contains a
stairway inside with numerous peep-holes--is perhaps unequalled in the
whole of France. For mile upon mile the country stretches away in
great billowy masses of dark mountain and green plain, and the little
white houses with their red roofs are sprinkled everywhere around Le
Puy, suggesting a sweet and wholesome country life that is hard to
reconcile with the dark superstition of the town. This monument,
however, is of little interest--a vulgar modern affair cast from 213
guns taken at Sebastopol. More to our taste is the quaint little
building called the Baptistry of St. John, which, standing near the
cathedral, takes us back to the fourth century, and earlier still, for
it is built on the foundation of an ancient Roman temple. You see, Le
Puy was a flourishing Roman town when our forefathers in England were
living in wattle huts. We have made some progress in England since
those far-off days, but here, though changes rude and great have taken
place, one may reasonably doubt whether there is much to choose
between the present condition of Le Puy and that vanished past.
[Illustration: _Image of the Black Virgin in the Cathedral_]
[Illustration: _Remains of Roman Temple, Le Puy, with a fountain to
Virgin, a Calvary, and the Mairie_
LE PUY]
V.
Threading our way downhill among the filthy _ruelles_, we pass into
the wide and modern Boulevard Carnot, where the Sunday market is being
held and everything may be bought, from a tin-opener to a donkey, from
a rosary to a cow. A spirited statue of the great La Fayette, who was
born not far away, at the castle of Chavagnac, stands at the top of
this street, where the new Boulevard Gambetta strikes westward with
its clanging electric trams. Down near the river-side, where the
market comes to an end, we visit the old church of the Dominicans,
dedicated to St. Laurence, and in a dark and musty corner we are shown
a tomb with a recumbent figure carved upon it. Here reposes, we are
told, the dust of the greatest of the heroes of old France--none other
than that mighty warrior Du Guesclin, memories of whom the wanderer in
French by-ways meets with as often as the tourist in England comes
upon a house that sheltered Charles II. after the battle of Worcester.
There is every reason for believing that the valorous but ugly Du
Guesclin--he was an "object of aversion" to his own parents--was
buried at St. Denis, but my excellent M. Joanne assures me that this
statue is an authentic likeness of the hero; and the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_ (which in another place mentions St. Denis as the place of
burial) says that the church of St. Laurence "contains the remains of
Du Guesclin." What will you?
The electric tram lands us at the suburb of Espaly, and from the high
road we could almost throw a stone to the massive rock, with its
castle-like walls enclosing on the top a little garden of trees. But
it is another matter to pick our way, ankle-deep in mire, to the
entrance-gate, through the hovels that surround it. Clustering to the
rock we pass are buildings from which priests and "sisters" come and
go with a surprising mingling of the sexes, and when we have climbed
to the top a dark-eyed sister shows us for half a franc a collection
of the most extraordinary Romish trash we have ever looked upon. The
chapel is free to us, and within its incense-laden interior we find
several comfortable priests poring over books or sitting with
insensate stare at the candles burning on a particularly tawdry altar.
The place is in a way unique, as the chapel is not a building at all,
but is hewn out of the volcanic rock, being thus an artificial grotto
consecrated to worship. Its rough walls are hung with votive tablets
and studded with crude stuccos of many saints, giving it the
appearance of a toy bazaar. Only recently the large bronze statue of
St. Joseph that crowned the rock of Espaly, above the grotto-chapel,
was blown down, and visitors are invited to contribute towards the
cost of replacing it.
A little distance away is the higher and more remarkable volcanic mass
known as the Pic d'Aiguille, with a handsome and well-proportioned
church upon its summit. One has to climb a long and winding footpath
and then close on three hundred steps to reach the building, which we
found quite deserted, some village lads doing the "cake-walk" around
an angelic form with a box of donations to St. Michael, the patron
saint of the deserted sanctuary. These _gamins_ also seemed to derive
much pleasure from ringing the bell still hanging in the ancient
tower. It was a matter of speculation why the priests should continue
to use the stuffy and unwholesome grotto of St. Joseph, with this
airy, noble building lying vacant. We can only suppose that the toil
of climbing the higher rock is greater than their zeal. Near by the
base of the Pic d'Aiguille one notices a curious conjunction of old
paganism and modern mariolatry--an ancient temple of Diana flanked by
a massive crucifix on the one hand and a modern Gothic fountain and
shrine to the Virgin on the other.
VI.
After all, and somewhat unwillingly, I find that I have written rather
of the religious side of this interesting town than of its
picturesqueness. But sensational as the first impression of its unique
and beautiful outlines undoubtedly is, it is not that, nor yet the
quaint and entertaining habits of the people, that comes uppermost in
the mind after some days' acquaintance with the place. One leaves Le
Puy convinced, almost at a glance, of its claim to be considered the
most picturesque town in Europe, but depressed with the abounding
evidence that its people, despite their electric trams and their fine
modern buildings, are still largely the thralls of darkest
superstition. For the difference between the religion that here passes
for Roman Catholicism and that we know by the same name in England is
greater than the difference between the latter and the most
Calvanistic Protestantism. To me, at least, Le Puy will be ever the
city of the Black Virgin.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. MICHAEL, LE PUY]
[Illustration: HOUSE OF DU CHAYLA, AT PONT DE MONTVERT
"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."--R. L. S.]
The Country of the Camisards
"These are the Cevennes with an emphasis: the Cevennes of
the Cevennes."--R. L. STEVENSON.
I.
The word Camisard in the south of France, like Covenanter in Scotland,
recalls
"Old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago."
Both describe people who had much in common, for the Camisards were
the Covenanters of France. The origin of the term need not detain us
more than a moment. It is variously attributed to the "Children of
God" having worn a _camise_, or linen shirt, as a sort of uniform; to
_camisade_, which means a night attack, that having been a feature of
their warfare; while some historians have derived it from _camis_, a
road runner. Enough that it stands for a race of people whose
devotion to the Reformed Faith, whose fearless stand for religious
liberty, entitles them to rank among the heroes of Protestantism.
As one may suppose that the general reader, however well informed, is
likely to be somewhat hazy in his knowledge of the Camisards--unless,
indeed, he has had the good fortune to read one of the later, as it is
one of the best, of Mr. S. R. Crockett's romances, _Flower-o'-the-Corn_,
which gives a vivid and moving picture of the Protestant rebellion in
the Cevennes--it may be well that I set down at once a brief outline
of the events which, two centuries ago, made these highlands of the
South one of the historic regions in storied France.
The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, was a transforming
episode in the history of Europe. It represented the triumphant issue
of the sinister policy of the Jesuits, who had long been scheming to
undo the work of the Huguenot wars, whereby the rights of Protestants
to hold public worship and to take part in the government of the
country had been recognised as a sort of political compromise.
The atrocities inflicted by the Roman Catholics on their
fellow-citizens of the Protestant faith during the reign of terror,
which began in October of 1685, need not be recalled; they are among
the blackest pages in the annals of Romish tyranny. But we must know
that in the mountainous regions of the south of France, where the work
of the Reformation had been fruitful, and blessed in inverse ratio to
the poverty of the people and the barrenness of their country, these
hardy hill folk were too poor to quit their villages, and too devoted
to their religious faith to submit meekly to the new order. Like all
peoples whose lot it is to scrape a scanty living from a grudging
soil, the inhabitants of the Cevennes resemble in many ways the
Highlanders of Scotland and Wales. We find in them the same qualities
of sturdy independence, patience, endurance; the same strain of
gravity, associated with a deep fervour for the things that are
eternal. Thus isolated in their mountain fastnesses, hemmed in by the
ravening hordes of Catholicism and constituted authority, they
determined to fight for the faith they valued more than life. In this
hour of awful trial it was not surprising that, out of the frenzy of
despair, strange things were born, and an era of religious hysteria
began, simple women, poor ignorant men, children even, in great
numbers, being thought to come under the direct inspiration of God,
arising as "prophets" to urge the rude mountaineers into a holy war
with "His Most Christian Majesty, Louis, King of France and
Brittany."
But although there had been many encounters of an irregular kind
between the Camisards and the leagued officials of Pope and King in
the closing years of the seventeenth century, it was not until that
weird figure, Spirit Séguier, who has been called the "Danton of the
Cevennes," planned the murder of the Archpriest du Chayla at the
little town of Pont de Montvert, on the 23rd of July, 1702, that the
first blow in the Protestant rebellion may be said to have been
struck. Of this tragic event R. L. Stevenson writes:
"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 country side; 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."
On the 12th of August, nineteen days after the murder of the
Archpriest, the right hand of Séguier was stricken from his body, and
he was burned alive at the spot where he had driven home the first
knife into the oppressor of his people.
[Illustration: TWO VIEWS IN THE VILLAGE OF LA CAVALERIE
Scene of Mr. Crockett's romance "Flower-o'-the-Corn."]
II.
So began the war of the Camisards, for the faggots that burned the
prophet only added to the fire he lighted when he struck at Du Chayla.
Presently his place, as leader of the revolt, was taken by an old
soldier named Laporte, who gave the rising a touch of military
discipline, and soon the Camisards had many captains, all men who
believed themselves endowed with the gift of prophecy.
The Protestants of the Cevennes, thorough in every habit of life, took
up their arms and set about the making of entrenchments and works of
defence with the determination of men prepared to fight to a finish.
It is easy for us in these peaceful days to deprecate their vengeful
deeds, but let us remember, in charity, that if they met
blood-thirstiness with the same, they were maddened by a system of
oppression so brutal as to be almost beyond our belief. Their leader,
Roland, issued a dispatch which for callous suggestion has seldom been
equalled in the annals of war: "We, Count and Lord Roland,
Generalissimo of the Protestants of France, we decree that you have to
make away with, in three days, all the priests and missionaries who
are among you, under pain of being burned alive, yourselves as well as
they."
But the most picturesque figure among the Camisards was introduced
when Jean Cavalier, a baker's apprentice at Geneva, returned to his
native mountains, and by sheer force of a military genius to which
history offers few parallels became the chief leader of the Camisards
while still in his teens. The story of his life is romantic beyond the
invention of any novelist. Not only did he succeed over a period of
three years in defending many important parts of the Cevennes from
organised attacks, but in the course of that time he met and defeated
successively Count de Broglie and three Marshals of France--Montrevel,
Berwick, and Villars--although at one time there was a force of 60,000
soldiers in the field against him. At Nages, a little village in the
southern Cevennes, he encountered Montrevel, and, outnumbered by five
to one, he succeeded, after a desperate conflict, in effecting a
successful retreat with more than two thirds of his thousand men. Not
even the blessings of the Pope on the royalist troops, and on the
"holy militia," raised among the Catholic population, brought the
submission of the Camisards one day nearer. Commander after commander
retired baffled, and Montrevel's policy of extermination--during which
four hundred and sixty-six villages in the Upper Cevennes were
burned, and most of the population put to the sword--left Cavalier,
still a mere lad, master of the southward mountains, threatening even
to attack the great city of Nimes.
Marshal Villars, a renowned soldier, recognised the hopelessness of
continuing the methods of barbarism pursued by his predecessors, and
succeeded in concluding an honourable peace with Cavalier in the
summer of 1704, whereby the Camisards were granted certain important
rights affecting the liberty of conscience and of person. But Roland
and the more fanatical section of the Protestant army held out until
January of 1705, their battle-cry being, "No peace until we have our
churches," Cavalier's treaty having recognised the right to assemble
outside walled towns, but not in churches.
It is this extraordinary baker's apprentice--who at twenty-four had
concluded a long and desperate war, in which he played a part entitling
him to be remembered with national heroes such as William Tell and Sir
William Wallace--that Mr. S. R. Crockett has made the chief figure in
his brilliant romance of the Cevennes, _Flower-o'-the-Corn_.
III.
The little-known region of the Causses is "the Cevennes of the
Cevennes," but Stevenson in his travels did not visit the innermost
Cevennes, and was during most of his journey only on the outskirts of
the real country of the Camisards. The chief of these great plateaux
is the Causse de Sauveterre, which extends south-west from the town of
Mende for upwards of forty miles, and is in parts at least twenty
miles wide. It is divided from the Causse Méjan on the south by the
splendid gorges of the river Tarn, and due south of the Méjan, with
the beautiful valley of the Jonte between, lies the Causse Noir, some
twenty miles east and west, and ten from the Jonte on its north to the
no less beautiful glen on its south, where flows the river Dourbie.
Still southward, and with only this waterway dividing, extends the
splendid mass of the Causse du Larzac, some thirty miles in length,
from the neighbourhood of Millau to the ancient Roman town of Lodève,
which boasted a continuous bishopric from the year 323 to the
Revolution, and is now a bright and populous industrial centre. These
are the more notable of the Causses, and all, no doubt, formed one
mighty plateau in prehistoric times; but numerous swift flowing
rivers have through the ages worn them asunder, producing a series of
magnificent ravines that contain some of the finest scenery in France,
and on whose sides we can trace the slow and steady work of the
streams wearing down to their present courses through the limestone,
the local name for which is _cau_, whence _causse_.
[Illustration: LA CAVALERIE, WITHIN THE CAMISARD WALL
(_From a photograph by_ Mr. S. R. CROCKETT)]
[Illustration: ST. VERNAN, IN THE VALLEY OF THE DOURBIE]
To describe the character of the Camisard country, and to convey some
idea of it to English readers, is no easy matter, since there is
nothing in the British Islands, and little elsewhere in Europe, to
which it may be readily compared. Yet the effort must be made, since
the peculiar nature of the country is of first importance to the
understanding of its people and their historic resistance of all the
might of France two centuries ago.