Cévennes

“ 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. ”

“ Whilst there, I made some acquaintance with a banker of the place, who had a poetic Ruskin-like way of describing the wildness of the Cevennes, the grey rocks, desolate scenery, long lines of russet landscape. This so took hold of me, that I went to Lodêve and engaged a carriage for several days to explore the Cevennes thoroughly. It was wild enough certainly and rather curious, but an unbroken monotone; every view, every rocky foreground, even each dreary ruinous village, repeated the last, and after eight or nine hours I was utterly wearied of it ”

“ Footnote 1 Jean Cavalier, principal leader of the Camisards in the war of the Cevennes, born 1679 in the village of Rebaute, near Anduse, vas the son of a peasant, he lived at Geneva, and was employed in agriculture, when the persecutions of the reformed inhabitants of the Cevennes under Louis XIV. reached their highest pitch, and caused the breaking out of the troubles, enflaming his enthusiasm for his faith, and inducing him to return home. ”

“ The northernmost portion of the Cevennes is the chain of the Boutières, composed of granite and gneiss, and they are the least interesting portion of the series. Few of the summits surpass 3,600 feet, but they throw out a spur that is a supreme effort, the Mont Pilat, 4,700 feet; precisely as the Pyrenees, before expiring in the east, have projected to the north-east, and tossed aloft the noble pyramid of the Canigou. The Boutières attach themselves at their southern extremity to Mézenc, the loftiest peak of the Cevennes, 5,750 feet. ”

“ In the midst of this Babylon I found myself a rallying-point; every one was anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger. This was not merely from the natural hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise with which I was regarded as a man living of his own free will in Monastier, when he might just as well have lived anywhere else in this big world; it arose a good deal from my projected excursion southward through the Cévennes. A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto unheard of in that district. ”

“ In its upheaval, moreover, the granite turned up, snapped, and exposed the superposed beds, and left them as bristling ridges to the east and south. It is this fringe that constitutes the Cévennes. These describe a half-moon, with its convexity towards the basin of the Rhône. Locally, indeed, the name Cévennes is limited to a tangle of schist ridges and deep-cleft ravines, constituting that portion of the arc which is between the Coiron and the limestone plateau of Larzac. ”

“ From my youth upwards I have never been able to shoot but in a kneeling position; should a hare run by under my nose, I cannot hit it standing, I must first throw myself down; but I have always been much ridiculed by my companions for it."
"For the rest," resumed the priest, "you have mountain-legs, and you must have been born in the Cevennes, or the Pyrenees, your eye too is characteristic of the mountaineer who is far-sighted."
"Just so," said the huntsman, "I come from Lozère, the wildest part of the mountains." ”

“ THE Cevennes are a mountain fringe to the uplifted plateau of Central France, and are less visited by English tourists than any other mountainous district in la belle France. They have been most unjustly neglected. ”

“ There are panoramas more vast and sublime, but none more striking. The clouds drifting across the sky cast great patches of shadow over the storm-tossed and solidified ocean; and when the wind disperses the veil, it seems as though the abysses gaped suddenly under one's eye, so deep are the clefts, so tumultuous are the crests of the mountains. And the Alps! yonder they are, far away on the horizon. To the south is the immeasurable mass of the tossed Cévennes ”

“ Gabriel also, who had become a soldier in Montpellier, was recognized and executed, and the lovely Isabelle from fear, in the dungeon of Grenoble, retracted from her faith, and thus all had the appearance of tranquillity. Sparks of the faith, however, and of the force of miracles had been scattered and lost in the Cevennes. For the spirit possesses the property of fire, which, out of a little spark, by which a small beetle cannot warm itself, grows, in a few hours, into a brand that lays woods in ashes, and mocks all human efforts to extinguish it. What may not lie in one single word? ”

“ Men have scooped out rudimentary dwelling places in the sides in fifteen to twenty stages, one above another; a chapel and a prison were among these excavations. A troglodyte family lived in one of these caves at the end of the eighteenth century.
The mountains of the Vivarais are the finest portion of the Cévennes, so noble are their outlines, so deep are the clefts that seam them, so tumbled is the aspect of range heaped on range ”

“ North of those limestone hills lay the Cévennes, where since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the poor Huguenot peasants were making their desperate fight for liberty of conscience, against the might and the bigotry of Louis XIV. Their leader, Laporte, was dead, but he had been succeeded by Jean Cavalier and Roland, and revolt still raged in the caves and fastnesses of the upper Cévennes, though Maréchal Montrevel and the Intendant of Languedoc assured the king that they had wiped out the insurrection. ”

“ Their heights are not extraordinary; they throw out long lateral spurs towards the Rhone. The scenery is tamer than in any other part of the Cevennes; that portion from Annonay to S. Etienne is given up to factories, which makes the country people prosperous but the country unattractive. ”

“ On the side of Le Velay is a platform bristling with sucs. At the foot of the Gerbier is the nascent rill of the Loire crossing the road and flowing through a vast prairie in which ooze forth a thousand springs that plunge into the ravine in which the Loire gathers its waters."—Ardouin Dumazet.
The lake of Issarlès is indisputably the most beautiful of the sheets of water in the Cévennes. It is circular, and has no visible exit. It swarms with trout, yet they do not breed in it, as these fish will not spawn unless they can go up stream to a suitable gravelly bed, and no stream enters Issarlès. ”

“ The eastern face of the Cevennes towards the Rhone is torn and steep. That towards the west exhibits a different aspect altogether, as there the range starts out of a high uplifted plain but little eroded. ”

“ Coming here, I was told that it was almost impossible that Cyprien de Beauvilliers could have settled in the Cévennes without being known; travelling on to Savoy and to Lausanne, I learn at last that he did most undoubtedly come here from Geneva years ago. Shall I ever know--ever find out? ”

“ The mountainous district of France to which, somewhat loosely, Stevenson applies the name Cevennes, lies along the western confines of Provence, and overlaps on several departments, chief of which are Ardèche, Lozère, Gard, and Herault. In many parts the villages and the people have far less in common with France and the French than Normandy and the Normans have with provincial England. ”

“ Since M. Martel first drew attention to the gorges of the Tarn, and possibly due in a measure to my work, these gorges are becoming annually frequented more and more by tourists. However fine they may be, there are others in the departments of Ardèche, Gard, and Hérault, that fall but little, if at all, short of them in savagery and strangeness.
There are no great towns in the Cévennes. Such as there are are sleepy and stationary; but from Béziers, Montpellier, Nîmes, Le Puy, where every comfort may be found, it is easy to run into the mountains, and [Pg 14] return from them to recruit. ”

“ The Cevennes lie at right angles to the Pyrenees, and traverse the plains for about 2000 stadia, terminating in the middle near Lugdunum.1305 They call those people Aquitani who inhabit the northern portions of the Pyrenees, and the Cevennes extending as far as the ocean, and bounded by the river Garonne; and Keltæ, those who dwell on the other side of the Garonne, towards the sea of Marseilles and Narbonne, and touching a portion of the Alpine chain. ”

“ This was the band of Spirit Séguier; men who had joined their voices with his in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the Cevennes. Séguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc, whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole army of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart, who admitted people to the sacrament or refused them, by ‘intensively viewing every man’ between the eyes ”

“ Such was the industry of the Cevennes nearly two hundred years since, and such it remains to the present day.
(p. 083) The people are of a contented nature, and bear their poverty with cheerfulness and even dignity. While they partake of the ardour and strong temper which characterize the inhabitants of the South of France, they are probably, on the whole, more grave and staid than Frenchmen generally, and are thought to be more urbane and intelligent; and though they are unmanageable by force, they are remarkably accessible to kindness and moral suasion. ”

“ The maire, a Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself characteristic of the country. The young women of the Cevennes profit by the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as governesses into England ”

“ François Vivens was a wool-comber of Valleraux, a small man and lame, but with a robust and indefatigable body. He had gone to Holland, but, on the accession of William to the English throne, felt so confident that the Prince of Orange would bring all the power of his kingdom to assist the Calvinists of Languedoc, that he returned thither. When he arrived in the Cevennes he found the people agitated by the spirit of prophecy. He was the first to organise rebellion. ”

“ Only when in March 1819, a great number of the inhabitants of the Cevennes threatened the town of Nismes--"Thirty thousand men are ready to descend from their mountains, with the weapons of despair, if the salvation of their brethren demand it,"--the persecutions of the Protestants were put a stop to. ”

“ Now the head and forefront of the persecution—after Lamoignon de Bâvile—François de Langlade du Chayla (pronounce Chéïla) , Archpriest of the Cevennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house in which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert. He was a conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the moderation of which he is capable. ”

“ This work includes a dedication to the queen, an historical account of the people of the Cévennes, the bull of Pope Clement against the Camisards, and the bishop of Nîmes’s mandate publishing the bull, and a discourse on the obligations of the English to help the Camisards, and a form of prayer used in the Camisard assembly, printed in London in 1703 under the title Formulaire de prières des Cévennois dans leurs assemblées. ”

“ Winding, narrow, and all but impassable cliff-like glens predominate, giving to the Cevennes that peculiarly intricate character which enabled its Protestant inhabitants, in the beginning of the last century, to offer so stubborn and gallant a resistance to the atrocious persecutions of Louis XIV."
Such being the character of this mountain district—rocky, elevated, and sterile—the people inhabiting it, though exceedingly industrious, are for the most very poor. Sheep-farming is the principal occupation of the people of the hill country ”

“ Again, if in the northern Cevennes the people are narrow in religious judgments, and more filled with zeal than charity, what was I to look for in this land of persecution and reprisal—in a land where the tyranny of the Church produced the Camisard rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the Catholic peasantry into legalised revolt upon the other side, so that Camisard and Florentin [10] skulked for each other’s lives among the mountains?
Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the series of stone pillars came abruptly to an end ”

“ Cévennes, a range of low mountains on the eastern edge of the central plateau of France, separating the basin of the Rhône from those of the Loire and Garonne; average height from 3000 to 4000 ft.; the chief scene of the dragonnades against the Huguenots under Louis XIV.
Ceylon (3,008) , a pear-shaped island about the size of Scotland, separated from India, to which it geographically belongs, and SE. of which it lies, by Palk Strait, 32 m. broad; comprises a lofty, central tableland with numerous peaks, the highest Tallagalla, 8000 ft., and a broad border of well-watered plains. ”

“ All but one of the pastors in the Cévennes, Pierre Roman, had been captured and hung. The death of Vivens and the peace of Ryswick deprived the Calvinists there of hope of assistance from the Protestant powers, and resistance ceased. However, although all seemed quiet, the authorities redoubled their measures of severity. Everywhere new excesses of cruelty were committed by the governors of the provinces, the judges and the provosts of the mounted police, against poor creatures who desired only to be let alone to serve God according to their dim lights. ”