Wanderings by Southern Waters, Eastern Aquitaine

by Edward Harrison Barker

I had left this hamlet, and was on the bank of the Tarn, when I heard the patter of bare feet upon the pebbles behind me. Turning round, I saw the eldest of the boys who had been watching me in the doorway. He had an idea that I should go wrong, and followed stealthily to see. He now told me that if I continued by the water I should soon be stopped by rocks, and I accepted his offer to show me the way up the cliff. His recklessness in running over the sharp stones made me ask him if they did not hurt his feet. 'Oh no!' he replied; 'they are used to it.' It is indeed astonishing what feet are able to get used to. The boy's joy at the few sous which I gave him was almost ecstatic. He had hardly thanked me when he set off running homeward to show how he had been rewarded—for his sharpness in thinking that I should lose my way, and allowing me to do so before saying a word.

I was by the river-side not far from Sainte-Enimie when a rather alarming noise broke the silence and became rapidly louder. I looked up the steep cliff, and saw to my consternation a great stone bounding down the rocks and crashing through the vines. As I seemed to be in the line of it I hastened on. I had only gone about ten yards when it bounded into the air and, passing sheer over the path and bank, plunged into the Tarn with a mighty splash. I reckoned that had I remained where I was it would have just cleared my head. It was a fragment of rock which, from its size, might well have been two hundredweight. The same thing happened earlier in the day, but that time I was not so unpleasantly near. The heavy rain of the previous night, coming after a long period of drought, was probably the cause of these already-loosened stones starting upon their downward career. All these calcareous rocks are breaking up. The process of disintegration and decomposition is slow, but it is sure. Every frost does something to split them, and every shower of rain entering the crevices does something to rot them; so that even they cannot last. The Tarn is carrying them back to the sea, to be deposited again, but somewhere else.

I was at Sainte-Enimie before sunset, and there I found the air laden with the scent of lavender. True, all the hills round about were covered with a blue-gray mantle; but I had never known the plant when undisturbed give out such an aroma before. Looking down from the little bridge to the waterside, my wonder ceased. There in a line, with wood-fires blazing under them, were several stills, and behind these, upon the bank, were heaps of lavender stalks and flowers such as I had never seen even in imagination. There were enough to fill several bullock-waggons. The fragrance in the air, however, did not come so much from these mounds as from the distilled essence. It was evident that Sainte-Enimie had a considerable trade in lavender-water.

I spent an unhappy evening, for the inn where I stopped—it called itself a hotel—had been made uninteresting by enterprise; and a couple of tourists from the South, with whom it was my lot to dine, caused me unspeakable misery by talking of nothing else but of a bridge which they had lately seen; If I should ever be near it, I think the recollection of that evening will make me avoid it. It may be a miracle in iron, but none the less shall I owe it an everlasting grudge. These gentlemen from Carcassonne were typical sons of the South in this, that the sound of their own voices acted upon their imagination like the strongest coffee blended with the oldest cognac. They would have been amusing, nevertheless, but for the horrible intensity of their resolve to make me see that nightmare of a bridge. If one had taken breath while the other spoke, or rather shouted, I should have suffered less; but they both shouted together, and their struggle to get the better of one another by force of lung, gesticulation, and frenzied rolling of the eyes became a duel, whereby the solitary witness was the only person harmed. What a relief to me if they had gone down to the river bank and fought it out there! No such luck, however. Had there been no listener, they, too, might have wished the bridge in the depths of Tartarus.

If I passed an unhappy evening at Sainte-Enimie, I spent a worse morning. There was a change of weather in the night, and when the day came again, it was a blear-eyed, weeping day, with that uniform gray sky with steam-like clouds hiding half the hills which, when seen in a mountainous region by a person bent on movement, is enough to give him 'goose flesh.' I now felt a longing to leave the Cevennes and to return to the lower country, but there seemed no chance of escape. The rain continued hour after hour—and such rain! It was enough to turn a frog against water. As the people of the inn seemed incapable of showing sympathy, I went out to look at the town under a borrowed umbrella. It was certainly not much to look at, especially under circumstances of such acute depression. I walked or waded through a number of miry little streets where all manner of refuse was in a saturated or deliquescent state—cabbage-stumps and dead rats floating in the gutters, potato-peelings and bean-pods sticking to the mediaeval pitching—everything slippery, nasty, and abominable. There were old houses, as a matter of course; but who can appreciate antiquities when his legs are wet about the knees and his boots are squirting water? Nevertheless, I tried to notice a few things besides the vileness underfoot. One was a rudely-carved image of the Virgin in a niche covered by a grating. This was in such a dark little street that it seemed as if the sun had given up all hope of ever shining there again. I struggled through the slush to the church, built, with the town, on the side of a hill rising from the Tarn. I found a Romanesque edifice—old, but rough, and offering no striking feature, save the arched recesses in the exterior surface of the wall. A little higher upon the hill was the convent founded by St. Enimie; but the original building disappeared centuries ago.

On returning to the inn I passed the Fontaine de Burlats, where St. Enimie was cured of her leprosy in the Merovingian age. It was a change to see something that really seemed to enjoy the incessant downpour and to enter into the spirit of it. The fountain would be remarkable in another region by the volume of water that gushes in all seasons like a little river out of the earth; but there are so many such between the Dordogne and the Tarn, wherever the calcareous formation has lent itself to the honeycombing action of water, that this copious outflow loses thereby much of its claim to distinction.

The legend of St. Enimie is fully set forth in a Provençal poem of the thirteenth century by the troubadour Bertrand de Marseilles, who received his information from his friend the Prior of the monastery at Sainte-Enimie, which in the Middle Ages was the most important religious house in the Gévaudan. The MS. is preserved in the library of the Arsenal, Paris. It was at the express recommendation of St. Ilère that Enimie sought the fountain of Burla (now Burlats), and bathed her afflicted body in its pure waters. The passage of the poem containing this injunction is as follows:

'Enimia verges de Dyeu,
Messatges fizels ti suy yeu.
Per me ti manda Dieus de pla
Que t'en anes en Gavalda,[*]
Car, lay trobaras una fon
Que redra ton cors bel e mon
Si te laves en l'aygua clara.
* * * *
A nom Burla; vay l'en lay
Non ho mudar per negun play.'

[*] Gévaudan.

The relics of the saint were destroyed or lost at the time of the Revolution; but high upon the side of a neighbouring hill a chapel has been raised to her, and it is a place of pilgrimage.