Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches

by Henri de Crignelle

The capital of Le Morvan partially owed its rise to a celebrated nunnery, founded by Gerard de Roussillon, a great hero of romance and chivalry, who lived, loved, and fought under Pepin, the father of the grand Charlemagne. This nunnery, which was sacked and burnt to the ground by the Saracens, those terrible warriors of the East, was restored in the ninth century, and fortified; and as the sainted inmates were believed to have amongst their relics a tress of the golden hair of the beautiful and repentant Magdalen, troops of the faithful—and people were ready to believe a great deal in those days—flocked to Vezelay, when it soon became a large and flourishing town.

In the tenth century, when the people, in their endeavour to shake off a few links of their fetters, refused to bend their bodies in the dust before their lords and their minds before their priests—when the seeds of liberty, till then lying in unprofitable ground, though watered for centuries by the tears of tyranny and oppression, first germinated and rose above the earth, who gave the signal of resistance in France?—the inhabitants of Vezelay. Yes; it is to her citizens that the honour belongs of having first refused to submit to the power, the domineering power, of political and ecclesiastical rule; it was her brave inhabitants who, assembling in secret, thought not of the peril, but, having promised help and protection one to the other, flew to arms. A short and desperate struggle ensued, but the victory remained in the hands of the abbot of Vezelay. Hundreds of brave men were put, without mercy, to the sword, and many, with less mercy, burnt alive or died by the torture in the dark dungeons of the abbatical palace. Vezelay still preserves in its archives the names of twelve of these martyrs.

Again in the twelfth century, when the cry to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre shook all Europe, and every nation poured forth her tens of thousands to drive the infidel from that land in which their Redeemer had lived and died an ignominious and cruel death, it was at Vezelay that Pope Eugenius III. assembled a great council of the princes of the church, the great barons, and chivalry of those times. It was in her immense cathedral, one of the oldest and largest in the kingdom, amidst the clang of arms, war cries, and religious chaunts, and in the presence of Louis le Jeune, King of France, that St. Bernard preached, in 1146, the Second Crusade.

Vezelay is celebrated as having been the birth-place of Beza, the great Protestant Reformer (1519), who succeeded not only to the place but to the influence of Calvin, and was, after that eminent man's death, regarded as the head and leader of the Genevese church.

It was to Vezelay, the only town that dared to offer them the protection of its walls, that the unfortunate Protestants fled after the horrible massacre of St. Bartholomew's—the base political cruelty of the brutal homicide, Charles IX. Tracked and hunted down like wild beasts, and a price set upon their heads, they found staunch and noble hearts in the inhabitants of Vezelay; but, ere long, an army of their insatiable foes arrived and besieged the town, and treachery at a postern one stormy night made them masters of it, when scenes of horror followed under the mask of religion that even at this distance of time make one recoil with terror and disgust at the dogmas of the corrupt faith which dictated them.

Roasting men alive, and boiling women, dashing out the brains of many a cherub boy and prattling girl, was the pleasing and satisfactory pastime with which Pope Gregory, Catherine de Medicis, and her congenial son gladdened their Christian hearts. The blood of their victims still cries to us from the ground of their Golgotha; for on the south side of the town there is a large green field, called Le Champ des Huguenots. The damning fact, from which this spot received its name, has been handed down to us by the historian. It is as follows:

The Catholics, having instituted a strict search in the woods and caverns of the environs, made so many prisoners that they were puzzled what to do with them—nay, in what manner they should take their lives. Among many ingenious experiments, it was suggested that they should bury them alive up to their necks in the field to which we have alluded; and this was accordingly done with nine of them, whose heads were bowled at with cannon-balls taken from the adjoining rampart, as if they had been blocks of wood instead of live human heads. The shrieks of the miserable beings excited no compassion; on the contrary, it afforded amusement to their executioners: so that games of skittles upon the same principle were played the whole length of this meadow.

Turning aside from these execrable deeds of man to the works of Nature and of Nature's God, which have always been and always must be lovely and worthy of our deepest admiration, let us dwell for a moment upon the splendid view from the castle-terrace, which forms the principal promenade of Vezelay. Shaded by large and venerable trees, through the lofty branches of which many a storm has howled for nearly four hundred years, the sight from hence is one of the finest panoramic views in France.

All around, whether on the slope of the hills by the river-side, in the middle distance, or near the mountains which form the horizon, are seen hundreds of little villages, and many a white villa scattered among the green vines as daisies on the turf. To the left and right are St. Père and Akin, two hamlets, which seem like faithful dogs sleeping at the foot of the mountain crowned by Vezelay. The province in which this cloud-capped fortress-town is situated is a retired spot out of the beaten track of the tourist, the man of business, or the man of pleasure—lost, as it were, in the very heart of beautiful France, like a wild strawberry in the depth of the forest—encircled by woods, and unknown to the foreigner, who, in his rapid journey to Geneva or to Lyons, almost elbows it without dreaming of its existence.

Le Morvan rears in its sylvan depths a population of hardy and honest men and lovely women, fresh as roses, and gay as butterflies. There the soft evening breezes are charged with the songs of ten thousand birds, the odours of the eglantine, the lily of the valley, and the violet, which, shaking off its winter slumbers, opens its dark blue eye and combines its perfume with that of its snowy companion.