Geology—Fossil shells—Antediluvian salmon—The Druids—Chindonax, the High Priest—Roman antiquities—Julius Cæsar's hunting-box—Lugubrious village—Carré-les-Tombes—The Inquisitive Andalusian.
Le Morvan, independently of its hunting and fishing, its lovely climate and fine wines, pretty girls and jolly curés, possesses a more important class of beauties and perfections, secrets and enigmas, over which the savans would pore and ponder through many a day and many a night: those men who, like Eve, long to grasp the fatal apple—the apple which destroys while it attracts—the apple whose flavour, alas! is so bitter,—the apple of science. Let the geologists, who are ever bending in earnest study over the mysteries of nature, and breaking stones by the road-side,—who are ever seeking to analyse the matériel of creation,—who are always contemplating the internal and geognostic constitution of the globe, the red or the blue clay, the yellow gravel, the trappe, the limestone, the granite, or the slate, to satisfy themselves what this poor planet is made of,—let them come and ransack Le Morvan. Let them bring their hammers and chisels, their compasses and barometers, and above all, their passport,—precious document! an hundredfold more useful in France, in these liberty days, than a pair of shoes or a shirt,—let them come, and I promise them endless discoveries, a rich and ample harvest.
In the meadow lands, when, for the purpose of sinking wells, the soil is penetrated to an immense depth, the workmen often come to thick strata of schist, in which they find imbedded trunks and roots of trees, and stalks of plants and ferns, which now grow in tropical climates only.
In the highest and steepest parts of the mountain chain may be found marine petrifactions of every variety—the sea-hedgehog, the oyster, the mussel, and the star-fish; and in the beds of trachytic rock, deposited in such order that one might fancy they had been placed there by a careful and tasty housewife, are layers of the most curious shells, univalve, bivalve, sublivalve and multivalve, madrepors, and shapeless remnants of creatures now no longer known, and petrified fish.
Some few years ago, an engineer, who was carrying a road through a rock in the mountain called the Val d'Arcy, found a salmon in the most perfect condition, even with head and tail, the unhappy wretch enclosed in the heart of a large stone. I should certainly have pronounced this fish to be a cod, had not science decided it was a salmon of a large species—genus salmo, sixty vertebræ. It is now to be seen in the Natural History department, section Salmonidæ, of the Museum in the Jardin des Plantes, at Paris.
Poor old salmon! said I, and I took off my hat when I had the honour of being presented to him; Poor old salmon! what wouldst thou have said, some twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, when, free and glorious thou didst pierce the briny waves,—when, perhaps, thou wast gambolling amongst the pointed summits of the Alps, plunging in ecstacy into the emerald depths of oceans now vanished,—what wouldst thou have said, could the thought have crossed thy brain, that one day thou shouldst be here? Under a glass! ticketted, numbered, pasted to the wall! forming an item in a collection of things fabulous, and exhibiting thy venerable form, thine antediluvian physiognomy, to thousands of badauds, who either pass thee without a glance, or examine thee with unfeeling curiosity, bestowing not a thought upon thy great age or thy cruel fate, or with a whit more respect for thee and thine awful history, than a cockney would show to a whitebait caught but yesterday in the Thames, and served up to him as a fraction of his fishy feast at Blackwall.
Le Morvan, abounding in forests, was a district most congenial to the gloomy spirit of the religion of the ancient Druids; and therefore, in the earliest days of the history of France, they consecrated its groves of splendid oaks to the performance of their terrible rites. Remains of many of their massive monuments still exist, in the fields, in the deep valleys, and on the tops of the hills. Antique and mysterious all of them—three-pointed stones, three-cornered stones, and massive groups of stones in mystic circle ranged, round which, the peasant will tell you with bated breath, les Gaurics—the spirits of the giants—come to weep and bewail on the first night of each new moon. During the last century, a peasant, who was at work in a deep ditch in a beautiful field of this district, came, in the course of his excavations, upon a stone which indicated, that he was not far from one of those monuments with which he was so familiar; and, upon further investigation, it proved to be the black granite tomb of the famous Chindonax, the high-priest of the Druids. It contained many relics—the sickle and the collar of gold, the holy bracelets, the metal girdle, the sacrificial axe, the knife of brass; and, in the midst, was a glass urn, containing a pinch or two of grey powder—human dust! proud dust—sad and last remnant of the Druid Chindonax.
Tumuli were, a century ago, very numerous in the uncultivated and desert tract of Les Bruyères; but these little artificial hillocks are disappearing very fast, for the peasants throw them down when they wish to clear and level the ground. These tumuli always contain collars in baked clay, arrow-heads, battle-axes of stone, pieces of crystal, and other articles of a similar description.
Even Julius Cæsar, the cruel conqueror of Gaul, the pitiless victor of Vercingetorix—Cæsar, who cut off the hands of the Gauls as the only means of preventing them from fighting—Cæsar admired Le Morvan. He loved that savage country, he delighted in it; in the deep gorges of its mountains he pursued the large wolves and the wild boar, and in it he established the custom of relays of dogs the whole length of the woods.
In this our day, on the summit of a mountain near the one on which is built the town of Chinon, may be seen the thick strong walls of ancient Roman buildings—buildings that have been fortified, bristling with palisades, and surrounded by moats—where Cæsar had his principal kennel, his hunting-box; in short, the spot which, in the third book of his 'Commentaries,' he calls Castrum Caninum.