In the Track of R. L. Stevenson and Elsewhere in Old France

by J. A. Hammerton

"One of the most beautiful and romantic pictures is supplied by the ancient Castle of La Caze, which occupies a sheltered corner in a bend of the river."

It is indeed difficult to convey any adequate idea of the sensation of such a journey, where the water itself is at once the element and the cause of the progress. One sits as in a cockle shell on the enchanted sea, gliding along magically amid scenes of unequalled splendour; but, alas! the bronzed youth at the prow and the hairy wine-bibber at the stern are no creatures of fairyland, but the very serviceable mortals without whose aid the wonders of the Tarn would have remained to this day as distant as the realms of faëry.

The panorama, which seems to pass us slowly on both sides of the river—for the absence of mechanical propulsion gives one the illusion of sitting still while the cliffs on each hand move past the boat—is of ceaseless change. For a time the hills reach up, green and carefully cultivated, to the higher basaltic cliffs, that rise perpendicular to the edge of the plateau, a thousand feet or more above our level, and then as they suddenly narrow, with never a foothold for the tiniest of creatures, the river roars between precipices that soar sheer and stupendous from its water, or in some cases lean forward so that at a little distance both sides seem to meet and form an arch across the stream. And the whole is rich in colour, the prevailing grey of the rocks being varied by great masses in which warm reds and browns occur, while every crevice is picked out with greenery, and wherever the foot of venturesome man can scramble there have been those bold enough to terrace patches of the slopes where vines and even tiny crops of wheat contrive to grow. One of the most beautiful and romantic pictures is supplied by the ancient castle of La Caze, which occupies a sheltered corner in a bend of the river, where above it the cliffs uprear with great hollows and rotundities, illustrating how in the unknown ages the water has eaten its way down from the upper level to its present bed.

The Château de La Caze is set about by many tall and leafy trees, and one could imagine no holiday more enjoyable than a few days passed here, for—Oh, ye romantic and practical Frenchmen!—the castle has been transformed into an hotel, where all the appointments and even the costumes of the servants recall the Middle Ages in which it was built. As we approached, one of our boatmen took up a large conch and, blowing into it, set the gorge echoing as from a foghorn; but we had decided not to visit the château, as it was our purpose to lunch farther down at La Malene, and the sounding of the conch was meant only to attract the attention of some of the servants, to whom our boatmen shouted that we had thrown on the river-bank about a quarter of a mile above the castle a sack of loaves for its inmates.

V.

Between Ste. Enimie and La Malène there are four or five points at which we have to change our barque, where the river leaps over dangerous weirs, and several changes are necessary on the lower beach. It is due to this manœuvring and to a wait of nearly two hours at La Malène, while the bateliers lunch and gossip boisterously at one of the hotels—the voyageurs also being not unmindful of refreshment—that Le Rozier is not reached until six o'clock, despite the rapid course of the river.

La Malène is one of the three places south of Ste. Enimie, and still in the real cañon of the Tarn, where the river is crossed by bridges; all splendid structures, designed to withstand the spring floods when the current carries with it many a mighty block of ice and all sorts of debris from the hills. The first and newest of the bridges is passed at St. Chely, a small and dirty, but extremely picturesque, hamlet half-way between Ste. Enimie and La Malène, where we explored a wonderful series of ancient cave dwellings, and where, by the way, an enterprising photographer has joined the modern to the prehistoric by painting an advertisement of his wares on the face of the cliff overlooking the former haunts of the Troglodites.

La Malène is, to my thinking, one of the most beautiful points on the route. The little town sits in the mouth of a great ravine that reaches far into the Causse de Sauveterre, and on the opposite side the majestic mass of the Causse Méjan climbs to well-nigh 1,800 feet above the river, the mountain road wriggling upward from the bridge in a series of wonderful twists and turns, "exactly like an apple paring thrown over the shoulder of the engineer," as Mr. Crockett has said of another highway in the farther south. It takes a man, walking at his best, more than an hour to climb that same road, as I can testify, and never for a moment during the ascent is the little town at the foot out of view. This will convey some idea of the barrenness of the mountain-side, where cattle and sheep crop a scanty herbage on fields that slope like the roof of a house and are thickly strewn with stones and boulders. At La Malène also there is a mediæval castle, which, like La Caze, is the property of that great tourist agency, "La France Pittoresque," and now serves as a hotel; but we were more interested in the old church of Romanesque design, where we saw the common grave of the thirty-nine villagers who were slain by the Republican troops during the Terror, and are remembered throughout the Cevennes as "the Martyrs of La Malène." It is striking proof of the terrible thoroughness of that bloody regime that even to this remote and sequestered nook the gory hand of the Terror stretched out.