Amid these inflictions, however, and the later Protestant persecutions in Dauphiné, the diocese grew to great importance, and endures to-day as a suffragan of Aix, Arles, and Embrun.
The Église de Gap has even yet the good fortune to possess personal reliques of her first bishop, and accordingly displays them with due pride and ceremony on his jour de fête, the 26th October of each year. Says a willing but unknowing French writer: "Had Demetrius—who came to Gap in the first century—any immediate successors? That we cannot say. It is a period of three hundred years which separates his tenure from that of St. Constantine, the next prelate of whom the records tell."
Three other dioceses of the former ecclesiastical province have been suppressed, and Gap alone has lived to exert its tiny sphere of influence upon the religious life of the present day.
The history of Gap has been largely identified with the Protestant cause in Dauphiné. There is, in the Prefecture, a monument to the Due de Lesdiguières—Françoise de Bonne—who, from the leadership of the Protestants went over to the Roman faith, in consideration of his being given the rank of Connétable de France. Why the mere fact of his apostasy should have been a sufficient and good reason for this aggrandizement, it is difficult to realize in this late day; though we know of a former telegraph messenger who became a count.
Another reformer, Guillaume Farel, was born and lived at Gap. "He preached his first sermon," says History, "at the mill of Burée, and his followers soon drove the Catholics from the place; when he himself took possession of the pulpits of the town."
From all this dissension from the Roman faith—though it came comparatively late in point of time—rose the apparent apathy for church-building which resulted in the rather inferior cathedral at Gap.
No account of this unimportant church edifice could possibly be justly coloured with enthusiasm. It is not wholly a mean structure, but it is unworthy of the great activities of the religious devotion of the past, and has no pretence to architectural worth, nor has it any of the splendid appointments which are usually associated with the seat of a bishop's throne.
Notre Dame de l'Assomption is a modern edifice in the style Romano-Gothique, and its construction, though elaborate both inside and out, is quite unappealing.
This is the more to be marvelled at, in that the history of the diocese is so full of incident; so far, in fact, in advance of what the tangible evidences would indicate.