Originally it was the seat of the distinguished family whose name it bears. The Revolution practically destroyed it, but such as is left shows completely the great extent of its functions both as a fortress and a palace.
These elements were made necessary by long ages of warfare and discord,—local in many cases, but none the less bloodthirsty for that,—and while such institutions naturally promulgated the growth of Feudalism which left these massive and generous memorials, it is hard to see, even to-day, how else the end might have been obtained.
Auvergne, according to Fergusson, who in his fact has seldom been found wanting, "has one of the most beautiful and numerous of the 'round-Gothic' styles in France ... classed among the perfected styles of Europe."
Immediately to the southward of Le Puy is that marvellous country known as the Cevennes. It has been commonly called sterile, bare, unproductive, and much that is less charitable as criticism.
It is not very productive, to be sure, but a native of the land once delivered himself of this remark: "Le mûrier a été pendant longtemps l'arbre d'or du Cevenol." This is prima-facie evidence that the first statement was a libel.
In the latter years of the eighteenth century the Protestants of the Cevennes were a large and powerful body of dissenters.
A curious work in English, written by a native of Languedoc in 1703, states "that they were at least ten to one Papist. And 'twas observed, in many Places, the Priest said mass only for his Clerk, Himself, and the Walls."
These people were not only valiant but industrious, and at that time held the most considerable trade in wool of all France.
To quote again this eighteenth-century Languedocian, who aspired to be a writer of English, we learn:
"God vouchsafed to Illuminate this People with the Truths of the Gospel, several Ages before the Reformation.... The Waldenses and Albigenses fled into the Mountains to escape the violence of the Crusades against them.... Cruel persecution did not so wholly extinguish the Sacred Light in the Cevennes, but that some parts of it were preserved among its Ashes."