I may add that the only traces of volcanic action in the Causses have been found at Sauveterre, near the so-called capital. Here basaltic rocks exist amid the limestone.
It is not only the geologist and the botanist, in search of an emotion, to use a French phrase, who will find a paradise here. The palæontologist is no less happy. Sparsely peopled, isolated from civilization as is the 'great jurassic island' in our own day—lost as it seems to have been in the pages of French history—it was inhabited by our prehistoric forerunners, contemporaries of the great cave-bear. The entire department of the Lozère is a rich palæontological field, and the Causse Méjean especially has afforded abundant treasure-trove. In the vast caverns and grottoes of its walls, great quantities of flint implements and fossils, human and animal, have been discovered. A collection of these may be seen in the museum of Mende.
The Causses, owing to their isolated position, may be said to have escaped a history. The great wave of religious warfare that devastated the Cévennes in the Middle Ages passed them by. Only here and there on the skirts of Sauveterre, near Mende, and of the Causse Noir, near Millau, as we have seen, are relics of feudal times. Close around, under the very shadow of these vast promontories, cresting the borders of the Tarn and the green heights between Millau and Mende, ruined strongholds and châteaux abound. The Causse itself enjoyed immunity alike from ferocious seigneurs and still more ferocious theologian bandits, seeking, as they put it, the salvation of their neighbours' souls. The merciless Calvinist leader, Merle, who burnt, pillaged, and depopulated Mende; the equally merciless quellers of the Camisard revolt, emissaries of Louis XII., were tempted by no more prey to penetrate these solitudes.
Were they, indeed, peopled at all? Was the so-called capital of Sauveterre even in existence? Who can answer the questions? Nor is it easy to determine when the entire region first fell under the observation of French geographers, and found at last a name and a place on the map of France.
Arthur Young, the most curious and accurate traveller of his time, brought, moreover, into contact with the best informed Frenchmen of the day, had evidently never heard of any portion of the Gévaudan, as the Lozère was then called, at all answering to the Causses. But a French traveller before alluded to—himself without doubt stimulated by the example of our countryman—M. Vaysse de Villiers, author of the 'Itinéraire Descriptif de la France,' did in 1816, or thereabouts, accomplish the journey from Mende to Florac by way of Sauveterre. 'Never,' he wrote, 'have I seen a more complete aridity, so utter a desert,' He goes on to describe the beauty of the Tarnon (a small river of the Lozère) and its verdant banks. 'All this, added to the delightfulness of the autumn day and the horrible Causse of Sauveterre,' but just passed, transformed the dreary town and narrow valley of Florac into a delicious retreat. In a note he gives the accepted derivation of Causse from calx, saying that it was of general application, and that the word certainly filled a blank in French nomenclature.
It is now instructive to turn to French guidebooks and see how completely the region here described was ignored till within the last few years. I have before me Joanne's invaluable and conscientious guides for Auvergne, including the Cévennes, published respectively in 1874 and 1883. In the former, whilst the Causses figure in the map, beyond a brief allusion to the Causse Noir, they are ignored altogether. St. Énimie is not once mentioned, and nothing is said about the gorges of the Tarn. As to Montpellier-le-Vieux, it could find no place in a guide-book of that date, seeing that it was only discovered ten years later. We now take the edition of 1883. Here, the route from Mende to St. Énimie by way of Sauveterre is described also in the fewest possible words, two pages being found sufficient for short descriptions of the gorges of the Tarn by way of Florac, St. Énimie and the valley of the Joute. Montpellier-le-Vieux, for the very good reason mentioned above, is still absent. But just a year later we find the guide-book remodelled altogether. Joanne now devotes an entire, volume to the Cévennes, and states in his preface that the new issue of the 'General Itinerary of France' contains an account of a region very little known to French tourists, yet well worth visiting, the region comprising the Causses, the Cañon du Tarn and Montpellier-le-Vieux. The distinguished geographer, alas! did not live to see his little purple volume, and, I am compelled to add, Baedeker's red rival, in the hands of scores and hundreds of his fellow-countrymen and women bound for the Lozère.
If the reader now turns to a map of France, and draws a perpendicular line from Mende to Lodève, and a vertical line from Millau to Florac, he will have a pretty good notion of the area occupied by the Causses, including that of the Larzac in Aveyron.
When it is taken into account that the superficies thus covered in the Lozère alone reaches the total of 125,000 hectares, some idea may be gathered of the magnitude of the whole. The entire population of these highlands was only 6,662 souls in 1876, and there can be little doubt that, in the slow process of time, either they will be abandoned altogether, or by means of scientific methods utterly transformed. The laborious, long-suffering, hitherto ignored Caussenard will not surely be long neglected by the patriarchal Government of France. The Republic has laid iron roads across the Lozère, thus redeeming the department from the isolation and inertia of former times. Another tardigrade act of justice will surely ere long complete the work, and the inhabitant of the French steppes be made to share in the well-being and happiness long enjoyed by his fellow-countrymen.