Antoine, Baron de la Tour, and de Segard, and de S. Vidal, Governor of Le Velay, made a desperate and ineffectual effort, conjointly with the Governor of the Vivarais, in 1572, to capture the castle of Beaudiné in Velay, held by the Huguenot captain, La Vacheresse, who had secured it by stratagem, and who from it issued to ravage the country, destroy churches, hang priests and monks, and levy blackmail on the villages.
Two months later he was wounded at Espaly, as related. In the same year he was successful in dispossessing the Calvinists of five other castles. Then he besieged and took the town of Tence, hung the pastors, and gave up the inhabitants to massacre.
In 1577 he laid siege to Ambert in Auvergne, but failed to take it, and retired discomfited. By royal command, in 1580 he advanced upon S. Agrève, which had become the head-quarters of the Calvinists in the Vivarais. During the siege he lost an eye. After having taken measures for the defence of Le Puy, which was menaced by Polignac, who was at war with the city, he hastened to the relief of Bédoués in the Gévaudan, that was besieged by the redoubted Captain Merle, but was unsuccessful.
A few years later, in 1586, he left Le Puy with six cannons to assist the Duke of Joyeuse in the siege of Malziac. It was taken, and he was appointed governor; he also obtained the governorship of Marvejols, which capitulated after a siege of eight days. In 1588 he was before S. Agrève for the second time, and he took it and levelled the town walls. Devoted to the cause of the League, he hotly and zealously contested the governorship of Velay with De Chattes, who had been appointed by Henry IV. In 1590 he besieged Espaly again, burnt the town, and blew up the castle. In a negotiation in 1591 between the Royalists and the Leaguers the quarrel took so personal a turn that S. Vidal and the commandant of Le Puy challenged De Chattes and another to duel, and in it S. Vidal fell.
Still further up this picturesque stream is the Castle de La Roche Lambert, the theatre of Georges Sand's novel Jean de la Roche.
"I may say without exaggeration that I was reared in a rock. The castle of my fathers is strangely incrusted into an excavation in a wall of basalt five hundred feet high. The base of this wall, with that face to face with it of identically the same rock, form a narrow and sinuous valley, through which winds and leaps an inoffensive torrent in impetuous cascades, athwart delicious meadows shaded by willows and nut trees.
"This Château de la Roche is a nest—a nest of troglodites, inasmuch as the whole flank of the rock we occupy is riddled with holes and irregular chambers which tradition points to as the residence of ancient savages, and which antiquaries do not hesitate to attribute to a prehistoric people.
"The castle of my fathers is planted high up on a ledge of rock, but so that the tops of the conical roofs of the towers just reach above the level of the plain. One detail will illustrate our situation. My mother having poor health, and having no other place to walk save one little platform before the castle on the edge of the abyss, took it into her head to create for herself a garden at the summit of the crag on which we were perched."