The Abbé, laying his hand on the unfortunate man's head, pronounced Absolution. Then kneeling at his side, he recited the Lord's Prayer. At the words, "Thy will be done," the spirit of him, qui n'avait pas de chance, passed away. [5]
Le Monastier is the place whence Robert Louis Stevenson started with his donkey after having spent there a month.
He says:—
"Monastier is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of language, and for unparalleled political discussion. There are adherents of each of the four French parties—Legitimists, Orleanists, Imperialists, and Republicans—in this little mountain town, and they all hate, loathe, decry, and calumniate each other. Except for business purposes, or to give each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have laid aside even the civility of speech. 'Tis a mere mountain Poland. In the midst of the Babylon I find myself a rallying point; everyone was anxious to be kind and helpful to a stranger."
The book was published in 1879. Since then Legitimists, Orleanists, and Imperialists are no more such. They have acquiesced in being good Republicans. Perhaps they have found other themes on which to contend. I do not think that the peasant has much respect for the Republic, but he is content to live quietly under it. As for the deputies he sends to the National Assembly, for them he has no respect at all. They go up needy attorneys and return flush with money.
A peasant said to me one day: "Have you been at a chase and seen the poor brute down, all the hounds tearing at it and fighting each other for scraps of the carcass? That prey is France, and the hounds are the parties."
In 680 Calminius, Count of Auvergne, founded a Benedictine monastery under the red crags of La Moulette that rises to the east of the monastery. The abbey buildings which had suffered in the Wars of Religion were rebuilt in 1754 and are characterless. They have been converted into mairie and corn market. Everywhere in France we see Virgil's Sic vos non vobis exemplified. Monks erect monasteries that serve as barracks and schools, asylums and municipal buildings to a future generation.
The abbatial church remains, an edifice of the eleventh century, but with an apse of the fifteenth. The façade is Romanesque with mosaic work of lava, and the arcades of window and doorway are striped in the same manner.
On the south side of the choir is the pretty renaissance chapel of S. Chaffre, the second abbot, who was martyred by the Saracens in 732. This chapel with its painted roof dates from 1543. Names of saints became marvellously altered in the south. Theofred has been transformed into Chaffre, we have seen Evodius become Vozy, and in Hérault we come on St. Agatha disguised under the form of Ste. Chatte, and in Ardèche, Mélany is rendered Boloni. At the entrance of the town is another church, built of blocks of lava, of the twelfth century, S. Jean, but it has undergone alterations.