A Book of the Cevennes

by S. Baring-Gould

The splendid ruins of the Castle of Boulogne attract a host of visitors from Vals annually during the season. It is reached by carriage, quitting the high road from Aubenas to Privas by a branch road from Auriolles to S. Etienne. The castle was built by a Count of Valentinois in the eleventh century. It remained in the hands of the Grimaldi, Counts of Valentinois, to 1344. In 1384 it became the property of the Lestranges, and they retained it to 1579; when it passed to the de Hautefort de Lestranges till 1632. After that it shifted proprietors rapidly. At the Revolution it belonged to Fay-Gerlande till 1794, when it was sold. The Count, seeing what was coming, disposed of most of his land to one Blaise Comte on condition that he should every year present a violet at the castle on the 15th of March. Nevertheless it was disposed of to a man of S. Etienne, who pulled much of it down and sold the materials. It was then purchased by the Abbé Volle, curé of Asperjoc, to rescue it from complete demolition, and he retained it for thirty years and then disposed of it to the Marquess Theodore de Lestrange. The magnificent gateway with twisted columns and the arms of Montlaun was erected by Claude René d'Hautefort de Lestrange, who brought to him the barony of Privas; he it was who transformed a feudal stronghold into a sumptuous palace. The façade is sustained on a structural terrace.

A favourite walk of but an hour above Vals and through the valley of the Volane leads to Antraigues. The river has worked its laborious course through masses of basalt and beds of scoria overlying granite and porphyry. At every step some fresh picture opens or some fresh object of interest arrests the eye. Here is a precipice over which leaps a stream in a beautiful fall; there colonnades of prismatic form; further on masses of scoriæ brought down by the rains from the mountain side, whose flanks have been bared. The road plunges even deeper into the ravine that narrows. Then a stream bounds in a double fall over a basaltic face of rock, the second leap being formed by a ledge entitled the Devil's Chair, on which His Majesty is said to cool himself in the water on leaving his heated realms below. Next the Cheese Rock is reached, a mass of basalt standing by itself, and Antraigues appears as an eagle's nest perched on a peninsula of crag between three valleys, those of the Mas, the Bise, and the Volane. The tower of the church is all that remains of the old fortress of the Marquesses of Antraigues. The site is savage, amidst green chestnuts, black lava rocks, and red volcanic cinders. The Marquesses of Antraigues bore an evil name as robbers, lawless and violent in the extreme, for which several were executed at Toulouse. The story of the last of those who owned and for a while occupied the castle forms the theme of Jules Claretie's Les Muscadins.

Valée de la Volane (Le Fauteuil du Diable)

Emmanuel-Louis-Henri de Launez, Comte d'Antraigues, was born at Villeneuve de Berg, in the Vivarais, in 1755. In 1788 he published a Mémoire sur les états généraux, which attracted attention, as in it he denounced the hereditary nobility as the greatest scourge with which heaven could chastise a free people. It is an ill bird that befouls its own nest, and that the Count was sincere in his attack on the prerogatives of the aristocracy in France is doubtful judging by his subsequent conduct. This pamphlet caused him to be elected to the States-General convoked for the following year. But no sooner had he taken his seat in the Assembly than he changed his note, and spoke for the retention of the privileges of his class. This sudden conversion caused great offence, and he did not long retain his seat. In consequence of the events of the 5th and 6th October he quitted the Assembly, and left France in 1790 and went first to Switzerland, then to Russia, and after that to Vienna. The coalition of princes forgot his early encouragement of the Revolution and charged him with divers secret missions, and granted him a pension of 36,000 francs. He became the chief organiser of various plots to effect a counterrevolution in France, that "guerre de pots de chambre," as Napoleon called it in his highly coloured language; and he was at the bottom of the intrigue that provoked the treason of Pichegru. In 1797 he was in Venice, but when he saw that the capital of the Adriatic was about to succumb he fled, but fell into the hands of an outpost of the French army in Italy, and was arrested with all his papers that contained full evidence of the conspiracy of Pichegru. However, he managed to escape by the contrivance of Mme. Sainte-Huberti, who, after having been his mistress, later became his wife. Then he fled to Russia, where he joined the Greek Church, was accorded a pension by the Emperor, and was sent to Dresden as attaché to the Russian Legation. There he published a pamphlet against Bonaparte so violent and scurrilous, that the Saxon Government was constrained to expel him so as to avoid a conflict with France. He departed for London, carrying with him certain documents containing secret articles of the Treaty of Tilsit, of which he had obtained a copy. He communicated these to the English ministry, and in return was granted a liberal pension.

He still maintained relations with Paris, and was mixed up in every plot for the restoration of the Bourbons.

However, it was not given to him to see the realisation of his schemes. The imperial police had sent two emissaries to London, who managed to seduce Lorenzo, the Italian valet of the Count, and through him to obtain notes and despatches which his master was preparing for transmission to the Cabinet of the Prime Minister. On July 22nd, 1812, the Count d'Antraigues having expressed his intention to visit the Prime Minister to obtain his opinion on a certain memoir, Lorenzo, who had purloined it and committed it to the spies of Napoleon that they might make a transcript of it, saw that his faithlessness was at the point of being discovered. Then he resolved on killing his master and mistress and on blowing out his own brains.

This he did. Such was the version of the story as given in the English newspapers. The only witness to the murder was the Count's coachman. The circumstances of the assassination and suicide were never sifted; the whole matter was hushed up; and it became a matter of mutual recrimination between the French and English Governments, each casting on the other the blame of the murder of this miserable man—a man without a respectable quality.

The name of Antraigues is taken from its position, Inter Aquæ, between the three streams—the Volane, the Bise, and the Mas.