Fall at Antraigues
On August 16th, the fête of S. Roch, a great pilgrimage is made to Antraigues, attended by many thousand persons. The neighbouring villages send their processions with clergy, crosses, and banners waving. The bells of Antraigues clash merrily. The whole bourg is in gala costume. At nine o'clock a.m. all the processions unite and form one long, many-coloured, winding line that creeps up the hill towards the chapel of S. Roch, hid among chestnut trees. The path is rough, stony, sun-scorched. At intervals are little shrines constructed of boughs and adorned with flowers, roses, broom, lavender. In each of these is a little girl dressed in white with a chaplet on her head, holding a scroll that bears an inscription in honour of the patron saint, lavishing on him every possible expression of love and respect. The procession advances, now murmuring a litany, now breaking into hymn, and in the rear come the clergy in white, with the blue smoke of incense rising and spreading in the clear summer air.
On reaching the chapel the pilgrims separate their files to allow the ecclesiastics to pass. The priest ascends to the altar for Mass, and the crowd falls into a living stair along the slope of the mountain, kneeling in ranges, some among the chestnut trees, athwart whose leaves the sun shoots arrows of fire that make the white caps and the gold chains of the women flash. The Mass ended, the procession descends in the same order as that in which it mounted, and disperses. The second scene is less edifying—it is changed to the cabaret, where the pilgrims refresh themselves, and the men, in too many cases, carouse.
S. Roch was a native of Montpellier. His story is an ecclesiastical romance. The earliest biographer states candidly that he found "nothing trustworthy about him" in record, and so compiled his life from popular legend. In or about 1350 a squalid-looking man, a beggar, was taken up by the authorities of Montpellier and cast into gaol, where he died. On the removal of the body for burial, it was discovered that the vagabond was Roch, a nephew of the governor of the town, who had embraced a life of dirt and poverty out of "sheer cussedness." There always have been and always will be men who, like Falstaff, "have a kind of alacrity in sinking"; who revolt against the restraints and refinements of social life, and find their pleasure in living like swine. S. Roch had his parallel in Bampfylde Moore Carew.
There is nothing edifying in the story, nothing in his career to justify canonisation. Nevertheless he is in vast repute as a patron against plague and fever and sores, and he has been given a place in the Roman martyrology, accepted and held up to be invoked, although absolutely nothing trustworthy is known of him. Can slackness and carelessness go further? In fact, the Roman martyrology, possessing the sanction of the self-entitled Vicar of Christ, is a veritable Noah's Ark containing clean and unclean beasts.
From Antraigues, a climb of an hour leads to the Coupe d'Aizac, the best-preserved crater in the Vivarais. M. Paulett Scrope thus describes it:—
"The Coupe d'Aizac rises on the ridge of one of the granitic abutments that project from the steep escarpment of the Haut Vivarais. It has a beautiful crater slightly broken down towards the north-west, and from the breach a stream of basalt may be seen to descend the flank of the hill, and turning to the north-east enter the valley of the river Volane, which has subsequently cut it entirely across, and discloses three distinct storied ranges; the lowermost very regularly columnar, that in the middle less so, and the upper nearly amorphous, cellular, and with a ragged scoriform surface. This current, which appears originally to have occupied the bottom of the gorge in an extent of four miles, from the village of Antraigues nearly to Vals, has been worn away and carried off on many points by the violence of the torrent. Its relics adhere in vast masses to the granite rocks on both sides, sometimes reaching the height of 160 feet above it. The lower portion of this bed is very beautifully columnar, the upper obscurely so; this latter has been in parts destroyed, and a pavement or causeway left, formed by an assemblage of upright and almost geometrically regular columns fitted together with the utmost symmetry."