The two days' diligence journey from Grenoble to the département des Hautes-Alpes was over one of those broad macadamized highways which make driving a luxury in many parts of Europe. If we were more huddled than in the less-antiquated Swiss diligences, we had the compensation of far more original fellow-travelers than one is apt to find among the tourists that monopolize those vehicles. There were generally two or three priests, half a dozen merry peasants, and a sprinkling of small officers and country-townspeople, who respectively lost no time in establishing a pleasant intimacy with their neighbors. The unflagging chatter, in which all joined vivaciously, and often all at once, was in striking contrast with the silent gloom which would have enshrouded a similar party of English or American travelers. It was impossible to resist the contagion of cheerfulness or to refuse to mingle more or less in the talk.
On the second evening, having trusted to the map and the very meagre information supplied by Murray, we found ourselves deposited at an isolated wayside cabaret. It presently transpired that St. Bonnet, where we expected to pass the Sunday, was some half mile or more off the high-road on which this was the nearest station. While we waited in a long, low, dimly-lighted room for the guide we had bespoken, two gendarmes and a peasant sat listening to, or rather looking at, a vivid account of some shooting adventure given in extraordinary pantomime by a deaf and dumb huntsman. In time a withered gnome trundling a wheelbarrow took possession of us and our light belongings, and led us forth into the night. We traversed the valley, mounted the hill on the other side, and at last entered the deeper night of a lampless village, and began to thread its steep, black streets. The only gleam of light was at what seemed to be the central fountain. Many women were gathered there, chatting as they filled their pails or stood with the replenished vessels poised on their heads. The inn was of a piece with all those at which we lodged in Dauphiné, deficient in everything for which an inn exists. The feature of these inns which I remember, I think, with the least relish was the condition of the floors. It is literally true that they are never washed. A daily sprinkling is the only cleansing process they undergo: its effect is to soften the wood until it begins to absorb a large proportion of the rubbish which is often but never thoroughly swept up, and grows black and evil-odored. This result is most manifest, of course, and most offensive in the dining-rooms.
St. Bonnet offered even less than we anticipated of interest. On the Sunday morning we gladly drove away in such an equipage as the place afforded to the not very distant village of St. Laurent en Champsaur. Here we reached our first point in what was fifty years ago the parish of Felix Neff, and has been for centuries a refuge of Protestantism. It is a hamlet of stone cottages, lying on a kind of plateau and overlooking a wide and fertile valley. The surrounding hills, though mostly bare, were broken and beautified on that still autumn morning with dim clefts of shadow. The sun was not yet high, and broad masses of purple fell here and there across the plain and the brawling stream that divides it, still the Drac, which we had seen an almost stately river near Grenoble.
Having already learned something of the local habits, we bade our driver take us to the temple. That is the distinctive name of a Protestant church in these Roman Catholic lands. The morning service was in progress when we entered the square and austere little chapel. Every pew was occupied, the men and women taking different sides of the one stone-paved aisle. A gentle-looking old man was reading from a book with much clearness and expression, and in a singularly pleasant voice, what we soon found to be an excellent sermon. At its close a quaint, slow hymn was sung, and the congregation was dismissed. To our amusement, the simple folk formed a double line outside the door to inspect us as we emerged. It was easy to imagine their interest in an apparition so unusual as foreign visitors, and we submitted to their curious but entirely respectful scrutiny, wishing that our aspect might give them half the satisfaction we had in watching their eager faces and noting their droll costumes. Ludicrously high stocks and "swallow-tail" coats of brown homespun made the dress of the men different from that of corresponding rustics in America. The chief peculiarity in the women's attire was a straw hat, of which the towering crown, decked with huge bows, and the vast flapping brim, were like an extravagant caricature of the poke-bonnets of our grandmothers.
As we stood demurely in the midst of the group, the old man who had read, and who proved to be the schoolmaster, hastened out to greet us. It was his habit, he said, in the pastor's absence, to conduct the service. For more than thirty years, although the parish had repeatedly been for months without a minister, he had not allowed the temple to remain closed a single Sunday. His wife appeared directly, and both insisted, with apologies for their peasant fare, that we should stop to dinner at their house, a few yards from the church. We were in truth nothing loath to accept the invitation, and found little to excuse in the savory soup, the fresh-laid eggs and the fruit that composed the simple feast, while we were scarcely less regaled with the neatness of the rooms and the spectacle of well-washed floors and spotless though coarsely-woven linen. But most of all to be enjoyed and remembered was the peep we got into this good old man's life and history. From his youth he had been schoolmaster at St. Laurent, and it seemed never to have occurred to him that he might claim a more distinguished post. Unconscious of any special self-sacrifice, he told us about his work, heroic through its quiet faithfulness, in that obscure hamlet. He enumerated with pride the various pastors and teachers who had been his scholars—among the former his eldest son, among the latter two of his daughters. Listening to his talk, we understood the intelligence of expression in many faces and the large proportion of young men at the service of the morning.
In our walks about the village after dinner the schoolmaster took us to see an ancient woman who in her youth had been a catechumen of Felix Neff. It is curious to find that term, which was applied by the early Church to candidates for admission, in use now among the Protestants of France and Italy. With tears in her eyes and an enthusiasm that made her speech almost incoherent, the grandame talked of "Monsieur Neff," his courage, his friendliness, how he went among his people like one of themselves, and what good words he always spoke. As we left St. Laurent our host and his wife bore us company to the brow of a little hill whither we had sent on our chaise, and stood there to wave us an adieu as we descended on the other side. Then we saw them turn back toward the group of thatched and moss-grown cottages which was all their world.
That evening we reached Gap, the capital of the department of the High Alps, and once an important Protestant centre. Farel, the French Reformer of the sixteenth century, was born and for a time preached here. But since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes until very lately—during a period, that is, of nearly two hundred years—no Protestant pastor has been tolerated in the town, and the once numerous flock was long since dispersed. A Swiss society undertook two or three years ago a Protestant mission at Gap, and a friend in Geneva had given us the name of the present evangelist. A humbler or more thankless charge could scarcely be imagined than such a work in such a place. There is no nucleus of hereditary Protestants, as in the mountain-parishes of the department, and at the same time the little city is so isolated that its people have retained the superstitions and religious animosities of the Dark Ages. It was therefore with much compassionate thought of his pitiful case that we sought the evangelist's house. He was not, however, a man toward whom one could maintain for a moment that frame of mind. Brisk, cheerful, polished in manner and with an unsought elegance of dress and carriage, he had not in the least the air of a despised heretic struggling hopelessly against social as well as ecclesiastical contempt. Six avowed converts were the definite results of his work for more than two years. During much of that time he had been hampered by insuperable difficulties in finding a place for his service or even a lodging for his family. The latter was at last provided, as a daring defiance of popular prejudice, by a landlord who prided himself upon being a libre penseur. For his chapel he secured a disused shop in the front of a bath-house. The proprietress of the establishment was punished by the priests for her unrighteous thrift by being refused the sacrament. Her business, too, was for a while endangered. One instance out of many of the kind of prejudice she provoked was that of two wealthy and educated ladies, who, as they entered the bath one day, heard music in the chapelle évangélique and instantly beat a hurried retreat. They only stopped to explain that all the world knows the object of Protestant worship is the devil, and they dare not stay within hearing of the sacrilegious rites. In spite of multiform discouragements like these, the evangelist and his wife, a motherly woman of much quiet strength, whose gentleness made sweet a very homely face, talked of their work and prospects with a matter-of-course hopefulness which it was not easy to share. Nothing in their habits, they told us, had more amazed their Roman Catholic neighbors at first than their lavish use of water. But in that particular, at least, suspicion had been allayed, their perseverance had proved the practice harmless, and their example was beginning to find a few timid imitators.
Our first night after leaving Gap was spent at Embrun. As we approached the town, which surmounts an extraordinary platform of rock, its walls looking like part of the smooth, brown tufa precipice that rises abruptly out of the valley, we seemed to see in its picturesque and impressive aspect something of the grandeur and gloom of its long history. The cathedral where so many archbishops have ministered preserves little trace of its former splendors: even architecturally it is without attraction.
For the next two days our route continued to lie through the valley, which we entered upon leaving Gap, of the Durance. It is an apparently insignificant but treacherous stream, which by repeated floods has spread ugly devastation over a hill-girdled country that ought to be smiling with peace and plenty. At Guillestre we came in sight of the jagged double peak of Mont Pelvoux, and got a magnificent vista toward the south, ending in the white slopes of some giant of the Cottian Alps. The Mont Pelvoux and the Pointe des Écrins, the greatest of those mountains from which the department takes its name, although they appear on none of the ordinary maps, stand, I believe, only twelfth and thirteenth in the scale of height among the mountains of Europe. The explorations of Whymper have introduced them to his readers, but they still remain almost untrodden by other climbers.
On the second afternoon we reached the lateral valley of Fressinière, the climax of our journey. There was refreshment for soul as well as body in the daintily-clean, bare-floored rooms, redolent of apples set out to dry, into which we were welcomed by Pastor Charpiot and his wife at Pallons. The village is a mere group of Alpine huts, and the only chance of shelter was at the presbytery. So much we had little doubt of finding there, but we counted as little upon the warm and graceful hospitality which greeted our application. And when our nationality transpired it added new zest to the good-will of our host and hostess. We were their first Transatlantic guests.