The Annotated 'Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes'/The Heart Of The Country

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Heart Of The Country

I was now drawing near to Cassagnas^map, a cluster of black roofs upon the hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon in the clear air by many rocky peaks. The road along the Mimente is yet new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first cart arrived at Cassagnas.^[1] But although it lay thus apart from the current of men’s business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the history of France. Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons, Chabrier and Tavan,^[2] and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood.

Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas. This was the band of Spirit Séguier; men who had joined their voices with his in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the Cevennes. Séguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc, whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs^[3] as chaplain-general to the whole army of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart, who admitted people to the sacrament or refused them, by ‘intensively viewing every man’ between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures off by rote. And this was surely happy; since in a surprise in August 1703, he lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible.^[4] It is only strange that they were not surprised more often and more effectually; for this legion of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war, and camped without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God for whom they fought. This is a token, not only of their faith, but of the trackless country where they harboured. M. de Caladon,^[5] taking a stroll one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he might have walked into ‘a flock of sheep in a plain,’ and found some asleep and some awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no recommendation to insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond ‘his faculty of singing psalms’; and even the prophet Salomon ‘took him into a particular friendship.’ Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic troop subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but sacraments and ecstasies.

People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of Rimmon.^[6] When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, ‘convinced by the uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than sympathy,’^[7] granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed, one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic. It is that of a Catholic curé in revolt, who has taken to his bosom a schoolmistress. And his conduct, it is worth noting, is disapproved by the Protestant villagers.

‘It is a bad idea for a man,’ said one, ‘to go back from his engagements.’

The villagers whom I saw seemed intelligent after a countrified fashion, and were all plain and dignified in manner. As a Protestant myself, I was well looked upon, and my acquaintance with history gained me further respect. For we had something not unlike a religious controversy at table, a gendarme and a merchant with whom I dined being both strangers to the place, and Catholics. The young men of the house stood round and supported me; and the whole discussion was tolerantly conducted, and surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and contentious differences of Scotland. The merchant, indeed, grew a little warm, and was far less pleased than some others with my historical acquirements. But the gendarme was mighty easy over it all.

‘It’s a bad idea for a man to change,’ said he; and the remark was generally applauded.

That was not the opinion of the priest and soldier at Our Lady of the Snows. But this is a different race; and perhaps the same great-heartedness that upheld them to resist, now enables them to differ in a kind spirit. For courage respects courage; but where a faith has been trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population. The true work of Bruce and Wallace^[8] was the union of the nations; not that they should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but that, when the time came, they might unite with self-respect.

The merchant was much interested in my journey, and thought it dangerous to sleep afield.

‘There are the wolves,’ said he; ‘and then it is known you are an Englishman. The English have always long purses, and it might very well enter into some one’s head to deal you an ill blow some night.’

I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in the arrangement of life. Life itself, I submitted, was a far too risky business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth regard. ‘Something,’ said I, ‘might burst in your inside any day of the week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked into your room with three turns of the key.’^[9]

‘Cependant,’ said he, ‘coucher dehors!’^[10]

‘God,’ said I, ‘is everywhere.’

‘Cependant, coucher dehors!’ he repeated, and his voice was eloquent of terror.

He was the only person, in all my voyage, who saw anything hardy in so simple a proceeding; although many considered it superfluous. Only one, on the other hand, professed much delight in the idea; and that was my Plymouth Brother, who cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy ale-house, ‘Now I see that you know the Lord!’

The merchant asked me for one of my cards^[11] as I was leaving, for he said I should be something to talk of in the future, and desired me to make a note of his request and reason; a desire with which I have thus complied.

A little after two I struck across the Mimente, and took a rugged path southward up a hillside covered with loose stones and tufts of heather. At the top, as is the habit of the country, the path disappeared; and I left my she-ass munching heather, and went forward alone to seek a road.

I was now on the separation of two vast water-sheds; behind me all the streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean;^[12] before me was the basin of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozère, you can see in clear weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons; and perhaps from here the soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley Shovel,^[13] and the long-promised aid from England.^[14] You may take this ridge as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five legions camped all round it and almost within view—Salomon and Joani^[15] to the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien^[16] had finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cevennes, which lasted all through October and November 1703, and during which four hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe, utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land. Time and man’s activity have now repaired these ruins; Cassagnas is once more roofed and sending up domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens, in low and leafy corners, many a prosperous farmer returns, when the day’s work is done, to his children and bright hearth. And still it was perhaps the wildest view of all my journey. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of hills ran surging southward, channelled and sculptured by the winter streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts, and here and there breaking out into a coronal of cliffs. The sun, which was still far from setting, sent a drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but the valleys were already plunged in a profound and quiet shadow.

A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a black cap of liberty,^[17] as if in honour of his nearness to the grave, directed me to the road for St. Germain de Calberte^map. There was something solemn in the isolation of this infirm and ancient creature. Where he dwelt, how he got upon this high ridge, or how he proposed to get down again, were more than I could fancy. Not far off upon my right was the famous Plan de Font Morte, where Poul with his Armenian sabre slashed down the Camisards of Séguier.^[18] This, methought, might be some Rip van Winkle of the war, who had lost his comrades, fleeing before Poul, and wandered ever since upon the mountains. It might be news to him that Cavalier had surrendered, or Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an olive.^[19] And while I was thus working on my fancy, I heard him hailing in broken tones, and saw him waving me to come back with one of his two sticks. I had already got some way past him; but, leaving Modestine once more, retraced my steps.

Alas, it was a very commonplace affair. The old gentleman had forgot to ask the pedlar what he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect.

I told him sternly, ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ cried he.

I repeated ‘Nothing,’ and made off.

It’s odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became as inexplicable to the old man as he had been to me.

The road lay under chestnuts, and though I saw a hamlet or two below me in the vale, and many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it was a very solitary march all afternoon; and the evening began early underneath the trees. But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and a bel amoureux,^[20] her handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa in the poem,^[21] my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all,’^[22] outwears the accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God’s mercy, both easy and grateful to believe!

We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless dust.^[23] The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I issued ourselves into her light. I had emptied out my brandy at Florac, for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous and scented Volnay;^[24] and now I drank to the moon’s sacred majesty upon the road. It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury. Even Modestine was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her little hoofs as to a livelier measure. The road wound and descended swiftly among masses of chestnuts. Hot dust rose from our feet and flowed away. Our two shadows—mine deformed with the knapsack, hers comically bestridden by the pack—now lay before us clearly outlined on the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went off into the ghostly distance, and sailed along the mountain like clouds. From time to time a warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all the chestnuts dangling their bunches of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering music, and the shadows danced in tune. And next moment the breeze had gone by, and in all the valley nothing moved except our travelling feet. On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs and gullies of the mountain were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the huge field of sad nocturnal colouring.

At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great darkness, until another turning shot me without preparation into St. Germain de Calberte. The place was asleep and silent, and buried in opaque night. Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon the road to show me that I was come among men’s habitations. The two last gossips of the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me to the inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was already out, and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an hour later, and I must have gone supperless to roost.

Notes

1. when the first cart arrived .. it was not uncommon in Europe for isolated mountain villages to have no incoming roads and for the inhabitants to be mostly self-sufficient.
2. Chabrier and Tavan .. [unknown]
3. Cavalier treats in his memoirs .. Jean Cavalier, Memoirs of the Wars of the Cévennes under Col. Cavalier (1726)
4. surprise in August 1703 .. [unknown reference]
5. M. de Caladon .. a French Protestant exiled to England who left two published accounts of the Camisards, which Stevenson had read in the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh.
6. Naaman in the house of Rimmon .. 2 Kings, V, 18: "In this thing the LORD pardon thy servant, that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon: when I bow down myself in the house of Rimmon, the LORD pardon thy servant in this thing.", - Christopher MacLachlan annotated this referring to 2 Kings 5: in which Naaman is cured of leprosy by the prophet Elisha and thus accepts the power of God, but desires to continue to worship his Syrian God when he returns home.
7. the edict .. Edict of Toleration of 1787
8. Bruce and Wallace .. National Scottish heroes who resisted English occupation.

   William Wallace (1270-1305)

   Robert the Bruce (1274-1329).

   See Robert Burns (1759-1796), March To Bannockburn:

   Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,

   Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

   Welcome to your gory bed,

   Or to Victorie!

   Now's the day, and now's the hour;

   See the front o' battle lour;

   See approach proud Edward's power—

   Chains and Slaverie!

   Wha will be a traitor knave?

   Wha can fill a coward's grave?

   Wha sae base as be a Slave?

   Let him turn and flee!

   Wha, for Scotland's King and Law,

   Freedom's sword will strongly draw,

   Free-man stand, or Free-man fa',

   Let him on wi' me!

   By Oppression's woes and pains!

   By your Sons in servile chains!

   We will drain our dearest veins,

   But they shall be free!

   Lay the proud Usurpers low!

   Tyrants fall in every foe!

   Liberty's in every blow!—

   Let us Do or Die!

9. might burst in your inside any day of the week .. curiously, it is believed Stevenson died of a burst blood vessel in the brain.
10. translation .. "However", said he, "to sleep outside!"
11. one of my cards .. Visiting cards became an essential accessory to any 19th-century upper or middle class lady or gentleman. Visiting cards were not generally used among country folk or the working classes. The standard form visiting card in the 19th century in the United Kingdom was a plain card with nothing more than the bearer's name on it.
12. Western Ocean .. Atlantic Ocean.
13. Sir Cloudesley Shovel .. Cloudesley Shovell (1650-1707), British naval hero. In 1704 he served under Sir George Rooke in the Mediterranean and cooperated in the taking of Gibraltar. In January 1704 he was named Rear-Admiral of England, and shortly afterwards commander-in-chief of the British fleets. He co-operated with the Earl of Peterborough in the capture of Barcelona in 1705.
14. aid from England .. In 1703 Shovell broke off two ships from his Mediterranean fleet bearing money, arms and ammunition for the Camisards, near the coast of Sète. They cruised about and signaled, but the rebels could not respond due to nearby royalist forces. Finally the ships left and re-joined the fleet. The royalists proceeded to destroy coastal fishing villages to prevent future landings.
15. Joani .. or Joanny; a chief rebel who had about 400 Camisards under command.
16. Julien .. M. de Julien, a noble from the House of Orange and who was appointed by King Louis XIV as the major-general and military commander-in-chief of the Vivarais and the Cevennes. He was particularly ruthless in destroying villages, personally requesting from the King to be allowed to use fire instead of just pick-axes in carrying out their orders.
17. black cap of liberty .. a cone shaped hat which became a Republican symbol after the French Revolution; they were originally worn by emancipated slaves in ancient Rome.
18. Camisards of Séguier .. as Dumas describes in Massacres Of The South:

    "a hundred Reformers led by Esprit Seguier had encamped in the plain of Fondmorte, and about eleven o'clock in the morning one of their sentinels in the defile gave the alarm by firing off his gun and running back to the camp, shouting, "To arms!" But Captain Poul, with his usual impetuosity, did not give the insurgents time to form, but threw himself upon them to the beat of the drum, not in the least deterred by their first volley. As he had expected, the band consisted of undisciplined peasants, who once scattered were unable to rally. They were therefore completely routed. Poul killed several with his own hand, among whom were two whose heads he cut off as cleverly as the most experienced executioner could have done, thanks to the marvellous temper of his Damascus blade. At this sight all who had till then stood their ground took to flight, Poul at their heels, slashing with his sword unceasingly, till they disappeared among the mountains. He then returned to the field of battle, picked up the two heads, and fastening them to his saddlebow, rejoined his soldiers with his bloody trophies,--that is to say, he joined the largest group of soldiers he could find; for the fight had turned into a number of single combats, every soldier fighting for himself. Here he found three prisoners who were about to be shot; but Poul ordered that they should not be touched: not that he thought for an instant of sparing their lives, but that he wished to reserve them for a public execution. These three men were Nouvel, a parishioner of Vialon, Moise Bonnet of Pierre-Male, and Esprit Seguier the prophet."

19. Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an olive. .. as Dumas describes in Massacres Of The South:

    "Seeing himself surrounded, Roland let fall the clothes which he had not yet had time to put on, placed his back against a tree, drew his sword, and challenged the boldest, whether officer or private, to approach. His features expressed such resolution, that when he thus, alone and half naked, defied them all, there was a moment's hesitation, during which no one ventured to take a forward step; but this pause was broken by the report of a gun: the arm which Roland had stretched out against his adversaries fell to his side, the sword with which he had threatened them escaped from his hand, his knees gave way, so that his body, which was only supported by the tree against which he leaned, after remaining an instant erect, gradually sank to the ground. Collecting all his strength, Roland raised his two hands to Heaven, as if to call down the vengeance of God upon his murderers, then, without having uttered a single word, he fell forward dead, shot through the heart."

20. bel amoureux .. "handsome sweetheart", Stevenson gives the translation immediately after.
21. Pippa in the poem .. (1812-1889), Pippa Passes (1841). Known for its frankness on sexual matters; her singing influences goodness on those who hear her.
22. hope, which comes to call .. "Where peace, And rest can never dwell, hope never comes, That comes to all." John Milton (1608-1674), Paradise Lost, Book i. Line 65 - Milton's description of Hell. Christopher MacLachlan says it is a reference to Stevenson's feeling of separation from Fanny Osbourne.
23. noiseless dust .. soil made from volcanic ash has a softening flour-like quality.
24. Volnay .. a red burgundy wine produced in Volnay, located in the Côte-d'Or département, in the Bourgogne région.

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The Annotated 'Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes'