CHEYLARD AND LUC
CANDIDLY, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few
broken ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession
of open places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted
crosses, a shrine to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a
little hill; and all this, upon a rattling highland river, in the
corner of a naked valley. What went ye out for to see? thought I
to myself. But the place had a life of its own. I found a board,
commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for the past year, hung
up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering church. In
1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight francs
ten centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of the Faith.' Some
of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native
land. Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls
in Edinburgh; while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the
ignorance of Rome. Thus, to the high entertainment of the angels,
do we pelt each other with evangelists, like schoolboys bickering
in the snow.
The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of
a not ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle,
the clothes, the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of
the parish priest. There were five children, one of whom was set
to its morning prayers at the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and
a sixth would ere long be forthcoming. I was kindly received by
these good folk. They were much interested in my misadventure.
The wood in which I had slept belonged to them; the man of
Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and counselled me
warmly to summon him at law - 'because I might have died.' The
good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
uncreamed milk.
'You will do yourself an evil,' she said. 'Permit me to boil it
for you.'
After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having
an infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested,
to make a bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were
hung up to dry, and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my
knee, the eldest daughter let down a hinged table in the chimney-
corner for my convenience. Here I wrote, drank my chocolate, and
finally ate an omelette before I left. The table was thick with
dust; for, as they explained, it was not used except in winter
weather. I had a clear look up the vent, through brown
agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to the sky; and whenever a
handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my legs were scorched
by the blaze.
The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. 'You
will have to change this package,' said he; 'it ought to be in two
parts, and then you might have double the weight.'
I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey
hitherto created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.
'It fatigues her, however,' said the innkeeper; 'it fatigues her
greatly on the march. Look.'
Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the
inside, and blood was running from under her tail. They told me
when I started, and I was ready to believe it, that before a few
days I should come to love Modestine like a dog. Three days had
passed, we had shared some misadventures, and my heart was still as
cold as a potato towards my beast of burden. She was pretty enough
to look at; but then she had given proof of dead stupidity,
redeemed indeed by patience, but aggravated by flashes of sorry and
ill-judged light-heartedness. And I own this new discovery seemed
another point against her. What the devil was the good of a she-
ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few necessaries? I
saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I should have to
carry Modestine. AEsop was the man to know the world! I assure
you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.
It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me
upon the way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the
wind blew so rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand
from Cheylard to Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the
most beggarly countries in the world. It was like the worst of the
Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of
wood, scant of heather, scant of life. A road and some fences
broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the road was marked by
upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.
Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more
than my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel
not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The
great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life
more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and
find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our
affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To
hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing
north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and
compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can
annoy himself about the future?
I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect
at this season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving
hills rose round it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and
fields, there rising to peaks alternately naked and hairy with
pines. The colour throughout was black or ashen, and came to a
point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which pricked up
impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a tall white
statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed fifty
quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through
this sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly
equal size, which came down to join it through a broad nude valley
in Vivarais. The weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds
massed in squadron; but the fierce wind still hunted them through
heaven, and cast great ungainly splashes of shadow and sunlight
over the scene.
Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between
hill and river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable
feature, save the old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of
brand-new Madonna. But the inn was clean and large. The kitchen,
with its two box-beds hung with clean check curtains, with its wide
stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with
lanterns and religious statuettes, its array of chests and pair of
ticking clocks, was the very model of what a kitchen ought to be; a
melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or noblemen in disguise.
Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a handsome, silent,
dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun. Even the
public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal
tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a
harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one of
these, lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did
I do penance all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth,
and sigh, from time to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack
and the lee of some great wood.OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
'I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere -
And what am I, that I am here?'
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
FATHER APOLLINARIS
NEXT morning (Thursday, 20th September) I took the road in a new
order. The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length
across the saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of
blue wool hanging out of either end. It was more picturesque, it
spared the donkey, and, as I began to see, it would ensure
stability, blow high, blow low. But it was not without a pang that
I had so decided. For although I had purchased a new cord, and
made all as fast as I was able, I was yet jealously uneasy lest the
flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects along the line of
march.
My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of
Vivarais and Gevaudan. The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a
little more naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the
left, and the former had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that
grew thickly in the gorges and died out in solitary burrs upon the
shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of fir-wood were plastered
here and there upon both sides, and here and there were cultivated
fields. A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of railway in
Gevaudan, although there are many proposals afoot and surveys being
made, and even, as they tell me, a station standing ready built in
Mende. A year or two hence and this may be another world. The
desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn
the sonnet into PATOIS: 'Mountains and vales and floods, heard YE
that whistle?'
At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais,
the modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my
strange destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the
Snows. The sun came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and
I beheld suddenly a fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky
hills, as blue as sapphire, closed the view, and between these lay
ridge upon ridge, heathery, craggy, the sun glittering on veins of
rock, the underwood clambering in the hollows, as rude as God made
them at the first. There was not a sign of man's hand in all the
prospect; and indeed not a trace of his passage, save where
generation after generation had walked in twisted footpaths, in and
out among the beeches, and up and down upon the channelled slopes.
The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now broken into
clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I drew a
long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene
of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form
in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like
the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and
twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of
my life.
But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate
and inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top
marked the neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a
mile beyond, the outlook southward opening out and growing bolder
with every step, a white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a
young plantation directed the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows.
Here, then, I struck leftward, and pursued my way, driving my
secular donkey before me, and creaking in my secular boots and
gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.
I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of
a bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me
at the sound. I have rarely approached anything with more
unaffected terror than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.
This it is to have had a Protestant education. And suddenly, on
turning a corner, fear took hold on me from head to foot - slavish,
superstitious fear; and though I did not stop in my advance, yet I
went on slowly, like a man who should have passed a bourne
unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For there,
upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday
of my childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler -
enchanting prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes,
as large as a county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in;
and here, sure enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was
robed in white like any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the
instancy of his contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as
bald and yellow as a skull. He might have been buried any time
these thousand years, and all the lively parts of him resolved into
earth and broken up with the farmer's harrow.
I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address
a person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing
near, I doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious
reverence. He nodded back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I
going to the monastery? Who was I? An Englishman? Ah, an
Irishman, then?
'No,' I said, 'a Scotsman.'
A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he
looked me all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining
with interest, as a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator.
From him I learned with disgust that I could not be received at Our
Lady of the Snows; I might get a meal, perhaps, but that was all.
And then, as our talk ran on, and it turned out that I was not a
pedlar, but a literary man, who drew landscapes and was going to
write a book, he changed his manner of thinking as to my reception
(for I fear they respect persons even in a Trappist monastery), and
told me I must be sure to ask for the Father Prior, and state my
case to him in full. On second thoughts he determined to go down
with me himself; he thought he could manage for me better. Might
he say that I was a geographer?
No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not.
'Very well, then' (with disappointment), 'an author.'
It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
priests long since, who had received newspapers and kept him
informed of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he
asked me eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man
had continued ever since to pray night and morning.
'I thought he was very near the truth,' he said; 'and he will reach
it yet; there is so much virtue in prayer.'
He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but
pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near
the subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and
when he found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over
with great good-will.
The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father
had made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to
a corner, and showed us some white buildings a little farther on
beyond the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded
abroad. We were hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for
that was my companion's name) stopped me.
'I must not speak to you down there,' he said. 'Ask for the
Brother Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me as you go
out again through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed
to have made your acquaintance.'
And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and
crying out twice, 'I must not speak, I must not speak!' he ran away
in front of me, and disappeared into the monastery door.
I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive
my terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not
all be alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate
as fast as Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for
monasteries, would permit. It was the first door, in my
acquaintance of her, which she had not shown an indecent haste to
enter. I summoned the place in form, though with a quaking heart.
Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and a pair of brown-robed
brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a while. I think my
sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled the heart of
poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it to the
Father Prior, But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who
attend on strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no
difficulty as to my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman
to the stables, and I and my pack were received into Our Lady of
the Snows.
