FLORAC
ON a branch of the Tarn stands Florac, the seat of a sub-
prefecture, with an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint
street-corners, and a live fountain welling from the hill. It is
notable, besides, for handsome women, and as one of the two
capitals, Alais being the other, of the country of the Camisards.
The landlord of the inn took me, after I had eaten, to an adjoining
cafe, where I, or rather my journey, became the topic of the
afternoon. Every one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the
sub-prefectorial map was fetched from the sub-prefecture itself,
and much thumbed among coffee-cups and glasses of liqueur. Most of
these kind advisers were Protestant, though I observed that
Protestant and Catholic intermingled in a very easy manner; and it
surprised me to see what a lively memory still subsisted of the
religious war. Among the hills of the south-west, by Mauchline,
Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse, serious
Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great persecution,
and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded. But in
towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these old
doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the
King's Arms at Wigton, it is not likely that the talk would run on
Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's
wife had not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these Cevenols
were proud of their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was
their chosen topic; its exploits were their own patent of nobility;
and where a man or a race has had but one adventure, and that
heroic, we must expect and pardon some prolixity of reference.
They told me the country was still full of legends hitherto
uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's descendants - not
direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins or nephews -
who were still prosperous people in the scene of the boy-general's
exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old combatants dug
up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century, in a
field where the ancestors had fought, and the great-grandchildren
were peaceably ditching.
Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to
visit me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed
an hour or two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant,
part Catholic; and the difference in religion is usually doubled by
a difference in politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as
I did from such a babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as
Monastier, when I learned that the population lived together on
very quiet terms; and there was even an exchange of hospitalities
between households thus doubly separated. Black Camisard and White
Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon, Protestant prophet
and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all been sabring
and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their hearts hot
with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy
years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in
mutual toleration and mild amity of life. But the race of man,
like that indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating
virtues of its own; the years and seasons bring various harvests;
the sun returns after the rain; and mankind outlives secular
animosities, as a single man awakens from the passions of a day.
We judge our ancestors from a more divine position; and the dust
being a little laid with several centuries, we can see both sides
adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show of right.
I have never thought it easy to be just, and find it daily even
harder than I thought. I own I met these Protestants with a
delight and a sense of coming home. I was accustomed to speak
their language, in another and deeper sense of the word than that
which distinguishes between French and English; for the true Babel
is a divergence upon morals. And hence I could hold more free
communication with the Protestants, and judge them more justly,
than the Catholics. Father Apollinaris may pair off with my
mountain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and devout old men; yet
I ask myself if I had as ready a feeling for the virtues of the
Trappist; or, had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so
warmly to the dissenter of La Vernede. With the first I was on
terms of mere forbearance; but with the other, although only on a
misunderstanding and by keeping on selected points, it was still
possible to hold converse and exchange some honest thoughts. In
this world of imperfection we gladly welcome even partial
intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of our
heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without
dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God.
