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.
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.
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