The Lozere Lies Nearly East And West, Cutting Gevaudan Into Two Unequal
Parts; Its Highest Point, This Pic De Finiels,
On which I was then
standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea,
and in clear
Weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the
Mediterranean Sea. I have spoken with people who either pretended or
believed that they had seen, from the Pic de Finiels, white ships sailing
by Montpellier and Cette. Behind was the upland northern country through
which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood, without much
grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little beside wolves.
But in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new Gevaudan, rich,
picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. Speaking largely, I was in
the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey; but there is a
strict and local sense in which only this confused and shaggy country at
my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense the peasantry employ
the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis: the Cevennes of the
Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a
war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the Grand Monarch with
all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand
Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and eighty years ago,
the Camisards held a station even on the Lozere, where I stood; they had
an organisation, arsenals, a military and religious hierarchy; their
affairs were 'the discourse of every coffee-house' in London; England
sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied and murdered; with
colours and drums, and the singing of old French psalms, their bands
sometimes affronted daylight, marched before walled cities, and dispersed
the generals of the king; and sometimes at night, or in masquerade,
possessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged treachery upon their
allies and cruelty upon their foes.
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