Attraction of cohesion—Vals—Aubenas—Factory girls—Anomalies in the department—View from the terrace—When the volcanoes ceased to erupt—The castle—The Ornano family—The poisoning of the Marshal—Attractions of Vals—Intermittent spring—Castle of Boulogne—The Lestranges—Antraigues—The Count—Cascades—The Marquesses—Fête of S. Roch—The Coupe d'Aizac—Castle of Ventadour—Pretended Jewish origin of the family of Levis—Valley of the Lignon—Jaujac—The Coupe—The Gravenne—Castle of Pourcheirolles—The Flandrins—Bourzet—Good Friday there—Prismatic basalt—Montpezat—Le Pal—Huge crater—Suc de Bauzon—Thueyts—Pavé des Géants—The royal ladder—Mayres—The great eagle—What medieval men thought about basalt—First discovery of the Vivarais mountains being volcanoes.
drop Cap T
THE attraction of cohesion is one of the mightiest and most active forces in nature. It went towards the formation out of molecules of the terrestrial globe, it acts in the accumulation of large fortunes in the hands of millionaires, and it draws together great masses of human beings to one spot. Even when the heat of summer and the dispersion of schools scatter them to the north and south, east and west, out of cities, they draw together and coagulate in knots. But why one of these centres of concentration should be Vals and not Aubenas is to me a puzzle. Why when engaging a lodging should one select the cellar instead of an upper suite of apartments?
The Vivarais Chain
[Pg 115]
Vals-les-Bains lies in a hole shut in between steep hills, it commands no view, it trails like an ugly worm along the bank of a petty stream; whereas Aubenas, hard by, accessible by electric tram, is throned on a height, sits as a queen on a platform of rock, and commands such a prospect as is worth going thither from England to see if that were its only attraction.
Are there good hotels in Vals? So there are in Aubenas. Shops? As good in both. Electric illumination, telegraph and telephone? Each is similarly supplied. That which draws a crowd in the season to Vals is the baths. But the baths are a mere excuse. The fashion has set in and the crowd follow the fashion.
The river Ardèche, after having ploughed its way through beds of basaltic lava, runs between the prismatic columns as though sweeping through a forest of petrified bulrushes. It emerges above Aubenas into a broad, luxuriant, and well-peopled valley, where white walls smile and glass windows wink in the sun as far down as the eye can reach, and as far up the sides of the hills as folk choose to climb to their homes.
Moreover, factories stretch their long roofs below the rock of Aubenas and throw up their smoke, but without disfigurement to the scene or vitiation of the limpid air.
Come to Aubenas from the junction at Vogué on a Sunday evening, and you will see something of merry girl-life. The factory-hands from the lower country are returning from their homes to resume their work on Monday morning. They swarm into every carriage, crowding in at every station, each with a basket in one hand and a sack over the shoulder or under the arm. All are chattering, laughing; one wiping away a tear [Pg 116] either because she is suffering from toothache or heartache at parting with her intended. But neither ache is very enduring. Before the train has gone a thousand mètres, she is laughing and chirping like the rest. When settled into their seats they open their baskets to show each other the posies of flowers they are taking to Aubenas to brighten the poor little attic bedrooms and diffuse through them a fragrance and memory of home. But the sacks—what do they contain? As I helped some of the girls to heave these into the carriage and stow them under the seats or into the shelf above, I could guess from the feel, and see when the sack mouth gaped and discharged some of its contents. It holds their factory clothing washed by their mothers—aprons, bibs, and among them huge loaves of bread and greasy sausages, these latter wrapped round with a newspaper that has transferred its information reversed on to the skin of the saucisson.
These mill-hands do not wear the pretty scarlet or blue handkerchief over the head that adorns the Lancashire and Yorkshire factory girl, the theme of one of our most charming folk-songs.
"Why wear you that kerchief tied over your head?
'Tis the country girls' fashion, kind sir, then she said;
And the fashion young maidens will always be in,
So I wear a blue kerchief tied under the chin.
Why wear a blue kerchief, sweet maiden? I said.
Because the blue colour is not one to fade.
As a sailor's blue jacket who fights for the king,
So's my bonny blue kerchief tied under the chin."
These Vivarais girls wear no costume. There is not much beauty among them; but their honest faces are good to look on. The glorious southern sun has [Pg 117] penetrated to their hearts and shines back on you from their merry eyes.
They do not leave the train at the Aubenas station, but go on to the next, the group of factories at the foot of the hill at the head of the basin, between the town and the opening of the Valley of Vals.
From the station is a long ascent to the town; there is a gradual inclined road for carriages, and a short, steep climb for foot travellers.
Aubenas is, next to Annonay, the most important town in the Vivarais; neither is the seat of the préfet, nor of the bishop, nor of a university.
The department of Ardèche has been treated somewhat perversely in this respect. Its capital is Privas, of difficult access at the extremity of a branch line served by trains that run forward and back, advance and retreat again to pick up or to discharge luggage trucks, and that is ignorant of any other train than an omnibus.
The cathedral city is at one end of the department at its extreme verge, at Viviers, one of the deadest of dead cities, with a population of three thousand. The lycée is near the other end of the department, also at its eastern limit, with only a streak of water between it and Dr?me. That is Tournon, which has indeed a population of a little over five thousand, whereas in Annonay it is seventeen thousand, and in Aubenas above eight thousand. Moreover, Aubenas is not even a chef-lieu d'arrondissement, which Largentière is, numbering 2,780.
Aubenas stands 930 feet above the sea. You can breathe there; you stifle at Vals. And what a prospect it commands! To the west the wild heights of the [Pg 118] mountains of the Vivarais, volcanoes that have burst through the rocks, and flung them aloft in rents that reveal to this day the agony through which the earth passed when fire and fury broke forth. To the north the Coiron, a chain of huge lava beds overlying other rocks, that have given way and left the chain a mighty hacked and battered saw standing up against the sky. A look at a geological map of the Vivarais shows the Plutonic deposits extended like the fingers of a hand or the nerves of a vine-leaf over the mountain tops.
When did these explosions cease? Some of the deposits are of great age, others are comparatively recent. As we have seen, the bones of men have been found under the lavas of Mont Denise, near Le Puy. Nothing of this kind has been so far discovered in the Vivarais, only the skeletons of the mastodon. But there is historic evidence that leads us to suspect that the last expiring throe was in A.D. 468. S. Mamertus, Bishop of Vienne, instituted Rogation processions, and drew up a litany for use there, because the people were panic-stricken by the earthquakes, by a glare of light in the sky and the falling of ashes, and by loud explosions that were heard. The stags, the wolves even, fled from the Cévennes and took refuge in the towns, laying aside their instinctive fear of men.
Aubenas was erected about a large castle that was begun in the twelfth century and completed in the sixteenth by the Ornano family. It afterwards passed into the possession of the Count of Vogué, who held it till the Revolution. It has happily not been destroyed, and now serves as mairie, tribunal of commerce, etc. The fa?ade is imposing, flanked by round towers and commanded by a square keep. The whole was roofed [Pg 119] with glazed brown and yellow tiles. A portion was ripped by a storm and has been repaired with green tiles, and the effect is singular, as if a huge pot of green paint had been spilled over the roof.
The church, with a vulgar modern west-front, is wholly modernised within, but without, where not built into houses, shows that the original church was of the fourteenth century. The buttresses were round turrets that have been deprived of their tops. In a chapel of the church is the monument in black marble of the Marshal Ornano, raised by his wife the Duchess. It was mutilated at the Revolution.
The Ornano family was that of the Sovereign Counts of Corsica, descended from Ugo Colonna whom Leo III. charged with the expulsion of the Saracens from that isle. He was invested with the title of Count by Charlemagne, and he obtained at the same time sovereign rights.
The Genoese, by making themselves masters of Corsica, drove out the Ornanos, and Sanpietro, who went into the service of France, was engaged all his life in fighting the Genoese; and he succeeded in gaining the whole island for France, but Henry II. basely restored it to the Genoese. His son, Alphonso d'Ornano, born in 1548, died in 1610. He fought the Genoese like his father, and with equal success, and was created Marshal of France. His son, Jean Baptiste, was born in 1583, and died in 1626. He was brought up at the Court and was appointed governor of Pont-Esprit, and he was there when tidings reached him of the assassination of Henry IV. He married the Countess of Montlaure, an heiress. Under De Luynes he was appointed tutor to the Duke of Orléans, the King's brother, and governor [Pg 120] for the King in Normandy. The favour in which he was held raised him many enemies, and they persuaded Louis XIII. to withdraw his offices from him, and bid him retire to his estates. Ornano at once demanded admittance to the young King, and placed his person at his disposal. Let him be sent to prison, he urged, for he was resolved not to go back into Languedoc with the stigma of disgrace upon him. This bold conduct confounded his foes, and satisfied the King as to his innocence. His former offices were restored to him, and he was named Marshal of France. But Ornano was a bad courtier. He refused to go cap in hand and thank Richelieu for his restoration to honour, and he was so imprudent as to advise the King that he was old enough no longer to be held in leading-strings. The Cardinal, in alarm, had him arrested and thrown into the Castle of Vincennes and summarily poisoned, before any steps could be taken to obtain his release under the King's hand and seal. The Marshal died at the age of forty-three without issue, and his sorrowing widow had the magnificent mausoleum erected to him in the church of Aubenas.
From Aubenas an electric tram conveys one in ten minutes to Vals on the Volane, a lively spot during the season, dead out of it when the hotels are shut and the shops containing wares to attract visitors are closed. The only object of interest in Vals itself is the intermittent spring on the left bank of the stream. This rises in a paved basin with no outlet; and springs forth five times during the day. The hours are not certain, but almost invariably it jets at eleven o'clock or a few minutes later, sometimes leaping to the height of fifteen feet, sometimes rising no more than three, and emitting [Pg 121] sulphuretted hydrogen, which phthisic patients inhale eagerly. When the water falls it is sucked back into the bore.
The Volane Valley, by Vals
"For the inhabitants of the plains of Gard and the Bouches-du-Rh?ne," says Ardouin-Dumazet, "lands roasted by the sun, without shade or water, the valley of the Volane, with its growling torrents, its green chestnuts, the freshness of its slopes, is a little Switzerland. Vals has become to these exuberant populations what Dieppe and Trouville are to the Parisian. But it must not be concluded that folk come here only to be intoxicated with the gas from the springs that rise at every step under cupolas or from amidst rockwork. I have met here with many and genuine bathers, who have come to cure their livers and other internal vessels, by drinking the waters of the spring La Précieuse or that of Saint Jean. Those of the former are not only agreeable to the palate, they have also their clientelle which finds health in this mineralised draught. On tasting this light, sparkling, pleasant water one has some wish to be a patient so as to linger at the taps under the shade of the great trees, and to listen to the murmur of the Volane."
The splendid ruins of the Castle of Boulogne attract a host of visitors from Vals annually during the season. It is reached by carriage, quitting the high road from Aubenas to Privas by a branch road from Auriolles to S. Etienne. The castle was built by a Count of Valentinois in the eleventh century. It remained in the hands of the Grimaldi, Counts of Valentinois, to 1344. In 1384 it became the property of the Lestranges, and they retained it to 1579; when it passed to the de Hautefort de Lestranges till 1632. After that it shifted proprietors rapidly. At the Revolution it belonged to Fay-Gerlande till 1794, when it was sold. The [Pg 122] Count, seeing what was coming, disposed of most of his land to one Blaise Comte on condition that he should every year present a violet at the castle on the 15th of March. Nevertheless it was disposed of to a man of S. Etienne, who pulled much of it down and sold the materials. It was then purchased by the Abbé Volle, curé of Asperjoc, to rescue it from complete demolition, and he retained it for thirty years and then disposed of it to the Marquess Theodore de Lestrange. The magnificent gateway with twisted columns and the arms of Montlaun was erected by Claude René d'Hautefort de Lestrange, who brought to him the barony of Privas; he it was who transformed a feudal stronghold into a sumptuous palace. The fa?ade is sustained on a structural terrace.
A favourite walk of but an hour above Vals and through the valley of the Volane leads to Antraigues. The river has worked its laborious course through masses of basalt and beds of scoria overlying granite and porphyry. At every step some fresh picture opens or some fresh object of interest arrests the eye. Here is a precipice over which leaps a stream in a beautiful fall; there colonnades of prismatic form; further on masses of scori? brought down by the rains from the mountain side, whose flanks have been bared. The road plunges even deeper into the ravine that narrows. Then a stream bounds in a double fall over a basaltic face of rock, the second leap being formed by a ledge entitled the Devil's Chair, on which His Majesty is said to cool himself in the water on leaving his heated realms below. Next the Cheese Rock is reached, a mass of basalt standing by itself, and Antraigues appears as an eagle's nest perched on a peninsula of crag between [Pg 123] three valleys, those of the Mas, the Bise, and the Volane. The tower of the church is all that remains of the old fortress of the Marquesses of Antraigues. The site is savage, amidst green chestnuts, black lava rocks, and red volcanic cinders. The Marquesses of Antraigues bore an evil name as robbers, lawless and violent in the extreme, for which several were executed at Toulouse. The story of the last of those who owned and for a while occupied the castle forms the theme of Jules Claretie's Les Muscadins.
Valée de la Volane (Le Fauteuil du Diable)
Emmanuel-Louis-Henri de Launez, Comte d'Antraigues, was born at Villeneuve de Berg, in the Vivarais, in 1755. In 1788 he published a Mémoire sur les états généraux, which attracted attention, as in it he denounced the hereditary nobility as the greatest scourge with which heaven could chastise a free people. It is an ill bird that befouls its own nest, and that the Count was sincere in his attack on the prerogatives of the aristocracy in France is doubtful judging by his subsequent conduct. This pamphlet caused him to be elected to the States-General convoked for the following year. But no sooner had he taken his seat in the Assembly than he changed his note, and spoke for the retention of the privileges of his class. This sudden conversion caused great offence, and he did not long retain his seat. In consequence of the events of the 5th and 6th October he quitted the Assembly, and left France in 1790 and went first to Switzerland, then to Russia, and after that to Vienna. The coalition of princes forgot his early encouragement of the Revolution and charged him with divers secret missions, and granted him a pension of 36,000 francs. He became the chief organiser of various plots to effect a counterrevolution [Pg 124] in France, that "guerre de pots de chambre," as Napoleon called it in his highly coloured language; and he was at the bottom of the intrigue that provoked the treason of Pichegru. In 1797 he was in Venice, but when he saw that the capital of the Adriatic was about to succumb he fled, but fell into the hands of an outpost of the French army in Italy, and was arrested with all his papers that contained full evidence of the conspiracy of Pichegru. However, he managed to escape by the contrivance of Mme. Sainte-Huberti, who, after having been his mistress, later became his wife. Then he fled to Russia, where he joined the Greek Church, was accorded a pension by the Emperor, and was sent to Dresden as attaché to the Russian Legation. There he published a pamphlet against Bonaparte so violent and scurrilous, that the Saxon Government was constrained to expel him so as to avoid a conflict with France. He departed for London, carrying with him certain documents containing secret articles of the Treaty of Tilsit, of which he had obtained a copy. He communicated these to the English ministry, and in return was granted a liberal pension.
He still maintained relations with Paris, and was mixed up in every plot for the restoration of the Bourbons.
However, it was not given to him to see the realisation of his schemes. The imperial police had sent two emissaries to London, who managed to seduce Lorenzo, the Italian valet of the Count, and through him to obtain notes and despatches which his master was preparing for transmission to the Cabinet of the Prime Minister. On July 22nd, 1812, the Count d'Antraigues having expressed his intention to visit the Prime Minister to [Pg 125] obtain his opinion on a certain memoir, Lorenzo, who had purloined it and committed it to the spies of Napoleon that they might make a transcript of it, saw that his faithlessness was at the point of being discovered. Then he resolved on killing his master and mistress and on blowing out his own brains.
This he did. Such was the version of the story as given in the English newspapers. The only witness to the murder was the Count's coachman. The circumstances of the assassination and suicide were never sifted; the whole matter was hushed up; and it became a matter of mutual recrimination between the French and English Governments, each casting on the other the blame of the murder of this miserable man—a man without a respectable quality.
The name of Antraigues is taken from its position, Inter Aqu?, between the three streams—the Volane, the Bise, and the Mas.
Fall at Antraigues
On August 16th, the fête of S. Roch, a great pilgrimage is made to Antraigues, attended by many thousand persons............