Читать книгу In the Track of R. L. Stevenson and Elsewhere in Old France - John Alexander Sir Hammerton - Страница 12

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We had again joined the track of R. L. S., where, now armed with a goad, he drove his donkey. "The perverse little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must even go with pricking." We had but to sit in our saddles, and wheel rapidly down the long and exhilarating descent to Pradelles, a very tumbledown village with a great shabby square lying at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. The town occupies a little corrie on the hillside, and the ground slopes quickly on the west to the river Allier, beyond which the country rises again in mighty undulations as far as the eye can reach. For all its slanternness—perhaps, in some degree, because of that—Pradelles is a place of interest, perched here at an altitude of 3,800 feet above sea-level.

OLD BRIDGE AT LANGOGNE

"Just at the bridge at Langogne a lassie of some seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, 'D'où 'st-ce-que vous venez?'"—R. L. S.

THE LOIRE NEAR GOUDET

"An amiable stripling of a river, which it seems absurd to call the Loire."—R. L. S.

More than any other place we saw in our journey, this old mountain town wears an unmistakable "foreign" appearance, and one walks its streets with the feeling that one is moving cautiously along the sloping roof of a house. Among its tumbledown buildings it still possesses fragments of considerable historic value, such as its ancient hospice, and a gateway from the top of which a village heroine killed some Huguenot heroes by throwing a stone at them while they were leading an assault against its walls. In the church of Nôtre Dame this episode in the history of the town is commemorated by a mural painting in vivid colours, the stone which the devout Catholic maiden is hurling at the devoted heads of the besiegers being large enough to warrant the assistance of a steam crane. The interior of the church is very quaint and unusual, and I am sorry that Stevenson did not yield to the urging of the landlady of the inn to visit Our Lady of Pradelles, "who performed many miracles, although she was of wood," for his impressions of the church could not have failed to be peculiarly piquant. The miraculous image of the virgin is a wooden doll, dressed in lace and set on the high altar. Pilgrims come in large numbers to its shrine every fifteenth of August; and one of the spirited paintings on the wall depicts the rescue of the idol from a burning of the church which, I should guess, took place about the time of the Revolution. Evidently the rescuers of Our Lady were not prepared to submit her to the crucial test a sister image at Le Puy survived—"burning for thirty-six hours without being consumed." Many and unfamiliar saints look down at us from the walls, and at the west end there is a loft such as might be seen in some of the very old Scottish churches, occupied at the time of our visit by a group of women, members no doubt of some pious confraternity.

R. L. S. has some picturesque notes on "The Beast of Gévaudan," whose trail he first struck at Pradelles; for we were now in the wild and uncultivated country of Gévaudan, "but recently disforested from terror of the wolves," whose grizzly exploits in the way of eating women and children seem to have engaged the imagination of our traveller. If the wolves have gone, they have left in their stead a flourishing progeny of wolf-like curs, who infest the highways and byways in extraordinary numbers, to the embarrassment of the wheelman.