Over twelve days Stevenson walked 220 kilometres through the Auvergne and the Cevennes from Monastier sur Gazeille Haute Loire to St Jean-du-Gard via La Bastide Puylaurent and Pont de Montvert in Lozere with the GR 70. He had chosen as his thematic quest the trail of the Camisards.
A mountain walk across Europe and the Stevenson
trail GR 70
Nicholas Crane
Werewolves
and Other Beasts
I was
woken in my cave above the Tarnon by a man walking his dog who told me that it
was Sunday. I rolled my sleeping-bag and ambled down the path towards
Florac and a medley of bell-ringing, the
peals for Catholic Mass begonning as those for the Protestant Eucharist were
dying away.
'We had the wars,' shrugged the baker, as if the bitter struggle 300 years ago between the Protestant Camisards and their Catholic persecutors were yesterday.
One of the leaders of the ragged Camisards - who had used Florac as a mountain lair was the guerrilla genius Jean Cavalier, a one-time shepherd boy who changed sides after being defeated by Louis XIV's generals and then, by a circuitous route, rose to lieutenant-governor of Jersey under the British before being buried in 1740, now a major-general, in the parish of St Luke's, Chelsea.
On the
last day of September, 138 years later, a twenty-seven-year- old lapsed
Calvinist walked into Florac intent on picking up the echoes of the Camisards.
He was told in the cafe of cousins and nephews descended from Cavalier and of
bones dug up where ancestors had fought.
Robert Louis Stevenson
was launching his career as a writer by making a romantic journey with a
recalcitrant donkey called Modestine. Over twelve days Stevenson walked 220
kilometres through the
Cevennes from
Monastier sur Gazeille
to St Jean-du-Gard. He had chosen as his thematic quest the trail of the
Camisards. It was a canny judgement; from Bloomsbury as Travels With a Donkey in
the Cevennes to Bruno, where it appeared as Putovani s Oalici do Hor,
Stevenson's well-crafted story became a best- seller, and launched a century of
donkey abuse.
I took a room in Chez Bruno on the place (still a pleasant 'alley of planes') and spent the rest of the day ambling around Florac's dishevelled streets. The 'live fountain' Stevenson had visited still tumbled in tiers past the twin-towered chateau (now a national park information centre) to a succession of weirs patrolled by ducks. Tilted berets and Citroens the colour of faded denim loitered outside the cafes on the place. The street where Stevenson lodged on his ninth night, Rue de Therond, now teetered between Gallic quaintness and irredeemable rubble, its derelict houses exfoliating plaster and shedding fractured drainpipes.
The mist
had not lifted by morning. Ahead of me lay the heart of Lozere, the poorest and
most isolated of France's departements, and at fourteen inhabitants per square
kilometre, the least populated (the figure for Paris is 21537).
To this impoverished land came a beast as horrible as the Cannibal of Gargas. Twenty years before Blaise Ferage terrorized the Pyrenean foothills, the Beast of Gevaudan was preying on this part of the Cevennes, eating sheep and young women. Bodies were found drained of blood and partially eaten. Theories blazed along the valleys: the Beast was a vampire wearing a wolfskin, or it was a wolfpack being guided by a crazed tyrant, or it was a lone wolf of enormous size. For three years the Beast caused panic in the isolated communities of the Cevennes, separated from one another by forest and appalling roads.
The bishop
of
Mende ordered
public prayers and hunts were dispatched by the intendant of Languedoc. As more
went missing, dragoons rode out and a reward of 6000 livres was offered by the
king. When a 130-pound wolf was shot in September 1765, the harassed
population filled the churches and the Beast was sent, stuffed, to Versailles.
Three months later two boys were killed near Mont Lozere. Through the winter and
following spring the killing spree resumed with new ferocity until Jean Chastel
found himself looking down his sights at a second wolf. After that, the
killings stopped.
The Beast of Gevaudan terrorized the French psyche and fascinated Robert Louis Stevenson: 'Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance...' he noted in his journal. Risk, for Stevenson, was one of the reasons for travelling. '... you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe and not meet with an adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the frontiers of hope...'
A wilderness lives through
its beasts, and the memory of grotesques such as the Cannibal of Gargas and the
Beast of Gevaudan goes some way towards filling in gaps left by exterminated
predators. Those that remained the wolves and the bears were with me
nevertheless, a presence whose dark superiority brought a quality of scale to
the mountains that was taller than the peaks, colder than the ice and deeper
than the water.
Above
Florac my draille rose towards the bleak granite baguette of Mont Lozere, thirty
kilometres long and five wide, but rising to 1699 metres. A ridge eased up the
mountain, its spine occupied by a community of menhirs, some three metres high,
frozen in the opaque mist. I stayed with the menhirs till darkness fell and the
full moon cast long shadows from each standing stone. Near the uppermost menhir
stood a small wood where I climbed to the top of one of the pines and howled at
the moon while the tree swayed in the gale and the silver clouds sailed above
Mont Lozere's petrified sentinels.
I fell asleep at the foot of the tree on a bed of pine needles and woke before dawn to find water dripping on my bivouac bag and realized that I was screwed up with cold. This bald western rump of Mont Lozere, wrecked by overgrazing and shorn of timber, was being hammered by winds that hit no higher land between the Alps and the Atlantic. I pulled on my thin balaclava helmet beneath my trilby, and then the cotton hood of my coat. The wind was too strong for the umbrella. The little black copse was still marooned in thick mist and I had to use the compass to find the track down to the Bramon, a stream that had turned into a freezing turgid little river. I had to take off my boots, socks and trousers to wade across. As I completed this bleak exercise, rain began to fall and I reassured myself that the weather would definitely improve. In about April.
Beyond the Bramon I came to the hamlet of La Fage where I rested and sheltered inside the communal bread oven, a small barn-like building which had been restored as a 'curiosity' in 1982. A plaque described the demise of La Fage: in 1861, the hamlet had had 146 inhabitants distributed between twenty-seven families; now there were twenty inhabit- ant and six families. With its walls of great blocks and rye roofs it must have borne a resemblance to the granite-and-thatch palloza villages of the Sierra de Ancares. Many of the houses had fallen down; six were now second homes and one was a gite d'etape. The bread oven had last been fired in 1950.
From "Clear Waters Rising" A mountain walk
across Europe by Nicholas Crane (Penguin Books)
Buy the book
Old romantic Hotel, L'Etoile Guest-House is a mountain retreat in the South of France. With a beautiful park along the Allier River, L'Etoile Guesthouse is located in La Bastide Puylaurent between Lozere, Ardeche and Cevennes. Many hiking trails like GR70 Stevenson trail, Regordane way (St Gilles trail), GR7, GR72, GRP Le Cevenol, Roujanel, Margeride loop and Allier river trail. The right place to relax.