"No land bears so deeply impressed on it the scars of battles fought for liberty of conscience as does our Cevenol country. Nowhere else in the world were fire and sword employed with more savagery to conquer the human being to God, and nowhere has it succeeded worse. It is the chastisement of all criminal enterprises to lead to ends the reverse of those aimed at. Our mountaineers have remained what the Romans found them—energetic, sober, satirical. Certainly we have no end of processions; corporations and pious congregations abound. But it is a remarkable fact, that these gatherings of the faithful lack that gravity which a religious character should impress upon them. There is prayer, perhaps, but most assuredly there is diversion as well." Cavalier in England was made a great deal of; he was fêted as a hero, received into the best society, and died Governor of Jersey in receipt of a handsome income; which he certainly did not deserve, as he had shown himself atrociously cruel, not to priests only, but to harmless peasant men and women, whose only crime consisted in adherence to the faith of their fathers. CHAPTER XII ALAIS Descent from La Bastide—Viaduct of the Luech—Coal-beds—The town of Alais—Rochebelle—Ancient oppidum—Hermitage—The last hermit—Sidonius Apollinaris—The Citadel—Family quarrels—The Cambis family—A ghost story—Making polemical use of a ghost—Huguenots take Alais—Murders—The Bishopric—The Cathedral—Silk culture—Introduction of the mulberry and the worm to Europe—Silk husbandry in France—Favoured by Henry IV.—Olivier de Serre—Colbert—The Magnanerie—Silk-weaving introduced into England—A disaster that proved a blessing—Transformations of the caterpillar—Florian—The faults of an Englishman. When the train, after quitting La Bastide, has passed through a tunnel at the highest point of the pass, you rush out of a northern clime, with northern vegetation, into a climate with tree, shrub, and flower wholly southern. The Allier and its tributaries were making full gallop for the Atlantic; you see at once torrents racing down gorges to fling themselves into the Mediterranean in which no Greenland icebergs ever float to chill alike the currents and the air. Gulfs open beside the line clothed in chestnuts, mulberries, almonds, vines; oleanders appear, and the kermes oak with its varnished leaves covering the slopes. The line does not descend the first valley entered, but bores its way through spur after spur of the mountain chain till it reaches the furrow through which flows the Gardon d'Alais. Génolhac is passed, that suffered cruelly from Catholic and Camisard alike, whence Pont-de-Montvert may be visited, and the house seen where lived the Abbé du Chayla.