Cévennes Mountains (France); France -- Description and travel
A peasant said to me one day: "Have you been at a chase and seen the
poor brute down, all the hounds tearing at it and fighting each other
for scraps of the carcass? That prey is France, and the hounds are the
parties."
In 680 Calminius, Count of Auvergne, founded a Benedictine monastery
under the red crags of La Moulette that rises to the east of the
monastery. The abbey buildings which had suffered in the Wars of
Religion were rebuilt in 1754 and are characterless. They have been
converted into mairie and corn market. Everywhere in France we see
Virgil's _Sic vos non vobis_ exemplified. Monks erect monasteries that
serve as barracks and schools, asylums and municipal buildings to a
future generation.
The abbatial church remains, an edifice of the eleventh century, but
with an apse of the fifteenth. The façade is Romanesque with mosaic
work of lava, and the arcades of window and doorway are striped in the
same manner.
On the south side of the choir is the pretty renaissance chapel of S.
Chaffre, the second abbot, who was martyred by the Saracens in 732.
This chapel with its painted roof dates from 1543. Names of saints
became marvellously altered in the south. Theofred has been transformed
into Chaffre, we have seen Evodius become Vozy, and in Hérault we come
on St. Agatha disguised under the form of Ste. Chatte, and in Ardèche,
Mélany is rendered Boloni. At the entrance of the town is another
church, built of blocks of lava, of the twelfth century, S. Jean, but
it has undergone alterations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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