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 Drôme. 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 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 façade is imposing, flanked by round towers and commanded by a square keep. The whole was roofed 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.