The powerful feudal system of the Middle Ages, which extended from the Atlantic and German Oceans nearly to the Neapolitan and Spanish borders--afterward carried still farther into Naples and Britain--finds its most important and striking monument of central France in the Château of Polignac, only a few miles from Le Puy. This to-day is but a ruin, but it rises boldly from a depressed valley, and suggests in every way--ruin though it be--the mediæval stronghold that it once was. Originally it was the seat of the distinguished family whose name it bears. The Revolution practically destroyed it, but such as is left shows completely the great extent of its functions both as a fortress and a palace. These elements were made necessary by long ages of warfare and discord,--local in many cases, but none the less bloodthirsty for that,--and while such institutions naturally promulgated the growth of Feudalism which left these massive and generous memorials, it is hard to see, even to-day, how else the end might have been obtained. Auvergne, according to Fergusson, who in his fact has seldom been found wanting, "has one of the most beautiful and numerous of the 'round-Gothic' styles in France ... classed among the perfected styles of Europe." Immediately to the southward of Le Puy is that marvellous country known as the Cevennes. It has been commonly called sterile, bare, unproductive, and much that is less charitable as criticism. It is not very productive, to be sure, but a native of the land once delivered himself of this remark: "_Le mûrier a été pendant longtemps l'arbre d'or du Cevenol._" This is prima-facie evidence that the first statement was a libel. In the latter years of the eighteenth century the Protestants of the Cevennes were a large and powerful body of dissenters. A curious work _in English_, written by a native of Languedoc in 1703, states "that they were at least ten to one Papist. And 'twas observed, in many Places, the Priest said mass only for his Clerk, Himself, and the Walls." These people were not only valiant but industrious, and at that time held the most considerable trade in wool of all France. To quote again this eighteenth-century Languedocian, who aspired to be a writer of English, we learn: "God vouchsafed to Illuminate this People with the Truths of the Gospel, several Ages before the Reformation.... The _Waldenses_ and _Albigenses_ fled into the Mountains to escape the violence of the Crusades against them.... Cruel persecution did not so wholly extinguish the Sacred Light in the _Cevennes_, but that some parts of it were preserved among its Ashes." As early as 1683 the Protestants in many parts of southern France drew up a _Project_ of non-compliance with the Edicts and Declarations against them.