The Road Along The Mimente Is Yet
New, Nor Have The Mountaineers Recovered Their Surprise When The First
Cart Arrived At Cassagnas.
But although it lay thus apart from the
current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the
history of France.
Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the
five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and
arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves
gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the
same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were
brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons,
Chabrier and Tavan, and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood.
Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the
oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas. This
was the band of Spirit Seguier; men who had joined their voices with his
in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the
Cevennes. Seguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc,
whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole army
of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart, who
admitted people to the sacrament or refused them, by 'intensively viewing
every man' between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures off by
rote. And this was surely happy; since in a surprise in August 1703, he
lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 114 of 131
Words from 30281 to 30544
of 34922
