Page:A book of the Cevennes (-1907-).djvu/126

80 They go up needy attorneys and return flush with money.

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 facade 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.