Page:A book of the Cevennes (-1907-).djvu/127

Rh From Monastier one can drive to Goudet and thence walk to Arlempdes, distant but three miles, one of the most picturesque sites, with one of the most interesting castles in the Velay. At Goudet itself are the ruined castles of Goudet and Beaufort. At Arlempdes the Loire has cut its way through a mass of lava exposing prismatic columns, and the village is commanded by a castle flanked by round and square towers on a basaltic rock above it, and looking down from a sheer precipice on the Loire that glides below. The summit of the rock was irregular, and the feudal remains were grouped about on the platform equally irregularly. The chapel of Arlempdes is of the twelfth century. The Lac du Bouchet has been already spoken of. It is visited from Cayres. It is not the only object worth seeing in that direction; three-quarters of a mile off the main road from Le Puy to Langonne at Chacornac are caves excavated by the hand of man, that served Mandrin as one of his mints for forged coins. He was a native of S. Etienne; his principal factory of coins was at S. André on the sea coast, but when disturbed there he set up his workshop at Chacornac. Caught repeatedly, he managed to break out of prison again and again, but finally was broken on the wheel in 1755 at the age of forty-one. For some time he used an old castle as his place for coining, first scaring the owner out of it by spectral appearances and keeping up the idea among the peasantry around that it was haunted.

Some commotion was caused in the spiritualistic world in 1903 by stories circulating relative to a haunted mill at Perbet between Le Puy and S. Front. It was occupied by a miller, Joubert, and his wife and two daughters, Marie aged fourteen, and Philomène aged