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Then evening closes in, and the rest is lost to us. As on my first visit to Mende, a year ago, I lose the romantic approach to this wonderfully placed little city. The Hotel Manse, whither we now betake ourselves, is a great improvement on the other mentioned in my first chapter in matters of situation, sanitation, and comfort; the people are very civil and obliging in both.
Meanwhile Mende revolted, a town in Pallene and a colony of the Eretrians, and was received without scruple by Brasidas, in spite of its having evidently come over during the armistice, on account of certain infringements of the truce alleged by him against the Athenians.
This science, translated into so many languages, was no doubt intelligible only in broad outline to the masses, and sometimes, when it percolated through the labyrinthine maze of such minds as that of the worthy Bishop of Mende, it appeared overwrought, full of contradictions, and of double meanings. It seems then as if the symbolist were splitting a hair with embroidery scissors.
Wild-flowers in plenty brighten the edges of the road stonecrops, cornflowers, purple 'lady's fingers, and many others; but wedged as we are in our not too comfortable caleche, to get out and pluck them is impossible. The road from Mende to the summit of the plateau can only be described as a vertical ascent; before beginning to descend, we have a few kilometres of level, that is all.
Paul, Abbe Duchayla's brother, and the Marquis Duchayla, his nephew, brought eighty horsemen from the family estates. The Count of Morangiez rode in from St. Auban and Malzieu with two companies of cavalry, and the town of Mende by order of its bishop despatched its nobles at the head of three companies of fifty men each.
Here also we find certain English notions concerning peasant property entirely disproved. So far is French territory from being cut into minute portions of land, that on this side of Mende farms are let, not by the hectare, but by the tract, many tenant farmers being unable to tell you of how many hectares their occupation consists.
You stand there as it were upon the summit of a lonely pedestal, with nothing but a rocky edge around you. Each is dried up; but the Catisse of Mende is without so much as a dew-pan or a well; it is wrinkled, horny, and cauterised under the alternate frost and flame of its fierce open sky, as are the deserts of the moon.
But a French traveller before alluded to himself without doubt stimulated by the example of our countryman M. Vaysse de Villiers, author of the 'Itineraire Descriptif de la France, did in 1816, or thereabouts, accomplish the journey from Mende to Florac by way of Sauveterre.
No one, however, can make a sojourn at Mende without recalling the atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion, and compared to which the excesses of the Jacquerie and the Terror sink into insignificance.
During the following summer Mende was recovered by Nicias for the Athenians, Scione was closely invested, and Perdiccas, who had quarrelled with Brasidas, once more became an ally of Athens, and gave proof of his sincerity by preventing the passage of Spartan reinforcements to Thrace.
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