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No!" exclaimed all our company. "Tzagan? "Yes, yes," said the Tartar, "all are Whites." "Mende! Mende!" they grunted and, after starting their cups of tea, began to relate very interesting and important news.
He was charged with the interruption of the sittings of the 20th of June, 1789, with the Bed of Justice held on the 23d of the same month, the aristocratic conspiracy thwarted by the insurrection of the 14th of July, the entertainment of the Life Guards, the insults offered to the national cockade, the refusal to sanction the Declaration of Rights, as well as several constitutional articles; lastly, all the facts which indicated a new conspiracy in October, and which were followed by the scenes of the 5th and 6th; the speeches of reconciliation which had succeeded all these scenes, and which promised a change that was not sincere; the false oath taken at the Federation of the 14th of July; the secret practices of Talon and Mirabeau to effect a counter-revolution; the money spent in bribing a great number of deputies; the assemblage of the "knights of the dagger" on the 28th of February, 1791; the flight to Varennes; the fusilade of the Champ de Mars; the silence observed respecting the Treaty of Pilnitz; the delay in the promulgation of the decree which incorporated Avignon with France; the commotions at Nimes, Montauban, Mende, and Jales; the continuance of their pay to the emigrant Life Guards and to the disbanded Constitutional Guard; the insufficiency of the armies assembled on the frontiers; the refusal to sanction the decree for the camp of twenty thousand men; the disarming of the fortresses; the organisation of secret societies in the interior of Paris; the review of the Swiss and the garrison of the palace on the 10th August; the summoning the Mayor to the Tuileries; and lastly, the effusion of blood which had resulted from these military dispositions.
On the other side of him were Xanthippus, the other son of Pericles, Philippides, the son of Philomelus; also Antimoerus of Mende, who of all the disciples of Protagoras is the most famous, and intends to make sophistry his profession. I should mention also that there were some Athenians in the company.
The people are charming, and the house is a mousy, ratty, ramshackle place hundreds of years old. It may be as well to mention that folk assured me I was the first English-speaking lady ever seen at Mende. A short time before no little excitement had been created by the appearance of six young Englishmen in knickerbockers, footing it with knapsack on shoulder.
To the same effect is the following letter of the bishop of Mende, in France, bearing date of the year 800 A. D.: "Because the darkness has disappeared, and because also Christ is a real man, Pope Adrian commands us to paint him under the form of a man. How did a lamb hold its place on the cross for eight hundred years?
And here, as in the valley of the Allier, and on the road from Langogne to Mende, it is wonderful to see the uncompromising devotion of the French peasant to Mother Earth neither stones, brushwood, nor morass daunting his energy.
Here, the route from Mende to St. Enimie by way of Sauveterre is described also in the fewest possible words, two pages being found sufficient for short descriptions of the gorges of the Tarn by way of Florac, St. Enimie and the valley of the Joute. Montpellier-le-Vieux, for the very good reason mentioned above, is still absent. But just a year later we find the guide-book remodelled altogether.
These grumblers will doubtless erelong take a different tone, as the glorious scenery of the Lozere becomes more widely known and Mende is made the tourists' headquarters. Our hotel, situated in the middle of the town, offers good beds, good food, dirty floors, charges low enough to please Mr. Joseph Pennell, and a total absence of anything in the shape of modern ideas.
If the reader now turns to a map of France, and draws a perpendicular line from Mende to Lodeve, and a vertical line from Millau to Florac, he will have a pretty good notion of the area occupied by the Causses, including that of the Larzac in Aveyron.
Each of the Causses casts up above its plain fantastic heaps of rock consonant to the wild spirit of its isolation; but the Causse of Mende holds a kind of fortress a medley so like the ghost of a dead town that, even in full daylight, you expect the footsteps of men; and by night, as you go gently, in fear of waking the sleepers, you tread quite certainly among built houses and spires.
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