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It is thus that many of the peasants of the Aveyron sleep. This is not a part of France where the study of cleanliness and comfort is carried to excess. If the floor of the room that I now entered had ever been washed, the boards must have forgotten the scrubbing sensation a century or more ago.
Within a few yards of the Hotel Flouron we reach the edge of this escarpment, and gaze upon the wide valley of the Aveyron, village-crested hills, and the dim blue outline of the far-off Larzac. From the public promenade at the other end of the city we look westward upon a richly-cultivated plain set round with the Cantal mountains, gold-green vineyards, wine-red soil, and deep purple distance.
At Montvalon- Tauriac, in the same department, under the castle are refuges and granaries. At Murat in Cantal is the castle of Anterroche, and the rocks about it are traversed with galleries leading to chambers containing silos. At Salles-la-Source in Aveyron, in a cleft of the plateau, is the castle of the Count of Armagnac, and here also there is the same provision.
After following it a little distance I found myself between towering walls of Jurassic rock, vertical towards the summit, capped on each side by a long row of houses. There was also a church, likewise on the edge of the precipice. This was Bozouls a place scarcely known beyond a small district of the Aveyron, but one of the most curious in France.
More than a hundred megalithic monuments of France have been found to contain bronze, and this number would be more than doubled if we counted the finds in tombs not connected with megaliths, such as those of Aveyron and Lozere, where a few bits of bronze were found mixed with numerous stone objects.
Moreover, in the departments of Aveyron, Tarn, and Hérault have been found what are known as menhir-statues, upright pillars of stone roughly shaped into human semblance at the top; they are of two types, the one clearly female and the other with no breasts, but always with a collar or baldric. It has been argued that these figures represent a deity or deities of the megalithic people.
At Villeneuve, Aveyron, and throughout the department of Cantal, Representative Taillefer and his delegate Deltheil, instruct the Revolutionary Committees to "place under military requisition and conscription all muscadins above the first class," that is to say, all between twenty-five and forty years of age who are not reached by the law.
Some few years ago MM. Cartailhac and Boule discovered one of these primitive quarries at Mur de Barrez, the chief town of the department of Aveyron. They made out eight shafts in the face of a layer of limestone some eighty-one feet long, and at every turn of their excavations they came to fresh shafts.
At last the chair of physics fell vacant at the college of Ajaccio, the salary being 72 pounds sterling, and he left for Corsica. His stay there was well calculated to impress him. There the intense impressionability which the little peasant of Aveyron received at birth could only be confirmed and increased.
For two hours they marched through forest and marshland, along the left bank of the river Aveyron; Sir Nigel riding behind his Company, with Alleyne at his right hand, and Johnston, the old master bowman, walking by his left stirrup. Ere they had reached their journey's end the knight had learned all that he would know of his men, their doings and their intentions.
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