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CHAPTER XII

ALAIS

Descent from La Bastide—Viaduct of the Luech—Coal-beds—The town of Alais—Rochebelle—Ancient oppidum—Hermitage—The last hermit—Sidonius Apollinaris—The Citadel—Family quarrels—The Cambis family—A ghost story—Making polemical use of a ghost—Huguenots take Alais—Murders—The Bishopric—The Cathedral—Silk culture—Introduction of the mulberry and the worm to Europe—Silk husbandry in France—Favoured by Henry IV.—Olivier de Serre—Colbert—The Magnanerie—Silk-weaving introduced into England—A disaster that proved a blessing—Transformations of the caterpillar—Florian—The faults of an Englishman.

WHEN the train, after quitting La Bastide, has passed through a tunnel at the highest point of the pass, you rush out of a northern clime, with northern vegetation, into a climate with tree, shrub, and flower wholly southern. The Allier and its tributaries were making full gallop for the Atlantic; you see at once torrents racing down gorges to fling themselves into the Mediterranean in which no Greenland icebergs ever float to chill alike the currents and the air. Gulfs open beside the line clothed in chestnuts, mulberries, almonds, vines; oleanders appear, and the kermes oak with its varnished leaves covering the slopes.

The line does not descend the first valley entered, but bores its way through spur after spur of the mountain chain till it reaches the furrow through which flows the Gardon d'Alais. Génolhac is passed, that

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