"Here, atmospheric agencies have carved the strangest edifices. Huge calcareous hats cover and overhang slender schistous supports, shaped like the tables in a glacier. Many of these gigantic mushrooms have reeled on their corroded stalks and are thrown into a sloping position like fallen dolmens. The plateau of l'Hospitalet is both picturesque and of scientific interest."[12]
Florac hardly comes within the range that I have marked out for description, and yet some words must be given to it, as it was the centre of the Cevenol revolt, and was the scene of several conflicts and of the execution of Camisards.
It is a very dirty place, originally walled; the houses were so crowded that the streets were contracted to the narrowest possible width. One has to be careful not to walk down them before eight o'clock in the morning, as all the slops are thrown from the windows into the street, and may fall on the head of the incautious passenger; and here no warning call is given, as in the narrow lanes of old Edinburgh, to put the man in the street on his guard. What is cast forth remains where it falls till torrential rains sweep away the accumulated filth of weeks and even months. In the Languedoc towns that reek with evil odours, in a country too where the hillsides are redolent with aromatic herbs, lavender, sage, marjoram, rosemary, beds of violets, thyme in sheets, one can hardly help repeating the lines of Bishop Heber:
"What though the spicy breezes Blow sweet o'er Ceylon's isle, And every prospect pleases, Yet only man is vile."
But it is not man who is vile, _that_ he is nowhere, it is the refuse he casts about him that is offensive, and the offensiveness is a provision of nature to instruct him to remove it beyond the reach of the nose. But familiarity must breed a liking for these disgusting odours, or women would not sit on their doorsteps all day working and chatting, and let their children play about amidst festering garbage.
Florac is, in spite of dragonades and gallows and the stake, almost entirely Protestant. The large meeting-house contains nothing but a pulpit and bare benches. The Catholic church is a new and mean structure, the temple bare as a barn, the church ugly as a modern French architect can make one.