"These men," said the abbot to Mr. Landon, "live here in the mountain of their own free will; a few of them are allowed a little light whereby reading is possible, but these are the weaker brethren; the others live in darkness in a square cell partly hewn out of the sharp slope of the rock, partly built up, with the window just within reach of the upraised hand. There are three periods of immurement. The first is endured for six months, the second, upon which a monk may enter at any time he pleases, or not at all, is for three years and ninety-three days; the third and last period is for life. Only this morning," said the abbot, "a hermit died after having lived in darkness for twenty- five years." Mr. Landon goes on to say: "Voluntary this self-immolation is said to be, and perhaps technically speaking it is possible for the pluckier souls to refuse to go on with this hideous and useless form of self-sacrifice, but the grip of the Lamas is omnipotent, and practically none refuse."
He describes a visit to the cell of one of those thus immured: "The abbot led us into a small courtyard which had blank walls all round it, over which a peach-tree reared its transparent pink and white against the sky. Almost on a level with the ground there was an opening closed with a flat stone from behind. In front of this window was a ledge eighteen inches in width with two basins beside it, and one at each end. The abbot was attended by an acolyte, who, by his master"s orders, tapped three times sharply on the stone slab. We stood in the little courtyard in the sun and watched that wicket with cold apprehension. I think, on the whole, it was the most uncanny thing I saw in all Tibet.
What on earth was going to appear when that stone slab, which even then was beginning weakly to quiver, was pushed aside, the wildest conjecture could not suggest. After half-a-minute"s pause the stone moved, or tried to move, but it came to rest again. Then, very slowly and uncertainly it was pushed back, and a black chasm was revealed.
There was a pause of thirty seconds, during which imagination ran riot, but I do not think that any other thing could have been so intensely pathetic as that which we actually saw. A hand, m.u.f.fled in a tightly wound piece of dirty cloth, for all the world like the stump of an arm, was painfully thrust up, and very weakly it felt along the slab. After a fruitless fumbling the hand slowly quivered back again into the darkness. A few moments later there was again one ineffectual effort, and then the stone slab moved noiselessly again across the opening.
Once a day water and an unleavened cake of flour is placed for the prisoner upon that slab, the signal is given, and he may take it in.
His diversion is over for the day, and in the darkness of his cell, where night and day, noon, sunset, and the dawn are all alike, the poor soul has thought that another day of his long penance was over."
Here is another account from the pen of Sven Hedin.
He visited the monastery of Sumde-pu-pe, where was a hermitage consisting of a single room five paces each way, built over a spring that bubbles up in the centre. Inside the hermit had been walled up with only a tiny tunnel communicating with the outside world. Once inside, he was never again to see the light of day nor hear a human voice. The man Sven Hedin saw had been immured for sixty-nine years, and wished to see the sun again.
"He was all bent up as small as a child, and his body was nothing but a light-grey parchment-like skin and bones. His eyes had lost their colour, and were quite bright and blind. Of the monks who sixty-nine years before had conducted him to the cell not one survived.... And he had scarcely been carried out into the sunlight when he too, gave up the ghost." [Footnote: "Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet," Lond. 1910.]
S. Theresa once said that she had a vision of h.e.l.l. The torture did not consist of flames, but in being planted opposite a blank wall, on which to gaze through all eternity. The hermit in a Buddhist cell must have undergone this torture till all intelligence, all consciousness, save desire for food, was dead within him.
There have been horrible instances of voluntary immurement in Christian Europe, and above all in the Christian East; but not quite--though very nearly--as bad as this. Moreover, not one line, not a single word in the Scriptures inculcates such self-annihilation. Christ set the example of retirement from the world into the wilderness for forty days, to a mountain apart for one night, to teach men occasionally and for a limited period, to withdraw from the swirl of business and the clatter of tongues. And S. Paul retired from the society of men after his conversion to gather his thoughts together, and prepare for his great missionary work. But that was something altogether different from ascetic abnegation of life and flight from its responsibilities.
The peopling of the solitudes of Syria and Egypt by solitaries was due, not to flight from persecution, but to revulsion from the luxury of the great cities, and very largely as an escape from compulsory military service. It was not a new thing. Judaism had been impregnated with Buddhism, or at all events with Brahminism, and with ideas of asceticism. The Essenes and Therapeutae lived, the first in the time of the Maccabees upon the sh.o.r.es of the Dead Sea, and the last two centuries later, in Egypt. Both inhabited cells in the desert, preserving celibacy, renouncing property, pleasure, and delicate food, and consecrating their time to the study of the Scriptures, and to prayer. And yet celibacy was in violation of the principles of Judaism, which required every man to marry, in the hopes of becoming a progenitor of the Messiah. Further, they rejected the b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifices of the law, and would have nothing to do with the temple at Jerusalem.
We can see by Philo"s "On the Contemplative Life" how completely Alexandrian Judaism had sucked in Buddhist doctrine, and how Therapeutic asceticism formed the bridge from Buddhism to Christian monachism. In the same places where Essenes and Therapeutae had been, there later we find Christian solitaries. "We can have no doubt," says Ferdinand Delaunay, "that the Therapeutic Convents which perhaps gave the first signal for conversion to the new faith, served also as the cradle for Christian monachism. History shows us, hardly a century later, this flourishing in the same localities on the borders of the lake Mareotis, and on the heights of Nitrea. And we cannot doubt but that Christian solitaries continued at Alexandria the work of their Jewish predecessors, and endeavoured to make their oracles serve for the propagation of the Gospel." [Footnote: Delaunay (F.), _Moines et Sibylles_, Paris, 1874, p. 316.]
The language in which Philo describes the Therapeutae might be applied to the Christian monks of Egypt. I must condense his rambling account.
The Therapeutae abandon their property, their children, their wives, parents, and friends and homes, to seek out fresh habitations outside the city walls, in solitary places and in deserts. They pray twice in the day, at morning and evening, and the interval is wholly devoted to meditation on the Scriptures and elucidating the allegories therein.
They likewise compose psalms and hymns to G.o.d, "and during six days each, retiring into solitude, philosophises, never going outside the threshold of the outer court, and indeed never looking out. But on the seventh day they all a.s.semble, and sit down in order, and the eldest, who has the most profound learning, speaks with steadfast voice explaining the meaning of the laws."
They wore but one garment, a s.h.a.ggy hide for winter, and a thin mantle for summer. Their food was herbs and bread, and their drink water.
Philo concludes his account thus: "This then is what I have to say of those who are called Therapeutae who have devoted themselves to the contemplation of nature, and who have lived in it, and in the soul alone, being citizens of heaven and of the world, and very acceptable to the Father and Creator of the universe because of their virtue; it has procured them His love as their most appropriate reward, which far surpa.s.ses all the gifts of fortune, and conducts them to the very summit and perfection of happiness."
It was not among the Jews alone that the solitary life was cultivated.
In the Serapium of Thebes were also heathen monks leading a very similar life. That Persian Manichaeism had infected Jews and heathen as well there can exist little doubt. [Footnote: Philo gives an account of the sacred banquets of the Therapeutae that strongly reminds us of the Agapae of the Early Christians.]
In 177, in Lyons, when S. Pothinus and others were arrested, thrown into prison, tortured and killed for the Faith, there was one of the martyrs who caused offence to the rest because "he had long been used to a very austere life, and to live entirely on bread and water. He seemed resolved to continue this practice during his confinement, but Attalus (another martyr), after his first combat in the theatre, understood by revelation that Alcibiades gave occasion of offence to others by seeming to favour the new sect of the Montanists (a Christian phase of Manichaeism), who endeavoured to recommend themselves by their extraordinary austerities. Alcibiades listened to the admonition, and from that time ate of everything with thanksgiving to G.o.d." [Footnote: Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._, v. i.]
But, although Buddhism affected the lives of certain Christians, it in no way touched their faith--that life was the result of contact with Manichaeism, which taught that all matter was evil, and that the flesh must be subdued, as essentially unG.o.dly. The Buddhist religion in its ethics is the absolute reverse of the Christian. The Buddhist prays and tortures, and stupefies himself for purely selfish reasons, so as to escape reincarnation in the form of a bug, a louse, or a worm, by the destruction within himself of all human pa.s.sions and inclinations. His self-torture is undertaken for the object of absorption into Nirvana, only to be reached by reducing the mind and heart to absolute indifference to every animal desire, and thus to escape the eternal revolution of metempsychosis. "No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself," is a maxim incomprehensible to a Buddhist. As Mr.
Landon says: "The spiritual brigandage of the Lamas finds its counterpart in many other creeds, but it would be unjust not to record in the strongest terms the great radical difference that exists between Lamaism at its best and Christianity at its worst. There has never been absent from the lowest profession of our faith a full recognition of the half-divine character of self-sacrifice for another. Of this the Tibetians know nothing. The exact performance of their duties, the daily practice of conventional offices, and continual obedience to their Lamaic superiors is for them a means of escape from personal d.a.m.nation in a form which is more terrible perhaps than any monk- conjured Inferno. For others they do not profess to have even a pa.s.sing thought. Now this is a distinction which goes to the very root of the matter. The fact is rarely stated in so many words, but it is the truth that Christianity is daily judged by one standard, and by one standard only--its altruism, and this complete absence of carefulness for others, this insistent and fierce desire to save one"s own soul, regardless of a brother"s, is in itself something that makes foreign to one the best that Lamaism can offer."
One day a gnat stung S. Macarius, and he killed it. To punish himself for this, he went to the marshes of Scete, and stayed there six months.
When he returned to his brethren he was so disfigured by the bites of the insects that they recognised him only by the tone of his voice. A Brahmin would have been filled with remorse lest he had killed a reincarnation of his grandmother, but the Egyptian ascetic only because he had given way to momentary irritation.
One has but to read the sayings of the Fathers of the Desert to see that no vein of Brahminism or Buddhism had tinctured their faith, however deeply it may have coloured their practice. When plague raged in Alexandria, they were ready to quit their cells and hasten into the cities to minister to the sick and dying; when the faith, as they understood it, was menaced, to champion the truth.
That the Egyptian hermits, flying from a.s.sociation with the world, should betake themselves to caves, is hardly to be wondered at. In that land the rocks are pitted with artificial grottoes, which were the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, and were commodious and to be had without asking leave of any one.
Twice was Athanasius obliged to fly from the fury of the Arians, and to take refuge among the solitaries in their caves. Once he was constrained to remain in concealment in his father"s tomb, also a cavern. When he was banished to Treves, tradition says that he would not occupy a house, but sought out a grotto in a hill beyond the Moselle, and made his abode therein.
The filiation between the Syrian and Egyptian solitaries with the hermits of Buddhism may be made out with some plausibility. In the East sanct.i.ty and asceticism are inseperable. The smug missionary who cannot preach the Gospel apart from a wife, mosquito curtains and a cottage piano, and who travels from one station to another in a palanquin borne by sweating natives, does not impress the imagination of an Oriental, and has small chance of making converts. It was possibly much the same with the barbarians who overwhelmed the Roman Empire. To strike their imagination and win them to the Cross, it may be that asceticism was a necessary phase of mission work. "The Spirit breatheth where He wills, and thou canst not tell whence He cometh or whither He goeth," is the Vulgate rendering of S. John iii. 8. But if it was at one time a necessary phase, it ceased to be so when the effect required was produced; and from the close of mediaeval times the hermit was an anachronism. The life of S. Antony by Athanasius, and the _Historia Lausiaca_ or "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert," by Palladius (died c. 430), were published in the West, and inflamed minds with the desire to emulate the ascetics of Syria and Egypt; and speedily there were zealots who sought out retreats in the dens of the earth, in which to serve G.o.d in simplicity.
Some anchorites [Footnote: Properly an _anchorite_ is a recluse, walled into his cell; a _monk_ is a solitary; and an _eremite_ or _hermit_ is a dweller in the desert.] are commemorated in both the Greek Menaea and the Roman Martyrology more worthy to be esteemed Buddhists than Christian saints. Theodoret, who wrote A.D. 440, describes the lives of two women of Ber?a, whom he had himself seen. They lived in a roofless hovel with the door walled up and plastered over with clay, and with a narrow slit left for a window, through which they received food. They spoke to those who visited them but once in the year, at Pentecost; not content with the squalor and solitude of their hut, they loaded themselves with ma.s.ses of iron which bent them double. Theodoret was wont to peer in through the c.h.i.n.k at the revolting sight of the ghastly women, a ma.s.s of filth, crushed double with great rings and chains of iron. Thus they spent forty-two years, and then a yearning came on them to go forth and visit Jerusalem. The little door was accordingly broken open, and they crawled out, visited the Holy City, and crawled back again.
Another visited by Theodoret was Baradatus, who built himself a cabin on the top of a rock, so small that he was unable to stand upright in it, and was obliged to move therein bent nearly double. The joints of the stones were, moreover, so open that it resembled a cage and exposed him to the sun and rain. Theodosius, patriarch of Antioch, as a sensible man, ordered him to leave it. Then Baradatus encased himself in leather so that only his nose and mouth were visible. Nowhere was the imitation carried to such wild extravagance as in Ireland. S.
Findchua is described as living like an Indian fakir. In his cell he suspended himself for seven years on iron sickles under his arm-pits, and only descended from them to go forth and howl curses on the enemies of the King of Leinster.
In England also there was extravagance. S. Wulfric, who died in 1154, encased himself in a coat of chain-mail worn next his skin even in winter, and occupied a cell at Hazelbury in Somerset. S. Edmund of Canterbury (died 1242) wore a shirt of twisted horsehair with knots in it, and bound a cart rope round his waist so that he could scarce bend his body. In Advent and Lent he wore a shirt of sheet-lead. Thomas a Becket, when slain, was found by the monks of Canterbury to be wearing a hair shirt and hair-cloth drawers, and their admiration became enthusiastic when they further discovered that this hair-cloth was "boiling over" with lice. That this species of sanct.i.ty is still highly approved and commended to the imitation of the faithful we may suppose from the fact that Pius IX. in 1850 beatified the Blessed Marianna, because she was wont to sleep in a coffin or on a cross, and on Fridays hung herself for two hours on a cross attached to it by her hair and by ropes. On broiling hot days she denied herself a drop of water to quench an almost intolerable thirst. Verily Manichaeism has eaten like a canker into the heart of the Latin Church.
But the early anchorites of Europe were not usually guilty of such extravagance. They were earnest men who sought by self-conquest to place themselves in a position in which they could act as missionaries.
It was their means of preparing for the work of an evangelist. In most cases the apostle of a district sunk in paganism had no choice, he must take up his abode in a cave or in a hovel made of branches. In the Gallo-Roman cities the Christian bishops had gradually taken into their hands the functions of the civil governors. They were men of family and opulence, and lived in palaces crowded with slaves. They did nothing whatever towards the conversion of the country folk, the pagani. This was the achievement of the hermits. Till the peasants had been Christianised they would not invite the preacher of strange doctrines under their roofs, they looked on him with dislike or mistrust as interfering with their cherished superst.i.tions and ancestral customs.
He could not force his society on reluctant hosts.
S. Beatus, a British or Irish missionary, settled into a cave above the lake of Thun, dreaded by the natives as the abode of a dragon. He succeeded in his work, and died there at the advanced age of ninety. In 1556 the Protestant Government of Berne built up the mouth of the grotto and set soldiers to repel the pilgrims who came there. Now a monster hotel occupies the site, and those who go there for winter sport or as summer tourists know nothing or care less about the abode of the Apostle whence streamed the light of the Gospel throughout the land.
Below the terrace that surrounds the height on which Angouleme is built is the cave of S. Cybard (Eparchius died 581). An iron gate prevents access to it, and the path down to it is strewn with broken bottles and sardine tins. No one now visits it. But within, where are an altar and the mutilated statue of the saint, lived the hermit who in the sixth century did more than any other man to bring the people of the Angoumois out of darkness into light. But, as already said, when the work of evangelisation was done, then the profession of the hermit was no longer required, and such anchorites as lingered on in Europe through the Middle Ages to our own day were but degenerate representatives of the ancient evangelical solitaries.
A few years ago hermits abounded in Languedoc. They took charge of remote chapels on mountain tops, or in caves and ravines. They were always habited as Franciscan friars, but they were by no means a reputable order of men, and the French prefets in conjunction with the bishops have suppressed them.
They were always to be seen on a market day in the nearest town, not infrequently in the taverns, and in the evening festooning along the roads on their way back to their hermitages, trolling out convivial songs spiced with s.n.a.t.c.hes of ecclesiastical chants. "Mon Dieu," says Ferdinand Fabre, [Footnote: Barnabe, Paris, 1899] "I know well enough that the Free Brothers of S. Francis, as they loved to ent.i.tle themselves, had allowed themselves a good deal of freedom, more than was decorous. But as these monastically-habited gentry in no way scandalised the population of the South, who never confounded the occupants of the hermitages with the cures of the parishes, why sweep away these fantastic figures who, without any religious character, recruited from the farms, never educated in seminaries, peasants at bottom, in no way priests, capable, when required, to give a helping hand with the pruning knife in the vineyard, or with the pole among the olives, or the sickle among the corn. Alas! they had their weaknesses, and these weaknesses worked their ruin." The salt had lost its savour, wherewith could it be seasoned?
It was not in Southern France alone that the part of the hermit was played out. An amusing incident in the confession of Fetzer, head of a gang of robbers who infested the Rhine at the end of the eighteenth century, will go some way to show this. The gang had resolved on "burgling" a hermit near Lobberich. Had he been an eremite of the old sort, the last place in which robbers would have expected to find plunder would be his cell. But in the eighteenth century it was otherwise, and this particular hermit kept a grocer"s shop, and sold coffee, sugar, and nutmegs. The rogues approached the cell at night, and as a precaution one of them climbed and cut the rope of the bell wherewith the hermit announced to the neighbourhood that he was about to say his prayers. Then they broke open his door. In Fetzer"s own words, "The hermit was not at home, but as we learned, had gone a journey in connection with his grocery business. In the hermitage, however, we found several men placed there to keep guard over his goods. We soon settled them, beat them with our cudgels and cast them prostrate on the floor. Then we burst open all the chests and cupboards, but found little money. There was, however, plenty of tea and sugar. As we were about to leave, a fearful storm came on, and without more ado we returned into the hermitage to remain there till it was overpast. In order to dissipate the tedium, we ransacked the place for food, and found an excellent ham and wine in abundance. I a.s.sumed the place of host. Serve the meal! Bring more! I ordered, and we revelled and shouted and made as great a din as we liked. In the second room the hermit had a small organ. I seated myself at it; and to make the row more riotous I played as well as I was able. The laughter and the racket did not cease till morning broke. Then I dressed myself up in the hermit"s cowl and habit, and so went off with my comrades."
[Footnote: _Der neue Pitaval_, Leipzig, xviii. p. 182]
I remember visiting a hermit in 1868 who lived on a ledge in the cliff above S. Maurice in the Vallais, where was a cave that had been occupied by the repentant Burgundian King Sigismund. He cultivated there a little garden, and I have still by me a dried bouquet of larkspur that he presented to my wife on our leaving after a pleasant chat. A pilgrimage to the cave was due on the morrow, and he had just returned from the town whither he had descended to borrow mugs out of which the devotees might drink of the holy spring that issued from the cave.
The Wild Kirchlein, in Appenzell, is now visited rather by tourists than by pilgrims. A huge limestone precipice rises above the Bodmenalp, that is a paradise of wild flowers. A hundred and seventy feet up the cliff gapes a cavern, and at its mouth is a tiny chapel. It is reached by what is now a safe pathway and over a bridge cast across a chasm.
But formerly the ascent could not be made without danger. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, some Alpine shepherds, who had reached the cave, reported that they had seen in it the remains of an altar. This aroused interest, and in the summer of 1621 a Capuchin named Tanner ascended to the cave, blessed, and consecrated it as a place of pilgrimage. He said ma.s.s there and preached. He was shortly afterwards called away to Freiburg, and for thirty years the cave was disregarded and neglected. But at the end of that time Tanner returned to Appenzell, and interested the parish priest Ulmann in it. When war broke out between Schwyz and Zurich in 1656, Ulmann concealed the treasures of the church in the cave. This drew attention to it, and shortly after an altar was furnished with what was needful, and on the Feast of S. Michael in 1657 ma.s.s was again said there. Various matters --loss of friends, and contests with the secular authorities--wearied Ulmann, and he resolved on retiring as a hermit to the cave in the cliff, taking with him, however, an attendant. The swallows left, the winter storms came on, yet he braved the wind and cold, and remained a tenant of the cave for two winters and as many summers; but then, by order of the Bishop, he left to act as chaplain to a convent in Lindau.
There he spent nine years, till falling ill, he felt a craving for the purer air of his Appenzell home, and obtained leave to return and again re-tenant the beloved cave. In his last will he bequeathed the Upper Bodmen Alp that was his ancestral inheritance for the maintenance of the Holy Grotto. After his death the little chapel with its tower was built, and a Capuchin friar occupied the hermitage. In 1853, the last hermit there, Brother Antony Fa.s.sler, fell down the precipice whilst gathering herbs. Since then there has been no such picturesque object to lead the visitor through the recesses of the cavern and show the stalact.i.tes; that office is now performed by the innkeeper of the hotel on the Alp.
The cave of S. Verena is one of the favourite pilgrim resorts in Switzerland. It is near Soleure, and lies in a valley of a spur of the Jura. According to the received tradition she ran after the Theban legion--in modern parlance was a camp-follower, but deserted the soldiers here, and took up her abode in this grotto. There is no mention of this hermitage earlier than 1426, and the legend has grown up since. That the cave was much more ancient, and was invested with holy awe, is no doubt true. In fact, there is reason to believe that Verena was a German G.o.ddess. [Footnote: Rocholz, _Dei Gaugottinnen_, Leipzig, 1870.] Her symbol is a comb, and in the wall are cut these words:
Pectore dum Christo, dum pectine servit egenis, Non latuit quondam sancta Verena cavo;
that is to say, serving Christ and combing the heads of the poor, the holy Verena lived unconcealed in this grotto.
The way to the chapel is through woods, the valley closing in till bold rocks are reached. In a niche is a statue of the Magdalen, with the inscription, "I sleep, but my heart waketh." A few steps further is a representation of the Garden of Gethsemane. From this a long and steep stair leads up to the chapel, cut deep in the rock, with an altar in it. Behind this is the Holy Sepulchre carved in the stone, in the seventeenth century by the hermit a.r.s.enius. On the other side of the chapel a long stone stair leads again into the open air. Under this stair is a hole in the rock into which the hand can be thrust.
According to a "pious belief" the Saint one day was much tormented with the remembrance of the military, and longed to resume her pursuit of them, and she gripped the rock, which yielded like wax to her fingers.
Another Swiss rock hermitage is that of the Magdalen near Freiburg, in the cliff on the right bank of the Saane. At the close of the seventeenth century it was enlarged by a hermit, John Baptist Dupres, and his comrade John Licht. They worked at it for twenty years. Dupres dug a number of cells out of the sandstone, a kitchen with a chimney, a dining-room, a church, and a stable. The church measures 63 feet long, 30 feet wide, and is 22 feet high. He built a tower to his church, and gave his chimney the height of 90 feet so as to ensure that his fire should not smoke. The hermit Dupres was drowned in 1708 as he was rowing over the river a party of scholars who had come to visit him. No hermit lives there now. His residence is occupied by a peasant with his family.
On the Nahe, that flows into the Rhine, is the little town of Oberstein, whose inhabitants are nearly all employed in cutting and polishing agates, sardonyxes, and various other stones prized by ladies. Precipitous cliffs arise above the town, and contract the s.p.a.ce on which houses could be raised, and these rocks are crowned by two ruined castles, the Older and the Newer Oberstein. About half-way up the face of the cliff, 260 feet above the river, can be seen a tiny church, to which ascent is made by flights of steps. The old castle rises above this, and stands 360 feet above the river, but its remains are reduced to a fragment of a tower. Separated from it by a notch in the rocks is the new castle that was destroyed by fire about thirty- five years ago.
In the old castle lived in the eleventh century two brothers, Wyrich and Emich von Oberstein. Both fell in love with the daughter of the knight of Lichtenberg, but neither confessed his pa.s.sion to the other.
At last, one day Emich returned to the castle to announce to his brother that he had been accepted by the fair maid; Wyrich, in an impulse of jealousy, caught his brother by the throat and hurled him down the precipice. His conscience at once spoke out, and in the agony of his remorse he had resort to a hermit who bade him renounce the world, grave for himself a cell in the face of the melaphyre clay--the hermit did not give to the rock its mineralogical name--and await a token from heaven that he was forgiven. Accordingly Wyrich von Oberstein scrambled up the face of the cliff as high as he could possibly go, and there laboured day after day till he had excavated for himself a grotto in which to live and expiate his crime. And a spring oozed out of the rock in his cave, and was accepted by him as the promised token of pardon. After a while he obtained that a little church should be consecrated which he had constructed at the mouth of his cave. On the day that the bishop came to dedicate the structure he was found dead.
What is supposed to be his figure, that of a knight in armour, is in the chapel. This latter was rebuilt in 1482, and the monument came from the older structure. The chapel has been handed over to the Calvinists for their religious services, which is the humour of it, as Nym would have said.
Beside the highroad (_route nationale_) from Brive to Cahors, but a very little way out of the town, is a ma.s.s of red Permian sandstone perforated with caves. In 1226 S. Anthony of Padua was at Brive, and resided for a while in one of them. Since then it has been held sacred and occupied by Franciscans, who erected a convent above it; in so doing they cut into and mutilated some very ancient artificial workings in the sandstone for the contrivance of rock habitations. The cave, however, was neglected when the Franciscans were expelled at the Revolution, but they returned in 1875 and rebuilt or greatly enlarged their convent, only to be expelled again in 1906. The grottoes, now converted into chapels to the number of four, are in a line under the superstructures, that in the middle the actual hermitage. This, moreover, has been cut out of the rock artificially, at a higher level than the others, that are natural and are untenable, owing to the incessant drip of water from the roofs. The first cave is dedicated to S. Francis of a.s.sisi, but it is a rock shelter rather than a cave. It is natural, but in one corner a small water-basin has been scooped. The second cave is mainly natural, but partly artificial; it is dedicated to Notre Dame Auxiliatrice. The third, reached by steps, is wholly artificial, and before the stairs were built to lead to it, was inaccessible save by a short ladder. It placed the occupant in safety from invasion by wolves or other objectionable visitors. It measures 21 feet by 15 feet. This, which was the habitation of S. Anthony, communicated with the two lower caves, one on each side, by lateral openings.
The fourth cave is that of Des Fontaines, in which are basins of water cut in the rock, receiving the everlasting drip from above.
It is impossible to give one t.i.the of the hermitages in caves that are to be seen in Europe; but a few words may be devoted to La Sainte Beaume in Var, where, according to tradition, Mary Magdalen spent the end of her days. The tradition is entirely dest.i.tute of historical basis, and rests on a misconception. Scott has described the cave with tolerable accuracy in "Anne of Geierstein," though he had not seen it himself.