The same battle occurs here over Protestant interments as in other parts of Franche-Comté. In some cases it is necessary for the préfets to send gendarmes, and have the law carried out by force; the village mayors being generally uneducated men, mere tools of the curés.
After the idyllic pictures I have drawn of other parts of France, I am reluctantly obliged to draw a very different picture of society here. The army and the celibate clergy, the soldier and the priest--such are the demoralizing elements that undermine domestic morality and family life in garrison, priest-ridden towns like this. Drink and debauchery fill the prisons, and the taint of immorality is not limited to one class alone. How can it be otherwise? seeing that while the heads of families openly profess unbelief, and deride their priests, they permit their wives and daughters to go to confession, and confide their children to the spiritual teachers they profess to abhor? This point was clearly brought out by the Père Hyacinthe in one of his recent discourses in Paris, and his words struck home. Next to the celibate priesthood, it is the army that brings about such a state of things. Householders in Lons-le-Saunier will tell you that, no matter whether their female servants be young, middle-aged, or old, they have to bar and bolt their doors at night as if against marauding Arabs in remote settlements of Algeria. Even when these precautions are taken, the sound of whistling outside the kitchen door at nightfall will often indicate the presence of loafers on their evil quest. In the rural districts domestic morality is at a very low ebb also, and on the whole there is much to be done here by both reformer and educationalist.
I left Lons-le-Saunier early on a bright September morning, the children being lifted, still drowsy, out of their little beds to bid their English friend good-bye. Several diligences start simultaneously from the _Bureau des Messageries_ here for different places in the heart of the Jura, so that tourists cannot do better than make this a starting place. No matter what direction they take, they will find themselves landed in the midst of glorious mountain scenery, and romantic little towns and valleys, unknown to the majority of the travelling world. This is the charm of travelling in these parts. The tourist is breaking virgin soil wherever he goes, and if he has to rough it at every stage, at least he receives substantial reward. My route, marked out for me beforehand by experienced _Jurassiens_, lay by way of Champagnole and Morez to St. Claude, the ancient little bishopric in the heart of the Jura highlands, thence to Nantua, thus zig-zagging right through the country.