XXVI.
It was a pleasure to feel one"s self in Provence again, - the land where the silver-gray earth is im- pregnated with the light of the sky. To celebrate the event, as soon as I arrived at Nimes I engaged a caleche to convey me to the Pont du Gard. The day was yet young, and it was perfectly fair; it ap- peared well, for a longish drive, to take advantage, without delay, of such security. After I had left the town I became more intimate with that Provencal charm which I had already enjoyed from the window of the train, and which glowed in the sweet sunshine and the white rocks, and lurked in the smoke-puffs of the little olives. The olive-trees in Provence are half the landscape. They are neither so tall, so stout, nor so richly contorted as I have seen them beyond the Alps; but this mild colorless bloom seems the very texture of the country. The road from Nimes, for a distance of fifteen miles, is superb; broad enough for an army, and as white and firm as a dinner-table.
It stretches away over undulations which suggest a kind of harmony; and in the curves it makes through the wide, free country, where there is never a hedge or a wall, and the detail is always exquisite, there is something majestic, almost processional. Some twenty minutes before I reached the little inn that marks the termination of the drive, my vehicle met with an ac- cident which just missed being serious, and which engaged the attention of a gentleman, who, followed by his groom and mounted on a strikingly handsome horse happened to ride up at the moment. This young man, who, with his good looks and charming manner, might have stepped out of a novel of Octave Feuillet, gave me some very intelligent advice in reference to one of my horses that had been injured, and was so good as to accompany me to the inn, with the re- sources of which he was acquainted, to see that his recommendations were carried out. The result of our interview was that he invited me to come and look at a small but ancient chateau in the neighborhood, which he had the happiness - not the greatest in the world, he intimated - to inhabit, and at which I en- gaged to present myself after I should have spent an hour at the Pont du Gard. For the moment, when we separated, I gave all my attention to that great structure. You are very near it before you see it; the ravine it spans suddenly opens and exhibits the picture. The scene at this point grows extremely beautiful. The ravine is the valley of the Gardon, which the road from Nimes has followed some time without taking account of it, but which, exactly at the right distance from the aqueduct, deepens and ex- pands, and puts on those characteristics which are best suited to give it effect. The gorge becomes romantic, still, and solitary, and, with its white rocks and wild shrubbery, hangs over the clear, colored river, in whose slow course there is here and there a deeper pool.
Over the valley, from side to side, and ever so high in the air, stretch the three tiers of the tremendous bridge. They are unspeakably imposing, and nothing could well be more Roman. The hugeness, the soli- dity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rect.i.tude of the whole thing leave you nothing to say - at the time - and make you stand gazing. You simply feel that it is n.o.ble and perfect, that it has the quality of greatness. A road, branching from the highway, de- scends to the level of the river and pa.s.ses under one of the arches. This road has a wide margin of gra.s.s and loose stones, which slopes upward into the bank of the ravine. You may sit here as long as you please, staring up at the light, strong piers; the spot is ex- tremely natural, though two or three stone benches have been erected on it. I remained there an hour and got a cornplete impression; the place was per- fectly soundless, and for the time, at least, lonely; the splendid afternoon had begun to fade, and there was a fascination in the object I had come to see. It came to pa.s.s that at the same time I discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality. That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in the nice adaptation of the means to the end. The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great. Of this Roman rigidity the Pont du Gard is an admirable example. It would be a great injustice, however, not to insist upon its beauty, - a kind of manly beauty, that of an object constructed not to please but to serve, and impressive simply from the scale on which it carries out this intention. The number of arches in each tier is dif- ferent; they are smaller and more numerous as they ascend. The preservation of the thing is extra- ordinary; nothing has crumbled or collapsed; every feature remains; and the huge blocks of stone, of a brownish-yellow, (as if they had been baked by the Provencal sun for eighteen centuries), pile themselves, without mortar or cement, as evenly as the day they were laid together. All this to carry the water of a couple of springs to a little provincial city! The con- duit on the top has retained its shape and traces of the cement with which it was lined. When the vague twilight began to gather, the lonely valley seemed to fill itself with the shadow of the Roman name, as if the mighty empire were still as erect as the supports of the aqueduct; and it was open to a solitary tourist, sitting there sentimental, to believe that no people has ever been, or will ever be, as great as that, measured, as we measure the greatness of an individual, by the push they gave to what they undertook. The Pont du Gard is one of the three or four deepest impressions they have left; it speaks of them in a manner with which they might have been satisfied.
I feel as if it were scarcely discreet to indicate the whereabouts of the chateau of the obliging young man I had met on the way from Nimes; I must con- tent myself with saying that it nestled in an en- chanting valley, - _dans le fond_, as they say in France, - and that I took my course thither on foot, after leaving the Pont du Gard. I find it noted in my journal as "an adorable little corner." The princ.i.p.al feature of the place is a couple of very ancient towers, brownish-yellow in hue, and mantled in scarlet Vir- ginia-creeper. One of these towers, reputed to be of Saracenic origin, is isolated, and is only the more effective; the other is incorporated in the house, which is delightfully fragmentary and irregular. It had got to be late by this time, and the lonely _castel_ looked crepuscular and mysterious. An old house- keeper was sent for, who showed me the rambling interior; and then the young man took me into a dim old drawing-room, which had no less than four chimney-pieces, all unlighted, and gave me a refec- tion of fruit and sweet wine. When I praised the wine and asked him what it was, he said simply, "C"est du vin de ma mere!" Throughout my little joumey I had never yet felt myself so far from Paris; and this was a sensation I enjoyed more than my host, who was an involuntary exile, consoling him- self with laying out a _manege_, which he showed me as I walked away. His civility was great, and I was greatly touched by it. On my way back to the little inn where I had left my vehicle, I pa.s.sed the Pont du Gard, and took another look at it. Its great arches made windows for the evening sky, and the rocky ravine, with its dusky cedars and shining river, was lonelier than before. At the inn I swallowed, or tried to swallow,a gla.s.s of horrible wine with my coach- man; after which, with my reconstructed team, I drove back to Nimes in the moonlight. It only added a more solitary whiteness to the constant sheen of the Provencal landscape.
XXVII.
The weather the next day was equally fair, so that it seemed an imprudence not to make sure of Aigues- Mortes. Nimes itself could wait; at a pinch, I could attend to Nimes in the rain. It was my belief that Aigues-Mortes was a little gem, and it is natural to desire that gems should have an opportunity to sparkle.
This is an excursion of but a few hours, and there is a little friendly, familiar, dawdling train that will con- vey you, in time for a noonday breakfast, to the small dead town where the blessed Saint-Louis twice em- barked for the crusades. You may get back to Nimes for dinner; the run - or rather the walk, for the train doesn"t run - is of about an hour. I found the little journey charming, and looked out of the carriage win- dow, on my right, at the distant Cevennes, covered with tones of amber and blue, and, all around, at vineyards red with the touch of October. The grapes were gone, but the plants had a color of their own.
Within a certain distance of Aigues-Mortes they give place to wide salt-marshes, traversed by two ca.n.a.ls; and over this expanse the train rumbles slowly upon a narrow causeway, failing for some time, though you know you are near the object of your curiosity, to bring you to sight of anything but the horizon. Sud- denly it appears, the towered and embattled ma.s.s, lying so low that the crest of its defences seems to rise straight out of the ground; and it is not till the train stops, close before them, that you are able to take the full measure of its walls.
Aigues-Mortes stands on the edge of a wide _etang_, or shallow inlet of the sea, the further side of which is divided by a narrow band of coast from the Gulf of Lyons. Next after Carca.s.sonne, to which it forms an admirable _pendant_, it is the most perfect thing of the kind in France. It has a rival in the person of Avignon, but the ramparts of Avignon are much less effective. Like Carca.s.sonne, it is completely sur- rounded with its old fortifications; and if they are far simpler in character (there is but one circle), they are quite as well preserved. The moat has been filled up, and the site of the town might be figured by a billiard-table without pockets. On this absolute level, covered with coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, Aigues-Mortes presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a school-boy draws upon his slate, or that we see in the background of early Flemish pictures, - a simple parallelogram, of a contour almost absurdly bare, broken at intervals by angular towers and square holes. Such, literally speak- ing, is this delightful little city, which needs to be seen to tell its full story. It is extraordinarily pictorial, and if it is a very small sister of Carca.s.sonne, it has at least the essential features of the family. Indeed, it is even more like an image and less like a reality than Carca.s.sonne; for by position and prospect it seems even more detached from the life of the present day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little busi- ness; it sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a ca.n.a.l beside it, and which carry their cargo into actual places. But nothing could well be more drowsy and desultory than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two or three brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier, who strolled on the little quay beneath the western wall. "C"est bien plaisant, c"est bien paisible," said this worthy man, with whom I had some conversa- tion; and pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed, though the former of these epithets may suggest an element of gayety in which Aigues-Mortes is deficient.
The sand, the salt, the dull sea-view, surround it with a bright, quiet melancholy. There are fifteen towers and nine gates, five of which are on the southern side, overlooking the water. I walked all round the place three times (it doesn"t take long), but lingered most under the southern wall, where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat down on an old stone, and looked away to the desolate salt- marshes and the still, shining surface of the _etang_, and, as I did so, reflected that this was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took place, in 1538, between Francis I.
and Charles V. It was also not easy to perceive how Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the Holy Land, set his army afloat in such very undeveloped channels. An hour later I purchased in the town a little pamphlet by M. Marius Topin, who undertakes to explain this latter anomaly, and to show that there is water enough in the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have sustained a fleet of crusaders. I was unable to trace the channel that he points out, but was glad to believe that, as he contends, the sea has not retreated from the town since the thirteenth century.
It was comfortable to think that things are not so changed as that. M. Topin indicates that the other French ports of the Mediterranean were not then _dis- ponsibles_, and that Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible spot for an embarkation.
Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not crumbled, like the Cite of Carcas- sonne. It can hardly be said to be alive; but if it is dead it has been very neatly embalmed. The hand of the restorer rests on it constantly; but this artist has not, as at Carca.s.sonne, had miracles to accomplish.
The interior is very still and empty, with small stony, whitewashed streets, tenanted by a stray dog, a stray cat, a stray old woman. In the middle is a little _place_, with two or three cafes decorated by wide awnings, - a little _place_ of which the princ.i.p.al feature is a very bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by Pradier. It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that bears the name of that pious monarch. You may walk round the enceinte of Aigues-Mortes, both outside and in; but you may not, as at Carca.s.sonne, make a por- tion of this circuit on the _chemin de ronde_, the little projecting footway attached to the inner face of the battlements. This footway, wide enough only for a single pedestrian, is in the best order, and near each of the gates a flight of steps leads up to it; but a locked gate, at the top of the steps, makes access im- possible, or at least unlawful. Aigues-Mortes, however, has its citadel, an immense tower, larger than any of the others, a little detached, and standing at the north- west angle of the town. I called upon the _casernier_, the custodian of the walls, - and in his absence I was conducted through this big Tour de Constance by his wife, a very mild, meek woman, yellow with the traces of fever and ague, - a scourge which, as might be ex- pected in a town whose name denotes "dead waters,"
enters freely at the nine gates. The Tour de Con- stance is of extraordinary girth and solidity, divided into three superposed circular chambers, with very fine vaults, which are lighted by embrasures of prodigious depth, converging to windows little larger than loop- holes. The place served for years as a prison to many of the Protestants of the south whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had exposed to atrocious penalties, and the annals of these dreadful chambers during the first half of the last century were written in tears and blood. Some of the recorded cases of long confinement there make one marvel afresh at what man has inflicted and endured. In a country in which a policy of extermination was to be put into practice this horrible tower was an obvious resource.
From the battlements at the top, which is surmounted by an old disused light-house, you see the little com- pact rectangular town, which looks hardly bigger than a garden-patch, mapped out beneath you, and follow the plain configuration of its defences. You take possession of it, and you feel that you will remember it always.
XXVIII.
After this I was free to look about me at Nimes, and I did so with such attention as the place appeared to require. At the risk of seeming too easily and too frequently disappointed, I will say that it required rather less than I had been prepared to give. It is a town of three or four fine features, rather than a town with, as I may say, a general figure. In general, Nimes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman re- mains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland. It is true that this church looked out on a square completely French, - a square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a cla.s.sical _palais de justice_ embellished with trees and parapets, and occupied in the centre with a group of allegorical statues, such as one encounters only in the cities of France, the chief of these being a colossal figure by Pradier, representing Nimes. An English, an American, town which should have such a monu- ment, such a square, as this, would be a place of great pretensions; but like so many little _villes de province_ in the country of which I write, Nimes is easily ornamental. What n.o.bler ornament can there be than the Roman baths at the foot of Mont Cavalier, and the delightful old garden that surrounds them?
All that quarter of Nimes has every reason to be proud of itself; it has been revealed to the world at large by copious photography. A clear, abundant stream gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered with trees and laid out in paths), and is distributed into basins which sufficiently refer themselves to the period that gave them birth, - the period that has left its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we ad- mired at Montpellier. Here are the same terraces and steps and bal.u.s.trades, and a system of water-works less impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious and charm- ing. The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French eighteenth century; for the remains of the antique baths are in a measure incorporated in the modern fountains. In a corner of this umbrageous precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known as a temple of Diana, but was more apparently a _nymphaeum_, and appears to have had a graceful con- nection with the adjacent baths. I learn from Murray that this little temple, of the period of Augustus, "was reduced to its present state of ruin in 1577;"
the moment at which the townspeople, threatened with a siege by the troops of the crown, partly demolished it, lest it should serve as a cover to the enemy. The remains are very fragmentary, but they serve to show that the place was lovely. I spent half an hour in it on a perfect Sunday morning (it is en- closed by a high _grille_, carefully tended, and has a warden of its own), and with the help of my imagina- tion tried to reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the Gallo-Roman days. I do wrong, perhaps, to say that 1 _tried_; from a flight so deliberate I should have shrunk. But there was a certain contagion of antiquity in the air; and among the ruins of baths and temples, in the very spot where the aqueduct that crosses the Gardon in the wondrous manner I had seen discharged itself, the picture of a splendid paganism seemed vaguely to glow. Roman baths, - Roman baths; those words alone were a scene. Every- thing was changed: I was strolling in a _jardin francais_; the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hanging over the place, is crowned with a shapeless tower, which is as likely to be of mediaeval as of antique origin; and yet, as I leaned on the parapet of one of the fountains, where a flight of curved steps (a hemicycle, as the French say) descended into a basin full of dark, cool recesses, where the slabs of the Roman foundations gleam through the clear green water, - as in this att.i.tude I surrendered myself to contemplation and reverie, it seemed to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world. Such mo- ments are illuminating, and the light of this one mingles, in my memory, with the dusky greenness of the Jardin de la Fontaine.
The fountain proper - the source of all these dis- tributed waters - is the prettiest thing in the world, a reduced copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up at the foot of the Mont Cavalier, at a point where that eminence rises with a certain cliff-like effect, and, like other springs in the same circ.u.mstances, appears to issue from the rock with a sort of quivering stillness. I trudged up the Mont Cavalier, - it is a matter of five minutes, - and having committed this c.o.c.kneyism en- hanced it presently by another. I ascended the stupid Tour Magne, the mysterious structure I mentioned a moment ago. The only feature of this dateless tube, except the inevitable collection of photographs to which you are introduced by the door-keeper, is the view you enjoy from its summit. This view is, of course, remarkably fine, but I am ashamed to say I have not the smallest recollection of it; for while I looked into the brilliant s.p.a.ces of the air I seemed still to see only what I saw in the depths of the Roman baths, - the image, disastrously confused and vague, of a vanished world. This world, however, has left at Nimes a far more considerable memento than a few old stones covered with water-moss. The Roman arena is the rival of those of Verona and of Arles; at a respectful distance it emulates the Colosseum. It is a small Colosseum, if I may be allowed the expression, and is in a much better preservation than the great circus at Rome. This is especially true of the external walls, with their arches, pillars, cornices. I must add that one should not speak of preservation, in regard to the arena at Nimes, without speaking also of repair.
After the great ruin ceased to be despoiled, it began to be protected, and most of its wounds have been dressed with new material. These matters concern the archaeologist; and I felt here, as I felt afterwards at Arles, that one of the profane, in the presence of such a monument, can only admire and hold his tongue. The great impression, on the whole, is an impression of wonder that so much should have sur- vived. What remains at Nimes, after all dilapidation is estimated, is astounding. I spent an hour in the Arenes on that same sweet Sunday morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that the corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are still virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the Colosseum, whose sublimity of size, however, can afford to dispense with detail. The seats at Nimes, like those at Verona, have been largely renewed; not that this mattered much, as I lounged on the cool surface of one of them, and admired the mighty concavity of the place and the elliptical sky- line, broken by uneven blocks and forming the rim of the monstrous cup, - a cup that had been filled with horrors. And yet I made my reflections; I said to myself that though a Roman arena is one of the most impressive of the works of man, it has a touch of that same stupidity which I ventured to discover in the Pont du Gard. It is brutal; it is monotonous; it is not at all exquisite. The Arenes at Nimes were ar- ranged for a bull-fight, - a form of recreation that, as I was informed, is much _dans les habitudes Nimoises_, and very common throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it is the usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nimes it has a characteristic setting, but in the villages the patrons of the game make a circle of carts and barrels, on which the spectators perch themselves. I was sur- prised at the prevalence, in mild Provence, of the Iberian vice, and hardly know whether it makes the custom more respectable that at Nimes and Arles the thing is shabbily and imperfectly done. The bulls are rarely killed, and indeed often are bulls only in the Irish sense of the term, - being domestic and motherly cows. Such an entertainment of course does not supply to the arena that element of the exquisite which I spoke of as wanting. The exquisite at Nimes is mainly represented by the famous Maison Carree.
The first impression you receive from this delicate little building, as you stand before it, is that you have already seen it many times. Photographs, engravings, models, medals, have placed it definitely in your eye, so that from the sentiment with which you regard it curiosity and surprise are almost completely, and per- haps deplorably, absent. Admiration remains, how- ever, - admiration of a familiar and even slightly patronizing kind. The Maison Carree does not over- whelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great sensations of the antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvellously preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming com- pactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest that vibrates from one age to another when the note of taste is struck.
If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy production, the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard that conducts to it, adorned with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops. Here, in a respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations, and with the theatre, of a cla.s.sic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of a playing-card, and he ex- presses his admiration for it by the singular wish that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris.
He even goes so far as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been rendered to its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to "have" in that city "le Pantheon de Rome, quelques temples de Grece." Stendhal found it amusing to write in the character of a _commis-voyageur_, and some- times it occurs to his reader that he really was one.
XXIX.
On my way from Nimes to Arles, I spent three hours at Tarascon; chiefly for the love of Alphonse Daudet, who has written nothing more genial than "Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Taitarin," and the story of the "siege" of the bright, dead little town (a mythic siege by the Prussians) in the "Conies du Lundi." In the introduction which, for the new edition of his works, he has lately supplied to "Tar- tarin," the author of this extravagant but kindly satire gives some account of the displeasure with which he has been visited by the ticklish Tarascon- nais. Daudet relates that in his attempt to shed a humorous light upon some of the more erratic phases of the Provencal character, he selected Tarascon at a venture; not because the temperament of its natives is more vainglorious than that of their neighbors, or their rebellion against the "despotism of fact" more marked, but simply because he had to name a par- ticular Provencal city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of women, a true "_produit du midi_," as Daudet says, who has the most fantastic and fabulous adventures. He is a minimized Don Quixote, with much less dignity, but with equal good faith; and the story of his exploits is a little masterpiece of the light comical. The Tarasconnais, however, declined to take the joke, and opened the vials of their wrath upon the mocking child of Nimes, who would have been better employed, they doubtless thought, in show- ing up the infirmities of his own family. I am bound to add that when I pa.s.sed through Tarascon they did not appear to be in the least out of humor. Nothing could have been brighter, softer, more suggestive of amiable indifference, than the picture it presented to my mind. It lies quietly beside the Rhone, looking across at Beaucaire, which seems very distant and in- dependent, and tacitly consenting to let the castle of the good King Rene of Anjou, which projects very boldly into the river, pa.s.s for its most interesting feature.
The other features are, primarily, a sort of vivid sleepi- ness in the aspect of the place, as if the September noon (it had lingered on into October) lasted longer there than elsewhere; certain low arcades, which make the streets look gray and exhibit empty vistas; and a very curious and beautiful walk beside the Rhone, denominated the Chaussee, - a long and narrow cause- way, densely shaded by two rows of magnificent old trees, planted in its embankment, and rendered doubly effective, at the moment I pa.s.sed over it, by a little train of collegians, who had been taken out for mild exercise by a pair of young priests. Lastly, one may say that a striking element of Tarascon, as of any town that lies on the Rhone, is simply the Rhone itself: the big brown flood, of uncertain temper, which has never taken time to forget that it is a child of the mountain and the glacier, and that such an origin carries with it great privileges. Later, at Avignon, I observed it in the exercise of these privileges, chief among which was that of frightening the good people of the old papal city half out of their wits.
The chateau of King Rene serves to-day as the prison of a district, and the traveller who wishes to look into it must obtain his permission at the _Mairie of Tarascon_. If he have had a certain experience of French manners, his application will be accompanied with the forms of a considerable obsequiosity, and in this case his request will be granted as civilly as it has been made. The castle has more of the air of a severely feudal fortress than I should suppose the period of its construction (the first half of the fifteenth century) would have warranted; being tremendously bare and perpendicular, and constructed for comfort only in the sense that it was arranged for defence. It is a square and simple ma.s.s, composed of small yellow stones, and perched on a pedestal of rock which easily commands the river. The building has the usual cir- cular towers at the corners, and a heavy cornice at the top, and immense stretches of sun-scorched wall, relieved at wide intervals by small windows, heavily cross-barred. It has, above all, an extreme steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle has kept its large moat, which is now a hollow filled with wild plants. To this tall fortress the good Rene retired in the middle of the fifteenth century, finding it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a dominion which had included Naples and Sicily, Lorraine and Anjou. He had been a much-tried monarch and the sport of a various fortune, fighting half his life for thrones he didn"t care for, and exalted only to be quickly cast down. Provence was the country of his affection, and the memory of his troubles did not prevent him from holding a joyous court at Tarascon and at Aix. He finished the castle at Tarascon, which had been begun earlier in the century, - finished it, I suppose, for consistency"s sake, in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante, addicted to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in the image that he has imprinted on the page of history. He was both clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not imbittered him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet Provence, and his sweet Provence has been grateful; it has woven a light tissue of legend around the memory of the good King Rene.
I strolled over his dusky habitation - it must have taken all his good-humor to light it up - at the heels of the custodian, who showed me the usual number of castle-properties: a deep, well-like court; a collection of winding staircases and vaulted chambers, the embra- sures of whose windows and the recesses of whose doorways reveal a tremendous thickness of wall. These things const.i.tute the general ident.i.ty of old castles; and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and remember, and contents one"s self with consigning them to the honorable limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not the least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects Tarascon with Beaucaire, in order to examine the old fortress whose ruins adorn the latter city. It stands on a foundation of rock much higher than that of Tarascon, and looks over with a melancholy expression at its better-conditioned brother.
Its position is magnificent, and its outline very gallant.
I was well rewarded for my pilgrimage; for if the castle of Beaucaire is only a fragment, the whole place, with its position and its views, is an ineffaceable picture. It was the stronghold of the Montmorencys, and its last tenant was that rash Duke Francois, whom Richelieu, seizing every occasion to trample on a great n.o.ble, caused to be beheaded at Toulouse, where we saw, in the Capitol, the butcher"s knife with which the cardinal pruned the crown of France of its thorns. The castle, after the death of this victim, was virtually demolished.
Its site, which Nature to-day has taken again to herself, has an extraordinary charm. The ma.s.s of rock that it formerly covered rises high above the town, and is as precipitous as the side of the Rhone. A tall rusty iron gate admits you from a quiet corner of Beaucaire to a wild tangled garden, covering the side of the hill, - for the whole place forms the public promenade of the townsfolk, - a garden without flowers, with little steep, rough paths that wind under a plantation of small, scrubby stone-pines. Above this is the gra.s.sy platform of the castle, enclosed on one side only (toward the river) by a large fragment of wall and a very ma.s.sive dungeon. There are benches placed in the lee of the wall, and others on the edge of the platform, where one may enjoy a view, beyond the river, of certain peeled and scorched undulations. A sweet desolation, an everlasting peace, seemed to hang in the air. A very old man (a fragment, like the castle itself) emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the honors, - a very gentle, obsequious, tottering, toothless, grateful old man. He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon, and the barefaced, bald-headed hills behind it. It may appear that I insist too much upon the nudity of the Provencal horiion, - too much, considering that I have spoken of the prospect from the heights of Beaucaire as lovely. But it is an exquisite bareness; it seems to exist for the purpose of allowing one to follow the de- licate lines of the hills, and touch with the eyes, as it were, the smallest inflections of the landscape. It makes the whole thing seem wonderfully bright and pure.
Beaucaire used to be the scene of a famous fair, the great fair of the south of France. It has gone the way of most fairs, even in France, where these delight- ful exhibitions hold their own much better than might be supposed. It is still held in the month of July; but the bourgeoises of Tarascon send to the Magasin du Louvre for their smart dresses, and the princ.i.p.al glory of the scene is its long tradition. Even now, however, it ought to be the prettiest of all fairs, for it takes place in a charming wood which lies just beneath the castle, beside the Rhone. The booths, the barracks, the platforms of the mountebanks, the bright-colored crowd, diffused through this midsummer shade, and spotted here and there with the rich Provencal sun- shine must be of the most pictorial effect. It is highly probable, too, that it offers a large collection of pretty faces; for even in the few hours that I spent at Tarascon I discovered symptoms of the purity of feature for which the women of the _pays d"Arles_ are renowned. The Arlesian head-dress, was visible in the streets; and this delightful coiffure is so a.s.sociated with a charming facial oval, a dark mild eye, a straight Greek nose, and a mouth worthy of all the rest, that it conveys a presumption of beauty which gives the wearer time either to escape or to please you. I have read somewhere, however, that Tarascon is supposed to produce handsome men, as Arles is known to deal in handsome women. It may be that I should have found the Tarasconnais very fine fellows, if I had en- countered enough specimens to justify an induction.
But there were very few males in the streets, and the place presented no appearance of activity. Here and there the black coif of an old woman or of a young girl was framed by a low doorway; but for the rest, as I have said, Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta.
There was not a creature in the little church of Saint Martha, which I made a point of visiting before I re- turned to the station, and which, with its fine Romanesque sideportal and its pointed and crocketed Gothic spire, is as curious as it need be, in view of its tradition. It stands in a quiet corner where the gra.s.s grows between the small cobble-stones, and you pa.s.s beneath a deep archway to reach it. The tradition relates that Saint Martha tamed with her own hands, and attached to her girdle, a dreadful dragon, who was known as the Tarasque, and is reported to have given his name to the city on whose site (amid the rocks which form the base of the chateau) he had his cavern. The dragon, perhaps, is the symbol of a ravening paganism, dis- pelled by the eloquence of a sweet evangelist. The bones of the interesting saint, at all events, were found, in the eleventh century, in a cave beneath the spot on which her altar now stands. I know not what had be- come of the bones of the dragon.
x.x.x.
There are two shabby old inns at Arles, which compete closely for your custom. I mean by this that if you elect to go to the Hotel du Forum, the Hotel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it (at a right angle) watches your arrival with ill-concealed dis- approval; and if you take the chances of its neighbor, the Hotel du Forum seems to glare at you invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that, it had been the other. The two stand together on the Place des Hommes, a little public square of Arles, which somehow quite misses its effect. As a city, indeed, Arles quite misses its effect in every way; and if it is a charming place, as I think it is, I can hardly tell the reason why. The straight-nosed Arlesiennes account for it in some degree; and the remainder may be charged to the ruins of the arena and the theatre. Beyond this, I remember with affection the ill-proportioned little Place des Hommes; not at all monumental, and given over to puddles and to shabby cafes. I recall with tenderness the tortuous and featureless streets, which looked like the streets of a village, and were paved with villanous little sharp stones, making all exercise penitential. Consecrated by a.s.sociation is even a tiresome walk that I took the evening I arrived, with the purpose of obtaining a view of the Rhone. I had been to Arles before, years ago, and it seemed to me that I remembered finding on the banks of the stream some sort of picture. I think that on the evening of which I speak there was a watery moon, which it seemed to me would light up the past as well as the present. But I found no pic- ture, and I scarcely found the Rhone at all. I lost my way, and there was not a creature in the streets to whom I could appeal. Nothing could be more pro- vincial than the situation of Arles at ten o"clock at night. At last I arrived at a kind of embankment, where I could see the great mud-colored stream slip- ping along in the soundless darkness. It had come on to rain, I know not what had happened to the moon, and the whole place was anything but gay. It was not what I had looked for; what I had looked for was in the irrecoverable past. I groped my way back to the inn over the infernal _cailloux_, feeling like a dis- comfited Dogberry. I remember now that this hotel was the one (whichever that may be) which has the fragment of a Gallo-Roman portico inserted into one of its angles. I had chosen it for the sake of this ex- ceptional ornament. It was damp and dark, and the floors felt gritty to the feet; it was an establishment at which the dreadful _gras-double_ might have appeared at the table d"hote, as it had done at Narbonne. Never- theless, I was glad to get back to it; and nevertheless, too, - and this is the moral of my simple anecdote, - my pointless little walk (I don"t speak of the pave- ment) suffuses itself, as I look back upon it, with a romantic tone. And in relation to the inn, I suppose I had better mention that I am well aware of the in- consistency of a person who dislikes the modern cara- vansary, and yet grumbles when he finds a hotel of the superannuated sort. One ought to choose, it would seem, and make the best of either alternative. The two old taverns at Arles are quite unimproved; such as they must have been in the infancy of the modern world, when Stendhal pa.s.sed that way, and the lum- bering diligence deposited him in the Place des Hommes, such in every detail they are to-day. _Vieilles auberges de France_, one ought to enjoy their gritty floors and greasy window-panes. Let it be put on re- cord, therefore, that I have been, I won"t say less com- fortable, but at least less happy, at better inns.
To be really historic, I should have mentioned that before going to look for the Rhone I had spent part of the evening on the opposite side of the little place, and that I indulged in this recreation for two definite reasons. One of these was that I had an opportunity of conversing at a cafe with an attractive young Eng- lishman, whom I had met in the afternoon at Tarascon, and more remotely, in other years, in London; the other was that there sat enthroned behind the counter a splendid mature Arlesienne, whom my companion and I agreed that it was a rare privilege to contem- plate. There is no rule of good manners or morals which makes it improper, at a cafe, to fix one"s eyes upon the _dame de comptoir_; the lady is, in the nature of things, a part of your _consommation_. We were there- fore feee to admire without restriction the handsomest person I had ever seen give change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully rich and robust, and full of a certain phy- sical n.o.bleness. Though she was not really old, she was antique, and she was very grave, even a little sad.
She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Caesar. I have seen washerwomen in the Trastevere who were perhaps as handsome as she; but even the head-dress of the Roman contadina con- tributes less to the dignity of the person born to wear it than the sweet and stately Arlesian cap, which sits at once aloft and on the back of the head; which is accompanied with a wide black bow covering a con- siderable part of the crown; and which, finally, accom- modates itself indescribably well to the manner in which the tresses of the front are pushed behind the cars.
This admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar has distracted me a little; for I am still not sufficiently historical. Before going to the cafe I had dined, and before dining I had found time to go and look at the arena. Then it was that I discovered that Arles has no general physiognomy, and, except the delightful little church of Saint Trophimus, no architecture, and that the rugosities of its dirty lanes affect the feet like knife-blades. It was not then, on the other hand, that I saw the arena best. The second day of my stay at Arles I devoted to a pilgrimage to the strange old hill town of Les Baux, the mediaeval Pompeii, of which I shall give myself the pleasure of speaking. The even- ing of that day, however (my friend and I returned in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression of the way, in Rome itself, on evenings like that, the moonshine rests upon broken shafts and slabs of an- tique pavement. As we sat in the theatre, looking at the two lone columns that survive - part of the decora- tion of the back of the stage - and at the fragments of ruin around them, we might have been in the Roman forum. The arena at Arles, with its great magnitude, is less complete than that of Nimes; it has suffered even more the a.s.saults of time and of the children of time, and it has been less repaired. The seats are almost wholly wanting; but the external walls minus the topmost tier of arches, are ma.s.sively, rug- gedly, complete; and the vaulted corridors seem as solid as the day they were built. The whole thing is superbly vast, and as monumental, for place of light amus.e.m.e.nt - what is called in America a "variety- show" - as it entered only into the Roman mind to make such establishments. The _podium_ is much higher than at Nimes, and many of the great white slabs that faced it have been recovered and put into their places.
The proconsular box has been more or less recon- structed, and the great converging pa.s.sages of approach to it are still majestically distinct: so that, as I sat there in the moon-charmed stillness, leaning my elbows on the battered parapet of the ring, it was not im- possible - to listen to the murmurs and shudders, the thick voice of the circus, that died away fifteen hun- dred years ago.
The theatre has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with a different music. The Roman theatre at Arles seemed to me one of the most charm- ing and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton, - the arena may be called a skeleton; for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the row of columns which formed the scene - the permanent back-scene - remain; two marble pillars - I just mentioned them - are upright, with a fragment of their entablature. Be fore them is the vacant s.p.a.ce which was filled by the stage, with the line of the prosoenium distinct, marked by a deep groove, impressed upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a high screen had been in- tended to fit into it. The semicircle formed by the seats - half a cup - rises opposite; some of the rows are distinctly marked. The floor, from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by slabs of colored marble - red, yellow, and green - which, though terribly battered and cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the interior. Every- thing shows that it was on a great scale: the large sweep of its enclosing walls, the ma.s.sive corridors that pa.s.sed behind the auditorium, and of which we can still perfectly take the measure. The way in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the architects of our epoch, as also the immense size of the place is a proof of extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors. It was after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena that we came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin. The princ.i.p.al entrance was locked, but we effected an easy _escalade_, scaled a low parapet, and descended into the place behind file scenes. It was as light as day, and the solitude was complete. The two slim columns, as we sat on the broken benches, stood there like a pair of silent actors. What I called touching, just now, was the thought that here the human voice, the utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven armor, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short, one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems no profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of Arles, who use it to pa.s.s, by no means in great num- bers, from one part of the town to the other; treading the old marble floor, and brushing, if need be, the empty benches. This familiarity does not kill the place again; it makes it, on the contrary, live a little, - makes the present and the past touch each other.
x.x.xI.
The third lion of Arles has nothing to do with the ancient world, but only with the old one. The church of Saint Trophimus, whose wonderful Romanesque porch is the princ.i.p.al ornament of the princ.i.p.al _place_, - a _place_ otherwise distinguished by the presence of a slim and tapering obelisk in the middle, as well as by that of the Hotel de Ville and the museum - the interesting church of Saint Trophimus swears a little, as the French say, with the peculiar character of Arles. It is very remarkable, but I would rather it were in another place. Arles is delightfully pagan, and Saint Trophimus, with its apostolic sculptures, is rather a false note. These sculptures are equally re- markable for their primitive vigor and for the perfect preservation in which they have come down to us.
The deep recess of a round-arched porch of the twelfth century is covered with quaint figures, which have not lost a nose or a finger. An angular, Byzan- tine-looking Christ sits in a diamond-shaped frame at the summit of the arch, surrounded by little angels, by great apostles, by winged beasts, by a hundred sacred symbols and grotesque ornaments. It is a dense embroidery of sculpture, black with time, but as uninjured as if it had been kept under gla.s.s. One good mark for the French Revolution! Of the in- terior of the church, which has a nave of the twelfth century, and a choir three hundred years more recent, I chiefly remember the odd feature that the Romanesque aisles are so narrow that you literally - or almost - squeeze through them. You do so with some eager- ness, for your natural purpose is to pa.s.s out to the cloister. This cloister, as distinguished and as per- fect as the porch, has a great deal of charm. Its four sides, which are not of the same period (the earliest and best are of the twelfth century), have an elaborate arcade, supported on delicate pairs of columns, the capitals of which show an extraordinary variety of device and ornament. At the corners of the quadrangle these columns take the form of curious human figures.
The whole thing is a gem of lightness and preserva- tion, and is often cited for its beauty; but - if it doesn"t sound too profane - I prefer, especially at Arles, the ruins of the Roman theatre. The antique element is too precious to be mingled with anything less rare. This truth was very present to my mind during a ramble of a couple of hours that I took just before leaving the place; and the glowing beauty of the morning gave the last touch of the impression. I spent half an hour at the Museum; then I took an- other look at the Roman theatre; after which I walked a little out of the town to the Aliscamps, the old Elysian Fields, the meagre remnant of the old pagan place of sepulture, which was afterwards used by the Christians, but has been for ages deserted, and now consists only of a melancholy avenue of cypresses, lined with a succession of ancient sarcophagi, empty, mossy, and mutilated. An iron-foundry, or some hor- rible establishment which is conditioned upon tall chimneys and a noise of hammering and banging, has been established near at hand; but the cypresses shut it out well enough, and this small patch of Elysium is a very romantic corner.
The door of the Museum stands ajar, and a vigilant custodian, with the usual batch of photographs on his mind, peeps out at you disapprovingly while you linger opposite, before the charming portal of Saint Trophimus, which you may look at for nothing.
When you succ.u.mb to the silent influence of his eye, and go over to visit his collection, you find yourself in a desecrated church, in which a variety of ancient objects, disinterred in Arlesian soil, have been ar- ranged without any pomp. The best of these, I be- lieve, were found in the ruins of the theatre. Some of the most curious of them are early Christian sar- cophagi, exactly on the pagan model, but covered with rude yet vigorously wrought images of the apostles, and with ill.u.s.trations of scriptural history. Beauty of the highest kind, either of conception or of execu- tion, is absent from most of the Roman fragments, which belong to the taste of a late period and a provincial civilization. But a gulf divides them from the bristling little imagery of the Christian sarcophagi, in which, at the same time, one detects a vague emulation of the rich examples by which their authors were surrounded. There is a certain element of style in all the pagan things; there is not a hint of it in the early Christian relics, among which, according to M. Joanne, of the Guide, are to be found more fine sarcophagi than in any collection but that of St. John Lateran. In two or three of the Roman fragments there is a noticeable distinction; princ.i.p.ally in a charming bust of a boy, quite perfect, with those salient eyes that one sees in certain antique busts, and to which the absence of vision in the marble mask gives a look, often very touching, as of a baffled effort to see; also in the head of a woman, found in the ruins of the theatre, who, alas! has lost her nose, and whose n.o.ble, simple contour, barring this deficiency, recalls the great manner of the Venus of Milo. There are various rich architectural fragments which in- dicate that that edifice was a very splendid affair.
This little Museum at Arles, in short, is the most Ro- man thing I know of, out of Rome.
x.x.xII.
I find that I declared one evening, in a little journal I was keeping at that time, that I was weary of writing (I was probably very sleepy), but that it was essential I should make some note of my visit to Les Baux. I must have gone to sleep as soon as I had recorded this necessity, for I search my small diary in vain for any account of that enchanting spot. I have nothing but my memory to consult, - a memory which is fairly good in regard to a general impression, but is terribly infirm in the matter of details and items. We knew in advance, my companion and I that Les Baus was a pearl of picturesqueness; for had we not read as much in the handbook of Murray, who has the testimony of an English n.o.bleman as to its attractions? We also knew that it lay some miles from Aries, on the crest of the Alpilles, the craggy little mountains which, as I stood on the breezy plat- form of Beaucaire, formed to my eye a charming, if somewhat remote, background to Tarascon; this as- surance having been given us by the landlady of the inn at Arles, of whom we hired a rather lumbering conveyance. The weather was not promising, but it proved a good day for the mediaeval Pompeii; a gray, melancholy, moist, but rainless, or almost rainless day, with nothing in the sky to flout, as the poet says, the dejected and pulverized past. The drive itself was charming; for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the gray-green landscape of Provence.
It is never absolutely flat, and yet is never really ambitious, and is full both of entertainment and re- pose. It is in constant undulation, and the bareness of the soil lends itself easily to outline and profile.
When I say the bareness, I mean the absence of woods and hedges. It blooms with heath and scented shrubs and stunted olive; and the white rock shining through the scattered herbage has a brightness which answers to the brightness of the sky. Of course it needs the sunshine, for all southern countries look a little false under the ground gla.s.s of incipient bad weather. This was the case on the day of my pil- grimage to Les Baux. Nevertheless, I was as glad to keep going as I was to arrive; and as I went it seemed to me that true happiness would consist in wandering through such a land on foot, on September afternoons, when one might stretch one"s self on the warm ground in some shady hollow, and listen to the hum of bees and the whistle of melancholy shepherds; for in Provence the shepherds whistle to their flocks.
I saw two or three of them, in the course of this drive to Les Baux, meandering about, looking behind, and calling upon the sheep in this way to follow, which the sheep always did, very promptly, with ovine unanimity. Nothing is more picturesque than to see a slow shepherd threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside, with his flock close be- hind him, necessarily expanded, yet keeping just at his heels, bending and twisting as it goes, and looking rather like the tail of a dingy comet.
About four miles from Arles, as you drive north- ward toward the Alpilles, of which Alphonse Daudet has spoken so often, and, as he might say, so in- timately, stand on a hill that overlooks the road the very considerable ruins of the abbey of Mont- majour, one of the innumerable remnants of a feudal and ecclesiastical (as well as an architectural) past that one encounters in the South of France; remnants which, it must be confessed, tend to introduce a cer- tain confusion and satiety into the pa.s.sive mind of the tourist. Montmajour, however, is very impressive and interesting; the only trouble with it is that, unless you have stopped and retumed to Arles, you see it in memory over the head of Les Baux, which is a much more absorbing picture. A part of the ma.s.s of buildings (the monastery) dates only from the last century; and the stiff architecture of that period does not lend itself very gracefully to desolation: it looks too much as if it had been burnt down the year before. The monastery was demolished during the Revolution, and it injures a little the effect of the very much more ancient fragments that are connected with it. The whole place is on a great scale; it was a rich and splendid abbey. The church, a vast basilica of the eleventh century, and of the n.o.blest proportions, is virtually intact; I mean as regards its essentials, for the details have completely vanished.
The huge solid sh.e.l.l is full of expression; it looks as if it had been hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution; and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and precious.
To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself!
Beneath the church of Montmajour is a most extra- ordinary crypt, almost as big as the edifice above it, and making a complete subterranean temple, sur- rounded with a circular gallery, or deambulatory, which expands it intervals into five square chapels.
There are other things, of which I have but a con- fused memory: a great fortified keep; a queer little primitive chapel, hollowed out of the rock, beneath these later structures, and recommended to the visitor"s attention as the confessional of Saint Tro- phimus, who shares with so many worthies the glory of being the first apostle of the Gauls. Then there is a strange, small church, of the dimmest antiquity, standing at a distance from the other buildings. I remember that after we had let ourselves down a good many steepish places to visit crypts and con- fessionals, we walked across a field to this archaic cruciform edifice, and went thence to a point further down the road, where our carriage was awaiting us. The chapel of the Holy Cross, as it is called, is cla.s.sed among the historic monuments of France; and I read in a queer, rambling, ill-written book which I picked up at Avignon, and in which the author, M. Louis de Lainbel, has buried a great deal of curious information on the subject of Provence, under a style inspiring little confidence, that the "delicieuse chapelle de Sainte-Croix" is a "veritable bijou artistique." He speaks of "a piece of lace in stone," which runs from one end of the building to the other, but of which I am obliged to confess that I have no recollection. I retain, however, a suf- ficiently clear impression of the little superannuated temple, with its four apses and its perceptible odor of antiquity, - the odor of the eleventh century.
The ruins of Les Baux remain quite indistinguish- able, even when you are directly beneath them, at the foot of the charming little Alpilles, which ma.s.s themselves with a kind of delicate ruggedness. Rock and ruin have been so welded together by the con- fusions of time, that as you approach it from behind - that is, from the direction of Arles - the place presents simply a general air of cragginess. Nothing can be prettier than the crags of Provence; they are beautifully modelled, as painters say, and they have a delightful silvery color. The road winds round the foot of the hills on the top of which Lea Baux is planted, and pa.s.ses into another valley, from which the approach to the town is many degrees less pre- cipitous, and may be comfortably made in a carriage.