A Spring Walk in Provence
by Archibald Marshall · English · Gutenberg #46035 · 456,819 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: A Spring Walk in Provence
Author: Archibald Marshall
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE ***
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A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE HOUSE OF MERRILEES
RICHARD BALDOCK
EXTON MANOR
THE SQUIRE'S DAUGHTER
THE ELDEST SON
THE HONOUR OF THE CLINTONS
THE GREATEST OF THESE
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
WATERMEADS
UPSIDONIA
ABINGTON ABBEY
THE GRAFTONS
THE CLINTONS, AND OTHERS
SIR HARRY
MANY JUNES
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
PEGGY IN TOYLAND
[Illustration: EVENING AMONG THE OLIVES]
A SPRING WALK IN
PROVENCE
BY
ARCHIBALD MARSHALL
AUTHOR OF "EXTON MANOR," "SIR
HARRY," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
To
SIR OWEN SEAMAN
PREFACE
The following pages owe a considerable debt to what others who have
been over the same ground have written. Mr. T. A. Cook's[1] "Old
Provence" (London: Rivington's, 2 vols.) is a most valuable record of
the history of the country as it attaches to the innumerable places
of interest to be visited, and his taste and knowledge when brought
to bear upon its architectural remains have greatly enhanced my own
appreciation of those rich treasures. I know of no book, either in
French or English, from which a visitor to Provence could get so much
to supplement his own observation, and I have made constant use of it.
To Mr. Thomas Okey's[2] "Avignon" in Dent's "Mediæval Towns" series, I
also owe a great debt of gratitude. The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould's "In
Troubadour Land" (London: W. H. Allen), though slighter than those two
works, contains much interesting information. Mistral's "Mes Origines"
(Paris: Libraire Plon), translated from the Provençal, is of course
invaluable for its pictures of Provençal life, and from that book and
from M. Paul Mariéton's "La Terre Provençale" (Paris: Ollendorf) one
can get the best information about the movement of the Félibrige,
which has done so much to revivify the old life of Provence. A good
deal of desultory information is afforded by M. Louis de Laincel's
"La Provence" (Paris: Oudin), and some of the stories that linger
on Provençal soil are well told in M. Charles-Roux's "Légendes de
Provence" (Paris: Bloud). These books, and the French translation of
Mistral's "Mirèio," which is a mine of Provençal lore, besides being a
noble poem, have been my chief "authorities," but they have been very
usefully supplemented by the various pamphlets to be picked up locally.
Some of these have been excellent, and I have made mention of their
authors in the following pages.
The photographs are of my own taking, except those very kindly given
to me by Mr. Hope Macey, whom I was fortunate enough to come across in
Avignon in the course of an expedition that coincided with mine at many
points. The one of Mistral's birthplace I bought at Arles, and those of
the picture and tapestry at Aix in Paris.[3]
This account of my spring journey has been finished under the shadow
of the great war, which might have caused me to look upon the _jours
de conscription_ with which I fell in on the early days of the walk in
a light much sadder, if I could have foreseen it. I left Provence in a
train full of young soldiers going to their homes in various distant
parts of France for their Easter furlough. Of those who crowded the
carriage in which I travelled from Arles to Lyons the faces come before
me as clearly as if I saw them in the flesh, and I can hear their
songs and jokes and laughter. They seemed to have been drawn from all
classes, but to mix in the readiest frankest comradeship. Whenever I
read now of the French in action I think of those light-hearted boys
in their holiday mood, and wonder what they are doing, and how many of
them are still alive. One has somewhat changed one's view of the toll
that France has taken of her manhood since those days that now seem so
far off.
CHATEAU D'OEX, _August, 1914_.
* * * * *
The world has changed since this book was written, but I hope that the
record of an expedition made in the happy days before the war may still
be read with pleasure, now that the great shadow is in part removed. I
have been over the manuscript again and made a few alterations here and
there, but have altered nothing that shows it to have been written five
years ago.
BURLEY, HANTS, _August, 1919_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HILLS AND OLIVES 1
II. FLOWERS AND SCENTS 18
III. IN OLD PROVENCE 31
IV. DRAGUIGNAN AND SAINT-MAXIMIN 48
V. THE CHURCH OF SAINT-MAXIMIN 68
VI. CAIUS MARIUS AND THE GREAT BATTLE 85
VII. AIX 97
VIII. SALON AND THE CRAU 116
IX. LES BAUX 127
X. LES BAUX (_Continued_) 143
XI. MISTRAL 158
XII. SAINT-REMY 168
XIII. AVIGNON 175
XIV. THE PALACE OF THE POPES 190
XV. VAUCLUSE 209
XVI. NIMES AND THE PONT DU GARD 227
XVII. AIGUES-MORTES AND THE CAMARGUE 239
XVIII. SAINTES-MARIES DE LA MER 252
XIX. SAINT-GILLES AND MONTMAJOUR 266
XX. THE LAST WALK. ST. MICHEL DE FRIGOLET 282
XXI. VILLENEUVE-SUR-AVIGNON 301
XXII. ARLES 311
ILLUSTRATIONS
Evening among the olives _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
The road downhill "looks just like a temperature chart" 10
I "posed" him among the ruins 11
A Provençal shepherd 44
Fayence could be seen on its own hillside 44
How they prune the plane-trees 45
The dolmen near Draguignan 45
Altar of the Crucifixion, Saint-Maximin 74
The Field of the Great Battle, with Mount Olympus in the background 75
The Canterbury Tapestry 106
The famous "Tarasque" 107
Le Buisson Ardent 110
Porte d'Eyguières 111
The Castle Ruins, Les Baux 130
The Castle Dovecot, Les Baux 131
Pavillon de la Reine Jeanne 140
Huguenot Chapel in Les Baux 141
Les Baux from the Castle Ruins 150
One of the beauties of Les Baux 151
Mistral's birthplace, Mas du Juge 160
Fresco in the Palace of the Popes at Avignon 161
The Mausoleum, Saint-Remy 170
The Triumphal Arch, Saint-Remy 171
Sixteenth century doors and Virgin and Child of
Eighteenth Century, St. Pierre, Avignon 182
The Pont Benezet 183
The Cathedral, Avignon 194
"The Popes' Palace is most like those almost
brutally strong buildings that the Romans left" 195
The "fountain," Vaucluse 212
The caves above the "fountain" 213
The Pont du Gard 228
The Fountains, Nîmes 229
The Maison Carrée 234
The Amphitheatre, Nîmes 235
Aigues-Mortes, the Ramparts 244
"Looked away to the desolate salt marshes" 245
Saintes-Maries, the Fortress Church 256
Saint-Gilles, the Central Porch 257
The Maison-Romaine 276
The staircase in the farmyard at Montmajour 277
Saint-Michel de Frigolet 284
The Coronation of the Virgin, Villeneuve-Sur-Avignon 285
A courtyard in Villeneuve 308
The Rotunda at Villeneuve 309
The Arena at Arles 312
The Greek Theatre, Arles 313
The Cloisters, South walk, St. Trophime 316
The Cloisters, North walk, St. Trophime 317
Arles, the Alyscamps 320
Boy's head in marble, Musée Lapidaire, Arles 321
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
CHAPTER I
_Hills and Olives_
I was to walk through the country from the Italian border, but it
rained so heavily on the first day that I went to Mentone and took the
mountain tramway to Sospel, where in any case I had intended to spend
the night.
Two years ago, before this tram-line was quite finished, I motored
up to Sospel to play golf. It was a pleasant experience, though not
without its thrills, for the road zigzags and corkscrews up mountain
sides and across deep gorges in a way to make one thankful for strong
brakes and a reliable driver, especially on the return journey. The
hillsides are cultivated everywhere. The precipitous slopes have been
terraced with infinite labour, and orange and lemon groves surrounding
pretty little lodges and cottages, only give way as one mounts higher
to the grey-green of olive plantations.
When you have climbed up 2,300 feet, the road, as if tired of twisting
and turning, boldly attacks the mountain side, runs through a tunnel
pierced in the solid rock and comes out on the other side of the peak.
Then it takes a turn so sharp that not long ago a car coming too fast
through the tunnel went over the precipitous edge and all its occupants
were killed.
The crowning danger safely surmounted, you drop down into a green
mountain valley, surrounded by what Smollett, who passed through Sospel
on his way from Nice to Italy a hundred and fifty years ago, described
as "prodigious high and barren mountains." The valley is all verdant
pasture, watered by a broad, shallow, tree-shaded river, which, to
quote the same authority, "forms a delightful contrast with the hideous
rocks surrounding it." All mountains were "hideous" and "horrid" in the
eyes of our ancestors. We, as we play along the grassy meadows, and
cross here and there the clear river rippling over its pebbles, have
come to think that the towering rock-ramparts, upon which the sun and
the clouds play with infinite gradations of light and colour, have as
much to do with the beauty of the scene as the verdant valley itself,
or the little old huddled Italian-looking town which hugs both banks of
the river.
It was that little old town, which the golfer coming up from Mentone
only skirts on his way to the links, that had remained in my memory,
even more than the unusual charm of the links and the excellence of
the greens. It stands curiously aside from the wave of modernity that
has washed up to it from the wealthy delocalized coast. Turn to the
right when you reach the corner, and you are still in the atmosphere of
the Côte d'Azur, although you are fifteen miles inland from Mentone;
turn to the left and you are in southern provincial France, in a street
of little shops and little _cafés_ and _buvettes_, and pick your way
amongst a crowd of peasants and townspeople, buying and selling,
talking of their crops and their commerce, and as little concerned with
what is going on half a mile away as if they had never seen a mashie
or a putter, and none of them had ever shouldered a bag of clubs for a
curiously-garbed curiously-spoken foreigner.
Probably it is only the caddies or the ex-caddies who ever mention golf
in the town of Sospel. It stands so aloof that even its prices have not
yet been affected by the lavish ways of the holiday coast, with which
it has formed this late new connection.
So I turned to the left. I wanted to have done for a time with
everything English, and more particularly with the sort of hotel that
has an English-speaking waiter, or indeed a waiter at all. Sospel was
to provide me with my first genuine experience of a French inn, as used
by the people of the country and not by the tourist.
Sospel rose adequately to the occasion, as I had thought it would. I
found an hotel facing the market stalls and the river beyond them. I
went up a flight of stone stairs and into a kitchen, which was also
the bureau of the _patronne_. Yes, I could have a room for the night,
and the charge would be two francs. I went up to see the room. It had
a tiled floor, which was very clean, a large four-poster bed hung
round with muslin curtains, and a few old cumbrous pieces of furniture
besides--just the sort of room I wanted.
I had a good dinner, which I ate in company with four _commis
voyageurs_ and an engineer, all of whom were cordially interested in
my coming expedition, and none of whom had a word of English or seemed
to have any idea in their minds of connecting Sospel with golf. I felt
that I had fallen plumb into it by taking that left-hand turn, and
it needed an effort to call to mind the great new hotel at the other
end of the links two miles away, where no diner had tucked his napkin
inside his collar, or would soak his dessert biscuits in his wine;
where the waiter brought a clean knife and fork for every course, and
the proprietor would have requested me to leave if I had sat down in
the clothes in which I intended to walk on the morrow. I felt happy, as
I went to bed at nine o'clock, after a look at the rapid-flowing river
on which the moon was now shining through the parting clouds. The fun
had begun.
I felt happier still at six o'clock the next morning, when I took
the road with my pack on my back. The clouds had blown away from the
mountain tops, though wisps of them hung about the lower slopes, and
the cup of the valley still held a light mist. It was going to be a
lovely day, and perhaps hotter than would be altogether comfortable
for a walker habited and burdened as I was. For it was still early
in March, and I had come down from Alpine snows. Moreover, the
replenishments of clothing that I had sent on ahead were at least a
week away, and I carried "changes" to a rather nervous extent; also
some reading matter, which is a mistake, for books weigh heavy, however
light their contents, and if your day on the road is not filled with
walking, eating and sleeping, and whatever recreation in the way of
talk may come to you, you are not throwing yourself enough into the
spirit of your adventure.
The road wound and turned and twisted, always going uphill, but never
very steeply. I was on the old high road from the north, where it
enters on its last stage of about five and twenty miles to Nice. I
thought I must have come near to its highest point when I had climbed
up on a level with the heavy fort that frowned on me from a hill near
by, and sat down to take my last look at the green valley now lying far
beneath me.
It showed as a level carpet of vivid green, broken by the grey mass
and outlying buildings of the town, with the river threading it
lengthwise. The hills rose up sheer on every side. Their lower slopes
were so regularly terraced that at this distance they had the effect
of horizontal "shadings" in a pencil drawing. Above that they were
grey, and dark green, and red as with heather, and the summits of some
of them still held snow. White roads jagged them here and there, but
the flat valley floor had the effect of being completely cupped and
confined by the rugged heights, as indeed it is, except just where the
river, having filled up the bottom of the cup with a rich layer of
alluvium, must have broken through at some time, and left the fertile
plain all ready and waiting for cultivation. It was like looking down
on a miniature Promised Land, so marked was the contrast between the
fresh green of the valley and the sombre tones of its encircling hills.
This southern country flushes to tender spring green only here and
there. The cultivated hillsides keep their darker colours, though they
may be most sweetly lit with the pink of almonds. March would be a
glorious month in Provence if it were only for the almond blossom.
Mixed with the soft grey of the olives it makes delicious pictures, and
it is to be found everywhere. And the wild rosemary is in flower--great
bushes of it, lighting up the rocky hillsides with their delicate blue.
They were all around me as I sat on this height, and there were brooms
getting ready to flower, and wild lavender, and thyme. The air held
an aromatic fragrance, and as I walked on between the pines and the
deciduous trees, not yet in leaf, the birds were singing and the water
rushing down its channels from the snowy heights very musically. There
were primroses and violets by the roadside, as if it had been spring
in England, and juicy little grape hyacinths to remind one that it was
not. There was something to look at and enjoy at every step.
I was nowhere near the top of the pass, as I had thought, but reached
it at last at the Col de Braus, where I found a rude little inn, and
entered it not without reluctance in search of refreshment.
I found myself in a vaulted stone kitchen, its floor below the level of
the ground outside. An elderly woman sat by the hearth, winding wool,
with a child playing at her knee; a younger woman brought me wine and
bread and cheese. The place was very dirty, but the wine was good and
the viands eatable.
The older woman was a picture of grief as she sat under the great stone
chimney and told me how hard life was in that exposed spot, especially
in the winter, when they were sometimes flooded out of the lower rooms.
And now they had taken away her only son, for his military service, and
what she should do without him she could not think. It was a hard tax
on poor mothers. In three years, when he had done with the army, who
knew? She might be dead.
"But you have a husband, madame, isn't it so? Otherwise they could not
take him."
Yes; she had a husband. She nodded her head slowly with infinite
meaning, and as if to interpret it there entered the room an extremely
unattractive person, dirtier even than his dirty surroundings, who
addressed her, or the younger woman, or perhaps me, in a flood of
intemperate speech, of which I could not make out a single word. Nobody
answered him, and he slouched out of the room again.
"Is that your husband, madame?"
She nodded her head slowly up and down, without speaking. I could see
for myself.
We talked about the little child, and her face lighted up. Presently
the husband came in again, and expressed himself in his unrecognizable
tongue with as much freedom and fervour as before. Again nobody took
any notice of him, and again he went out. I don't know whether he was
drunk or not, but am inclined now to think that he only wanted to be.
I was sure that he was annoyed with me, for some reason, by the way
he glared at me, and as I was a customer and prepared to pay for my
entertainment it must either have been because I did not offer him any
or because I was interfering with the hour of his own repast. I think
it is likely that his bark, which was strident enough, was worse than
his bite, that he was merely a ne'er-do-well with an unusual gift of
self-expression, which had ceased to interest those about him. His wife
took no steps to carry out whatever may have been his wishes at this
particular juncture of circumstances, and her attitude of frozen grief,
effective at the time, thawed enough to enable her to make a mild
overcharge when I came to settle up. She gave me permission to take a
photograph of the room and its occupants if I wished to do so, but I
said that the light was not good enough, and came away.
Now I changed my view for a different set of hills, and began to
descend on roads that zigzagged more than ever. There was a good deal
of quarrying going on. Great blocks of stone were lying by the roadside
ready to be built up into the parapet, and presently I came upon a
group of Italian workmen busy with their picks and crowbars. I don't
know why, after all these years, the enormous work of protecting this
old road should be taken in hand, but certainly there are places in
it at which a fall over the edge can hardly be thought of without a
shudder, and with the surface in the muddy state in which I found it
a motor-car might easily skid with danger. At one place, if you stand
where it rounds a point and look down to where it takes another slope,
it looks just like a temperature chart, where the thermometer has taken
a series of rises and drops and at last runs off steadily downwards.
This long downward slope led me at last to welcome shade, and I found a
little lawn under olive boughs, below the road and above a river gorge
which was an ideal place for a siesta. If food and drink are so good
when one is on the long steady tramp, sleep is no less so. There are
those who scorn it except at night between sheets, but when one has
made an early start, and has covered many miles by the time the sun has
reached its greatest power, it is pleasant enough to sleep for an hour
under the shade of a tree, and to wake up refreshed for what remains to
be done of the day's journey.
The sound of the river beneath me, and the birds singing all around,
lulled me to sleep. But for this there was no sound, except a very rare
noise of wheels, and once a motor-car, on the road above, to arouse me
for a moment and to make the sinking back into sleep more blissful.
The first time, on an expedition of this sort, that you take your pack
for a pillow, mother earth for your bed and green leaves for your
canopy, there is something that falls away from you of the troubles and
irritations of the world. You are as near to nature as you are ever
likely to be in this sophisticated age, and nature will smooth things
out for you if you trust yourself to her.
[Illustration: THE ROAD DOWNHILL "LOOKS JUST LIKE A TEMPERATURE CHART"]
[Illustration: I "POSED" HIM AMONG THE RUINS
_Page 20_]
I dropped down to L'Escaréne, a picturesque old town with an ancient
bridge straddling across the quick-flowing river. But before I reached
it I was met by a man with a drum and several intoxicated youths
carrying a flag, who cried "Vive la République" and "Vive l'armée,"
with the most patriotic fervour. I had begun my walk just at the
time when the conscripts were being called up from their homes all
over France, and lived in the thick of the concomitant disturbances
during the next few days. These rather pathetic little processions
of service-old boys, usually accompanied by middle-aged men more
drunk than they were, trailing out of a town and back again, became a
commonplace. They shouted at me frequently, but never rudely.
I sat under a naked vine-trellis on a raised terrace outside an inn and
drank wine. A talkative damsel, with needlework to occupy her hands,
but nothing to keep her fine eyes from noting everything that happened
in the _place_, for the observation of which this was a vantage-ground,
kept me company. She explained to me, with much shrugging of shapely
shoulders, some of the differences between the _patois_ used in
this part of the country and the true French, but she disclaimed
knowledge of Provençal. I was in Provence, but not yet among the true
Provençals--unless I mistook her altogether, which is quite possible.
She gave me excited and exhaustive instructions how to reach the hill
town of Berre, where I had thought to spend the night. I had had a
description of it from the engineer in whose company I had dined the
evening before, and when I came within sight of it, perched on its rock
summit, an hour or two later, its high walls and dominating church
tower lit by the westering sun, it gave me a little thrill--it was so
beautiful, and so just right.
It was just right to look at from a distance, or for a walk through its
narrow twisting alleys, part staircase, part passage, part drain. There
is nothing more picturesque than these little rock-perched towns and
villages that lie behind the Italian and French Rivieras. They are as
untouched as anything in the way of congregated buildings can be in
these days, and carry your imagination right back into the past. And
I had thought that a night spent in some old inn in one of them would
strengthen that touch of romance for me.
But in Berre there was no inn such as I had pictured, where one would
sleep in such a room as I had slept in the night before and awake to a
glorious view as from some commanding tower. There were two _cafés_,
and I penetrated one of them in search of dinner and a bed. Militarism
was being celebrated with much consumption of fluid, and much singing
and shouting, and the place was very dirty, and had that air of hard
discomfort and newness which is the peculiar property of French
_buvettes_ of the poorer sort. I was not sorry to be told that it was
impossible for me to have a bed there. I think I could have got one by
pressing for it, but I did not press. The romance of Berre was oozing
out fast, and I still had in me the four miles or so that would take me
to Contes, in the valley below.
The revellers here were all men of middle age, or at any rate long
past the age at which the new three years' service could affect them
personally, but their enthusiasm for it was very great. One of them,
who had detached himself from the rest while I had been making my
enquiries and was reeling down the road waving a branch of mimosa and
singing loudly, showed me the way to Contes; for I already knew better
than to follow the road, which always approaches these high-perched
villages in an over-deliberate fashion for pedestrians. He was very
amiable about it, and I rather feared that he would offer to go with
me. But he only came a little way, to where he could point me out
a mule-track, and during our walk together I understood him to be
persuading me, and possibly himself, that he was on the eve of gaining
much military glory. But he was bald and pot-bellied, and I think that
he was only touched by that noble and unselfish enthusiasm which takes
patriotic men when there is question of other people doing their duty.
Dusk was falling, and I went down stony paths between olive gardens,
which are very peaceful and mysterious in twilight. I met some of the
inhabitants of Berre mounting slowly to their little town after their
day's work. Most of the women carried cut olive boughs on their heads,
and some of the men drove asses laden with them. It was the time of
pruning, and olive leaves are very acceptable to most animals as food.
By and bye I had the track to myself, and sometimes lost it, but I did
not much mind. I could see the lights of Contes below me, and whenever
I found myself on a path that seemed to lead aside from them I took
a straight line over the terraces till I found a more suitable one. I
was rather tired, but rest and refreshment were not far off, and it
was soothing to the spirit to walk in this odorous dusk, and in such
quietness.
It was quite dark by the time I came to Contes, and I was quite ready
for my dinner. But I did not reach it for some time yet. When I had
gone down long, steep, paved paths between walls to what seemed to
be the heart of the town I had to go down much farther still until I
thought I should never come to the end of things. But at last, there
was the bottom of the hill, and an hotel, no less, with a garden in
front of it.
I sat down in the _café_, since, although a room was promised me, there
was no suggestion of taking me to it, and at the moment I had no wish
to mount stairs even for the sake of a wash. There are certain habits
of civilization that are very easily dropped. One comes to the end of a
day's march, and one's first desire is for rest, one's second for food
and drink; and in these little inns this sequence of desire seems to
be well understood. It seemed quite natural to exchange my heavy dusty
boots for a pair of slippers out of my pack, sitting by the table, to
pass at once to the consumption of wine, and as soon as might be to
the consumption of food, without any further preparation.
The wine was very good, with a slight tang that was almost a sparkle in
it, and as I sat blissfully at rest with it the room was invaded first
by a man with a drum, then by a man with a cornet, then by several
more men with very loud voices. I was immediately whisked away by the
youth who had received me, and who seemed to be in sole charge of the
place, into another little room across a passage, where he presently
served me with dinner, consisting of soup, an omelette, beef, potatoes
and carrots, cheese, oranges, and biscuits, and another litre of
the good wine. Soon after that he showed me a clean little room, in
which I slept deeply, hardly disturbed by the voices of the _jour de
fête_ beneath me, and was only once thoroughly awakened, at about one
o'clock, by a great bustle of arrival in a room adjoining mine.
The busy young man was still as active as possible at that hour, but he
was quite ready to give me my coffee at six o'clock the next morning,
at a little table in the garden. He had also thoroughly cleaned my
boots, but before I left I heard him called a marauder for something or
other he had omitted to do for the two gentlemen who had arrived in the
night.
For the whole of this entertainment I paid five francs and a half, and
the helpful and willing young man explained that the charge was rather
high because I had drunk two litres of wine.
And so I came happily to my second day, in the bright spring sunshine.
CHAPTER II
_Flowers and Scents_
If you look at a map of this coast, before it begins to run south from
Cagnes and Villeneuve, you will see that the hills stretch down to the
sea like the fingers of a hand spread out, and the main roads run down
between them. I should have preferred to keep away from the coast and
cross the remaining ranges by tracks and footpaths, but I wanted to see
a relative who lives at Nice. Otherwise I should never have gone near
such a place, for which I was quite unsuited, both in spirit and attire.
Contes is only fourteen miles or so from Nice by a good road, and I
thought I might pay my visit, and in the afternoon get back into the
hills again. But crowning the ridge opposite to the one I had come down
the night before was the old deserted town of Châteauneuf, and in the
soft early morning sunshine it looked so attractive that I thought I
would go up to it, and walk down to Nice along the valley on the other
side.
It was a steep and stony climb. When I got a little way up I was
already glad I had embarked upon it, for if I had gone down by the
road I should have missed the glorious view I had looking back upon
Contes, and upon Berre on its wooded height far above it. I saw now
that Contes itself was a most picturesque little town on a hill of its
own, crowned by the spire of its church, that its outlying houses ran
straggling up the higher slope down which I had come, and that the inn
at which I had slept was in another little group right at the bottom
of the hill. It was not nearly so large as it had seemed to me in the
dark, but it was wonderfully picturesque, from whatever shifting point
of view I saw it.
I sat for half an hour outside a little inn before I climbed the
last steep slope to the ruins above me. They loomed big and massive,
and I asked why the place had been deserted. Owing to lack of water,
they told me, but there was still a woman who inhabited it with her
children, and had some small "lands" to cultivate thereabouts. There
were a few little pocket handkerchiefs of terraced soil among the lower
ruined walls, and some tall cypresses growing among the scattered
stones. But it was a scene of desolation when one went along what had
been a street or lane of the village. The ruin was too far advanced
to tell many stories, and only the glorious view, which embraced the
sea to the south and all the great panorama of the hills and distant
mountains elsewhere, made the reward of the climb.
A ragged child came running towards me over the stones. I "posed" him
among the ruins which were his habitation, and asked him questions
about them, which he did not answer. I found his mother, with some
smaller children, in a dwelling not so very uncomfortable, and she
was pleasant with me, and said there was no lack of water at all in
Châteauneuf, and it was a convenient enough place to live in, and cheap.
There was not much to stay there for. The ragged child was instructed
to take me to some grotto or other which his mother said was well worth
seeing, and he did accompany me a few hundred yards on my way down the
other side of the hill; but I saw nothing of any grotto, and presently
he went back again.
A depression of spirit came upon me as I walked down the road to Nice,
which, however, was picturesque enough, passing for some distance
through a narrow gorge with a foaming river running along the bottom of
it. But there were people in carriages and motor-cars, and presently
there were tram-lines and untidy-looking buildings such as always
hang on to the skirts of a French town. I was coming into a sort of
civilization that I wanted none of at that time. I cut short the
approach by taking a tram, and I will say nothing more of Nice except
that I spent the rest of the day and the night there.
It took me a long time to get out of it the next morning, and in fact
its atmosphere seemed to hang about me all day. I walked along the
pavement of the interminable Promenade des Anglais, drank coffee at an
_auberge_ somewhere at the end of it, and then took a tram to Cagnes,
where they play golf. I must not be taken to throw scorn upon Nice
because it did not happen to be the sort of place I wanted at that
particular time. It is the chief of the pleasure cities of that sunny
flowery coast, and was so when all the rest were mere fishing villages.
It is bright and gay, and fronts its curving shore with a flaunting
elaboration of architecture that spells wealth and luxury down to the
smallest eccentric pavilion. And this wealth and luxury spreads its
influence for miles around.
It was evident in the little _café restaurant_ at which I rested early
in the afternoon, which was just off the dusty high road to Grasse,
and was continually passed by motor-cars speeding along in either
direction. It was not a place at which any of them were ever likely to
stop, but I was charged at least double prices for the mild refreshment
that I took, and when I had paid for it was requested to leave as soon
as possible, for the lady of the house wished to shut it up and go
and wash at the fountain. I was sitting outside, and could only have
carried off a chair and a table if I had been minded to carry off
anything, but I was not to be allowed to sit there a little longer. She
had got my money and wanted to see my back.
I walked on, into the land of flowers--flowers grown not for their
beauty but for their scent, and grown in terraced fields, just like any
other crop. Grasse, the centre of the industry, draws supplies for its
scents and soaps, pomades and oils, from miles of country around it,
and I was getting near to Grasse.
There were great plantations of roses, all carefully pruned and
trained on low trellises, but not yet in flower. Sometimes the rows
were interspersed with vines, and many of the fields were bordered
with mulberries. There were ledges covered with the green foliage of
violets, and great double heads of purple, scented bloom peeping out of
it. There were fields of jasmine, of tuberoses; terraces of lavender,
of lilies of the valley, carnations, mignonette; gardens of orange
trees, grown more for their flowers than for their fruit; and of course
groves of olives, of which the oil forms so important a part in the
local manufactures. This day and the next day I walked for miles with
the scent of flowers all about me.
I climbed up to another Châteauneuf; there must be a round dozen of
them in Provence alone, and they are all very old. This was another
most picturesque hill town, and again I thought I might get a bed
there. But I could get no such thing, and after sitting for half an
hour on a terrace and enjoying the wide view I set out again as the sun
sank behind the hills to walk to Grasse.
I had come up by a wide sweeping road, and took a short cut down
through the olive groves to where I thought I should strike it again.
But my sense of direction, never very strong, failed me altogether, and
I don't know where I might have wandered to if I had not frequently
caught sight of the lights of Grasse in the distance. Presently I
seemed to be going right away from them, but between me and them there
was a deep valley, and I knew that the road which I ought to have
taken, or found again, kept to the level on my right. So I turned, to
round the slope of the hill which would take me on to it.
I wandered for an hour up paths and down paths and along the edges of
terraces where there were no paths, but keeping my face generally to
the right quarter. The lights of Grasse shone more and more plainly
between the tree-trunks, but were still a very long way off. Sometimes
I came across little secluded farms, and in the garden of one of them
a great stretch of yellow jonquil shone in the dusk like a square of
sunshine left behind from the departed day, and its fragrance followed
me for a long way. From another a dog barked and somewhat alarmed me,
for dogs are not to be lightly regarded in this country. Later on I
should have been more alarmed still, for reasons which will presently
appear. But this dog did no more than bark savagely, and bye and bye,
when it was quite dark, I came out onto the road, not so very far from
Châteauneuf, round which I had walked almost in full circle.
I was still four miles or so from Grasse, but had no wish to walk there
if I could find my dinner and bed closer at hand, and just beyond where
I had come out onto the road there was an inn, in which I got both. I
think this place was called Pré du Lac, but am not sure.
I dined in the _café_, which was so large as to take up nearly the
whole of the ground floor. There was a billiard table in it, but it was
in a corner and seemed to make small impression on the floor space.
As I sat at my table against a wall, the people of the inn dined at
another one, pushed up against an iron stove, and at such a distance
from mine that we had to raise our voices in talking to one another.
They were an interesting group, but I had some difficulty in making out
their relationship. There was a woman at the head of things, bustling
and voluble, who brought me one special dish, which she said was a
_plat du pays_, and not given to every guest. I have forgotten all
about it, except that it was good. There was a man with one eye who may
have been her husband, but I think he was only a friend of the family.
There was a married daughter, rather handsome, with a small child who
went to sleep over his macaroni. These sat at the table. But there were
besides, a son, who was to be off on his military service the next day,
and a girl who may have been a younger daughter. She wore a boy's cloth
cap and a black skirt, and looked very much like a Kentish hop-picker.
These two hovered about the scene. There were also people coming in now
and then, to bring something or to take something away, and they all
stayed for a word or two before going out into the night, and slamming
the door.
One man, who had just cut his beard very short, or else had not shaved
for a week, came to fill a bottle with wine. He stood for a minute or
two by the table, talking loudly, and then made for the door, still
talking. By the time he reached it he had found something to say that
took him back to the table, where he stayed for another two or three
minutes. Then he went to the door again, stood there as before, and
came back. He did this six or seven times. He first came in as I
finished my soup, and finally left us as I was peeling my orange, and
I am quite sure that he pictured himself as having stopped just to say
a word, and told his wife so when he got home with the wine for their
meal.
I watched them as they sat and stood there, talking vociferously, and
frequently all at the same time, and thought how different they were
from our northern peasantry. They live far better; the poorest of
them have well-cooked food and wholesome natural wine as a matter of
course. Their ideas flow more freely, and they take a great delight in
imparting them. They are not so much under the domination of richer
men. One could not, in England, walk through the country and drop down
to the way of life of the peasantry without a conscious and possibly
irksome process of self-adjustment--as irksome to them as to oneself.
There one lives exactly as they do, and lives better than in most
middle-class houses in England; and they will talk to you freely, and
interest you.
I went over and sat at their table, while the one-eyed man and the
married daughter played a game of cards, which they explained to me
but I did not understand, and offered me most fragrant coffee, from
the stove at the lady's elbow. The _patronne_ came in, and gave me a
liqueur glass of rum, which she said would be good for me. A handsome
young man in the clothes of a plasterer came in and watched the card
game, and another rather older man joined the circle, together with the
son and the girl in the cloth cap, who had carried off the sleeping
child and put him to bed. She was smoking a cigarette. I suggested that
the rum should go round to my order, but only the _patronne_ herself,
the one-eyed man and the young plasterer accepted it. The budding
soldier would have done so, but his mother forbade him.
The talk was of military service, as it had been throughout the
evening. They all disliked the new three years' law, except the
one-eyed man, who said that soldiering was all fun and no work, and
you saw the world. But they cried out at him that he had never done
military service, and he subsided and helped himself largely to
counters out of the pool.
They were all as genial as possible with me, looked at my map with
interest, and suggested various places that I might visit. The
conscript presently showed me up to my room, which was bare but clean,
and asked me how many handkerchiefs I had with me. I thought it was
rather a personal question, but showed them to him, and he deluged
each one with a different scent. He said they were the best scents
that could be obtained in or around Grasse, and they were certainly
very strong. For some days thereafter my "essences turned the live
air sick," and one of the handkerchiefs now, after several washings,
retains a faint commemorative odour. But the attention I valued, though
the scent I came to dislike extremely.
They were nice people, all of them, though a little greedy, as next
morning's settling up showed. But I was still on the high road between
Nice and Grasse, and I suppose was fair game.
The weather was still lovely as I set out early in the morning, and
Grasse was a sight to see, with its towers and roofs lit up by the sun,
as it stood on its dominating height over the wide valley, in which the
light mists still lingered.
I walked right through the town, but if I had not already seen
something of the processes by which the scents from the miles of
flowery fields through which I was passing are extracted and hoarded,
I think I should have stayed to do so. For I am so constituted that
every manufacturing process remains a complete and insoluble mystery to
me until I have seen it, and yet arouses my curiosity and my willing
interest.
It was about this time of the year that I had visited one of the light,
airy factories of Grasse. I remember a huge, scented mass of the
heads of violets heaped up on a white sheet on one of the upstairs
floors. It was half as high as I was, and smelt divinely. These were
the only flowers in evidence, for the full harvest, when all the great
space of this chamber would be covered with gathered blossoms, was
not yet. But there were sacks of lavender there besides, and bundles
of sweet-scented roots--orris, and patchouli, and _vétiver_--which
can be turned into essences as sweet as those taken from the flowers
themselves.
I remember in other rooms boiling vats, very clean, and bright copper
vessels, and great stills; and casks full of the fine grease which is
used to catch and hold the distilled essences. It is spread on sheets
of glass, framed in wood, like school slates, which are stacked in
tiers; and other tiers hold the wooden trays for the flower-heads ready
to be treated. And of course there were great stores of attractive
flasks and bottles, all labelled and ribboned, and ready to take their
places in the shops of Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix, and every
other place where there is a market for them.
There was a room, too, with machinery for turning out scented soap. You
saw a soft fat pink deliciously-smelling roll squeezed out of a press,
and in no time sections were cut off and stamped in another press into
cakes ready for the toilet table.
I must confess that I have only the dimmest idea now as to the actual
details of the various processes by which the scent of the flowers is
stoppered up into the aristocratic bottles, but I have seen it all
done, and the impression remains on my mind that any scent that bears
a label from Grasse does come from the flowers themselves, and with no
adulteration that I could see anywhere.
CHAPTER III
_In Old Provence_
I now finally left behind me the cosmopolitan coast, and came into the
true Provence.
My objective was the old city of Aix, which lay almost due east, across
country in which there are not many places standing out on the map as
of any importance, but which seemed to me rather more attractive on
that account.
Once at Aix, one would be in the thick of it. Avignon, Nîmes, Arles,
and a score of points of interest lie within a few miles of one
another. When I reached this rich and crowded corner, the adventure of
walking through unknown country would take second place. But at least
as long as the weather held I wanted to be on foot, and in the country
that lies apart from the main tourist routes.
When I had passed beyond the sphere of the villas with their flowery
gardens the road became rather lonely. The fields of blossom became
rarer, but there were vines and olives everywhere. The earth was
red, and looked rich, and the hills on either side of me took on all
sorts of lovely shades of orange and purple and blue, as the light
changed and shifted during the day. I could still see, when I turned
round, some of the higher mountains from among which I had come, and
the country did not sensibly change its character until I had crossed
another pass later on in the day.
I walked for some miles, hoping to come across an inn where I could get
something to drink. I had had nothing since the bread and coffee of the
early morning, and had walked straight through Grasse, only stopping to
get my letters and buy some provisions.
I believe that most people on the tramp find it enough to have one good
meal at the end of the day. Some of them find it necessary to start
with a stout breakfast, but that is hardly possible outside England,
and for my part the coffee and roll of France or Switzerland carries me
on very well for two or three hours, when I am ready for something more
substantial.
You need not trust to an inn for this second collation, and if you do
they will only send out to get for you what you could have got for
yourself, and charge you rather more for it. They quite understand
your bringing your own _vivres_ with you, and eating them to the
accompaniment of their wine. Even the wine you can buy and carry with
you, but it is hardly necessary to do that as long as you are in a
country where you can get it anywhere.
You go to a _boulangerie_ and buy a crisp, newly baked loaf for a
penny. Then you go to an _épicerie_ and buy cheese or sausage, or both;
also oranges and chocolate to amuse yourself with at odd moments during
the day. Here is food fit for the gods, and all you want is wine to
wash it down with. My own preference is for a great deal of wine at
such times, but there are some who may be content with water. I want
water, too, and a great deal of that, and carry an aluminum folding cup
with me, filling it almost anywhere without regard to possible germs.
It may be dangerous in some places, and possibly so in Provence; but I
have never taken any harm from it, there or anywhere.
It was on this morning that I realized for the first time that it was
not necessary to find an inn in order to find wine. Everybody makes
wine in Provence and almost anybody will sell it to you. I got my
litre at a blacksmith's; they brought me out a chair under a tree,
and I ate and drank to the ring of the anvil. The wine cost fourpence
halfpenny--I like to present these little sums in English money--and
was drinkable, but no more. I was beginning to get rather tired of the
ordinary red wine of the country, though I never drank white that was
not good. But it is mostly red wine that the peasants make, and it is
only occasionally that it is anything more than a mere beverage.
That afternoon I came to a beautiful place. The road had been falling
for some time, and at last entered a deep and narrow valley of verdant
meadows through which flowed a very clear river. I had walked a long
way, and it was very hot. The idea came to me to find a sheltered spot
and bathe in these clear waters. Perhaps fortunately, there was an
inn at the point at which the road crossed a bridge and doubled back
on the other side of the gorge, and when I had refreshed myself there
bathing did not seem such a reasonable undertaking. The river, though
invitingly clear, was rapid, and must have been fed by snows not so
very far away; and it was still early March, in spite of the hot sun.
There were motor-cars in front of this inn, and a party had finished a
late and from evidence a long _déjeuner_ at a table in the open. They
were flushed with food and wine and other liquors, and chattered like
parrots before they packed themselves into their cars and made off
in the direction of the coast. I disliked them one and all, and felt
vastly superior to them--a feeling which no doubt they also experienced
towards me, if they took any notice of me at all. Their sensation
of superiority would be based upon the fact that they were showing
themselves in command of quite a lot of money, and would be heightened
by the mild delirium that comes from over-feeding and being carried
along swiftly in that state, with no call for bodily or mental effort.
Mine arose from the pride of living frugally and feeling particularly
well from having walked a good many miles and being ready to walk a
good many more in about half an hour's time. I'm not sure, now that I
have drawn the comparison, that the one feeling was any more laudable
than the other.
I crossed the bridge, which was called the Pont de la Saigne, and began
the long ascent to the Colle Noire. When I had reached it the scenery
began to show a change. I had left the high rugged hills behind me at
last, and was dropping down into a fertile valley, which spread out
into a plain. The hills, more rounded now, bounded this plain to the
north, and were dotted at intervals with little towns that showed up
picturesquely from a distance on their blue and purple slopes. I was
making for one of them--Fayence, where I had been assured that I should
find a good inn. It was still a long way off after a few hours' walk,
and still hidden from me by an intervening hill, and I had walked quite
far enough that day.
I sat down on the coping of a bridge as the dusk began to steal over
the fields and hills. It was a peaceful, soothing scene. An old
shepherd came slowly towards me with his flock following him to their
night's shelter. It was like a picture by Millet. There was not enough
light for a photograph, but I took one of another shepherd with his
flock later on. They watch their sheep as the Swiss watch their cattle
in the mountain pastures, never leaving them alone; and I never saw a
flock of sheep in Provence that numbered above thirty.
When I had walked on a little farther I got a lift in a cart drawn by
an old white horse that was jogging along my way. It was driven by a
good-looking young man with a wonderful set of teeth and a pleasant
smile. He was a sort of general carrier. He dropped a large bundle of
what looked like washing at one cottage and a basket of provisions at
another, and a man stopped him on the road to hand in a lantern for
repair, and a woman at a railway crossing asked for medicine to be
brought the next day. There was a little conversation on general topics
at every stop, and the tongue was the true Provençal, which he told me
they all talked among themselves, though most of them talked French as
well.
Provençal is soft and sweet. It is not difficult to make out its
meaning in print if one knows some Latin and some French, but I never
succeeded in catching more than the glimmer of an idea of what was
being talked about. Of Provençal as a literary language there will be
more to say later on.
As we rounded the hill that had hidden Fayence, there came into view
a castle with two towers that stood most imposingly on a summit
overlooking the valley; but as we approached it turned out to be, not
an ancient ruined keep as it had seemed in the dusk, but a not very
ancient unfinished château of enormous proportions. It had been built
so far, my friend informed me, by a General Fabre, or Favre, and, as I
afterwards learnt, about the year 1836. I made up my mind to visit it
the next day, for it showed up as a most lordly pleasure house, with
terraced gardens commanding the great stretch of country between the
range of hills on which it stood, and the mountains of the Estérel and
the Maures towards the sea.
Fayence lay just beyond it. My carrier was going on to Seillans, and
dropped me at the foot of the hill, and I made my way slowly up a
winding road to my night's shelter.
I found a good inn where they gave me an excellent dinner and a
delicious white wine. The dinner consisted of pea soup, a spit upon
which was impaled alternate morsels of liver and bacon, a dish of
little sausages with succulent cabbage, a dish founded on beef or
mutton, I forget which, cream cheese, biscuits, oranges, and nuts,
and the charge for this, including the wine, of which I drank a large
quantity, was two francs. My bed, in a small clean room, was also two
francs, and coffee and rolls the next morning fifty centimes. This
comes to about three shillings and ninepence for a day's living, apart
from what one consumes upon the road; and this was the chief hotel in a
town of fifteen hundred inhabitants.
Such hotels are common all over southern France, and easy enough
to find in a town not too large or too small. They are not so well
furnished or so comfortable as an English inn of the same class, but it
would be rare indeed to find an English inn where the food would be so
good. An evening meal would have to be ordered or cooked specially, and
one would consider oneself charged moderately in a bill that came to no
more than three times as much. In the bigger towns such hotels are more
difficult to find, but they are there if one knows where to look for
them, and has learnt exactly what to look for. In the smaller places to
which tourists go, and there is no choice, the charges are considerably
higher; but one can usually get a bath, which is an unknown luxury in
the ordinary way of things.
I wish very much that I had not left these wanderings on foot over
foreign countries until middle age. I can imagine no more delightful
experience for a young man, either alone or in company. If I could go
back to undergraduate days, I would spend some part of every spring and
summer vacation on foot in this way. Ready money is apt to be scarce at
that happy age, but it need cost so little.
My own experiences, for various reasons, are no particular guide,
but Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who is pastmaster in the art of seeing fresh
country, is worth quoting on the subject. He wrote to me when I asked
him for advice before setting out on this expedition:
"I think the thing is quite easy if one only remembers that the
conditions, upon the Western Continent at least, that is, in France,
Italy and Spain, are so different from those in England that no one
asks questions and no one dreams of interfering with one's liberty.
The rule is as simple as possible. Any inn whatsoever in France and
almost any inn north of Naples in Italy gives you a tolerable bed,
and on entering it you ask the price of a room and of coffee the next
morning. They are accustomed to the process and bargain with you. I
have been to dozens of places where I was charged no more than a franc.
"For your mid-day meal you will be wise to carry a leather bottle
which the French call a _Gourde_ and the Spaniards a _Bota_, holding
wine, which again you must have filled in shops where wine is sold
retail. You will again do well to ask before it is filled at what
price the wine is sold. I have carried a half-gallon _gourde_ of this
kind over many journeys. It is slung from the shoulders by a strap and
is purchasable in all the mountain countries. Bread is purchasable
everywhere, and that kind of sausage which the French call by various
names, which the Spaniards call 'Salpicon' and the Italians 'Salami'
is common to all countries and is with cheese the accompaniment of the
meal. Your night meal you must make the principal meal of the day,
and if you wish to save money eat it at some place different from the
place where you sleep. Thus accoutred you can live indefinitely at a
rate of five francs a day and see all that there is to be seen. Always
carry upon your person in such countries one good 'piece,' as they
call it, for identification, the best of which is a passport issued
by the British authorities wherever you are. Be careful to have it
_viséd_ by the consul of the countries where you are to travel. It
is the _visa_ that counts more than the passport. For instance, if
you are starting from Switzerland get such a document _viséd_ by the
consul in some principal towns of France, Italy and Spain, then you
have nothing to fear.
"Remember that telegrams or letters sent to you at one place _poste
restante_ do not tie you to going to that place. You have but to send
a message to the post office to have them forwarded to another, and
it will be done. But you cannot get your letters, still less your
registered letters, at a _poste restante_ without some such 'piece' as
I mentioned.
"It is a good rule not to carry personal luggage except in the
smallest amount in your sack, and to buy things as you need them. It
is cheaper in the long run."
Now five francs a day is not quite thirty shillings a week, and for
the price of a few days' revel "in town" an enterprising youngster
might spend a fortnight walking through almost any beautiful stretch
of country in nearer Europe, including his journey there and back to
England. However it may have been in the past, it is now possible to
travel third class on the Continent in no more discomfort than in
England, and indeed in the holiday season third class is apt to be
a good deal less crowded than second, on the fast trains in which
third-class passengers are carried. They are not carried, of course,
in all trains; but where the saving of shillings is an object it is no
particular hardship to spend a few hours more on the way, and unless
the journey is a very long one the time lost is small and the money
saved considerable.
The burden to be carried is a more debatable matter. Mr. Belloc's
advice is worth a good deal more than mine, but his early training in
arms must have used him to a less fearful regard of discomfort than is
possible with most of us. The less you carry the easier your walking
will be, and I would never hamper myself with any protection against
rain. Unless you can keep your legs as well as your body protected you
must occasionally expect to be under the necessity of having something
dried before a fire, and while you are about it you may as well go to
bed and have everything dried. But I should not care to be without a
spare shirt, at least one pair of spare socks, and a pair of light felt
slippers, and with other small necessaries for comfort and a reasonable
degree of cleanliness this already makes up a fair weight. Let every
one choose for himself. My experience is that one very quickly gets
used to a moderate pack strapped upon one's shoulders, and hardly
notices it, except for a time after one may have taken a day off and
walked about carrying nothing.
I took a day off at Fayence. It was Sunday, although I had no idea of
it until well on into the morning.
I came down at about half past seven, and found that the three _commis
voyageurs_ in whose company I had dined the night before had already
finished their breakfast and gone out; but two of them came in again
as I was finishing mine, and transacted serious business with some
townspeople whom they brought with them. They keep early hours in
France.
I walked up to the top of the hill upon which the town is built, and
found an old and very solid tower with a clock in its face and a bell
in a cage of wrought iron on the top of it. The clock had a date on
it--1908--and I took some little trouble to discover whether it could
be seen from any part of the town except by climbing up to it as I had
done. I found that it could not. Then I made my way to the Château du
Puy.
I approached it along a sort of drive, and stood in a doorway looking
down three stories deep into the stone-built husks of enormous rooms,
and up into three or four stories more. There was a series of great
halls, one above the other, in the main part of the building, and many
rooms opening out of them in both wings, which were carried up into
imposing towers; and there were lateral extensions besides. The house
seemed to have been designed for the accommodation of a regiment
rather than one solitary general.
The gardens to the south of it were on a level two stories lower, and
the gate to them was locked; but by a little scrambling I reached them.
The terraces had been laid out on a grand scale, and gardening had been
begun at some date or other. There were overgrown beds of iris getting
ready to flower, and in one corner a _pièce d'eau_, without which no
French garden is complete. A tall palm grew in one corner, and there
were fig-trees and bushes of hibiscus. In an extension of the main
building there were signs of habitation, and an orange-tree bright with
fruit grew in the middle of a chicken-run. Olives and almonds had been
planted where the ordered garden should have been, and most of the
ground had been made use of.
I had been able to get no information about the building of this great
pile; the tradition seemed to have departed. I do not know whether
it had been stopped by the death of the owner, or, as seems not
improbable, by a lack of money to go on. I imagined him, as I sat and
smoked in the deserted garden, as having thought continually of this
glorious site in his native country, and coming back to it when his
fighting was done to build himself the finest house for many miles
around. I think he must have enjoyed himself enormously while it was in
the building, but not without some doubts as to the way in which it was
to be lived in when it should at last be finished.
[Illustration: A PROVENÇAL SHEPHERD
_Page 36_]
[Illustration: FAYENCE COULD BE SEEN ON ITS OWN HILLSIDE
_Page 45_]
[Illustration: HOW THEY PRUNE THE PLANE-TREES
_Page 50_]
[Illustration: THE DOLMEN NEAR DRAGUIGAN
_Page 53_]
His site must have given him continual pleasure. From his terraced
garden the wide fertile plain was spread out before him, in front and
on either side. As I saw it, it was all browns and greens, threaded
with white roads, and punctuated by dark cypress spires. Miles away it
was bounded by pine-clad mountain slopes, beyond which lay the sea. At
the back of the house the little town of Tourettes showed its huddle
of old roofs and walls a mile away, and behind it the hills rose until
snow could be seen on distant summits. From the little side garden with
the fish pond, Fayence could be seen on its own hillside, and a range
of blue and purple hills beyond it. The sun came out as I sat there,
and the shadows of clouds played all over the beautiful scene. It was
the true Provence, which gets into the blood of those who are born in
it, and makes them think that no country in the world is fairer.
I walked back to the town and went into the church, a large eighteenth
century structure of some dignity, with an unornamented tower that
looks much older. The curé came in as I was looking about me. He was
as handsome and dignified as his church, with his white hair and
portly presence, and reminded me of Parson Irvine in "Adam Bede." He
was inclined to deprecate my admiration of his church. It was large,
yes, not particularly fine, he thought. But I was judging by other
standards. A church as large as this would hardly have been built in
England in the eighteenth century for a thriving town; for one of the
size of Fayence the idea of it would have been laughed at.
It would hardly have been built in Fayence a few years later. When I
had gone out on to the little _place_ in front of it, where there were
busy market stalls under a row of giant planes, and a view past the
Château du Puy to the rich plain and the mountains beyond it, I went
back into the church and watched the congregation arrive for Mass.
It was not until then that I made it out to be Sunday. One enjoys a
blessed disregard of the calendar on such expeditions as mine, walking
on from day to day.
Women and children--they filled about a quarter of the seats provided,
and these filled hardly more than half the church. There were two old
men besides, and one middle-aged one, who came in with his family with
an air of importance. The rest of the male population of Fayence was
buying and selling outside in the market, or in the shops, or talking
together on the terrace steps above the _place_, or in the _cafés_, or
walking up and down the steep streets.
In the late afternoon I walked over to Seillans, and saw the populace
of that town enjoying themselves on a fine promenade that they have on
the edge of their hill. It is planted with the ubiquitous shady plane,
and overlooks the magnificent view to the south.
A good many of the men were playing their game of _boule_, which needs
only a few yards of hard ground, and some wooden balls about the size
of a cricket ball, studded closely with nails. They throw a "jack"
about fifteen or twenty yards and then follow closely the rules of our
game of bowls. But they throw the ball with the back of the hand up,
and give it a spin which makes it run on after it has fallen. When
all of them do no more than this the game is dull enough, at least to
watch, although the inequalities of the ground give it some interest to
the players. But the good players will aim at coming right down upon
an adversary's ball and punching it away out of danger. They bend down
very low with the right leg curiously crooked, and then run forward
fast and spin the ball in the air. It looks a most difficult shot, but
I saw it brought off many times by these players at Seillans.
CHAPTER IV
_Draguignan and Saint-Maximin_
Early on Monday morning I set out to walk to Draguignan, which lay on
the other side of a range of hills to the southwest, at a distance of
about twenty-two miles. I kept to the high road all the way, but did
not pass a single village, although the land was cultivated almost
everywhere, with olives, vines, mulberries and cereals. The only
episode of a rather dull walk that remains in my memory is a chat with
a very stout proprietor of vineyards, who sold me a litre of his _bon
vin_ for fourpence. He said that his wine was very wholesome, and I
had no fault to find with any of its qualities, except possibly that
of taste. He talked to me about Mistral, the poet. He had seen him,
and said he was a very great man; but he did not seem to have read
his poems. There was to be a big Provençal _fête_ at Draguignan in
May, and Mistral would be there, as gay as any of them, in spite of
his eighty-four years. But alas! Mistral's death was to move all this
country for which he had done so much in little more than a week from
that time.
It was on that day that the wind, from which the poet's family took
its name, and which so vexes the plains of Provence, began to blow. I
did not recognize it at first. The sun still shone brightly in a blue
sky, and I was rather glad of the strong clean wind that cooled me as
I walked. There is something about the name _mistral_ that had seemed
to me to connote an unhealthful fever-bringing air. I suppose I had
unconsciously connected it with the word "malarial." But the _mistral_
of Provence is the _magistral_, the great master-wind from the north or
the north-east, which rushes down from the Alps and Cevennes to replace
the hot air that rises from the sun-baked plains in the great Rhône
delta. It is like our east wind, keen and strong, and seems to deprive
the air of all moisture, and to make even a cloudless sky look cold.
I first saw Draguignan some four miles away, as I rounded the shoulder
of a hill. It is the capital of the Department of Var, having replaced
Toulon, which now has more than ten times its population, at the end
of the eighteenth century. Baedeker describes it as an _assez belle
ville_, but it was not _assez belle_ for me. I thought it the dullest
possible sort of town, although there were picturesque "bits" in the
streets of the older quarter. The first thing that struck the eye
as I neared it was an enormous range of new barracks, with a huge
barrack square. The bugles were blowing gaily, and when I came to the
town it was alive with soldiers in dirty white, with dark-blue waist
sashes, puttees and tam-o'-shanters. As I walked up the narrow streets
of the old town into the untidy-looking newer part, I could not help
comparing it with another French military city that I had visited some
months before. This was Besançon, the brightest, cleanest, pleasantest
large town that I have seen in the whole of France, and I have seen a
good many. Perhaps it was hardly fair to compare the two, for I was
in Besançon on a fine mellow September day, and Draguignan must have
been about at its worst, with the _mistral_ tearing along its streets,
filling the eyes with dust and making the pavements look as if all the
waste paper and light rubbish of the town were habitually thrown on to
them.
And they were pruning the plane-trees. No one who has not visited the
south of France when this operation is going on can form any idea of
what it means. These trees are planted everywhere, and in summer give
a most welcome shade to the hot streets and the wide squares of the
bigger towns. They grow to an immense girth, and those in Draguignan
were especially fine. The way they prune them, from the very first time
of their planting, shows that they know very well what they are about,
for they get a wide spread of branch and an even and impenetrable roof
of green. The trees are never allowed to get out of hand, and are kept
at school when they have passed the span of the longest human life.
With ladders and saws and ropes they remove great branches with as
little concern as one cuts into a rose-bush. The reward comes in the
summer, but an avenue or a "square" of these trees in March, when the
saws have been at work upon them, is a desolating sight. Those that I
photographed the next morning are umbrageous compared with some. I have
seen far bigger planes than these kept to three branches, each as big
as a good-sized tree.
I read in the official Directory of the Department of Var that towards
the end of the fifth century the town was infested by an enormous
dragon (symbol of heresy). The inhabitants had recourse to St.
Hermentaire, Bishop of Antibes, who delivered them from the monster.
To perpetuate the memory of this happy disencumbrance the town changed
its ancient name of Griminum to that of Dragonia, from which has come
Draguignan. And St. Hermentaire has been regarded with affection in the
locality ever since, though his name is little known outside of it.
I had been recommended by my friends among the _commis voyageurs_ at
Fayence to an hotel of the right sort. I should certainly have passed
it by but for that, for it seemed to be nothing but a large restaurant,
not of the first order nor even of the second, and there was nothing
to show that it had much accommodation elsewhere. But when I asked
for a bedroom, and suggested two francs for it instead of two and a
half, I was introduced to a noble apartment, which reminded me of the
pictures one sees in the illustrated papers, when His Majesty the King
is put up for a few days at an Embassy abroad. It was very large, and
the furniture was old, and some of it handsome, especially the bed,
which had more in the way of canopy and curtains than I am accustomed
to. The lady of the house told me afterwards that she kept a shop
of antiquities in the town, which accounted for some of the unusual
splendour. I felt ashamed at paying no more than one and eightpence for
the privilege of sleeping in such a room.
The dinner was the same price, and included a bottle of white wine that
was worth thinking about as one drank it. A good many men came in to
dine, at any time between half past seven and half past eight. Very few
of them looked to be above the rank of a workman, and all of them kept
on their hats as they ate. They sat in groups at different tables, and
enjoyed themselves in much the same way as men do in a club in London.
Probably they paid even less for the same dinner than I did, and I hope
their wives had as good a one at home.
The _mistral_ blew as keenly as ever the next morning, and I determined
to cut off a bit of the distance by train. I wanted to get to some of
the interesting places, which are nearly all in the west of Provence.
It was a two days' march to Saint-Maximin, where there is a noble
church, but I thought I would sleep there that night.
The train did not start until half past nine. I had time to walk out a
few miles on the other side of Draguignan to see a famous dolmen, the
only remains of prehistoric life to be found in this immediate region.
It was a curious well-preserved structure, hard by a little farmhouse
just off the road. I paid a youth who said he was the proprietor fifty
centimes for the privilege of looking at it, but thought his demand
for a further two francs because I had photographed it unreasonable.
He blustered, but made no effort to detain me as I walked off the
field with the two francs in my pocket instead of his. I had already
been asked once or twice if I was travelling for the purpose of taking
picture postcards, and probably that was his idea. But he was a
potential robber all the same, and I doubt if he was the proprietor at
all. I wish I had thought of threatening him with St. Hermentaire.
It took three hours to cover the thirty miles to Barjols, where I took
the road again at half past twelve. Barjols is quite out of the beaten
track, although this pottering little line, which eventually reaches
Arles, passes near it. As I walked through a very wide _place_ I
stopped to ask a group of school children playing marbles which was my
route. At the sound of my voice they scattered away with every sign of
alarm, and I laughed at them and went on, with my vanity rather wounded
at being regarded as an object of terror.
When I had gone a mile down the hill I met a man in his best clothes
reading a newspaper. I had seen the start of a funeral procession in
Barjols, and I supposed him to have the intention of joining it at his
own convenience. He asked me where I was going, and told me I could cut
off four kilometres if I followed the route he would describe to me.
He took immense trouble about it, and it was a kindly thought, but I
wished afterward that he had not had it, although I found his interest
in me soothing after having so lately been run away from.
I left the road bye and bye and followed the path that he had
indicated, but, as generally happens in such circumstances, it soon
ceased to be a path at all, and I found myself wandering among the
hills with a very small idea of where I was on the map. There was
frequent cultivation, but very few signs of habitation, and I saw no
living soul until I struck the high road again more than two hours
later. It was not the high road I had expected, and left me about
eleven miles to do out of what would have been a total of fifteen if my
adviser had been punctual at the funeral. The road to Saint-Maximin was
quite straight for the last three miles, and I saw the long line of the
great church standing high above the roofs of the town from far away.
I approached Saint-Maximin with an agreeable sense of anticipation.
The learned M. Rostan considers that its church shows the fairest page
of Gothic art in the South, and to be the only religious monument of
real architectural importance in Provence. This is perhaps extravagant
praise, but it was at any rate the first big thing of its kind that I
was to see. I had surveyed the country at large for a week, and was
ready for a different sort of interest, especially as the _mistral_ had
blown steadily all day long and walking was beginning to lose the edge
of its rapture.
It is not only the architectural beauties of this noble church that
give it its interest. It is its connection with a tradition that has
left its marks all over Provence, and in past centuries has met with
such universal acceptance that it is small wonder that innumerable
people firmly believe in it to this day. Saint-Maximin was the first
place to which I came that had to do with it.
I read about it that evening sitting before a wood fire in a room more
comfortable than is to be found in most French inns. I had come in
to Saint-Maximin as dusk was beginning to fall and had gone straight
to the church. But it was closed for the night. All I saw was the
disappointing west front, which has never been finished. So I betook
me to the hotel. Saint-Maximin is a town of small importance in the
present day, but it contains a good one, something like an old English
coaching inn, both in appearance and custom. It was a pleasant change
to dine in a medium-sized parlour instead of a large bare _café_, and
to find a fire in it; for the _mistral_ had blown away all the warmth
in the air and was blowing still.
Possibly it was from this inn that Lucien Bonaparte married his first
wife, who was the daughter of an _aubergiste_ of Saint-Maximin, where
at the age of twenty-one he administered the military provisions of the
Revolutionary army. The Revolutionists, disliking any name inclusive of
Saint, called the town Marathon, but it reverted later.
So I sat very late before the fire and read about Saint-Maximin and
about the legend of the three Marys. It must have been after ten
o'clock when I took my candle and went up to bed. Here is the story,
adapted from the learned M. Rostan, who made a life study of the
antiquities of Provence and especially of Saint-Maximin, and whose
memory is deservedly held in honour throughout the country.
After the death of Jesus Christ and his divine resurrection, the Jews,
alarmed by the rapid progress made by the new faith in Jerusalem, began
a terrible persecution, for which the martyrdom of St. Stephen was, so
to speak, the signal. They threw into a boat, without sails, oars or
rudder, the following saints: Mary Magdalene,[4] Lazarus and Martha
with their servant Marcelle, Sidonius, the man who was born blind,
Maximin, one of the seventy-two disciples, Mary the wife of Cleophas,
and Mary the wife of Zebedee, also called Salome, and several others,
including Sarah the black servant of these last two Marys, Trophimus,
and Joseph of Arimathea.
(The list extended itself as the legend grew, for it almost certainly
began with three only, as we shall see later. But M. Rostan includes
most of the above.)
The illustrious confessors were exposed to what seemed a certain and
horrible death, but the sacred barque, far from being overwhelmed by
the waves, floated in a calm that spread immediately around it, and
protected by the mercy of Providence on its long and perilous voyage,
touched at last the shores of Provence at the mouth of the Rhône, at
the place now called Saintes-Maries, or Notre Dame de la Mer.
Mary the mother of James the Less, and Salome stayed in that place
with their black servant Sarah. The other holy men and women spread
themselves over different parts of the country and diligently preached
their religion. St. Maximin went to Aix, of which he was the first
bishop, St. Martha to Tarascon, which she delivered from the ravages of
a horrible monster, St. Lazarus and St. Mary Magdalene to Marseilles.
Now although the church and town of Saint-Maximin bear the name of
that illustrious saint their chief glory is of a still greater. St.
Mary Magdalene made herself celebrated at Marseilles, then one of
the chief cities of the world, by her preaching. After having made
numerous converts and performed striking miracles, she went to Aix,
where she was named in the charter of the Church of St. Saviour as
co-founder with the bishop, St. Maximin. After some years she formed a
wish to take refuge from the eyes of the world, and betook herself to
the heart of the mysterious mountain forest now called Sainte-Baume,
because of the cave in which she passed the last thirty years of her
life in the practice of the most austere penitence. Seven times a day
angels came to her in this wild retreat and exalted her to the summit
of the mountain, so that her ears might be ravished by the celestial
harmonies. As her last moments approached they transported her some
distance from Sainte-Baume near to an obscure spot in which St. Maximin
was then in retreat. She received the last sacraments at his hands, and
a few days later breathed her last sigh, leaving behind her, says the
Golden Legend, "an odour so sweet that the oratory was perfumed by it
for seven days." Her mortal remains were reverently interred, and her
tomb became thenceforward an object of remarkable devotion. Shortly
afterwards the holy Prelate himself, with others of the blessed saints,
was buried at her side, and above these sacred remains arose a church
that became from that time a place of pilgrimage and deep veneration.
It is unfortunate that the invasions of the Saracens in the eighth
century should have made it impossible to produce documentary evidence
of any of this earlier than that date, for those barbarians devastated
everything. Seven or eight hundred years is a big gap to cover, and
when we begin to look into profane history the gap becomes much
bigger; for the legend cannot be traced earlier than the translation of
the relics of St. Trophimus in the twelfth century, and did not receive
general acceptance until three hundred years later still. But since
that time it has exercised an immense power upon the imagination of
Christendom.
M. Rostan, who was an antiquarian of note, believed in it. He summons
in evidence the stones of Saint-Maximin itself. In 1859, when the
church was undergoing restoration, he examined a brick-built tomb
which was incontestably of the date of the early Christian era, and
"might well be the primitive burial-place of one of the holy personages
venerated on this spot." It is true that the tomb was empty, but the
sacred relics are stated to have been removed after the persecutions
of the fifth century into the sarcophagi which are there to this day.
The walls of the crypt also, exposed in course of further restoration
thirty years ago, convinced M. Rostan, who saw them uncovered, that
this was "the veritable Cubiculum, the sepulchral chamber of St.
Magdalene, not only in its plan and dimensions, but in its still living
reality, as it existed when the celebrated penitent was buried there,
and where they placed her sarcophagus in the fourth or fifth century
after the triumph of the Church. The vaulting alone is not the same."
Out of all of which the sceptic may at least accept the fact,
interesting enough, that the crypt as it stands is of the date at which
St. Mary Magdalene probably died.
When the Saracens were burning all the churches, and scattering all
the sacred relics that they could lay hands upon, the Cassianite monks
who had been in charge of these peculiarly holy ones for three hundred
years, filled the crypt of their church with earth so as to hide it,
and for further precaution moved the bones of St. Mary Magdalene from
their tomb in the place of honour into that previously occupied by
those of Sidonius, where they remained for five hundred years.
So far, then, we have in evidence the tradition of the landing of
this company of saints on the shores of Provence and their subsequent
missions, not from St. Maximin alone, but also from Aix, Marseilles,
Tarascon and Saintes-Maries, in each of which places are monuments to
their glory. We have also the evidence of a burial-place of the first
century which was an object of veneration at that time and remained so
thereafter.
It is true that during the epoch of the Crusades the magnificent
church of Vezelay in Burgundy, in which Bernard of Clairvaux preached
and Richard Coeur de Lion took the vows, attracted to itself great
honour by its claim to possess the true relics of St. Mary Magdalene.
But M. Rostan points out that this belief on the part of Vezelay, so
far from being in flagrant contradiction to the Provençal tradition,
confirms it; for the monks of the Abbey of Vezelay attributed the
possession of these sacred relics to the piety of their founder,
Gérard de Roussillon, who was Count and Governor of Provence under
the Emperor Lothair. "But as the body of St. Magdalene had not been
visible at Saint Maximin for a long time, and the precise spot in which
it was hidden was not known, the statement of Vezelay was believed,
and conferred great celebrity upon it as a place of pilgrimage, until
the moment when it entered the designs of Providence to clear up the
mystery that enveloped the tomb of the glorious saint and dispel all
uncertainty upon the subject of her relics."
The instrument of this discovery was the Prince of Salerno, known later
as Charles II, King of Sicily and Count of Provence, who was the son of
Charles of Anjou, the belligerent brother of St. Louis.
It was in 1279. While Charles I was fighting in Italy, his son, then at
Aix, moved by a great devotion towards St. Mary Magdalene and a lively
desire to recover her relics, betook himself to Saint-Maximin in order
to have excavations made beneath the pavement of the church. He put
himself at the head of the workers, and on the ninth day of September
had the singular happiness of uncovering the ancient sarcophagus which
held the venerated body. Restraining the zeal of his assistants the
prince put his seal on the tomb, and at once summoned a convocation
of prelates to witness the exhumation of the sacred bones, which took
place on the eighteenth day of the same month. In the dust of the tomb
was discovered a box of cork enclosing an inscription on parchment or
papyrus, which, translated from the Latin, runs thus:
"In the year of our Lord 716, in the month of December, very secretly
in the night, when the most pious Odo was king of the French, at the
time of the invasion of the perfidious nation of the Saracens, this
body of the most dear and revered Mary Magdalene was translated from
its own tomb of alabaster into this one of marble, out of fear of the
said perfidious nation of the Saracens, because it is more secret
here, the body of Sidonius having been removed."
Contemporary historians unanimously report the miraculous circumstances
that accompanied the discovery. All make mention of the delicious odour
that came from the sarcophagus when it was opened. They tell, too,
how a verdant plant of fennel grew from the tongue of the blessed
penitent, whose body had not yet known corruption. The _noli me
tangere_, the spot on the forehead which the Saviour had touched, was
in a perfect state of preservation. Among the eminent churchmen who
vouched for the miraculous events that surrounded the disinternment was
the Cardinal de Cabassoles, Petrarch's friend, whose country retreat at
Vaucluse we shall visit later.
Prince Charles caused a magnificent reliquary to be made at Aix to hold
the head of the saint. It was of silver gilt, in the form of a hollow
bust, into which the skull was fitted. The face and the hair were of
gold, and it was surmounted by a gold crown set with precious stones.
In the next year Prince Charles was taken prisoner by Peter of Aragon,
and shut up in Barcelona for four years. He attributed his deliverance
and the restoration of his kingdom--his father having died in the
meantime--to the influence of St. Mary Magdalene, and set in hand the
building of a church at Saint-Maximin which should be more worthy
of the holy relics it contained. But it was not until more than two
hundred years later that it was finished.
Charles carried to Rome the sacred head, to offer it for the veneration
of the Pope, Boniface VIII. We are not told how it had come about, but
the head had been discovered deprived of the lower maxillary. The Pope
knew that a relic of this sort was honoured at the church of St. John
Lateran in connection with St. Mary Magdalene. It was found to fit
perfectly, and the Pope presented it to the King, who did not keep it
with the greater part of the head, possibly because the magnificent
reliquary would have had to be altered to receive it, but presented
it in his turn to the nuns of Notre Dame de Nazareth at Aix. There it
remained, until the amiable King René, who has left such a pleasant
memory of himself in Provence, finally restored it to Saint-Maximin.
During all the two hundred and forty years that the great church
was in the building the precious relics that it enshrined attracted
pilgrims without number. Six Popes visited them, to say nothing
of two anti-Popes; in one year alone five kings bowed before the
shrine; royalties came from as far off as Sweden; the unfortunate
Albigenses, after they had "abjured their errors," were compelled to
make pilgrimage to it; and finally Louis XIV, with his mother, Anne
of Austria, his brother, afterwards Duke of Orleans, and a numerous
and splendid following, bent his knee at the sacred tomb, and assisted
in the translation of the relics into a magnificent receptacle of
porphyry. These relics would not, of course, include the head. Some
vertebræ were offered to the Queen, who accepted them with gratitude.
The sacred bones were examined by the King's head physician, and
immediately placed in a case of lead covered with gold brocade, upon
which the King placed his seal in six places. It was carried the next
day in procession, and the church was filled with people, who shed
tears of joy to see renewed in their own day "a devotion so holy and
august in the presence of a king and queen so pious and devout."
During all these years, however, the relics had not been preserved
without vicissitude or diminution. Under the Queen Jeanne, Provence
was overrun by brigands, and for three years they were hidden at
Sainte-Baume. King René gave part of the lower arm to the nuns who
had the lower jaw. In 1505 a Neapolitan monk robbed the reliquary of
its jewels, and was caught and hanged. After this mutilation a new
reliquary was presented by the Queen of France, Anne of Brittany, as
splendid as the old one, and a statuette of herself was added to it in
enamelled gold. Louis XIII asked for some fragments of the body, and
was refused. Four years later he asked again, on behalf of the Queens
Mary of Medici and Anne of Austria, and was more successful, obtaining
also a fragment to be presented to the Sovereign Pontiff.
In 1639 a portion of the much venerated _noli me tangere_ was stolen
from the head, and, whether it is the same or not, a minute particle
of the _noli me tangere_ is cherished in the church of Mane, in the
Basses-Alps. In 1781 Louis XVI ordered a thigh bone to be detached and
presented to the Duke of Parma, which was done.
We have followed the story for nearly eighteen hundred years, and now
comes the Revolution, which wrought more havoc than all the successive
disturbances that had taken place before it. The church was spoiled
and the sacred relics profaned. The porphyry urn was violated, and
the documents it contained burnt. The glorious remains of the saint
were thrown pell-mell on the pavement, the head was torn from its gold
case, and the other bones from their reliquaries. But the piety of the
sacristan preserved the chief glory of the church, which was restored
to it five years later. The head, a bone from one of the arms, some
locks of hair, together with the reliquary of the Holy Ampulla, and
sundry fragments of the bodies of other saints were received back when
the storm had passed over, and there the bulk of them remain to this
day.
CHAPTER V
_The Church of Saint-Maximin_
So persuasive was M. Rostan that when I had read his account of all
this, sitting in front of the fire at my inn, within a stone's throw of
the great church that had been the scene of so many strange and moving
happenings, it is small wonder that I was inclined to believe at least
a good half of it. It was my first introduction to the legend, which
was to colour so much of my future wanderings, and many of the facts
that I have given were unknown to me then. I thought, at least, that
the main facts vouching for its truth went much farther back than they
seem to, and if it was difficult to accept quite that galaxy of New
Testament names, or the story of the miraculous voyage, still I thought
there might be some truth in the tradition as attaching to some of them.
What emerges as indisputable fact, and what moved me at the time, is
that through some centuries countless people did believe in every word
of it, and thronged this little town where I was resting from all parts
of the then known world. And there in the church which I was to see on
the morrow was--no doubt about this either--the very thing that had
brought them here--princes and prelates, hard soldiers and lawyers, men
and women of every degree, making journeys, some of them, of immense
difficulty just for the sake of beholding what I or any other traveller
coming into a dull little town could see for a few sous before passing
on our way. Or would not even take the trouble to see. A man with whom
I had talked at dinner came to Saint-Maximin several times in the year
and had never seen it. He was '_bon Catholique_,' too, and said that
there was no doubt at all that it was the head of St. Mary Magdalene
they had in the church there. Some day he would go and see it, but not
to-morrow, for he was too busy.
You may put your finger on strange gaps in such a story; you may find
the first foundations upon which it rests too weak to bear it; parts of
it you may refuse altogether to believe. But make what deductions you
wish, and what a lot remains.
_Some_ poor tired body was laid to rest in the soil from which this
great church has sprung at a time when there were still alive those who
had walked and talked with Our Lord; and it was the body of one who
was venerated. Out of the dusk of successive centuries come gleams of
light that show innumerable people, who differed not so greatly from
ourselves, believing that the remains they had knowledge of were those
that their forbears had held in honour from the beginning. It becomes
hardly more difficult to believe that they were than that they were not.
Say that there has been error, say that there has been fraud if you
like, and what have you denied? Nothing in the way of strong and moving
power over those who have believed. There is the church, to which men
whose names stand out in history made successive gifts through two
centuries and a half, until it stood the splendid monument that it is
today. There is the dust that countless pilgrims' feet have trodden
for two centuries past. There is the echo of prayers and hymns, sighs
from burdened hearts and praise from lightened ones that have gone up
through ages from this place. The Revolution, which was to sweep away
all error and superstition, might despise these sanctities, and scatter
the venerated human dust, but it could not destroy the least particle
of the faith that had been. It did not move the iconoclasts, but it had
moved the world, and its effects remain in spite of them.
The wind had blown itself out the next morning and the air was cold,
but sunny and still, as I paid my early visit to the church.
Its beauty is compelling, and when I had walked round it I sat down
and tried to find out for myself in what it consists.
The first impression is one of austere simplicity. There are a nave and
two aisles, with chapels, no transepts, and except for the Renaissance
work about the choir and the altar, and the fine pulpit, scarcely
any decoration. Rows of clustered pillars carry arches between the
nave and the aisles; and between the arches spring from the floor
itself successive groups of three very slender pillars, like rods of
stone attached to the wall, which run up uninterrupted far above the
arcading, until from a simple moulding spring the delicate ribs of
the vaulting, all as light as if it were a roof of leaves held up by
slim tree-trunks. The sense of lightness is wonderful, gained as it is
without the slightest disguise of the solid masonry, by sculpture or
other suggestion; and the wonder increases when one remembers that this
is not the work of one architectural genius, but the flower of many
successive periods of building. It is clean and strong and beautiful, a
church with a true religious significance.
The choir contains some very fine wood-carving and metal-work of the
seventeenth century, and above the gilt and jasper of the high altar is
a rich device of almost life-size angels and cherubs, surrounding and
enclosing a little oval window on which the Holy Dove is emblazoned.
The morning sun, shining through this window, made a striking effect,
though it is perhaps at variance with the pure dignity of the church
itself. The celestial figures are wrought with a gay and delightful
luxuriance of imagination. They overflow from the main composition with
its sweep and spread of angels' wings; delicious cherubic forms perch
on the marble of the reredos, on the carved frames of the medallions
which it encloses, on the rich screens of the choir itself; and each of
them has its own attitude of devotion, or interest, or expectation, or
even curiosity.[5]
The inspiration of the Gothic had begun to die away when the fabric of
the church had come near to completion. We may perhaps be thankful that
it was never quite finished, for it has such perfection of life as it
stands: life that sprang from an impulse lasting through centuries. No
such impulse exists now. It is safe to say that the most understanding
and sympathetic architecture would seem like a dead thing if it were
sought to complete what was left undone.
The church lovers of the Renaissance made no such mistake. Their work
was alive, too, and they spent their inspiration not on the beautiful
fabric of the church but on its rich furnishing. What they wrought is
as far away from us as the work of the Gothic builders was from them,
and it is almost as unapproachable.
The iconoclasts of the Revolution wreaked their devastating zeal upon
this Gloria, and upon any symbol or figure in the rich carvings of the
choir that spoke of power or privilege. The church itself they spared,
though you may see a device of _fleur de lys_ on a boss of the roof
vaulting spitefully disfigured by bullets.
What was it that they hated so? The arrogance of a church that had
allied itself too much with the rich and powerful and worked on
superstitions of mankind to gain riches and power and glory to itself,
when there was so much wretchedness all around that it made small
attempts to cope with? They would have said so, and to imagine them
possessed only by the spirit of wickedness would be to make the same
mistake about them as they made about the Church. In that dark hour
the Church reaped the reward of its virtues at the same time as it
paid for its sins. To the extent that it had been faithful those who
had drawn comfort and consolation from it came to its aid; and if
the fury of its attackers had been ten times as great they could not
have stamped out the life that persisted through all the years of
destruction; and flowered again profusely when the poor substitutes
that had been planted in its place had wilted away. Religion could
have done everything to heal the wrongs that had been suffered by the
people who were now rising up to take the redress of wrongs into their
own hands; and religion had done very little. It had been chiefly on
the side of the oppressors, not of the oppressed. At its best it had
given consolation in trouble that it had not sought to remove, at its
worst it had committed crimes unspeakable. No wonder that a blind,
insensate fury against the outward tokens of such a system seized those
who thought that they had a mission to remove all oppression from
the world. The buildings that enshrined it they could put to other
uses, and the churches themselves were spared. But sacred relics they
scattered to the dust with bitter contempt, and the treasures of art
which spoke of an impotent faith that they despised, they destroyed or
mutilated.
One of the minor glories of Saint-Maximin is the Altar of the
Crucifixion, or the _Corpus Domini_, at the end of the north aisle.
The high reredos, with gilded columns and pilasters, frames two large
paintings and a series of sixteen smaller ones on wood, which are of
the utmost interest. It has only comparatively lately become known
that these are the work of a Venetian painter of the early sixteenth
century, Antonio Ronzen, who stayed at Saint-Maximin two years and a
half to execute them, together with the reredos itself.
[Illustration: ALTAR OF THE CRUCIFIXION, SAINT-MAXIMIN]
[Illustration: THE FIELD OF THE GREAT BATTLE, WITH MOUNT OLYMPUS IN THE
BACKGROUND
_Page 94_]
Though Ronzen came into Provence from Venice, it seems unlikely that
he was an Italian. His name is Dutch, and so is his style of painting;
and a striking resemblance has been pointed out between one of these
paintings and an engraving of the same subject executed by Lucas van
Leyden ten years before. Wherever he came from, Ronzen was a great
artist, and left behind him at Saint-Maximin a great treasure.
The sixteen panels are of different scenes in the Passion. The light
was not good when I was in the church, and some of them are too high to
be seen easily; but most of them are wonderfully fresh and vivid and
suggestive, crowded with figures, and creating that sense of intimacy
which has always been the mark of the Dutch school. Each of the scenes
is set in a characteristic landscape. You can pick out the Ducal Palace
at Venice, the Palace of the Popes at Avignon, the Coliseum; and the
figures include all the types of the period, from the aristocrat to
the peasant. Many of them, no doubt, are portraits of people very well
known in their time, who came in and out of the church, or wherever the
artist did his work, to see how he was getting on, and had a great deal
to say about the painting and about the magnificent present that the
Seigneur de Semblançay was making to the church, and what a fortunate
thing it was that so clever an artist had been available to undertake
the commission. Perhaps they used a little flattery, so that he should
offer to "put them in."
He was an important person, this Jacques de Beaune, Seigneur de
Semblançay. He was superintendent of the finances of Francis I, whose
finances wanted a good deal of looking after, and lived at this time
chiefly in Paris. But previously he had been Treasurer-General of
Provence, and it might have been well for him if he had stayed in his
own country. For he fell into disgrace, and was put to death seven
years after Ronzen had finished the pictures he had ordered from him.
Probably he found time, during the period from the end of 1517 to July,
1520, when Ronzen was at Saint-Maximin, to pay him a few visits and
see how he was progressing. According to the custom of the time his
portrait would almost certainly have been included among the figures
that still appear so lifelike after five hundred years, and remains
there, if we could only tell which of them all it is. Did he have
any premonition or dread of the fate that was hanging over him, and
did the people who were taking such a lively interest in the work he
was inaugurating think of him as having attained to the pinnacle of
success, and much to be envied in comparison with themselves, living
humdrum lives in their beautiful Provence?
Saint-Maximin has a fine Sacristy, furnished with presses and panelling
of beautifully carved walnut, of the seventeenth century. Before the
Revolution it contained many rich treasures, gold cups and chalices,
silver reliquaries, ornaments jewelled and enamelled. Kings and
Sovereign Pontiffs had showered gifts upon it; but in 1793 everything
was rifled.
"Barras and Fréron came to carry out the spoliation. Barras presented
himself to the Popular Assembly to announce his mission, and a simple
peasant, Jean Saurin, who died in 1842, Member of the Club, alone rose
before the representative of the Convention to protest against the
act of vandalism. He spoke honourably and with energy, but without
success: the church was despoiled. Some rare and precious fragments,
however, were saved from the wreck by the care and devotion of the
sub-sacristan, Joseph Bastide, whose name deserves to be held in
grateful memory by archæologists; for besides the sacred bones that
the Church of Saint-Maximin can still offer, thanks to him, to public
veneration, he was able to withdraw from the revolutionary spoliation
a few rich ornaments, some ancient reliquaries, and a textile specimen
of great value, the cope of St. Louis d'Anjou, Bishop of Toulouse.
This cope, of the end of the thirteenth century, left by the holy
bishop to the convent founded by his father, is one of the most
beautiful and curious ornaments of the period."
Thus M. Rostan, who proceeds to describe it. But alas! it is no longer
there. The sacristan, worthy descendant of the pious Joseph Bastide,
told me the sad story after he had made me admire the beautiful
woodwork and shown me how the long drawers in the presses that held the
vestments drew in and out, as if they had been made yesterday instead
of two hundred and fifty years ago.
He had taken such care of the treasures under his charge, locking up
everything whenever he left the church, and seeing that all was fast
when he went home for the night. And often he would look out of his
window, in the little ancient house in which he lived hard by, to
satisfy himself that no marauders were about.
But ten years ago--how well he remembered it--the marauders had come.
He pointed to the iron-barred window through which they had made their
entry. They had taken I forget what from the sacristy, but not the
precious cope. I think he rather wished they had. Then they had broken
into the church and into the crypt, and from there they had stolen the
Holy Ampulla.
"This name is given," wrote M. Rostan, some years before the theft,
"to a tube of crystal bearing the characters of the fourteenth century,
and containing little fragments of glass, the remains of a phial still
more ancient, which enclosed, according to tradition, some of the
precious blood of the Saviour, collected by St. Mary Magdalene on Mount
Calvary, brought by her to our country and discovered with the remains
of this illustrious penitent."
The thieves had broken into the iron-protected case in which this relic
was kept, together with the skull of the saint in its rich and heavy
reliquary, and a bone from the arm. They had stolen the bone, too, but
had left the chief treasure intact, possibly because it was too heavy
and bulky to bear away with safety.
What was the meaning of this strange crime? As far as I understand
what happened, the breaking in was difficult, and nothing of great
intrinsic value was taken, though many things might have been. Much
money, certainly, would be paid for such relics as were stolen, if
they could have been bought openly; but if the fact that they had been
stolen would have to be disclosed, as it would in order to attach even
a damaged authenticity to them, of what value were they to anybody?
Protestant zeal, which sometimes indulges itself in a similar way
in England, may be ruled out. In France it does not act with those
impulsions, and in any case destruction or contemptuous mutilation
would be its object rather than theft, and I think the people who
had done the damage would be rather inclined to advertise it, and
themselves. The sacred skull was not damaged.
Is it not forced upon one to believe that their value to the thief, or
to those who may have encouraged the theft, was precisely that which
they had always had; which was not represented by money at all?
"If our tradition is well-founded," wrote M. Rostan, "the _Sainte
Ampoule_ is evidently the most precious relic of the Church of
Saint-Maximin. It has enjoyed wide celebrity throughout centuries, and
frequent miracles have been attributed to it. On Good Friday, after the
reading of the Passion, the traces of the divine blood were seen to
liquefy, to rise and fall, bubbling, and to fill the whole phial. It
was called the 'holy miracle.' A great crowd of pilgrims came each year
to witness it."
Where is the relic hidden now? Does the thief who risked so much to
possess it cherish it in secret, with his sin on his conscience,
but hoping from its possession one knows not what in the way of
preservation or blessing? Or is it hidden fearfully in some church--a
priceless treasure that may never be displayed, but may be expected,
by its secret presence, to sanctify its resting-place above other
places? Do those who hold it still watch with strained attention on
Good Fridays for the "holy miracle" to be performed? Do they perhaps
persuade themselves that they see it, as many others must have done
before them? For even M. Rostan, good and believing Catholic that he
is, does not assert that the liquefaction has been plain to see within
living memory.
I asked the sacristan whether the theft had been held to be the work of
religious enthusiasts, but either he misunderstood me or his grievance
overshadowed all such questions.
They had taken the wonderful cope out of his care. It was a unique
specimen of thirteenth century needlework, and is now in safe keeping
in Paris. After so many years they might have trusted him to look after
it, he said, ignoring the fact that his care had proved unequal to the
preservation of relics still more valuable, at least in the eyes of the
Church. The Ministry of Fine Arts, or whatever authority had deprived
Saint-Maximin of the cope, had been quite content that it should keep
the sacred skull, showing some cynicism, it may be thought, as well as
indulgence.
With much unlocking of iron grilles and doors, we descended into the
crypt, the storied place that has seen so much during centuries past,
where kings and popes have bent the knee, and before which so many
princes and nobles have put off their arms.
It is almost square--a vaulted chamber about fourteen feet wide and a
little longer, with an apse containing the altar, behind which is the
reliquary enclosing the skull. The staircase leading down to it, and
the side walls of the crypt itself, have been decorated with marble,
comparatively recently, but the form of the chamber remains much as it
always has been.
The sacred tombs, heavily carved with Biblical subjects, in the manner
of the fourth century, are ranged on either side. They are said to be
those of St. Maximin, St. Marcelle, St. Susan, St. Sidonius, and St.
Mary Magdalene herself. They have been a good deal mutilated "by the
piety of pilgrims," and in some degree made up, for the covers do not
always belong to the sarcophagi on which they are fixed, or indeed to
any other here.
The head of the Magdalen is contained in an elaborate gilt reliquary
of the year 1860, of small artistic value. Under a heavy canopy four
angels hold up a hollow metal bust with flowing hair, into which the
head has been fitted.
What can one say of it? The sacristan pointed out to me the _noli me
tangere_ on the forehead, and I tried hard but could not distinguish
it, though he said that it was quite plain to him. He was a believer,
and I, frankly, was not, although the great antiquity of the relic and
its stirring history aroused at least an endeavour to put myself in the
mood of one who believed. But he, the believer, made it all appear so
commonplace, holding up his stump of a candle here and there to exhibit
a great curiosity, but showing no sign either in manner or speech of
being moved to veneration or awe, or to any feeling outside those
attaching to his customary occupation, that it is little wonder that I
was scarcely able to produce any emotion at all.
One asks oneself many questions. Are not all the signs and wonders
wrought by such relics as these a matter of self-deception, induced by
crowds and movement and the atmosphere of enthusiasm? Or, in the rare
instances in which they have been experienced by one alone, arising
out of some state of ecstasy, hardly to be accepted as convincing
testimony? If not, then how vaguely and arbitrarily these occult powers
work! Faced by a known, even if half understood, power of nature, one
knows the power to be there, and it will be felt beyond question if
contact is made with it. Here, with a supposed spiritual power, there
is only deadness of spirit, even with those who have the faith.
With one's facile modern venerations one is inclined to shudder at the
iconoclasm of the Revolutionists, who laid rude hands on such objects
as this. But may they not have been right after all? Long periods of
deadness of spirit are a heavy price to pay for an occasional and
questionable exhibition of arbitrary activity. And there are spiritual
powers that do react to an exercise of faith, neither occasionally nor
questionably, nor arbitrarily, which belief in tangible sanctities
tends to obscure.
We locked and barred the grilles and doors and came up into the
sunlight, leaving the much venerated relic to keep its watch in the
dark crypt. With whatever lack of emotion it may be faced now, even by
a believer, there has been no lack of it in the long past. And whatever
view you may take of it, it is the seed from which sprang this strong
and beautiful church.
CHAPTER VI
_Caius Marius and the Great Battle_
It was still early when I had finished with these sights and took the
long straight road to Trets on my way to Aix. The sky was very clear
and cold, and the country was flat and open. For a long time, whenever
I looked back, I could see the great church standing up across the
plain, and it was a long time before I ceased thinking about it.
But gradually another interest began to take its place, for I was
passing through country where scenes had been enacted that changed the
current of history long before the legend of which my mind had been
full had had its beginning. Indeed, centuries were to elapse before the
legend was to emerge out of the twilight of rumour and tradition and
to rest upon documentary evidence, and yet the one story seems to go
back to the dim ages of history while the other far earlier one is as
plain in its main facts as if it were of yesterday. For it is of the
Roman occupation of this country, and our feet are on the solid rock of
history.
After two thousand years, the name of the great deliverer, Caius
Marius, is still alive in Provence. Twice alive, indeed, if the very
legend of the Marys which permeates the country can be traced back to
the tradition of the Marii, of which there seems little doubt. But to
that we shall come when we visit Les Baux and the monuments there.
In the year 102 B.C. Caius Marius gained a great victory over the
Ambrons and Teutons at a spot between Saint-Maximin and Trets which I
was to pass that morning. It was one of the decisive battles of the
world, and to judge by the number of the slain one of the fiercest.
You may read all about it in Plutarch, and here on the very spot you
may follow the details of the parallel march of the Romans and the
barbarians until they came to the place of the great slaughter, with
recognition at every step, finding indeed here and there actual traces
of the battle itself. Certain doubtful points have been cleared up and
the story told by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, who went over the whole
ground, Plutarch in hand, and published his results in a chapter of his
interesting book, "In Troubadour Land."
In the year 113 B.C. the northern frontiers of Italy were threatened
by a vast horde of barbarians, of whom the chief were the Cimbri and
the Teutons. They did not, however, cross the Alps, but swept westwards
into Gaul, carrying with them other tribes, among whom were the
Ambrons.
They reached the Rhône three years afterwards and defeated the governor
of the Roman province. Three successive consuls were sent against them
from Rome, and were also defeated. Their chiefs exalted by success
consulted as to whether they should march into Italy and exterminate
or enslave the Romans, but although they devastated the province they
could not yet make up their minds to march upon Rome.
The Cimbri divided from the rest and poured into Spain, which they
ravaged. A few years later they returned, and it was now decided to
invade Italy. The Cimbri were to enter it by way of the Brenner Pass,
the Teutons and Ambrons by the Maritime Alps.
The menace of the barbarians had been hanging over Rome for ten years,
and the utmost consternation now prevailed. Marius was despatched into
Provence, as the only man who could cope with the danger there. The
barbarian horde had not yet reached the Rhône on their eastward march,
but were moving slowly in that direction, and Marius had a winter
in which to organize the demoralized Roman troops and to choose his
positions.
In the spring, when the grass had grown enough to provide food for
their horses and oxen, the barbarians put themselves in motion. Marius
left the Cimbri to take their agreed-upon route to the north-east,
and waited for the Teutons and Ambrons. He allowed them to cross the
Rhône, and they drew up before his fortified camp at St. Gabriel on
the westernmost spur of the Alpilles, and shouted defiance and insult
to his troops. But he restrained the Romans from attacking them. Their
ambition, he told them, should not now be for triumphs and trophies
but to dispel the dreadful storm that hung over them and to save Italy
itself from destruction.
The barbarians made a half-hearted attack upon the Roman camp, which
was easily repulsed, and then moved on. It was said that though they
moved forward without pause it took them six days to pass the camp, so
vast were their numbers. They were indeed nations and not only armies
on the march. The cumbrous house-wagons with which they moved were
their homes, for their wives and families were with them, and none had
been left behind.
The hot-blooded Romans were by now inured to their insults, one of
which was to shout the question whether they had any commands for their
wives in Italy, for they would shortly be with them. One can picture
them sulkily watching from the high ground, where they were encamped,
the interminable rabble moving on day after day, and wondering whether
they would ever end. But directly the barbarians had passed Marius
struck camp and followed them, not by the straight Roman road which
they had taken along the valley, but by the heights to the south, and
observed all their movements, himself out of sight.
At Aix the Ambrons detached themselves from their allies to make a
descent upon Marseilles. Marius had fixed upon a hill for his camp at
Les Milles, four miles to the south of Aix. It was unexceptionable in
point of strength, but afforded little water. By this circumstance,
says Plutarch, they tell us he wanted to excite his soldiers to action,
and when many of them complained of thirst he pointed to the river Arc,
which ran close by the enemy's camp, and told them that thence they
must buy water with their blood.
It was this lack of water that precipitated the contest. The soldiers
obeyed the order first of all to fortify their camp, but the servants
of the army could not be restrained from going down to the river
for water. Some of the enemy were bathing in the hot springs that
well up in this place, others were eating. These were cut off by the
camp-followers, others came to their assistance, and the Roman soldiers
rushed down from the hill to rescue their servants. The engagement
became general, and the Ambrons were beaten with great loss, the river
being choked with their dead.
This was a good beginning, but the Romans spent the night in fear of
attack, for their camp was not yet fortified. "There remained yet many
myriads of the barbarians unconquered; and such of the Ambrons as
escaped mixing with them, a cry was heard all night not like the sighs
and groans of men, but like the howling and bellowing of wild beasts.
As this came from such an innumerable host the neighbouring mountains
and the hollow banks of the river returned the sound, and the horrid
din filled all the plains. The Romans felt a sense of terror, and
Marius himself was filled with apprehension at the idea of a tumultuous
night engagement."
Fortunately, however, the barbarians did not attack, but after a day
and a night moved on and joined the Teutons, who were passing along the
road to the north of the river Arc. At this point Plutarch's narrative
becomes confused, for he does not effectually distinguish the fields of
the two battles, which were fought two days apart. It is here that Mr.
Baring-Gould's careful investigations are valuable in elucidating the
narrative.
The barbarians halted at the Roman station Tegulata, now the hamlet of
La Petite Pugère, a day's march from Aix. Marius crossed the river
and kept to the south of it till he reached Trets. At his rear he had
a fortified camp on Mount Olympus, to the north of the barbarians
was another fortified Roman camp, Panis Annonæ, still called Pain de
Munition. To this he had sent the day before an officer with three
thousand men, who had made their way to it protected by the range of
Mont Victoire. His plan must have been made long before, from a careful
consideration of the route the enemy was likely to take, and the
commanding positions fortified and provisioned. The barbarians were in
a trap, but did not yet know it.
In the morning the enemy awoke to see the bulk of the Roman army drawn
up on the slope of a hill to the south of their camp. They could not
contain their impatience until the army advanced into the plain, and
received their first setback by rushing up to attack it. Marius sent
his officers among the troops with orders to stand still and await the
onslaught. When the enemy was within reach they were to throw their
javelins, and then, sword in hand, press them down with their shields.
He knew that the slope was so slippery that the blows of the enemy
would be delivered with no great force and that they could not keep any
close order.
When this attack had been repulsed the Romans crossed the river and
fell upon the main body of the enemy, who was beginning to form again.
But at the same time the ambushed troops descended from Panis Annonæ in
the rear, and panic seized the barbarians. The slaughter was terrific.
Plutarch gives the number of killed as a hundred thousand of the enemy
alone. Some accounts double the number, and give that of the prisoners
as another eighty thousand. It is said also that three hundred thousand
of the camp-followers and women were either killed or sold into
slavery. It was the extermination not of an army but of a nation.
So frightful was the carnage that the field of battle was known as
Campi Putridi, and the neighbouring village is still called Pourrières.
It was said that the inhabitants of Marseilles walled in their
vineyards with the bones they found in the field, and that the rain
which fell the winter following soaked in the moisture of the putrefied
bodies and the ground was so enriched by it that it bore a prodigious
crop.
"After the battle, Marius selected from among the arms and other
spoils such as were elegant and entire, and likely to make the
greatest show in his triumph. The rest he piled together, and offered
as a splendid sacrifice to the gods. The army stood round the pile,
crowned with laurel; and himself, arrayed in his purple robe, and
girt after the manner of the Romans, took a lighted torch. He had just
lifted it up with both hands towards heaven, and was about to set
fire to the pile, when some friends were seen galloping towards him.
Great silence and expectation followed. When they were come near, they
leaped from their horses and saluted Marius as consul for the fifth
time, delivering him letters to the same purpose. This added great joy
to the solemnity, which the soldiers expressed by acclamations and by
clanking their arms; and while the officers were presenting Marius
with new crowns of laurel, he set fire to the pile and finished the
sacrifice."[6]
How different from the sort of corroboration brought to bear upon the
later Christian history of Provence is the fact that the spot on which
this great holocaust took place two thousand years ago has lately been
identified by the ashes, melted lead and other metals, and fragments of
burnt pottery discovered there!
Here also was erected a monument to Marius, which existed in its
entirety up to the time of the Revolution, and was then partially
destroyed, one would like to know why. And here was found some five and
twenty years ago a beautiful Greek marble statue of Venus Victrix,
but without head and arms, which is now in the museum at Avignon. Mr.
Baring-Gould considers that this proves that the monument was raised
by Julius Cæsar, for there would be an indirect compliment to his
own family in it. "Venus was the ancestress of the Julian race, and
Cæsar perhaps insinuated, if he erected the statue, that the success
of Marius was due to the patronage of the divine ancestress and
protectress of the Julian race, and of Julius Cæsar's aunt, the wife of
Marius, quite as much as to the genius in war of Marius himself."
On the top of Mount Victoire, which overlooks the scene of the terrific
battle, a temple was erected and dedicated to Venus Victrix. This
became a Christian church, and Venus Victrix became St. Victoire. Right
up to the time of the Revolution the inhabitants of the neighbouring
villages ascended the mountain on March 23rd, bearing boughs of box and
shouting "Victoire! Victoire!" and Mass was celebrated. Then a bonfire
was lit, and the peasants with garlands on their heads danced the
farandole round it. The beautiful ancient music to which the peasants
made their progress is still preserved; so hard does tradition die in
this land of long memories.
I should have liked to make a stay at Trets, and to explore this
country. There is so much to see in connection with the battle--the
ruins of the church on Mont Victoire, the ruins of the trophy on the
field itself, the traces of the fortifications on the Pain de Munition,
and perhaps the very hill slope of slippery marl upon which the Romans
first bore back the attacking enemy. But I wanted to get on to Aix, the
first large Provençal city in my itinerary, and thence to Arles and
Nîmes and the rest of the beautiful places that are like a cluster of
jewels in the country's diadem. So I contented myself with identifying
the mountain heights which played their part in that grim struggle
twenty centuries ago.
There was the great range running parallel to the road on the south,
with Mount Aurelian rising up and overlooking Saint-Maximin, and Mount
Olympus due south from the field of battle. There was the bold rampart
of Mont Victoire away to the north, and the hills among which is the
Pain de Munition, on the other side of the plain on which the battle
was fought. I could picture it alive with the tents and wagons of the
vast horde of barbarians, so soon to be exterminated, and then strewn
with their dead or mangled bodies. I knew that I was looking upon the
same everlasting hills as those thousands upon thousands of dying eyes
looked upon centuries ago; and there was more of a thrill in that than
in the sight of the blackened skull in the church of Saint-Maximin.
For this mighty conflict happened here, without a doubt, and the
plain and the hills upon which our eyes look today were a part of the
happening. There is something for the imagination to rest and work
upon.
CHAPTER VII
_Aix_
The rain began to fall as I sat outside the inn at Porcieux, and by
the time I reached Trets I was wet through. So I went to bed in an inn
until my clothes should be dry, and greatly daring ordered a cup of
tea. When it came it was of a pale straw colour, and its flavour would
not have satisfied the connoisseurs of Mincing Lane. But it was tea,
with the astringent quality possessed by that beverage alone among all
infusions of herbs or berries. Wine is one of the gifts of God that in
this drab world one may be thankful for, but as a beverage it palls. Of
all the many drinks I enjoyed in my travels in Provence I think that
cup of indifferent tea stands out as the most refreshing.
My clothes were brought up to me in an hour or two's time almost as
wet as ever, and I put them on and went down into the kitchen to
dry them myself. There was an enormous open hearth, but very little
fire on it; but they threw on bundles of sticks, and very soon there
was a hot fire. The master of the inn, his wife and daughters, the
cook in his white cap and apron, who had just come in to begin his
evening's work, and one or two maids, all took the most serious and
sympathetic interest in the process. I hung my coat on the back of a
chair, which I placed on the hearth itself, and stood by the fire,
turning to it first one side and then the other, enveloped in a cloud
of steam from my sopping flannel trousers. I should have thought that
most people under the necessity of drying their clothes would have
done so something after this fashion, but to them it seemed to show
an ingenious originality, and people were summoned from tables in the
_café_ to stand at the kitchen door and see the remarkable sight. When
I was fairly dry we all drank wine together, after which we shook hands
and I went out to see the town, leaving behind me, by all tokens, an
agreeable memory.
Trets is very old, and has the appearance of being uncared for. One
is so accustomed, in France, to seeing remains of historic interest
cleaned and furbished up and saved from further decay, that these
ruinous gateways and towers and fortifications, and narrow untidy
streets with decayed-looking houses lining them, strike a dismal note.
The church is partly of the eleventh century, very massive and very
dark inside, and has an unfinished tower that adds to the general
appearance of decay. Perhaps the rain, which had begun to fall again,
had something to do with the impression that the place made upon me; I
was glad enough to get away from it and take the train to Aix.
I dined for a franc at Gardanne, and reached Aix after dark in renewed
torrents of rain. But I had something to look forward to--an hotel that
I knew, which would provide a hot bath, and a bag of clothes waiting
for me. I had been on the road for nine days, and was ready for a
little ordinary comfort.
It was dull and cold the next morning, and Aix is a city that has
provided itself against heat. Its fine broad central boulevard, the
Cours Mirabeau, is shaded by a double avenue of planes, which must be
among the largest to be found even in this land of planes. The Place de
la Rotonde, at one end of it, has an elaborate system of fountains, and
there are three other fountains in the middle of the boulevard itself,
one of which is fed by a hot spring. The shade of the giant trees and
the plash of the water must be pleasant enough in hot weather, but the
bare branches conveyed none of the charm that their foliage would give
later on, and Aix seemed to me a little cheerless, though I hasten to
say that that is not its true character.
Aix rejoices in the name of "The French Athens." It has always been
learned, classical, and aristocratic. The streets are lined with
the fine hotels of the Provençal _noblesse_, some of which are still
occupied by families whose roots strike far back into history. Many of
them are said to contain rare treasures of art, hidden from the public
gaze in proud seclusion, and for the most part unknown to the world.
These things are not for the wayfarer to see, but I think that if I had
read M. Paul Mariéton's charming book, "La Terre Provençal," before my
walk in Provence instead of after, I should have made an attempt to see
some of them.
"In Aix," he writes, "you will find masterpieces in rooms scarcely
furnished, mansions mouldering to decay, with staircases of honour
bare and cold leading to garden courts uncultivated--unless a few
vegetables for the pot are grown between staves in wine casks.
"An undoubted masterpiece, in a mansion neither cold nor bare, but
full of laughter and gaiety, is the portrait of Rubens by Vandyke,
which the master presented to his friend Peiresc at Antwerp. The
existence of this page of genius, the most significant, it seems to
me, of the great painter's work, is not suspected by the critics, and
scarcely known except to a few amateurs."
In another vast Louis XIV hotel, M. Mariéton mentions a Teniers, two
Van Eycks, a Vanloo, a Hobbema, and a Raphael; in another, a superb
ivory Christ attributed to Cellini. And he speaks of the store of
historic documents, still unpublished, to be found in these ancient
houses.
A wandering Englishman might possibly receive a welcome in some of
these houses because of his nationality. Aix used to be a favourite
place of residence for English people of rank and wealth. In the
cathedral is a memorial tablet which I find inscribed in a guide-book
as that of the wife of "sir Dolben, baronnet d'Angleterre," and of his
three children, who died, the first aged seven years, the second seven
days, and the third seven hours; and there is another to "sir Webb,
baronnet anglais."
M. Louis de Laincel wrote thirty years ago of his childhood's memories
of a very rich Englishwoman, "my lady Russel."
"This lady had the generous habit of sending magnificent presents to
all the children of her acquaintance on New Year's Day. Dieu! what joy
for the children, when the lackey of mylady Russel rang at the door of
the house, carrying on his arm an enormous basket full of presents!
What bonbons, and what delightful toys! Bonne lady!"[7]
This was in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century, but
it is quite likely that in this country of long memories the tradition
of English generosity still remains.
But there is plenty to see in Aix without invading privacies. The city
itself I found not very attractive, partly for the reasons I have
already given. But it is lacking in the pleasant public gardens which
make so many French towns places of grateful memory: there is only
one, rather small and uninteresting, on the outskirts. Perhaps it was
the society of Aix that attracted our forbears; otherwise one would
have expected them to prefer Avignon, or Nîmes or Arles, of the inland
cities of southern France.
The large church of St. Madeleine is of the early eighteenth century,
with a rather clumsy imitation Renaissance façade of the year 1860. It
faces the Place des Prêcheurs, which opens out into the larger Place du
Palais, on the west side of which is the fine Palais de Justice, and
behind it the heavy ancient prison. A busy market was going on in this
open space, and people were crowding in and out of the church for the
Thursday's Mass.
It was being sung at a side altar. From the stacks of chairs by the
west door those who entered would take one, slipping the necessary
_sous_ into the hand of the old woman in charge of them, and put
it down in the most convenient place available within view of the
ceremony. The organist sat at a harmonium to the left of the altar,
with his choir boys about him and the congregation almost jostling
his elbows. There was a sort of domesticity about the scene. One felt
that all the people who came into the church so busily and familiarly
thought of it as a place in which to make themselves at home.
There was no such air about the fine cathedral church of St. Saviour.
It gave the impression, more than any French church I have visited,
that one gets in an English cathedral: of a noble monument of the
past, kept in apple-pie order, but with its religious usages somewhat
subordinated to its historic interest. At St. Madeleine, the little
votive tablets and pictures and relics that pious souls have brought to
their favourite altars for years past are stuck all over the walls of
the chapels in great profusion, and with no particular regard to order.
The cathedral is not without them, but they are confined severely to
the neat oval tablet with a gilt frame and gold lettering on a blue or
red ground, and they are disposed upon the walls or over the arches
in austere devices. And there is none of the tawdriness about the
altars that belongs to churches in which people make themselves at
home. Indeed, the high altar, and the choir, might belong to a stately
Anglican cathedral, with which the common people have about as much to
do as with the furnishing of the Deanery.
This cathedral church of St. Saviour is full of happy surprises. Its
component parts have been built in widely different periods, but it
has "come together" in the most satisfactory way, and its variety is
only equalled by its beauty. The first surprise, upon entrance, is the
magnificent octagonal Baptistery. It is said to have been originally
a Temple of Apollo, and the eight monolithic columns that support the
modern cupola are of the Roman period. Two are of granite, and the rest
of porphyry, but the bases and the delicately carved capitals are of
white marble. The effect of the whole structure is exquisite; it can be
seen from different parts of the cathedral through intervening arches,
and adds enormously to the charm of the building.
The Baptistery is to the south of the aisle that was the original
church. This aisle was consecrated in 1103. The present nave, with the
choir slightly out of axis, and the north aisle, were begun at the end
of the thirteenth century and not finished until the sixteenth. The
central nave is enclosed by walls almost entirely solid, and the effect
of the narrow openings cut through them, with glimpses into the side
aisles, is singularly pleasing.
The long rows of carved stalls on either side of the choir are
surmounted by some very fine tapestries. The design is attributed
to Quentin Matsy's, and although the guide-books call them the
"Cantorbéry" tapestry, they state that they came from our St. Paul's
Cathedral and were bought in Paris in the year 1656 for twelve hundred
crowns. But Dr. Montagu Rhodes James, Provost of King's College,[8]
investigated the whole question some years ago, and read a paper before
the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, from which it appears that there
is no foundation for the connection with St. Paul's. Nor does he say
anything about Quentin Matsy's, though the tapestries are undoubtedly
Flemish, and of his date.
In the Inventory of Christchurch, Canterbury, taken in 1540, after the
suppression of the monastery, is the entry "Item one faire new hanging
of riche tapestrie con(taining) vj peces of the story of Christ and our
Lady." Three of them were the gift of a prior, Thomas Goldston, whose
device appears in the border, and three of Richard Dering, cellarer;
and on the border is part of an inscription, of which the beginning
is lost: _celarius me fieri fecit anno domini millesimo quingentesimo
undecimo_; ... the cellarer had me made A.D. 1511.
So there is no doubt about it. These fine tapestries hung in the choir
of Canterbury Cathedral for at least a hundred and thirty years, and
then they were sold and taken to Aix, where part of them hang in the
choir and part in the Archbishop's Palace. They have been a good deal
cut about, and Dr. James thinks there must originally have been five
scenes to a piece, which would give thirty instead of the twenty-six
now to be seen.
Katharine of Aragon is said, but not by Dr. James, to be represented
among the figures in the "Descent from the Cross," and there is a whole
bevy of fair Englishwomen in the first panel of all, which represents
"The Birth of the Virgin." They are portraits of ladies of the English
court, and might be beautiful English girls of today, so lifelike and
characteristic are they; some of them with the sweetest young faces
of a type that is as well known now as it apparently was four hundred
years ago.
I tried to get photographs of at least some of this delightful work in
Aix, but without success. There are postcards of the whole series, but
they are evidently from drawings and not photographs of the original.
In that charming picture of the English girls the faces lose most of
their character and half their beauty. Let nobody who may happen to
receive one of these postcards imagine that it gives a satisfactory
reproduction of the original.[9]
[Illustration: THE CANTERBURY TAPESTRY]
[Illustration: THE FAMOUS "TARASQUE"
_Page 108_]
Behind the high altar is the Chapel of St. Mitre. The life of this
saint is pictured in many of its episodes in a curious painting of the
sixteenth century which is to be seen there. His end was remarkable.
He was beheaded but rose to his feet, picked up his head, and carried
it more than a thousand paces to this very spot. You may see him
approaching the cathedral, his head in his hands, and the bishop with
his attendant clergy waiting for him at the door. And in the centre of
the composition he is represented, still with his head in his hands,
with many people on their knees around him, including the whole family
of the pious Jacques de la Roque, who did not happen to have been
present at the time, but who gave the picture.
St. Mitre's tomb is upheld by two columns of soft stone, from which is
said to exude moisture that cures blindness. There is a little hole in
the right hand pillar in which the sweating is supposed to show itself,
and during the octave of the saint many people come to do him honour
and to anoint their eyes from the pillar.
In the Chapelle de l'Université in the north aisle is a moving
representation of St. Martha and the Dragon, the famous "Tarasque,"
from which she freed the stricken country. The bull's head of this
curious monster wears an expression of mildness and mournful surprise,
as if it is wondering what it has done to make itself so disliked. It
seems to be saying: "I was made like this; I can't help it; I have only
followed the dictates of my nature." The tradition of the Tarasque is
all over Provence, and as most of the early Christian legends are based
upon Roman happenings it is probable that the dragon stands for the
scourge of invasion by the barbarians, and the various rescuing saints
for Marius and his Romans.
The triptych, called "Le Buisson Ardent," famous since it was exhibited
in the great exhibition of "Primtifs" in the Louvre, in 1904, hangs on
a wall of the nave. It is kept closed, but a few _centimes_ will unlock
it, and also uncover the beautiful carving of the west doors.
This very fine picture is by Nicolas Froment, a fifteenth century
painter from Avignon. It has been attributed to King René, but skilful
as that versatile amateur was he could never have painted anything half
so beautiful. The central picture, with its exquisite and wonderfully
preserved gold border, represents the Virgin and the Holy Child seated
upon a great mass of foliage, from which spring little flickering
flames. Beneath them is an angel appearing to Moses, who is struck
with astonishment and is taking off his shoe. A flock of sheep and
goats is pasturing between them, and Moses's dog, resting at his feet,
turns his head to the angel with a look of interest and watchfulness.
Behind is a rich Provençal landscape, with the Rhône running through
it. It is a delicious picture, both in design and colouring.
The side panels contain portraits of King René, and of his second
wife, Jeanne de Laval, kneeling--a panel to each. Above the king stand
Saints Madeleine, Antoine, and Maurice, above the queen Saints Nicolas,
Catharine and John, all of them evidently contemporary portraits. The
old king, whose many trials and happy disposition, as well as his
love for Provence, have preserved his memory as that of few kings has
been preserved, is shown to us here as realistically as if we could
look in on him in the flesh. It is a serious moment with him, and his
mouth is set tightly above the jutting double chin. But it is not the
seriousness of austerity. When he rises from his knees his face will
break out into smiles, and he will have much to say about the details
of the ceremony at which he has just assisted. For he was well versed
in such matters, and a patron of all the arts besides.
He was like a monarch out or a book, this good King René; and he has
been put into at least one famous book, though not without a touch of
caricature. In "Anne of Geierstein," Sir Walter Scott describes him
thus:
"René was a prince of very moderate parts, endowed with a love of the
fine arts, which he carried to extremity, and with a degree of good
humour, which never permitted him to repine at fortune, but rendered
its possessor happy, when a prince of keener feelings would have died
of despair. This _insouciant_, light-tempered, gay and thoughtless
disposition conducted René, free from all the passions which embitter
life, to a hale and mirthful old age. Even domestic losses made
no deep impression on the feelings of this cheerful old monarch.
Most of his children had died young; René took it not to heart. His
daughter Margaret's marriage with the powerful Henry (VI) of England
was considered a connection above the fortunes of the King of the
Troubadours. But in the issue, instead of René deriving any splendour
from the match, he was involved in the misfortunes of his daughter,
and repeatedly obliged to impoverish himself to supply her ransom....
Among all his distresses, René feasted and received guests, danced,
sang, composed poetry, used the pencil or brush with no small skill,
devised and conducted festivals and processions, studied to promote
the mirth and good humour of his subjects."
[Illustration: LE BUISSON ARDENT]
[Illustration: PORTE D'EYGUIÈRES
_Page 128_]
Of his genuine skill with the brush there is a most pleasing example
preserved in the Bibliothèque Méjane at Aix--a Book of Hours, of which
the initial letters are beautifully illuminated by his hand. There
is also a patent of nobility signed by him in a bold and picturesque
manner. Whether the illuminations are authentic or not--and I have no
reason to throw doubt upon them--René could sign his name, like a king
and an artist.
At the end of the Cours Mirabeau is a large statue of this merry
monarch, of no great artistic value, but showing him holding in his
hand a bunch of Muscat grapes, which he first introduced into Europe.
It is not his least claim to memory.
We have not quite done with the cathedral. The wonderful carving of the
west doors is protected by wooden covers, which have kept them in a
perfect state of preservation. They are of walnut wood, and were done
in 1504, seven years before Richard Dering, the Canterbury cellarer,
gave that commission for the tapestries which now hang near them. In
the lower parts are figures of Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah and Jeremiah,
each under a rich canopy; and above them are the twelve Sibyls, each
of a different nation and with appropriate symbol. The borders of
fruit and flowers are exquisite. There is hardly a finer piece of
wood-carving on a large scale to be seen anywhere than on these massive
doors, and they and the triptych should on no account be missed by any
one who finds himself in the cathedral.
The portal that enshrines these beautiful doors is of the same date,
and is quite worthy of them. There is a charming figure of the Virgin
and Child on a pedestal between the doors. The lusty, well-grown baby
is held upon his mother's arm, and she looks at him with smiling pride,
as mothers do all the world over.
The cloisters should also be visited, for the sake of the carvings on
the double rows of pillars that hold up the arcading, in which the
sculptors have let themselves loose in all sorts of luxuriant fancies.
They are hardly less interesting than those in the famous cloisters of
St. Trophime at Arles.
Aix is rich in pictures, besides those in the churches. I spent a
pleasant rainy afternoon in the Museum, and found a great deal to
interest me. Not to mention the very fine examples of the "Primitives,"
there are several pictures by Ingres, including the richly coloured
"Jupiter and Thetis," and the very interesting portrait of Granet.
But it was my discovery of Granet himself that gives me my pleasantest
recollection of the Aix Museum. There is a whole room devoted to his
pencil and water-colour drawings, which contains also many of his best
known paintings. His subjects are something of the same as those of
Wilkie, who was his contemporary, but in his composition and beautiful
effects of lighting he seems to me an incomparably greater artist.
He was a native of Aix, and died there in 1849. I was told by an old
gossip at Avignon that he was servant in the house of a rich amateur
painter, and that he used to lock himself into his garret, whenever
he had a moment to himself, to make his own experiments. One day his
master looked through the keyhole and saw what he was doing. He might,
said my gossip, have been struck with jealousy. But he was of the
_noblesse_. He was struck instead with admiration of the work that he
beheld--probably after having knocked at the door--, greeted the valet
as _his_ master, and assisted him to make his career.
The late afternoon was fine. I walked all about the town, visited the
remaining churches, and paid due attention to other objects of interest.
Among the curiosities of Aix is the monument of Joseph Sec, which the
owner of that harmonious name caused to be erected on the edge of his
garden in 1792. It faces the street, and bears the inscription:
Venez, habitants de la terre,
Nations, écoutez la loi!
It includes the figures of Themis and Moses, and among other symbols
two bas-reliefs of banknotes for a hundred and two thousand francs.
The whole erection is rather absurd, although it was the work of the
sculptor Chastel. But probably Joseph Sec was one of those patrons of
the arts who know what they want and see that they get it. I have not
the smallest doubt that Chastel, who was a sculptor of merit, heard
from him the phrase: "I pay the piper, and it is only fair that I
should call the tune," or its French equivalent.
Joseph Sec called another very curious tune to Chastel, of which M.
Mariéton tells.
He was taken into the deserted garden behind the monument--"the Trianon
of the bourgeois of Aix," he calls it--and into a little Louis XVI
kiosk littered with tools. In it was an old sofa, the seat of which was
lifted for him to see the life-sized figure of a naked man in painted
marble, with a bloodstained scar on his forehead--a dreadful, realistic
representation of a workman who had been killed by a stone falling from
Joseph Sec's monument.
How modern he was, this good bourgeois of Aix, who died over a hundred
years ago! A taste for the arts, and money enough to indulge it! I own
that I should have tried to get a glimpse of this artistic atrocity of
his, if I had known of its existence.
CHAPTER VIII
_Salon and the Crau_
Ever since I first saw Les Baux, on a motoring trip from the north to
the south of France, I had wanted to get back to it. I saw Aix and
Avignon and Nîmes and Arles at the same time, and I wanted to get back
to them. But Les Baux was the _bonne bouche_. When I contemplated this
spring walk it was what I was thinking of as the central point of
interest of the whole expedition; and I was thinking of it all the time
I was walking through the country during those first nine days.
For it sums up the whole past of Provence. It is connected with the
Græco-Phoenician colonies that preceded the Roman occupation; with
the Roman occupation itself, and especially with that stirring episode
of the Marian defeat of the barbarian invaders; with the Christian
Marian legends; almost more than any other place with the romantic
era of the Troubadours; with every internal struggle of the many that
disturbed the country during the Middle Ages; with the religious wars;
and indeed with every movement of significance in Provence down to the
time of the merging of the kingdom into that of France.
After that its importance dwindled, but did not expire until much
later. When it did, its ruin was so complete that it acquired another
sort of interest altogether. It arouses much the same feelings now as
the one-time flourishing cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, for it is
almost as dead as they, and its ruins tell as eloquently of the time
when it was alive. Added to which, it is most romantically situated, in
the very heart of the country that is most characteristic of Provence
as it is today--the Provence that lives its rich, picturesque life
with an eye kept always on its rich, picturesque past; the country of
Mistral, and the scenes of that moving epic in which all the poetry and
glamour of Provence is garnered up: "Mireille."
I shouldered my pack once more, but was in such a hurry now to get to
Les Baux that I took the train early in the morning as far as Maussane.
It was well that I did so, for the rain fell heavily when I reached
Salon, where I had an hour to wait.
Nostradamus, who was born at Saint-Remy, lived at various times at
Salon, and died there. Out of his thousand prophecies it is not
surprising that a few hit the mark, and from them he gained an immense
reputation. Exactly a hundred years after his death we find Pepys
writing: "Amongst other discourse we talked much of Nostradamus, his
prophecy of these times, and Sir George Cartaret did tell a story how
at his death he did make the town (of Salon) swear that he should
never be dug up or his tomb opened after he was buried; but that they
did after sixty years do it, and upon his breast they found a plate
of brasse saying what a wicked, unfaithful people the people of that
place were, who after so many vows should disturb and open him such a
day and year and hour, which, if true, is very strange." Probably it
was not true, as to the time; but he would not have risked much if he
had prophesied the fact. He did, however, prophesy that a new era would
begin for France in the year 1792, which was a bold shot, as it was
more than two hundred years after his death; and Napoleon is said to
have seen predictions that concerned himself in his writings.
M. Mariéton tells of the fashion in which he seized his opportunity in
the town of Salon.
Charles IX was making a solemn progress through Provence with his
mother Catharine de' Medici and the little Prince Henry of Navarre.
The town of Salon made elaborate preparations for their reception, and
Nostradamus was asked where he would like to walk in the procession.
He said that he proposed to have a little procession of his own. When
the royal party appeared before the gates the queen mother looked
anxiously about for the prophet, and when she saw him apart from the
rest beckoned him to take up his position between herself and the king.
He had been counting on something of this sort, for he had already been
in Paris, and had gained a considerable ascendancy over Catharine.
He was lodged in the castle during the royal visit, and invited to
a solemn consultation on the subject of the stability of the royal
line. Catharine wanted him to tell the fortune of Prince Henry. He
was quite ready to do it, and ordered the child to be undressed, as a
preliminary. The little prince thought he was going to be whipped, and
filled the castle with his howls. When he had calmed down, Nostradamus
boldly announced that he would come to be king.
If this story is true, it shows the prophet to have been a schemer
rather above his kind. Catharine had three sons still alive, and could
not have been expected to welcome the announcement. Nor would the young
king have been particularly pleased with it. Indeed, it may be said
to have been a prophecy not altogether free from risk to the man who
was bold enough to make it. But he seems to have judged human nature
aright. His reputation was vastly increased by the prediction, and
Catharine summoned him to Paris for the second time, which was no
doubt what he wanted.
The royal visit to Salon took place in the year 1564, and while the
great humbug of the time was preparing for his own little private
effect there must have been somewhere in the crowd that filled the
streets strewn with rosemary and lavender and thyme a young man who
deserved far better to be noticed. This was Adam de Craponne, who by
that time had already begun his work of fertilizing the Great Crau.
Mr. Baring-Gould, in the book already mentioned, gives an interesting
account of this "little Sahara in Europe," which occupies 30,000 acres.
"At a remote period, but, nevertheless in one geologically modern,
the vast floods of the diluvial age that flowed from the Alps
brought down incredible quantities of rolled stones, the detritus
of the Alps.... This rubble, washed down from the Alps, forms the
substratum of the immense plain that inclines at a very slight angle
to the Mediterranean, and extends for a considerable distance below
the sea.... There is a break in the chain on the south, between the
limestone Alpines and the sandstone Trévaresse; and the brimming
Durance, unable to discharge all her water, choked with rubble, into
the Rhône, burst through the open door or natural waste-pipe, by
Salon, and carried a portion of her pebbles into the sea directly,
without asking her sister the Rhône to help her. Now the two great
plains formed by the delta of the Rhône, and that of the Durance
with the Rhône, are called the Great and the Little Crau. They were
known to the ancients, and puzzled them not a little. Strabo says of
the Great Crau: 'Between Marseilles and the mouth of the Rhône, at
about a hundred stadia from the sea, is a plain, circular in form,
and a hundred stadia in diameter, to which a singular event obtained
for it the name of the Field of Pebbles. It is, in fact, covered
with pebbles, as big as the fist, among which grows some grass in
sufficient abundance to pasture heads of oxen.'"
The singular event referred to was the fight between Hercules and the
Ligurians. Hercules had used up all his arrows, and had retired to a
cave in the Alpilles to make his last stand, when Jupiter came to his
assistance and rained down a shower of stones which killed all his
enemies. When the hero, thus miraculously aided, emerged from his cave,
he saw the great plain covered with stones as it is today. Or rather,
as it was; for thanks to Craponne and those who came after him the
desolate area is now much circumscribed.
This legend, which is still alive in Provence, takes us back to the
very earliest times. For Hercules is the Phoenician Melkarth, and
wherever his name survives it is in connection with Phoenician
trading, before the Greek colonization.
Craponne's scheme was to bring "some of the waters of the Durance
through the gap where some of its overspill had flowed in the diluvial
period, by a canal, into the Great Crau, so that it might deposit its
rich alluvium over this desert of stones. He spent his life and his
entire fortune in carrying out his scheme, and it is due to this that
year by year the barren desert shrinks, and cultivation advances."
There are few things more interesting to learn about than the bold
works by which man gets the better of nature, or rather sets nature to
work to correct, as it were, her own mistakes. About a hundred years
later than this, Vermuyden, the Dutch engineer, started draining the
Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire fens, a work of even greater magnitude,
which gave England some of its richest agricultural land. The draining
of Holland was already a thing accomplished; the draining of the
Rommy marshes in Kent and Sussex was partly effected before the Roman
conquest of Britain. Of late years Australia has dammed up a great
river, and turned a dry valley into a lake over two hundred feet deep,
from which land will be irrigated as many miles away.
In all these great works, varied in means but the same in intention,
the thing to be done is as simple as a child's diversion of water on
the sloping sands of the seashore. What he does with his wooden spade,
digging his channels and building up his banks, the engineers do with
their laborious machinery, trenching canals, and piling up the huge
masses of their dams. The waters, obeying the few simple laws of their
fall, do all the rest.
The greatest of all these works, and one of the simplest in idea,
was the damming of the Nile at Assouan. More than two thousand years
before Christ the yearly rise and fall of the great river began to
be recorded, but it was not until four thousand years later that the
action was adapted to man's more effective use. The natural laws are
there waiting, always to be trusted. There is no scale too great, as
there is none too small, upon which they can be applied.
The result of this slow fertilization of the Provençal Crau is plain
to be seen from the line that skirts it on the way to Arles. There are
great plantations of olives, each tree clipped and pruned like a rare
shrub in a conservatory, every branch and almost every twig at an even
distance from the next, so as to get the maximum of air and sun to the
buds and the fruit. And there are wonderful sheets of almond blossom,
sometimes covering acres. As far as the eye can see on the level, the
plain is of the richest. There are frequent villages and homesteads,
and everywhere lines of cypresses, planted very close together and
allowed to grow as tall as they please. These are to break the force of
the _bise_, which blows so strongly as to scoop the crops out of the
ground if they are left unprotected, and once actually carried away the
suspension bridge between Beaucaire and Tarascon.
We pottered along the little single line, while the rain still came
down, but the clouds began to look a little lighter. One of my
fellow-travellers was a young conscript who was on furlough from his
regiment in Tunis. He was a handsome, charming-mannered youth. He said
that he liked soldiering, and there was little hardship in the life.
He wore his uniform when he was going on a journey, because soldiers
are taken at half fares on the railways. He told me with a grin that
he was liable to be court-martialled for wearing patent-leather boots,
but on this line he thought he might risk it. He was inclined to be
facetious at the expense of the line, and told me a story about it that
I first heard some twenty years or so ago in connection with one of our
own railways. And he said that it was a good deal used by companies of
cinema actors; that at any time you might find yourself in the society
of desperate characters prepared to do desperate deeds, or slowing down
between stations so that somebody might be photographed crawling along
the footboard or the roof of the carriages. The railway company had
obligingly arranged for a collision not long before, being glad enough
to sell some of its antiquated stock for this purpose; and in fact,
if it had not been for the money made out of the cinema operators, it
would have closed down long before.
He told me something about the Crau, too. This fertile tract through
which we were passing was very unlike the part that was still desert,
which I should be able to see from the heights of Les Baux. It is dry
and desolate, scorched by the sun in summer, but in winter affording
pasturage for flocks and herds that are brought down from the Alps.
The flocks are led by wise old goats, who know every mile of their
three weeks' journey; then come the she-goats, and after them the
innumerable company of sheep. The dogs of the shepherds surround
the flock, and the rear of the procession is brought up by asses,
carrying the baggage, and the little lambs that are too young to follow
their dams. Every night the great flock is shut in with hurdles,
and the shepherds keep guard over them. There are said to be two or
three hundred thousand sheep in the flocks that make these yearly
migrations, which have been going on for hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of years. Pliny mentions them, and there is little doubt that the order
followed in his day was much the same as it is now. For the primal
industries of the world do not change much, and in this ancient land
scarcely at all.
I asked my young soldier if he had ever seen the flights of flamingoes
that are said to make lovely the desert of the Crau, but I do not think
that he had, although he would not say that they were not to be seen.
He expressed himself with admiration and affection about his beautiful
country of Provence, and especially about this corner of it, in which
he had been brought up. A station or two before we reached Maussane, he
got out. There was an open carriage waiting for him, and an elderly,
prosperous-looking gentleman in it whom I took to be his uncle, on no
grounds except that I liked to think of him during his holiday coming
out from Salon to visit relations who lived in some roomy, picturesque
"mas," where there was welcome and good cheer for him in the hospitable
old-fashioned way of the country.
CHAPTER IX
_Les Baux_
As I got out of the train the rain ceased, though there looked to be
more to come, and I walked the three miles to Les Baux with the sun
shining, and the birds singing among the drenched leaves of the trees.
I was faced by the craggy rampart of the Alpilles, which hang over the
great plain, and were once sea cliffs washed by the Mediterranean. They
are of white limestone, and rise in places to a height of close upon a
thousand feet. Just at this point they thrust themselves forward in a
series of fantastic crags, rising up sheer from the plain and crowned
by great masses of gleaming rocks that look almost as if they had been
placed there by some giant hand.
I knew that Les Baux was upon one of these crags, and thought that I
remembered which it was. But there was nothing of it to be seen from
the plain. The line of cliffs was quite bare; the road might have been
leading over some deserted col to fairer regions beyond. No one could
have guessed himself to be nearing the remains of a once flourishing
city.
The road led up through a fertile valley in which there were fields and
scattered houses and gardens, and some sort of a mill. The cliff rose
abruptly to the right, and at a turn of the road--the green valley now
lying some way below--there came into view the walls of a few houses.
They were perched up high overhead, and seemed to be growing out of
the cliff itself, as indeed they were; for half of this strange city
is built out of the solid rock, and its ruins remain part of the cliff
from which they were hewn.
The road has been remade, so that it now zigzags steeply to an entrance
from the north. But the foot passenger can leave it and take a still
steeper track to the ancient gateway that was once the chief entrance
into this eagle's aerie. It is called the Porte d'Eyguières, and
is still in a good state of preservation, with the grooves of its
portcullis to be seen, and a stone bearing the arms of the Lords of
Les Baux--the star with sixteen rays which marks their descent from
Balthasar, one of the wise kings from the East, who brought gifts to
the Infant Christ.
A steep and narrow lane leads up through the still inhabited quarter of
the town, past the old but rebuilt Hôtel de Ville to the place where
the new road comes in and the two inns are situated. So far there is
nothing particularly to strike the visitor--nothing at all to compare
for picturesqueness with the old hill towns of western Provence, from
which I had come. Picturesqueness is not the note of Les Baux, and in
the lower quarter of the town the air is rather that of a poor village
which contains the bare remnants of some past importance.
But as one mounts up towards the summit of the crag this impression
of something like squalor gives place to a very different one. The
inhabited cottages are soon left behind. They have already been seen to
be interspersed with the ruins of noble mansions, and to be themselves,
for the most part, salvage from greater buildings. They line a narrow,
winding street, paved with rock in which the ruts of old cartwheels
are worn, just as they are in the streets of Pompeii. And now there is
nothing but ruin on either side, except where part of a great house has
been put into some sort of repair for the purposes of a museum. It is
ruin complete and irreparable; but it is not like other ruins. There
stands up a bare wall, with apertures for windows and doors; and it is
seen to be, not the remains of a structure of built-up stones, but a
shell of living rock, from which the inside has been scooped, like a
cheese with nothing left but the rind.
Now one is on the summit of the crag. It is a wide, grassy platform,
upon which rear themselves huge masses of rock cut into the forms of
towers and battlements, like a giant's castle in some fantastic dream.
The castle itself stands back on the northern edge of the cliff. Nearer
at hand are the remains of dwellings that are nothing but caves in
great jutting masses of rock. But they are caves with a difference.
They are carefully squared chambers, with chimney places still showing
the marks of fire, with holes into the walls that were once cupboards,
with ceilings cut into so as to provide hanging for lamps. They are
open to the south, and the entrances blocked with débris; but there is
no doubt that they were once merely the back parts of houses, which
showed fronts as well built as some of those still standing in the
streets below.
The grassy height is strewn with the stones of many buildings quite
destroyed, but once it contained the ordered precincts of the great
pile that nothing has been able completely to destroy. It stands grim
and majestic, towering over the whole mass of tumbled walls and the few
roofs and chimneys that are all that remain of the rich city. One can
see stone stairs and galleries high up in the rock and can mount up to
some of them. The dungeon, cut out of solid stone, shows a yawning hole
in the ground. It lies open to the sky, but the ribs of its vaulting
are still seen springing from the corners. Two sides of a rock hard by
are scooped into cells. This was the great castle dovecot. There is a
little ruined chapel, its roof delicately carved.
[Illustration: THE CASTLE RUINS, LES BAUX]
[Illustration: THE CASTLE DOVECOT, LES BAUX]
From the summit of the castle there is a magnificent view of the great
plain to the south. It includes the whole extent of the Crau; and now
you can see which part of it has been fertilized, with the threads
of canals running through it, and which part still remains in its
stony desolation. The great lagoon, called the Etang de Berre, lies
a glistening sheet almost on the horizon, and you can just descry
the line of the sea beyond it. To the right you see Arles and the
famous abbey of Montmajour, and the Rhône rolling its turgid waters
through the plain of the Camarque, to where Stes. Maries rears its
fortress church on the edge of the sea, and the holy men and women from
Palestine miraculously landed. It is very far away, but there is hardly
so much as a hillock between you and it.
From here too can be seen the strange, blanched desolation of the
valleys that creep up into the solitudes of these stony hills. They
are strewn with gigantic rocks that take on all sorts of fantastic
tortured shapes. Part of it is called the Val d'Enfer, and it is said
that Dante, who is known to have sojourned in Arles, took from it the
scenery of his Inferno. In the spring it is lightened with the delicate
flush of almond blossom, and Les Baux is beautiful with the silvers
and blues and purples of its surrounding country, and its own wild
aspect of strength and desolation. But its appeal is to the past, and
without some knowledge of its history it must present itself as an
almost undecipherable riddle.
We need not linger over the importance that this natural fortress had
in the time of Marius, who had camps very near to Les Baux, and perhaps
on the very spot; nor the story of the Christians who were driven to
take refuge here by Alaric the Visigoth. The first of the long line of
the counts of Les Baux who is known to history was Leibulf, who lived
at the end of the eighth century. From that time, until the year 1426,
when the death of the Princess Alix at last brought it to an end, it
continually increased in wealth and importance, until it vied with
the rest of the royal houses in Europe. Yes; this deserted, almost
forgotten city, which now contains a bare hundred of inhabitants,
was the seat of princes who intermarried with the reigning families
of England, France, Poland, Savoy, Nassau, Brunswick and many more.
It was the centre of a principality that included seventy-nine towns
and bourgs, villages, or castles. Its rulers were Princes of Orange,
besides, from which our own royal house is sprung; they derived
titles from Milan, Naples, Piedmont, Marseilles and elsewhere;
they were kings of Arles and Vienne; Princes of Achaia, Counts of
Provence, Cephalonia, Spoleto, and other places; finally emperors of
Constantinople, and that this was not an empty title is shown by the
fact that an embassy was sent to a reigning princess of Les Baux to
treat for her rights as empress. In the twelfth century the towns owned
by the prince of Les Baux included Aix, Saint-Remy, Salon, Pertvis, and
the Bourg-Neuf at Arles. The possessions of "La Baussenique" already
made of it a second Provence. Indeed, Raymond des Baux, who died in
1150, claimed, through his marriage with the daughter of the Count of
Provence, the whole of the country, and fought for it until his death.
There was continual fighting, with Les Baux as its centre, during the
Middle Ages, and sometimes its lords were on the summit of fortune,
sometimes forced to give up some of their lands. They fought with the
Saracen corsairs, with the counts of Barcelona and kings of Aragon,
with the counts of Anjou and Poitou, the king of Naples, and many more.
They went crusading with the rest, and one of them is mentioned with
honour in the pages of Froissart.
It was at the siege of La Reole in Gascony. The Earl of Derby lay
before it for nine weeks, and the townspeople were so reduced by
starvation that they wished the place to be given up. But Sir Agos des
Baux, who commanded the troops, would not consent to this, and retired
to the castle, with plenty of wine and other provisions. The castle had
been erected by the Saracens, and was much stronger than the English
had supposed. So they prepared to mine under it, and then the garrison
grew alarmed. So "Sir Agous dyscendedde downe fro the hygh towre, and
dyd put out his heed at a lytell wyndo, and make a token to speke with
some of the host." Lord Derby, Sir Walter Manny and Lord Stafford
came to parley with him, and he offered to give up the fortress if he
and his troops might retain "our lyves and goodes saved." Lord Derby
replied, "Sir Agos, Sir Agos, you will not get off so. We know your
distress, and will receive only an unconditional surrender." Then Sir
Agos said that he would trust to the honour of the English, and Lord
Derby, commending his gallantry, granted honourable surrender to the
garrison, with their armour.
"Then they dyd on their harnesse and toke their horses, whereof they
hadde no mo but sixe; some bought horses of thenglysshmen, the whiche
they payed for truely. Thus Sir Agous de Baus departed fro the Ryoll,
and yelded up the castele to the Englysshemen, and Sir Agos and his
company wente to Tholons."
One of the bloodiest struggles of all that had surrounded Les Baux took
place when the Princess Alix succeeded to its sovereignty at the age
of seven, and it was twenty-six long years before she was able, as a
widow, to take up her residence in her much battered but still noble
castle.
She was the ward of the Viscount of Turenne, the "Scourge of Provence,"
who married her at the age of thirteen to a young noble whom he
thought he could use for his own purposes, which were of course to get
possession of his ward's property. But Adon de Villers unexpectedly
decided to fight him, and succeeded in gaining valuable support, from
the neighbouring cities, and from the Pope himself, who was then
seated at Avignon. Besides men at arms, the Pope launched a threat of
excommunication against Turenne, who laughed at it, and said that for
a thousand florins he could get more soldiers than the Pope for seven
years of plenary absolution. He was not in the least particular where
he got his fighters from. He allowed a robber-chief to seize and sack
Les Baux itself and to murder and pillage in all the country round,
and he roused the Mediterranean pirates to spread further devastation
through the lands of his ward.
But, in the meantime, the Pope who had been deified died, and it
happened that the King of France had a quarrel with his successor and
sent troops against him under Marshal Boucicaut. When this little
affair was settled Boucicaut turned his attention to Turenne, whose
daughter he had married. As persuasion was useless, he besieged and
took Les Baux and other towns, and Turenne was brought to his knees.
He broke out again immediately afterwards, and there is no knowing how
much longer the poor Princess Alix could have been kept out of her
rights if he had not been accidentally drowned while he was crossing
the Rhône.
Her castle was almost defenceless, but she married again and lived in
it in peace for another twenty-four years. When she lay dying, it is
said that a bright star descended from the heavens and entered her
room, hanging over her until she breathed her last, when it faded away.
It was thought to be that very Star of the East which had shone upon
the founder of her long race, now extinguished with her.
Mr. T. A. Cook, in his admirable book on Provence, from which I have
chiefly drawn for the above facts, gives an account of the inventory
of Princess Alix's household effects, made for the crown after her
death. It makes a welcome impression of peace and luxury, which no one
can feel inclined to grudge this much-tried lady after the strife and
bloodshed with which half of her life had been surrounded, and shows
the grim castle of Les Baux in a light that is pleasant to contemplate.
"The entrance-courtyard of the château lay to the south. The chapel of
Ste. Marie, with its vaulted roof, was in the rez-de chaussée, near
several large reception-rooms, with kitchens, bakery, larders, and
cellars beneath them. Above were fifteen more out of the thirty-five
rooms. That in which Alix died was situated in a tower, beneath a
granary. It was furnished with two candlesticks of silver, with plate
of silver and of gold, with many lengths of tapestry, and with fine
Eastern rugs. In the oaken chests were robes of silk and velvet,
of cloth of gold, and 'vair'; furs, belts, eight rosaries set with
pearls, prayer-books, and books of hours, bound in red cloth of gold,
with clasps of silver-gilt. Within the 'Chambre de la Rose' were more
books of prayer, bound in cloth of gold and pearls, and set in a case
of stamped leather, bound with a silver band all gilt with fleurs de
lys. The chapel and its vestry were filled with rich ecclesiastical
garments and plate, chalices, pattens, candlesticks, and reading-desks,
in gold and silver-gilt, enriched with gems, enamel, and embroidery, a
number of illuminated liturgies, and a set of tapestries, showing the
adoration of the Magi, with Balthasar, the traditional ancestor of the
house. In other rooms were tables with huge legs enriched with carving,
long seats that opened to form linen-chests, sideboards in solid
worked wood, cupboards let straight into the stone, and lined with
cedar. In the larders and cellars were tuns of wine, both white and
red, great store of nuts and grain, piles of salt beef and pork, rows
of fishing-nets, and stronger nets for hunting the stag and the wild
boar; with herds of cattle, pigs, and sheep, in the pastures below, and
nearly fifty chickens. In the halls and passages were trophies of arms,
cuirasses, helmets, arbalètes, coulevrines, bombardelles, lances; and
swords; 'the most of them rusty,' for their day was over; the furniture
was partly sold by order of the king, partly bequeathed to the Bishop
of Tortosa, and partly sent over to the Château of Tarascon."
The princedom of Les Baux now became merged in that of Provence, and
a few years later the good King René succeeded to its honours. As Les
Baux had been famous in the annals of the Troubadours, it is probable
that he took considerable interest in the romantic place. He restored
the ramparts and the towers of the castle, and made over the barony for
life to his second wife, Jeanne de Laval, whose kneeling figure faces
him in the Triptych at Aix. There is a charming little reminder of her
still to be seen at Les Baux. In the valley beneath the fortress-rock
is a square walled-in field which was once a garden. In a corner of it
is a little stone pavilion with delicately carved Renaissance work,
upon which time and weather have had very little effect. There was
once one of these in each corner, but all signs of the others have
disappeared, as well as the "knots" and parterres and treillages and
the beds of sweet smelling herbs that lay between them. The one that
is left is called the Pavillon de la Reine Jeanne, and if it did not,
actually belong to her, which it probably did not, for she would have
had her pleasaunce nearer to the castle, it must have given delight to
some fair lady of her court, or to the wife of one of the Provençal
nobles whose mansions lined the narrow streets of Les Baux. Fine as
their remains show them to have been, they had no more ground attached
to them than a house in a street of Mayfair, and it is agreeable to
think that it was possible at this time for the ladies of Les Baux to
enjoy a garden outside the fortifications, and not to be cooped up day
after day within the protecting walls.
Soon after the principality of Les Baux became merged in that of
Provence, Provence itself came to the throne of France. Louis XI
was on the throne, and in the last year of his reign he ordered the
destruction of the ramparts and the castle of Les Baux. It was not the
first time that the castle had been destroyed, and it was not to be the
last. Its immense strength seems to have given it a sort of vitality
that suffered dismemberment without complete destruction, and even
now it seems not to be quite dead, though it is long since it was at
last rendered uninhabitable. Probably on this occasion it was only the
offensive and defensive parts of the castle that were destroyed, for
fifty years later, during a royal progress through Provence, Francis I
visited it with a brilliant train, and was entertained there by his own
High Constable, Anne de Montmorency, to whom he had given the barony of
Les Baux. Another royal visit, in 1614, ended in sad disaster. The Duc
de Guise was entertained one Sunday in May in the castle, and at every
toast that was drunk there was a salvo of artillery. Being probably a
little flushed with wine, the prince announced his intention of firing
a cannon himself. The cannon exploded and shattered his leg, and a few
days later he was buried at St. Trophime in Arles.
In the sixteenth century Les Baux, still in the thick of whatever
strife was going forward, became the battleground of Catholics and
Protestants. In 1543 Claude de Savoie, Count of Tende, who was
Seneschal of Provence, took up his residence in the castle, and
stayed there for a year trying to bring peace between the factions.
In 1561 the Protestants got into Les Baux, and made havoc, quite in
the old-fashioned way. In three months they were turned out, not at
all gently. But two years later they were back again, not only free
to practise their religion, but with the governor, Jehan de Manville,
a convert to it. He converted part of his house into a chapel to the
Huguenots. The house is in ruins, but there is enough left to show what
a fine one it was, and among the remains is a pedimented Renaissance
window of the chapel, with the famous Reformation motto carved over it
in stone: "Post Tenebras Lux," and the date 1571.
[Illustration: PAVILLON DE LA REINE JEANNE]
[Illustration: HUGUENOT CHAPEL IN LES BAUX]
This family of Manvilles is the most important in the annals of Les
Baux after that of its titulary princes. They held some sort of
seignorial authority for about a hundred years, but in 1621 the fourth
and last of them had to resign his rights for continuing to harbour the
Protestants.
A few years later the prosperity of Les Baux departed. Louis XIII
sent troops against its last seigneur, Antoine de Villeneuve, who was
an adherent of the Duke of Orleans, and Richelieu ordered the final
destruction of the castle.
This time the work was done thoroughly. But the stout old pile made a
resistance of its own. It took a month to demolish it, and gunpowder
had to be used to blow it up. And even now there is a great deal of it
left.
After that Les Baux steadily declined until it became no more than a
refuge for a handful of peasants, who squatted amongst the ruins, fed
their sheep where the grass grew over the castle courts, and cultivated
a few fields outside. But it kept one church out of its five or six,
and has always had some sort of corporate life. It is a little more
prosperous now, because of its visitors; but compared with its rich
past the life is a mere trickle, and only the ruins remain to tell of
what it once was.
CHAPTER X
_Les Baux_ (continued)
Mr. Cook had written of the inn at Les Baux that lunch was "a perilous
adventure, and any other form of hospitality impossible." This did not
frighten me, because when one takes a pack on one's back one drops
a good many prejudices. Read what the inns were like when Smollett
travelled through France, or Casanova, or Arthur Young. Probably the
inn at Les Baux, when Mr. Cook visited it, would have seemed to an
eighteenth century traveller a most desirable place of entertainment.
At any rate, the reproach is now removed altogether, for there is an
excellent inn at Les Baux. It is called the Hôtel de la Reine Jeanne.
The other inn is called the "Hôtel de Monte Carlo," which recalls
a curious episode in the history of Les Baux--the last in its long
history.
It was after Richelieu had wrecked it, and was caused, says Mr. Cook,
by the ambition of Spain to become possessed of Monte Carlo.
"The young Honoré de Grimaldi, seeking the protection of Louis XIII,
who had no desire to see the Spaniards conveniently planted between
Genoa and Nice, so near to his own territories, arranged by the Treaty
of Péronne for the independence of Monaco, and the protection of a
French garrison, in 1641, together with sufficient lands in France to
compensate for the loss of any Italian revenues confiscated by Spain.
Grimaldi got the Spaniards out of Monaco by a cleverly audacious
ruse, and was rewarded by lands in France which were called his
Duchy of Valentinois; and in 1643 Les Baux was created a marquisate
in the possession of the Grimaldis, Princes of Monaco, and Dukes of
Valentinois. The title that had been held by Diane de Poitiers, and
by Cæsar Borgia, added perhaps the last touch of sinister romance
that was needed to complete the history of Les Baux. A little country
pleasure-house, beneath the ruins of the fort, was enough for the
Grimaldis; and even that was knocked to pieces by the Revolution,
which also cut down every forest on the mountain-slopes."[10]
This "Hôtel de Monte Carlo" used to be called "A la Chevelure d'Or."
Some years ago when the pavement of the church was undergoing repair
there was found the body of a beautiful young girl, wrapped in a mantle
of her own golden hair. It fell to dust when exposed, all but the long
strands of hair which the innkeeper possessed himself of and displayed
in his tavern. When he left Les Baux he took the "Cabelladuro d'Or"
with him, but a tress of it is now in the Musée Arlaten at Arles. The
rock beneath the church is honeycombed with graves of the knights and
ladies of old time, and this fair girl is supposed to have been the
Princess Strella of Florence, who came to Les Baux to marry the Reine
Jeanne's seneschal, but died instead, and was buried beneath the stone
on which she would have stood to be wedded. A sad little story, very
real at the time, then forgotten for four hundred years, and now again
real enough to touch the heart!
All that afternoon and evening I wandered about among the ruins of the
deserted city. I call it deserted because the greater part of it is
actually so, and the life of the part that is inhabited is so different
from the life it once enshrined that it has little power to change the
meaning of the old buildings in which it shelters.
The church is perhaps an exception, for so many churches as ancient
as this have survived. But if you sit in its darkness and silence for
a time the present drops away from you and you are back again in the
days when it rang with the tread of mailed knights and rustled with the
silks and satins of their ladies. It has been clumsily enough restored
without, but inside it is much as it was centuries ago. The south aisle
is the oldest, and it has three chapels, as well as an altar, scooped
out of the living rock. Mr. Cook reminds us of Dumas' visit to it. "As
he entered the little, cold, dark building (in the days before its
restoration) he heard a sound of sorrow at the eastern end. Upon an
open bier, before the high altar, lay the dead body of a little girl.
Her two tiny sisters knelt on either side. Her mother sat crying in
a corner, and continued sobbing after the good Alexandre had thrown
her his whole purse. Her little brother tried to toll the bell for a
service at which no priest was present. A dozen or so of beggars had
looked in to see the sight. They comprised the whole population of Les
Baux."
In front of the church is a terrace overlooking the valley in which is
the garden with the pavilion. In one corner of it are the ruins of a
chapel of the White Penitents. On the other side the rock rises sheer
and steep, and in it is hollowed out a semi-circular cistern called
the Deïmo. Into this the vassals of the Lords of Les Baux poured their
tithes of wine and corn and olive oil.
One can picture this terrace on a sunny spring morning filled with the
people who had just come out from hearing Mass in the church. They
would linger awhile to gossip by the stone parapet, or round the steps
of the cross in the middle of the little _place_, before they went off
to their fine houses in the narrow streets. Les Baux was a favourite
residence of the Provencal nobility in its more peaceful days. Hardly
less interesting than the ruins of the castle and the older houses are
those of the fifteenth and sixteenth century mansions, with their noble
proportions and their rich decoration.
One of them, hard by the church, is still standing, and is used as a
school. You can get permission to see its vaulted frescoed hall. It
belonged to the noble family of the Porcelets, the origin of whose name
is legendary.
A proud lady of the family drove away a beggar woman, rebuking her
for bringing into the world more children than she could provide for.
The beggar chanced to be a witch, as so frequently happened in such
circumstances, and prophesied in return that the lady herself would
bear as many children as there should be little pigs in the litter of a
sow that was near them. The sow produced nine _porcelets_, and the lady
as many children, who with their descendants were thenceforward called
Porcelet.
If only one could catch just one glimpse of the place as it was in
the days of high romance! It would be impossible to dip anywhere into
the history of song and chivalry in the south during the Middle Ages
without coming across mention of Les Baux. Some of its princes were
noted Troubadours, knights and ladies thronged its Courts of Love, and
the names of its queens ring musically through the poetry that was made
there. Passe-Rose, Douce, Etiennette, Adélasie, Briande, Clairette,
Barbe, Aybeline, Baussette--how sweet they sound! And there are stories
to be told of all of them.
Characteristic of the times is that of the fair Azalais, wife of
Count Barral des Baux. Her charms were sung by the famous Troubadour,
Foulquet of Marseilles, but "neither by his prayers nor by his songs
could he ever move her to show him favour by right of love." Whether
or no he actually transferred his affections to his lady's young
sister-in-law, Laura, or only pretended to do so, Azalais took umbrage,
and "would have no more of his prayers or fine words." So, "he left
off singing and laughing, for he had lost the lady whom he loved more
than the whole world." But his homage continued, and we hear no more of
Laura.
Barral des Baux grew tired of his countess and divorced her, but
Foulquet, in spite of his friendship with her husband, maintained his
allegiance to Azalais. At last he wearied of his fruitless sighing, and
took the cowl. He rose to be Bishop of Toulouse, and his name lives,
not as one of the greatest poets of his time, which he was, but as the
cruel persecutor of the Albigensian heretics.
As one mounts towards the summit of the rock one sees the ruins of yet
other churches and chapels, and on the grassy plateau is a wide space
that was once used as an arena for bull-fights, but before
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