and was very thankful for the accommodation. It was my misfortune to
arrive at this ancient city late at night, on the eve of market-day; and
market-day at Narbonne is a very serious affair. The inns, on this
occasion, are stuffed with wine-dealers; for the country round about,
dedicated almost exclusively to Bacchus, has hitherto escaped the
phylloxera. This deadly enemy of the grape is encamped over the Midi in
a hundred places; blighted vineyards and ruined proprietors being quite
the order of the day. The signs of distress are more frequent as you
advance into Provence, many of the vines being laid under water in the
hope of washing the plague away. There are healthy regions still,
however, and the vintners find plenty to do at Narbonne. The traffic in
wine appeared to be the sole thought of the Narbonnais; every one I
spoke to had something to say about the harvest of gold that bloomed
under its influence. "C'est inoui, monsieur, l'argent qu'il y a dans ce
pays. Des gens à qui la vente de leur vin rapporte jusqu'à 500,000
francs par an." That little speech addressed to me by a gentleman at the
inn gives the note of these revelations. It must be said that there was
little in the appearance either of the town or of its population to
suggest the possession of such treasures. Narbonne is a _sale petite
ville_ in all the force of the term, and my first impression on arriving
there was an extreme regret that I had not remained for the night at the
lovely Carcassonne. My journey from that delectable spot lasted a couple
of hours and was performed in darkness--a darkness not so dense,
however, but that I was able to make out, as we passed it, the great
figure of Béziers, whose ancient roofs and towers, clustered on a goodly
hill-top, looked as fantastic as you please. I know not what appearance
Béziers may present by day, but by night it has quite the grand air. On
issuing from the station at Narbonne I found that the only vehicle in
waiting was a kind of bastard tramcar, a thing shaped as if it had been
meant to go upon rails; that is, equipped with small wheels, placed
beneath it, and with a platform at either end, but destined to rattle
over the stones like the most vulgar of omnibuses. To complete the
oddity of this conveyance, it was under the supervision, not of a
conductor, but of a conductress. A fair young woman with a pouch
suspended from her girdle had command of the platform; and as soon as
the car was full she jolted us into the town through clouds of the
thickest dust I ever have swallowed. I have had occasion to speak of
the activity of women in France--of the way they are always in the
ascendant; and here was a signal example of their general utility. The
young lady I have mentioned conveyed her whole company to the wretched
little Hôtel de France, where it is to be hoped that some of them found
a lodging. For myself, I was informed that the place was crowded from
cellar to attic, and that its inmates were sleeping three or four in a
room. At Carcassonne I should have had a bad bed, but at Narbonne,
apparently, I was to have no bed at all. I passed an hour or two of flat
suspense while fate settled the question of whether I should go on to
Perpignan, return to Béziers, or still discover a modest couch at
Narbonne. I shall not have suffered in vain, however, if my example
serves to deter other travellers from alighting unannounced at that city
on a Wednesday evening. The retreat to Béziers, not attempted in time,
proved impossible, and I was assured that at Perpignan, which I should
not reach till midnight, the affluence of wine-dealers was not less than
at Narbonne. I interviewed every hostess in the town, and got no
satisfaction but distracted shrugs. Finally, at an advanced hour, one of
the servants of the Hôtel de France, where I had attempted to dine, came
to me in triumph to proclaim that he had secured for me a charming
apartment in a _maison bourgeoise_. I took possession of it gratefully,
in spite of its having an entrance like a stable and being pervaded by
an odour compared with which that of a stable would have been delicious.
As I have mentioned, my landlord was a locksmith, and he had strange
machines which rumbled and whirred in the rooms below my own.
Nevertheless I slept, and I dreamed of Carcassonne. It was better to do
that than to dream of the Hôtel de France. I was obliged to cultivate
relations with the cuisine of this establishment. Nothing could have
been more _méridional_; indeed, both the dirty little inn and Narbonne
at large seemed to me to have the infirmities of the south without its
usual graces. Narrow, noisy, shabby, belittered and encumbered, filled
with clatter and chatter, the Hôtel de France would have been described
in perfection by Alphonse Daudet. For what struck me above all in it was
the note of the Midi as he has represented it--the sound of universal
talk. The landlord sat at supper with sundry friends in a kind of glass
cage, with a genial indifference to arriving guests; the waiters tumbled
over the loose luggage in the hall; the travellers who had been turned
away leaned gloomily against door-posts; and the landlady, surrounded by
confusion, unconscious of responsibility, and animated only by the
spirit of conversation, bandied high-voiced compliments with the
_voyageurs de commerce_. At ten o'clock in the morning there was a table
d'hôte for breakfast--a wonderful repast, which overflowed into every
room and pervaded the whole establishment. I sat down with a hundred
hungry marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of the rich
soil of Languedoc adhering to their hands and their boots. I mention the
latter articles because they almost put them on the table. It was very
hot, and there were swarms of flies; the viands had the strongest odour;
there was in particular a horrible mixture known as _gras-double_, a
light grey, glutinous, nauseating mess, which my companions devoured in
large quantities. A man opposite to me had the dirtiest fingers I ever
saw; a collection of fingers which in England would have excluded him
from a farmers' ordinary. The conversation was mainly bucolic; though a
part of it, I
[Illustration: NARBONNE--THE WASHING PLACE]
remember, at the table at which I sat, consisted of a discussion as to
whether or no the maid-servant were _sage_--a discussion which went on
under the nose of this young lady, as she carried about the dreadful
_gras-double_, and to which she contributed the most convincing blushes.
It was thoroughly _méridional_.
In going to Narbonne I had of course counted upon Roman remains; but
when I went forth in search of them I perceived that I had hoped too
fondly. There is really nothing in the place to speak of; that is, on
the day of my visit there was nothing but the market, which was in
complete possession. "This intricate, curious, but lifeless town,"
Murray calls it; yet to me it appeared overflowing with life. Its
streets are mere crooked, dirty lanes, bordered with perfectly
insignificant houses; but they were filled with the same clatter and
chatter that I had found at the hotel. The market was held partly in the
little square of the hôtel de ville, a structure which a flattering
woodcut in the Guide-Joanne had given me a desire to behold. The reality
was not impressive, the old colour of the front having been completely
restored away. Such interest as it superficially possesses it derives
from a fine mediæval tower which rises beside it with turrets at the
angles--always a picturesque thing. The rest of the market was held in
another _place_, still shabbier than the first, which lies beyond the
canal. The Canal du Midi flows through the town, and, spanned at this
point by a small suspension-bridge, presented a certain sketchability.
On the farther side were the vendors and chafferers--old women under
awnings and big umbrellas, rickety tables piled high with fruit, white
caps and brown faces, blouses, sabots, donkeys. Beneath this picture was
another--a long row of washerwomen, on their knees on the edge of the
canal, pounding and wringing the dirty linen of Narbonne--no great
quantity, to judge by the costume of the people. Innumerable rusty men,
scattered all over the place, were buying and selling wine, straddling
about in pairs, in groups, with their hands in their pockets, and packed
together at the doors of the cafés. They were mostly fat and brown and
unshaven; they ground their teeth as they talked; they were very
_méridionaux_.
The only two lions at Narbonne are the cathedral and the museum, the
latter of which is quartered in the hôtel de ville. The cathedral,
closely shut in by houses and with the west front undergoing repairs, is
singular in two respects. It consists exclusively of a choir, which is
of the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the next, and
of great magnificence. There is absolutely nothing else. This choir, of
extraordinary elevation, forms the whole church. I sat there a good
while; there was no other visitor. I had taken a great dislike to poor
little Narbonne, which struck me as sordid and overheated, and this
place seemed to extend to me, as in the Middle Ages, the privilege of
sanctuary. It is a very solemn corner. The other peculiarity of the
cathedral is that, externally, it bristles with battlements, having
anciently formed part of the defences of the _archevêché_, which is
beside it and which connects it with the hôtel de ville. This
combination of the church and the fortress is very curious, and during
the Middle Ages was not without its value. The palace of the former
archbishops of Narbonne (the hôtel de ville of to-day forms part of it)
was both an asylum and an arsenal during the hideous wars by which all
Languedoc was ravaged in the thirteenth century. The whole mass of
buildings
[Illustration: NARBONNE--THE CATHEDRAL AND HÔTEL DE VILLE.]
is jammed together in a manner that from certain points of view makes it
far from apparent which feature is which. The museum occupies several
chambers at the top of the hôtel de ville, and is not an imposing
collection. It was closed, but I induced the portress to let me in--a
silent, cadaverous person, in a black coif, like a _béguine_, who sat
knitting in one of the windows while I went the rounds. The number of
Roman fragments is small, and their quality is not the finest; I must
add that this impression was hastily gathered. There is, indeed, a work
of art in one of the rooms which creates a presumption in favour of the
place--the portrait (rather a good one) of a citizen of Narbonne, whose
name I forget, who is described as having devoted all his time and his
intelligence to collecting the objects by which the visitor is
surrounded. This excellent man was a connoisseur, and the visitor is
doubtless often an ignoramus.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxv
"Cette, with its glistening houses white,
Curves with the curving beach away
To where the lighthouse beacons bright,
Far in the bay."
[Montpellier]
That stanza of Matthew Arnold's, which I happened to remember, gave a
certain importance to the half-hour I spent in the buffet of the station
at Cette while I waited for the train to Montpellier. I had left
Narbonne in the afternoon, and by the time I reached Cette the darkness
had descended. I therefore missed the sight of the glistening houses,
and had to console myself with that of the beacon in the bay, as well as
with a _bouillon_ of which I partook at the buffet aforesaid; for, since
the morning, I had not ventured to return to the table d'hôte at
Narbonne. The Hôtel Nevet at Montpellier, which I reached an hour later,
has an ancient renown all over the south of France--advertises itself, I
believe, as _le plus vastedu midi_. It seemed to me the model of a good
provincial inn; a big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown,
labyrinthine corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule, into which the
diligence, in the _bon temps_, used to penetrate, and an hospitality
more expressive than that of the new caravansaries. It dates from the
days when Montpellier was still accounted a fine winter residence for
people with weak lungs; and this rather melancholy tradition, together
with the former celebrity of the school of medicine still existing
there, but from which the glory has departed, helps to account for its
combination of high antiquity and vast proportions. The old hotels were
usually more concentrated; but the school of medicine passed for one of
the attractions of Montpellier. Long before Mentone was discovered or
Colorado invented, British invalids travelled down through France in the
post-chaise or the public coach, to spend their winters in the wonderful
place which boasted both a climate and a faculty. The air is mild, no
doubt, but there are refinements of mildness which were not then
suspected, and which in a more analytic age have carried the annual wave
far beyond Montpellier. The place is charming, all the same; and it
served the purpose of John Locke, who made a long stay there, between
1675 and 1679, and became acquainted with a noble fellow-visitor, Lord
Pembroke, to whom he dedicated the famous Essay. There are places that
please without your being able to say wherefore, and Montpellier is one
of the number. It has some charming views, from the great promenade of
the Peyrou; but its position is not strikingly fine. Beyond this it
contains a good museum and the long façades of its school, but these are
its only definite treasures. Its cathedral struck me as quite the
weakest I had seen, and I remember no other monument that made up for
it. The place has neither the gaiety of a modern nor the solemnity of an
ancient town, and it is agreeable as certain women are agreeable who are
neither beautiful nor clever. An Italian would remark that it is
sympathetic; a German would admit that it is _gemüthlich_. I spent two
days there, mostly in the rain, and even under these circumstances I
carried away a kindly impression. I think the Hôtel Nevet had something
to do with it, and the sentiment of relief with which, in a quiet, even
a luxurious, room that looked out on a garden, I reflected that I had
washed my hands of Narbonne. The phylloxera has destroyed the vines in
the country that surrounds Montpellier, and at that moment I was capable
of rejoicing in the thought that I should not breakfast with vintners.
The gem of the place is the Musée Fabre, one of the best collections of
paintings in a provincial city. François Fabre, a native of Montpellier,
died there in 1837, after having spent a considerable part of his life
in Italy, where he had collected a good many valuable pictures and some
very poor ones, the latter class including several from his own hand. He
was the hero of a remarkable episode, having succeeded no less a person
than Vittorio Alfieri in the affections of no less a person than Louise
de Stolberg, Countess of Albany, widow of no less a person than Charles
Edward Stuart, the second pretender to the British crown. Surely no
woman ever was associated sentimentally with three figures more
diverse--a disqualified sovereign, an Italian dramatist, and a bad
French painter. The productions of M. Fabre, who followed in the steps
of David, bear the stamp of a cold mediocrity; there is not much to be
said even for the portrait of the genial countess (her life has been
written by M. Saint-Réné-Taillandier, who depicts her as delightful),
which hangs in Florence, in the gallery of the Uffizzi, and makes a
pendant to a likeness of Alfieri by the same author. Stendhal, in his
"Mémoires d'un Touriste," says that this work of art represents her as a
cook who has pretty hands. I am delighted to having an opportunity of
quoting Stendhal, whose two volumes of the "Mémoires d'un Touriste"
every traveller in France should carry in his portmanteau. I have had
this opportunity more than once, for I have met him at Tours, at Nantes,
at Bourges; and everywhere he is suggestive. But he has the defect that
he is never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and
that his style is perversely colourless for a man so fond of
contemplation. His taste is often singularly false; it is the taste of
the early years of the present century, the period that produced clocks
surmounted with sentimental "subjects." Stendhal does not admire these
clocks, but he almost does. He admires Domenichino and Guercino, he
prizes the Bolognese school of painters because they "spoke to the
soul." He is a votary of the new classic, is fond of tall, square,
regular buildings, and thinks Nantes, for instance, full of the "air
noble." It was a pleasure to me to reflect that five-and-forty years ago
he had alighted in that city, at the very inn in which I spent a night
and which looks down on the Place Graslin and the theatre. The hotel
that was the best in 1837 appears to be the best to-day. On the subject
of Touraine Stendhal is extremely refreshing; he finds the scenery
meagre and much overrated, and proclaims his opinion with perfect
frankness. He does, however, scant justice to the banks of the Loire;
his want of appreciation of the picturesque--want of the sketcher's
sense--causes him to miss half the charm of a landscape which is nothing
if not "quiet," as a painter would say, and of which the felicities
reveal themselves only to waiting eyes. He even despises the Indre, the
river of Madame Sand. The "Mémoires d'un Touriste" are written in the
character of a commercial traveller, and the author has nothing to say
about Chenonceaux or Chambord, or indeed about any of the châteaux of
that part of France; his system being to talk only of the large towns,
where he may be supposed to find a market for his goods. It was his
ambition to pass for an ironmonger. But in the large towns he is usually
excellent company, though as discursive as Sterne and strangely
indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of
things which the poor pages now before the reader are mainly an attempt
to render. It is his conviction that Alfieri, at Florence, bored the
Countess of Albany terribly; and he adds that the famous Gallophobe died
of jealousy of the little painter from Montpellier. The Countess of
Albany left her property to Fabre; and I suppose some of the pieces in
the museum of his native town used to hang in the sunny saloons of that
fine old palace on the Arno which is still pointed out to the stranger
in Florence as the residence of Alfieri.
The institution has had other benefactors, notably a certain M. Bruyas,
who has enriched it with an extraordinary number of portraits of
himself. As these, however, are by different hands, some of them
distinguished, we may suppose that it was less the model than the
artists to whom M. Bruyas wished to give publicity. Easily first are two
large specimens of David Teniers, which are incomparable for brilliancy
and a glowing perfection of execution. I have a weakness for this
singular genius, who combined the delicate with the grovelling, and I
have rarely seen richer examples. Scarcely less valuable is a Gerard Dow
which hangs near them, though it must rank lower, as having kept less of
its freshness. This Gerard Dow did me good, for a master is a master,
whatever he may paint. It represents a woman paring carrots, while a boy
before her exhibits a mouse-trap in which he has caught a frightened
victim. The goodwife has spread a cloth on the top of a big barrel which
serves her as a table, and on this brown, greasy napkin, of which the
texture is wonderfully rendered, lie the raw vegetables she is preparing
for domestic consumption. Beside the barrel is a large caldron lined
with copper, with a rim of brass. The way these things are painted
brings tears to the eyes; but they give the measure, of the Musée Fabre,
where two specimens of Teniers and a Gerard Dow are the jewels. The
Italian pictures are of small value; but there is a work by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, said to be the only one in France--an infant Samuel in prayer,
apparently a repetition of the picture in England which inspired the
little plaster image, disseminated in Protestant lands, that we used to
admire in our childhood. Sir Joshua, somehow, was an eminently
Protestant painter; no one can forget that, who in the National Gallery
in London has looked at the picture in which he represents several young
ladies as nymphs, voluminously draped, hanging garlands over a statue--a
picture suffused indefinably with the Anglican spirit and exasperating
to a member of one of the Latin races. It is an odd chance therefore
that has led him into that part of France where Protestants have been
least _bien vus_. This is the country of the dragonnades of Louis XIV.
and of the pastors of the desert. From the garden of the Peyrou, at
Montpellier, you may see the hills of the Cévennes, to which they of the
religion fled for safety and out of which they were hunted and harried.
I have only to add, in regard to the Musée Fabre, that it contains the
portrait of its founder--a little, pursy, fat-faced, elderly man, whose
countenance contains few indications of the power that makes
distinguished victims. He is, however, just such a personage as the
mind's eye sees walking on the terrace of the Peyrou of an October
afternoon in the early years of the century; a plump figure in a
chocolate-coloured coat and a _culotte_ that exhibits a good leg--a
culotte provided with a watch-fob from which a heavy seal is suspended.
This Peyrou (to come to it at last) is a wonderful place, especially to
be found in a little provincial city. France is certainly the country of
towns that aim at completeness; more than in other lands they contain
stately features as a matter of course. We should never have ceased to
hear about the Peyrou if fortune had placed it at a Shrewsbury or a
Buffalo. It is true that the place enjoys a certain celebrity at home,
which it amply deserves, moreover; for nothing could be more impressive
and monumental. It consists of an "elevated platform," as Murray
says--an immense terrace laid out, in the highest part of the town, as a
garden, and commanding in all directions a view which in clear weather
must be of the finest. I strolled there in the intervals of showers, and
saw only the nearer beauties--a great pompous arch of triumph in honour
of Louis XIV. (which is not, properly speaking, in the garden, but faces
it, straddling across the _place_ by which you approach it from the
town), an equestrian statue of that monarch set aloft in the middle of
the terrace, and a very exalted and complicated fountain, which forms a
background to the picture. This fountain gushes from a kind of hydraulic
temple, or _château d'eau_, to which you ascend by broad flights of
steps, and which is fed by a splendid aqueduct, stretched in the most
ornamental and unexpected manner across the neighbouring valley. All
this work dates from the middle of the last century. The combination of
features--the triumphal arch, or gate; the wide fair terrace, with its
beautiful view; the statue of the grand monarch; the big architectural
fountain, which would not surprise one at Rome, but does surprise one at
Montpellier; and to complete the effect, the extraordinary aqueduct,
charmingly fore-shortened--all this is worthy of a capital, of a little
court-city. The whole place, with its repeated steps, its balustrades,
its massive and plentiful stonework, is full of the air of the last
century--_sent bien son dix-huitième siècle_; none the less so, I am
afraid, that, as I read in my faithful Murray, after the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes the block, the stake, the wheel had been erected
here for the benefit of the desperate Camisards.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxvi
[The Pont du Gard]
It was a pleasure to feel one's self in Provence again--the land where
the silver-grey earth is impregnated with the light of the sky. To
celebrate the event, as soon as I arrived at Nîmes I engaged a calèche
to convey me to the Pont du Gard. The day was yet young and was
exceptionally fair; it appeared well, for a longish drive, to take
advantage, without delay, of such security. After I had left the town I
became more intimate with that Provençal charm which I had already
enjoyed from the window of the train, and which glowed in the sweet
sunshine and the white rocks and lurked in the smoke puffs of the little
olives. The olive-trees in Provence are half the landscape. They are
neither so tall, so stout, nor so richly contorted as you have seen them
beyond the Alps; but this mild colourless bloom seems the very texture
of the country. The road from Nîmes, for a distance of fifteen miles, is
superb; broad enough for an army and as white and firm as a
dinner-table. It stretches away over undulations which have a kind of
rhythmic value, and in the curves it makes through the wide, free
country, where there is never a hedge or a wall and the detail is always
exquisite, there is something majestic, almost processional. Some twenty
minutes before I reached the little inn that marks the termination of
the drive my vehicle met with an accident which just missed being
serious, and which engaged the attention of a gentleman who, followed by
his groom and mounted on a strikingly handsome horse, happened to ride
up at the moment. This young man, who, with his good looks and charming
manner, might have stepped out of a novel of Octave Feuillet, gave me
some very intelligent advice in reference to one of my horses that had
been injured, and was so good as to accompany me to the inn, with the
resources of which he was acquainted, to see that his recommendations
were carried out. The result of our interview was that he invited me to
come and look at a small but ancient château in the neighbourhood, which
he had the happiness--not the greatest in the world, he intimated--to
inhabit, and at which I engaged to present myself after I should have
spent an hour at the Pont du Gard. For the moment, when we separated, I
gave all my attention to that great structure. You are very near it
before you see it; the ravine it spans suddenly opens and exhibits the
picture. The scene at this point grows extremely beautiful. The ravine
is the valley of the Garden, which the road from Nîmes has followed some
time without taking account of it, but which, exactly at the right
distance from the aqueduct, deepens and expands and puts on those
characteristics which are best suited to give it effect.