rocks and wild shrubbery, hangs over the clear-coloured river, in whose
slow course there is, here and there, a deeper pool. Over the valley,
from side to side and ever so high in the air, stretch the three tiers
of the tremendous bridge. They are unspeakably imposing, and nothing
could well be more Roman. The hugeness, the solidity, the
unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude of the whole thing leave you
nothing to say--at the time--and make you stand gazing. You simply feel
that it is noble and perfect, that it has the quality of greatness. A
road, branching from the highway, descends to the level of the river and
passes under one of the arches. This road has a wide margin of grass and
loose stones, which slopes upward into the bank of the ravine. You may
sit here as long as you please, staring up at the light, strong piers;
the spot is sufficiently "wild," though two or three stone benches have
been erected on it. I remained there an hour and got a complete
impression; the place was perfectly soundless and, for the time at
least, lonely; the splendid afternoon had begun to fade, and there was a
fascination in the object I had come to see. It came to pass that at the
same time I discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality.
That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in
the nice adaptation of the means to the end. The means are always
exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigour was
apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing
small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great. Of this Roman
rigour the Pont du Gard is an admirable example. It would be a great
injustice, however, not to insist upon its
[Illustration: THE PONT DU GARD.]
beauty--a kind of manly beauty, that of an object constructed not to
please but to serve, and impressive simply from the scale on which it
carries out this intention. The number of arches in each tier is
different; they are smaller and more numerous as they ascend. The
preservation of the thing is extraordinary; nothing has crumbled or
collapsed; every feature remains, and the huge blocks of stone, of a
brownish-yellow (as if they had been baked by the Provençal sun for
eighteen centuries), pile themselves, without mortar or cement, as
evenly as the day they were laid together. All this to carry the water
of a couple of springs to a little provincial city! The conduit on the
top has retained its shape and traces of the cement with which it was
lined. When the vague twilight began to gather, the lonely valley seemed
to fill itself with the shadow of the Roman name, as if the mighty
empire were still as erect as the supports of the aqueduct; and it was
open to a solitary tourist, sitting there sentimental, to believe that
no people has ever been, or will ever be, as great as that, measured, as
we measure the greatness of an individual, by the push they gave to what
they undertook. The Pont du Gard is one of the three or four deepest
impressions they have left; it speaks of them in a manner with which
they might have been satisfied.
I feel as if it were scarcely discreet to indicate the whereabouts of
the château of the obliging young man I had met on the way from Nîmes; I
must content myself with saying that it nestled in an enchanting
valley--_dans le fond_, as they say in France--and that I took my course
thither on foot after leaving the Pont du Gard. I find it noted in my
journal as "an adorable little corner." The principal feature of the
place is a couple of very ancient towers, brownish-yellow in hue, and
mantled in scarlet Virginia-creeper. One of these towers, reputed to be
of Saracenic origin, is isolated, and is only the more effective; the
other is incorporated in the house, which is delightfully fragmentary
and irregular. It had got to be late by this time, and the lonely
_castel_ looked crepuscular and mysterious. An old housekeeper was sent
for, who showed me the rambling interior; and then the young man took me
into a dim old drawing-room, which had no less than four chimney-pieces,
all unlighted, and gave me a refection of fruit and sweet wine. When I
praised the wine and asked him what it was, he said simply "C'est du vin
de ma mère!" Throughout my little journey I had never yet felt myself so
far from Paris; and this was a sensation I enjoyed more than my host,
who was an involuntary exile, consoling himself with laying out a
_manège_ which he showed me as I walked away. His civility was great,
and I was greatly touched by it. On my way back to the little inn where
I had left my vehicle I passed the Pont du Gard and took another look at
it. Its great arches made windows for the evening sky, and the rocky
ravine, with its dusky cedars and shining river, was lonelier than
before. At the inn I swallowed, or tried to swallow, a glass of horrible
wine with my coachman; after which, with my reconstructed team, I drove
back to Nîmes in the moonlight. It only added a more solitary whiteness
to the constant sheen of the Provençal landscape.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxvii
[Aigues-Mortes]
The weather the next day was equally fair, so that it seemed an
imprudence not to make sure of Aigues-Mortes. Nîmes itself could wait;
at a pinch I could attend to Nîmes in the rain. It was my belief that
Aigues-Mortes was a little gem, and it is natural to desire that gems
should have an opportunity to sparkle. This is an excursion of but a few
hours, and there is a little friendly, familiar, dawdling train that
will convey you, in time for a noonday breakfast, to the small dead town
where the blessed Saint Louis twice embarked for the Crusades. You may
get back to Nîmes for dinner; the run--or rather the walk, for the train
doesn't run--is of about an hour. I found the little journey charming
and looked out of the carriage window, on my right, at the distant
Cévennes, covered with tones of amber and blue, and, all around, at
vineyards red with the touch of October. The grapes were gone, but the
plants had a colour of their own.
Within a certain distance of Aigues-Mortes they give place to wide
salt-marshes, traversed by two canals; and over this expanse the train
rumbles slowly upon a narrow causeway, failing for some time, though you
know you are near the object of your curiosity, to bring you to sight of
anything but the horizon. Suddenly it appears, the towered and embattled
mass, lying so low that the crest of its defences seems to rise straight
out of the ground; and it is not till the train stops close before them
that you are able to take the full measure of its walls.
Aigues-Mortes stands on the edge of a wide _étang_, or shallow inlet of
the sea, the farther side of which is divided by a narrow band of coast
from the Gulf of Lyons. Next after Carcassonne, to which it forms an
admirable _pendant_, it is the most perfect thing of the kind in France.
It has a rival in the person of Avignon, but the ramparts of Avignon are
much less effective. Like Carcassonne, it is completely surrounded with
its old fortifications; and if they are far simpler in character (there
is but one circle), they are quite as well preserved. The moat has been
filled up, and the site of the town might be figured by a billiard-table
without pockets. On this absolute level, covered with coarse grass,
Aigues-Mortes presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a
school-boy draws upon his slate or that we see in the background of
early Flemish pictures--a simple parallelogram, of a contour almost
absurdly bare, broken at intervals by angular towers and square holes.
Such, literally speaking, is this delightful little city, which needs to
be seen to tell its full story. It is extraordinarily pictorial, and if
it is a very small sister of Carcassonne, it has at least the essential
features of the family. Indeed, it is even more like an image and less
like a reality than Carcassonne; for by position and prospect it seems
even more detached from the life of the present day. It is true that
Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it sees certain bags of salt piled
into barges which stand in a canal beside it, and which carry their
cargo into actual places. But nothing could well be more drowsy and
desultory than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two
or three brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier, who
strolled on the little quay beneath the western wall. "C'est bien
plaisant, c'est bien paisible," said this worthy man, with whom I had
some conversation; and pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed, though
the former of these epithets may suggest an element of gaiety in which
Aigues-Mortes is deficient. The sand, the salt, the dull sea-view,
surround it with a bright, quiet melancholy. There are fifteen towers
and nine gates, five of which are on the southern side, overlooking the
water. I walked all round the place three times (it doesn't take long),
but lingered most under the southern wall, where the afternoon light
slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat down on an old stone and
looked away to the desolate salt-marshes and the still, shining surface
of the _étang_; and, as I did so, reflected that this was a queer little
out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the great dominions of
either monarch, for that pompous interview which took place, in 1538,
between Francis I. and Charles V. It was also not easy to perceive how
Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the Holy Land, set his
army afloat in such very undeveloped channels. An hour later I purchased
in the town a little pamphlet by M. Marius Topin, who undertakes to
explain this latter anomaly and to show that there is water enough in
the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have sustained a fleet of
crusaders. I was unable to trace the channel that he points out, but was
glad to believe that, as he contends, the sea has not retreated from the
town since the thirteenth century. It was comfortable to think that
things are not so changed as that. M. Topin indicates that the other
French ports of the Mediterranean were not then _disponibles_, and that
Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible spot for an embarkation.
Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not
crumbled like the Cité of Carcassonne. It can hardly be said to be
alive; but if it is dead it has been very neatly embalmed. The hand of
the restorer rests on it constantly; but this artist has not, as at
Carcassonne, had miracles to accomplish. The interior is very still and
empty, with small stony, whitewashed streets tenanted by a stray dog, a
stray cat, a stray old woman. In the middle is a little _place_, with
two or three cafés decorated by wide awnings--a little _place_ of which
the principal feature is a very bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by
Pradier. It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that
bears the name of that pious monarch. You may walk round the enceinte of
Aigues-Mortes both outside and in; but you may not, as at Carcassonne,
make a portion of this circuit on the _chemin de ronde_, the little
projecting footway attached to the inner face of the battlements. This
footway, wide enough only for a single pedestrian, is in the best order,
and near each of the gates a flight of steps leads up to it; but a
locked gate at the top of the steps makes access impossible, or at least
unlawful. Aigues-Mortes, however, has its citadel, an immense tower,
larger than any of the others, a little detached
[Illustration: AIGUES-MORTES]
and standing at the north-west angle of the town. I called upon the
_casernier_--the custodian of the walls--and in his absence I was
conducted through this big Tour de Constance by his wife, a very mild,
meek woman, yellow with the traces of fever and ague--a scourge which,
as might be expected in a town whose name denotes "dead waters," enters
freely at the nine gates. The Tour de Constance is of extraordinary
girth and solidity, divided into three superposed circular chambers,
with very fine vaults, which are lighted by embrasures of prodigious
depth, converging to windows little larger than loopholes. The place
served for years as a prison to many of the Protestants of the south
whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had exposed to atrocious
penalties, and the annals of these dreadful chambers in the first half
of the last century were written in tears and blood. Some of the
recorded cases of long confinement there make one marvel afresh at what
man has inflicted and endured. In a country in which a policy of
extermination was to be put into practice this horrible tower was an
obvious resource. From the battlements at the top, which is surmounted
by an old disused lighthouse, you see the little compact rectangular
town, which looks hardly bigger than a garden-patch, mapped out beneath
you, and follow the plain configuration of its defences. You take
possession of it, and you feel that you will remember it always.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxviii
[Nîmes]
After this I was free to look about me at Nîmes, and I did so with such
attention as the place appeared to require. At the risk of seeming too
easily and too frequently disappointed, I will say that it required
rather less than I had been prepared to give. It is a town of three or
four fine features rather than a town with, as I may say, a general
figure. In general Nîmes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman
remains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail
in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses
are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which
had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland. It
is true that this church looked out on a square completely French--a
square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a classical
_palais de justice_ embellished with trees and parapets and occupied in
the centre with a group of allegorical statues such as one encounters
only in the cities of France, the chief of these being a colossal figure
by Pradier representing Nîmes. An English, an American town which should
have such a monument, such a square as this would be a place of great
pretensions; but, like so many little _villes de province_ in the
country of which I write, Nîmes is easily ornamental. What nobler
element can there be than the Roman baths at the foot of Mont Cavalier
and the delightful old garden that surrounds them? All that quarter of
Nîmes has every reason to be proud of itself; it has been revealed to
the world at large by copious photography. A clear, abundant stream
gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered with trees and laid out in
paths), and is distributed into basins which sufficiently refer
themselves to the period that gave them birth--the period that has left
its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we admired at Montpellier. Here
are the same terraces and steps and balustrades, and a system of
waterworks less impressive perhaps, but very ingenious and charming. The
whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French eighteenth
century; for the remains of the antique baths are in a measure
incorporated in the modern fountains. In a corner of this umbrageous
precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known as a temple of Diana,
but was more apparently a _nymphæum_, and appears to have had a graceful
connection with the adjacent baths. I learn from Murray that this little
temple, of the period of Augustus, "was reduced to its present state of
ruin in 1577;" the moment at which the townspeople, threatened with a
siege by the troops of the Crown, partly demolished it lest it should
serve as a cover to the enemy. The remains are very fragmentary, but
they serve to show that the place was lovely. I spent half an hour in
it on a perfect Sunday morning (it is enclosed by a high _grille_,
carefully tended, and has a warden of its own), and with the help of my
imagination tried to reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the
Gallo-Roman days. I do wrong perhaps to say that I _tried_; from a
flight so deliberate I should have shrunk. But there was a certain
contagion of antiquity in the air; and among the ruins of baths and
temples, in the very spot where the aqueduct that crosses the Gardon in
the wondrous manner I had seen discharged itself, the picture of a
splendid paganism seemed vaguely to glow. Roman baths--Roman baths;
those words alone were a scene. Everything was changed: I was strolling
in a _jardin français_; the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very
modest mountain), hanging over the place, is crowned with a shapeless
tower, which is as likely to be of mediæval as of antique origin; and
yet, as I leaned on the parapet of one of the fountains, where a flight
of curved steps (a hemicycle, as the French say) descended into a basin
full of dark, cool recesses, where the slabs of the Roman foundations
gleam through the clear green water--as in this attitude I surrendered
myself to contemplation and reverie, it seemed to me that I touched for
a moment the ancient world. Such moments are illuminating, and the light
of this one mingles, in my memory, with the dusky greenness of the
Jardin de la Fontaine.
The fountain proper--the source of all these distributed waters--is the
prettiest thing in the world, a reduced copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up
at the foot of the Mont Cavalier, at a point where that eminence rises
with a certain cliff-like effect, and, like other springs in the same
circumstances, appears to issue
[Illustration: NÎMES--THE CATHEDRAL]
from the rock with a sort of quivering stillness. I trudged up the Mont
Cavalier--it is a matter of five minutes--and having committed this
cockneyism, enhanced it presently by another. I ascended the stupid Tour
Magne, the mysterious structure I mentioned a moment ago. The only
feature of this dateless tube, except the inevitable collection of
photographs to which you are introduced by the doorkeeper, is the view
you enjoy from its summit. This view is of course remarkably fine, but I
am ashamed to say I have not the smallest recollection of it; for while
I looked into the brilliant spaces of the air I seemed still to see only
what I saw in the depths of the Roman baths--the image, disastrously
confused and vague, of a vanished world. This world, however, has left
at Nîmes a far more considerable memento than a few old stones covered
with water-moss. The Roman arena is the rival of those of Verona and of
Arles; at a respectful distance it emulates the Colosseum. It is a small
Colosseum, if I may be allowed the expression, and is in much better
preservation than the great circus at Rome. This is especially true of
the external walls, with their arches, pillars, cornices. I must add
that one should not speak of preservation, in regard to the arena at
Nîmes, without speaking also of repair. After the great ruin ceased to
be despoiled it began to be protected, and most of its wounds have been
dressed with new material. These matters concern the archæologist; and I
felt here, as I felt afterwards at Arles, that one of the profane, in
the presence of such a monument, can only admire and hold his tongue.
The great impression, on the whole, is an impression of wonder that so
much should have survived. What remains at Nîmes, after all dilapidation
is estimated, is astounding. I spent an hour in the Arènes on that same
sweet Sunday morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that
the corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are
still virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the Colosseum,
whose sublimity of size, however, can afford to dispense with detail.
The seats at Nîmes, like those at Verona, have been largely renewed; not
that this mattered much, as I lounged on the cool surface of one of them
and admired the mighty concavity of the place and the elliptical
sky-line, broken by uneven blocks and forming the rim of the monstrous
cup--a cup that had been filled with horrors. And yet I made my
reflections: I said to myself that though a Roman arena is one of the
most impressive of the works of man, it has a touch of that same
stupidity which I ventured to discover in the Pont du Gard. It is
brutal; it is monotonous; it is not at all exquisite. The Arènes at
Nîmes were arranged for a bull-fight--a form of recreation that, as I
was informed, is much _dans les habitudes Nîmoises_, and very common
throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it is the
usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nîmes it has a
characteristic setting, but in the villages the patrons of the game make
a circle of carts and barrels, on which the spectators perch themselves.
I was surprised at the prevalence in mild Provence of the Iberian vice,
and hardly know whether it makes the custom more respectable that at
Nîmes and Arles the thing is shabbily and imperfectly done. The bulls
are rarely killed, and indeed often are bulls only in the Irish sense of
the term--being domestic and motherly cows. Such an entertainment of
course does not supply to the arena that element of the exquisite which
I
[Illustration: NÎMES--THE AMPHITHEATRE]
spoke of as wanting. The exquisite at Nîmes is mainly represented by the
famous Maison Carrée. The first impression you receive from this
delicate little building, as you stand before it, is that you have
already seen it many times. Photographs, engravings, models, medals,
have placed it definitely in your eye, so that from the sentiment with
which you regard it curiosity and surprise are almost completely, and
perhaps deplorably, absent. Admiration remains, however--admiration of a
familiar and even slightly patronising kind. The Maison Carrée does not
overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great
sensations of antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite
of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvellously
preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming
compactness, seem to bring one nearer to the century that built it than
the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest
that vibrates from one age to another when the note of taste is struck.
If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy
production, the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard
that conducts to it, adorned with inferior cafés and tobacco-shops.
Here, in a respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations and with
the theatre, of a classic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square
house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it
first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if
it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of
a playing-card, and he expresses his admiration for it by the singular
wish that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris. He even goes
so far as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been
rendered to its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than
to "have" in that city "le Panthéon de Rome, quelques temples de Grèce."
Stendhal found it amusing to write in the character of a
_commis-voyageur_, and sometimes it occurs to his reader that he really
was one.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxix
[Tarascon]