for the love of Alphonse Daudet, who has written nothing more genial
than "Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin," and the story of the
"siege" of the bright, dead little town (a mythic siege by the
Prussians) in the "Contes du Lundi." In the introduction which, for the
new edition of his works, he has lately supplied to "Tartarin," the
author of this extravagant but kindly satire gives some account of the
displeasure with which he has been visited by the ticklish Tarasconnais.
Daudet relates that in his attempt to shed a humorous light upon some of
the more vivid phases of the Provençal character he selected Tarascon at
a venture; not because the temperament of its natives is more
vainglorious than that of their neighbours, or their rebellion against
the "despotism of fact" more marked, but simply because he had to name a
particular Provençal city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of
women, a true "_produit du midi_," as Daudet says, a character of the
most extravagant, genial comedy. He is a minimised Don Quixote, with
much less dignity but with equal good faith; and the story of his
exploits is a little masterpiece of the free fantastic. The
Tarasconnais, however, declined to take the joke, and opened the vials
of their wrath upon the mocking child of Nîmes, who would have been
better employed, they doubtless thought, in showing up the infirmities
of his own family. I am bound to add that when I passed through Tarascon
they did not appear to be in the least out of humour. Nothing could have
been brighter, easier, more suggestive of amiable indifference, than the
picture it presented to my mind. It lies quietly beside the Rhone,
looking across at Beaucaire, which seems very distant and independent,
and tacitly consenting to let the castle of the good King René of Anjou,
which projects very boldly into the river, pass for its most interesting
feature. The other features are, primarily, a sort of vivid sleepiness
in the aspect of the place, as if the September noon (it had lingered on
into October) lasted longer there than elsewhere; certain low arcades
which make the streets look grey and exhibit empty vistas; and a very
curious and beautiful walk beside the Rhone, denominated the Chaussée--a
long and narrow causeway, densely shaded by two rows of magnificent old
trees planted in its embankment and rendered doubly effective at the
moment I passed over it by a little train of collegians who had been
taken out for mild exercise by a pair of young priests. Lastly one may
say that a striking element of Tarascon, as of any town that lies on the
Rhone, is simply the Rhone itself; the big brown flood, of uncertain
temper, which has never taken time to forget that it is a child of the
mountain and the glacier, and that such an origin carries with it great
privileges. Later, at Avignon, I observed it in the exercise of these
privileges, chief among which was that of frightening the good people of
the old papal city half out of their wits.
The château of King René serves to-day as the prison of a district, and
the traveller who wishes to look into it must obtain his permission at
the Mairie of Tarascon. If he have had a certain experience of French
manners, his application will be accompanied with the forms of a
considerable obsequiosity, and in this case his request will be granted
as civilly as it has been made. The castle has more of the air of a
severely feudal fortress than I should suppose the period of its
construction (the first half of the fifteenth century) would have
warranted; being tremendously bare and perpendicular, and constructed
for comfort only in the sense that it was arranged for defence. It is a
square and simple mass, composed of small yellow stones and perched on a
pedestal of rock which easily commands the river. The building has the
usual circular towers at the corners and a heavy cornice at the top, and
immense stretches of sun-scorched wall relieved at wide intervals by
small windows, heavily cross-barred. It has, above all, an extreme
steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as
sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle has kept its large
moat, which is now a hollow filled with wild plants. To this tall
fortress the good René retired in the middle of the fifteenth century,
finding it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a dominion
which had included Naples and Sicily, Lorraine and Anjou. He had been a
much-tried monarch and the sport of a various fortune, fighting half
his life for thrones he didn't care for, and exalted only to be quickly
cast down. Provence was the country of his affection, and the memory of
his troubles did not prevent him from holding a joyous court at Tarascon
and at Aix. He finished the castle at Tarascon, which had been begun
earlier in the century--finished it, I suppose, for consistency's sake,
in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in
accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his
old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante,
addicted to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in
the image that he has imprinted on the page of history. He was both
clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not embittered
him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet
Provence, and his sweet Provence has been grateful; it has woven a light
tissue of legend around the memory of the good King René.
I strolled over his dusky habitation--it must have taken all his good
humour to light it up--at the heels of the custodian, who showed me the
usual number of castle-properties: a deep, well-like court; a collection
of winding staircases and vaulted chambers, the embrasures of whose
windows and the recesses of whose doorways reveal a tremendous thickness
of wall. These things constitute the general identity of old castles;
and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of
step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and
remember, and contents one's self with consigning them to the honourable
limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not in the
least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects Tarascon with
Beaucaire, in
[Illustration: TARASCON--THE CASTLE]
order to examine the old fortress whose ruins adorn the latter city. It
stands on a foundation of rock much higher than that of Tarascon, and
looks over with a melancholy expression at its better-conditioned
brother. Its position is magnificent and its outline very gallant. I was
well rewarded for my pilgrimage; for if the castle of Beaucaire is only
a fragment, the whole place, with its position and its views, is an
ineffaceable picture. It was the stronghold of the Montmorencys, and its
last tenant was that rash Duke François whom Richelieu, seizing every
occasion to trample on a great noble, caused to be beheaded at Toulouse,
where we saw, in the Capitol, the butcher's knife with which the
cardinal pruned the crown of France of its thorns. The castle, after the
death of this victim, was virtually demolished. Its site, which nature
to-day has taken again to herself, has an extraordinary charm. The mass
of rock that it formerly covered rises high above the town and is as
precipitous as the side of the Rhone. A tall, rusty iron gate admits you
from a quiet corner of Beaucaire to a wild tangled garden covering the
side of the hill--for the whole place forms the public promenade of the
townsfolk--a garden without flowers, with little steep, rough paths that
wind under a plantation of small, scrubby stone-pines. Above this is the
grassy platform of the castle, enclosed on one side only (toward the
river) by a large fragment of wall and a very massive dungeon. There are
benches placed in the lee of the wall, and others on the edge of the
platform, where one may enjoy a view, beyond the river, of certain
peeled and scorched undulations. A sweet desolation, an everlasting
peace, seemed to hang in the air. A very old man (a fragment, like the
castle itself) emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the
honours--a very gentle, obsequious, tottering, toothless, grateful old
man. He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you
may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon
and the barefaced, bald-headed hills behind it. It may appear that I
insist too much upon the nudity of the Provençal horizon--too much
considering that I have spoken of the prospect from the heights of
Beaucaire as lovely. But it is an exquisite bareness; it seems to exist
for the purpose of allowing one to follow the delicate lines of the
hills and touch with the eyes, as it were, the smallest inflections of
the landscape. It makes the whole thing wonderfully bright and pure.
Beaucaire used to be the scene of a famous fair, the great fair of the
south of France. It has gone the way of most fairs, even in France,
where these delightful exhibitions hold their own much better than might
be supposed. It is still held in the month of July; but the bourgeoises
of Tarascon send to the Magasin du Louvre for their smart dresses, and
the principal glory of the scene is its long tradition. Even now,
however, it ought to be the prettiest of all fairs, for it takes place
in, a charming wood which lies just beneath the castle, beside the
Rhone. The booths, the barracks, the platforms of the mountebanks, the
bright-coloured crowd, diffused through this midsummer shade and spotted
here and there with the rich Provençal sunshine, must be of the most
pictorial effect. It is highly probable too that it offers a large
collection of pretty faces; for even in the few hours that I spent at
Tarascon I discovered symptoms of the purity of feature for which the
women of the _pays d'Arles_ are renowned. The Arlesian head-dress was
visible in the streets; and this delightful coiffure is so associated
with a charming facial oval, a dark mild eye, a straight Greek nose,
and a mouth worthy of all the rest, that it conveys a presumption of
beauty which gives the wearer time either to escape or to please you. I
have read somewhere, however, that Tarascon is supposed to produce
handsome men, as Arles is known to deal in handsome women. It may be
that I should have found the Tarasconnais very fine fellows if I had
encountered enough specimens to justify an induction. But there are very
few males in the streets, and the place presented no appearance of
activity. Here and there the black coif of an old woman or of a young
girl was framed by a low doorway; but for the rest, as I have said,
Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta. There was not a creature in
the little church of Saint Martha, which I made a point of visiting
before I returned to the station, and which, with its fine romanesque
side-portal and its pointed and crocketed gothic spire, is as curious as
it need be in view of its tradition. It stands in a quiet corner where
the grass grows between the small cobble-stones, and you pass beneath a
deep archway to reach it. The tradition relates that Saint Martha tamed
with her own hands and attached to her girdle a dreadful dragon who was
known as the Tarasque and is reported to have given his name to the city
on whose site (amid the rocks which form the base of the château) he had
his cavern. The dragon perhaps is the symbol of a ravening paganism
dispelled by the eloquence of a sweet evangelist. The bones of the
interesting saint, at all events, were found, in the eleventh century,
in a cave beneath the spot on which her altar now stands. I know not
what had become of the bones of the dragon.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxx
[Arles]
There are two shabby old inns at Arles which compete closely for your
custom. I mean by this that if you elect to go to the Hôtel du Forum,
the Hôtel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it (at a right angle),
watches your arrival with ill-concealed disapproval; and if you take the
chances of its neighbour, the Hôtel du Forum seems to glare at you
invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these
establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that it
had been the other. The two stand together on the Place des Hommes, a
little public square of Arles which somehow quite misses its effect. As
a city, indeed, Arles quite misses its effect in every way; and if it is
a charming place, as I think it is, I can hardly tell the reason why.
The straight-nosed Arlésiennes account for it in some degree; and the
remainder may be charged to the ruins of the arena and the theatre.
Beyond this, I remember with affection the ill-proportioned little Place
des Hommes; not at all monumental, and given over to puddles and to
shabby cafés. I recall with tenderness the tortuous and featureless
streets, which looked liked the streets of a village and were paved with
villainous little sharp stones, making all exercise penitential.
Consecrated by association is even a tiresome walk that I took the
evening I arrived, with the purpose of obtaining a view of the Rhone. I
had been to Arles before, years ago, and it seemed to me that I
remembered finding on the banks of the stream some sort of picture. I
think that on the evening on which I speak there was a watery moon,
which it seemed to me would light up the past as well as the present.
But I found no picture, and I scarcely found the Rhone at all. I lost my
way, and there was not a creature in the streets to whom I could appeal.
Nothing could be more provincial than the situation of Arles at ten
o'clock at night. At last I arrived at a kind of embankment where I
could see the great mud-coloured stream slipping along in the soundless
darkness. It had come on to rain, I know not what had happened to the
moon, and the whole place was anything but gay. It was not what I had
looked for; what I had looked for was in the irrecoverable past. I
groped my way back to the inn over the infernal _cailloux_, feeling like
a discomfited Dogberry. I remember now that this hotel was the one
(whichever that may be) which has the fragment of a Gallo-Roman portico
inserted into one of its angles. I had chosen it for the sake of this
exceptional ornament. It was damp and dark, and the floors felt gritty
to the feet; it was an establishment at which the dreadful _gras-double_
might have appeared at the table d'hôte, as it had done at Narbonne.
Nevertheless I was glad to get back to it; and nevertheless too--and
this is the moral of my simple anecdote--my pointless little walk (I
don't speak of the pavement) suffuses itself, as I look back upon it,
with a romantic tone. And in relation to the inn I suppose I had better
mention that I am well aware of the inconsistency of a person who
dislikes the modern caravansary and yet grumbles when he finds a hotel
of the superannuated sort. One ought to choose, it would seem, and make
the best of either alternative. The two old taverns at Arles are quite
unimproved; such as they must have been in the infancy of the modern
world, when Stendhal passed that way and the lumbering diligence
deposited him in the Place des Hommes, such in every detail they are
to-day. _Vieilles auberges de France_, one ought to enjoy their gritty
floors and greasy window-panes. Let it be put on record therefore that I
have been, I won't say less comfortable, but at least less happy, at
better inns.
To be really historic, I should have mentioned that before going to look
for the Rhone I had spent part of the evening on the opposite side of
the little place, and that I indulged in this recreation for two
definite reasons. One of these was that I had an opportunity of
gossiping at a café with a conversable young Englishman whom I had met
in the afternoon at Tarascon and more remotely, in other years, in
London; the other was that there sat enthroned behind the counter a
splendid mature Arlésienne, whom my companion and I agreed that it was a
rare privilege to contemplate. There is no rule of good manners or
morals which makes it improper, at a café, to fix one's eyes upon the
_dame de comptoir_; the lady is, in the nature of things, a part of your
_consummation_. We were therefore free to
[Illustration: ARLES--ST. TROPHIMUS]
admire without restriction the handsomest person I had ever seen give
change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would
never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully
rich and robust, and full of a certain physical nobleness. Though she
was not really old, she was antique; and she was very grave, even a
little sad. She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled
coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Cæsar. I have seen
washerwomen in the Trastevere who were perhaps as handsome as she; but
even the head-dress of the Roman contadina contributes less to the
dignity of the person born to wear it than the sweet and stately
Arlesian cap, which sits at once aloft and on the back of the head;
which is accompanied with a wide black bow covering a considerable part
of the crown; and which, finally, accommodates itself indescribably well
to the manner in which the tresses of the front are pushed behind the
ears.
This admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar has distracted me a little,
for I am still not sufficiently historical. Before going to the café I
had dined, and before dining I had found time to go and look at the
arena. Then it was that I discovered that Arles has no general
physiognomy and, except the delightful little church of Saint Trophimus,
no architecture, and that the rugosities of its dirty lanes affect the
feet like knife-blades. It was not then, on the other hand, that I saw
the arena best. The second day of my stay at Arles I devoted to a
pilgrimage to the strange old hill town of Les Baux, the mediæval
Pompeii, of which I shall give myself the pleasure of speaking. The
evening of that day, however (my friend and I returned in time for a
late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the
light of a magnificent moon and gathered an impression which has lost
little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been
aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any
irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the
heavens in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was
admirable; it brought back the impression of the way, in Rome itself, on
evenings like that, the moonshine rests upon broken shafts and slabs of
antique pavement. As we sat in the theatre looking at the two lone
columns that survive--part of the decoration of the back of the
stage--and at the fragments of ruin around them, we might have been in
the Roman Forum. The arena at Arles, with its great magnitude, is less
complete than that of Nîmes; it has suffered even more the assaults of
time and the children of time, and it has been less repaired. The seats
are almost wholly wanting; but the external walls, minus the topmost
tier of arches, are massively, ruggedly complete; and the vaulted
corridors seem as solid as the day they were built. The whole thing is
superbly vast and as monumental, for a place of light amusement--what is
called in America a "variety-show"--as it entered only into the Roman
mind to make such establishments. The _podium_ is much higher than at
Nîmes, and many of the great white slabs that faced it have been
recovered and put into their places. The proconsular box has been more
or less reconstructed, and the great converging passages of approach to
it are still majestically distinct; so that, as I sat there in the
moon-charmed stillness, leaning my elbows on the battered parapet of the
ring, it was not impossible to listen to the murmurs and shudders, the
thick voice of the circus, that died away fifteen hundred years ago.
[Illustration: ARLES--RUINS OF THE ROMAN THEATRE]
The theatre has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with
a different music. The Roman theatre at Arles seemed to me one of the
most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular
fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton--the arena may be called a
skeleton--for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the
row of columns which formed the scene--the permanent back-scene--remain;
two marble pillars--I just mentioned them--are upright, with a fragment
of their entablature. Before them is the vacant space which was filled
by the stage, with the line of the proscenium distinct, marked by a deep
groove impressed upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a
high screen had been intended to fit into it. The semicircle formed by
the seats--half a cup--rises opposite; some of the rows are distinctly
marked. The floor, from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc
of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by
slabs of coloured marble--red, yellow and green--which, though terribly
battered and cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the
interior. Everything shows that it was on a great scale: the large sweep
of its enclosing walls, the massive corridors that passed behind the
auditorium and of which we can still perfectly take the measure. The way
in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the architects of
our epochs, as also the immense size of the place is a proof of
extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors. It was
after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena that we
came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin. The principal
entrance was locked, but we effected an easy _escalade_, scaled a low
parapet, and descended into the place behind the scenes. It was as light
as day, and the solitude was complete. The two slim columns, as we sat
on the broken benches, stood there like a pair of silent actors. What I
called touching just now was the thought that here the human voice, the
utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of
intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven
armour, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short,
one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems no
profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of
Arles, who use it to pass, by no means in great numbers, from one part
of the town to the other; treading the old marble floor and brushing, if
need be, the empty benches. This familiarity does not kill the place
again; it makes it, on the contrary, live a little--makes the present
and the past touch each other.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxi
[Arles: the Museum]
The third lion of Arles has nothing to do with the ancient world, but
only with the old one. The church of Saint Trophimus, whose wonderful
romanesque porch is the principal ornament of the principal _place_--a
_place_ otherwise distinguished by the presence of a slim and tapering
obelisk in the middle, as well as by that of the hôtel de ville and the
museum--the interesting church of Saint Trophimus swears a little, as
the French say, with the peculiar character of Arles. It is very
remarkable, but I would rather it were in another place. Arles is
delightfully pagan, and Saint Trophimus, with its apostolic sculptures,
is rather a false note. These sculptures are equally remarkable for
their primitive vigour and for the perfect preservation in which they
have come down to us. The deep recess of a round-arched porch of the
twelfth century is covered with quaint figures which have not lost a
nose or a finger. An angular Byzantine-looking Christ sits in a
diamond-shaped frame at the summit of the arch, surrounded by little
angels, by great apostles, by winged beasts, by a hundred sacred symbols
and grotesque ornaments. It is a dense embroidery of sculpture, black
with time, but as uninjured as if it had been kept under glass. One good
mark for the French Revolution! Of the interior of the church, which has
a nave of the twelfth century and a choir three hundred years more
recent, I chiefly remember the odd feature that the romanesque aisles
are so narrow that you literally--or almost--squeeze through them. You
do so with some eagerness, for your natural purpose is to pass out to
the cloister. This cloister, as distinguished and as perfect as the
porch, has a great deal of charm. Its four sides, which are not of the
same period (the earliest and best are of the twelfth century), have an
elaborate arcade, supported on delicate pairs of columns, the capitals
of which show an extraordinary variety of device and ornament. At the
corners of the quadrangle these columns take the form of curious human
figures. The whole thing is a gem of lightness and preservation and is
often cited for its beauty; but--if it doesn't sound too profane--I
prefer, especially at Arles, the ruins of the Roman theatre. The antique
element is too precious to be mingled with anything less rare. This
truth was very present to my mind during a ramble of a couple of hours
that I took just before leaving the place; and the glowing beauty of the
morning gave the last touch to the impression. I spent half an hour at
the Museum; then I took another look at the Roman
[Illustration: ARLES--DOOR OF ST. TROPHIMUS.]
theatre; after which I walked a little out of the town to the Aliscamps,
the old Elysian Fields, the meagre remnant of the old pagan place of
sepulture, which was afterwards used by the Christians, but has been for
ages deserted and now consists only of a melancholy avenue of cypresses
lined with a succession of ancient sarcophagi, empty, mossy and
mutilated. An iron-foundry, or some horrible establishment which is
conditioned upon tall chimneys and a noise of hammering and banging, has
been established near at hand; but the cypresses shut it out well
enough, and this small patch of Elysium is a very romantic corner.