usual batch of photographs on his mind, peeps out at you disapprovingly
while you linger opposite, before the charming portal of Saint
Trophimus, which you may look at for nothing. When you succumb to the
silent influence of his eye and go over to visit his collection, you
find yourself in a desecrated church, in which a variety of ancient
objects disinterred in Arlesian soil have been arranged without any
pomp. The best of these, I believe, were found in the ruins of the
theatre. Some of the most curious of them are early Christian
sarcophagi, exactly on the pagan model, but covered with rude yet
vigorously wrought images of the apostles and with illustrations of
scriptural history. Beauty of the highest kind, either of conception or
of execution, is absent from most of the Roman fragments, which belong
to the taste of a late period and a provincial civilisation. But a gulf
divides them from the bristling little imagery of the Christian
sarcophagi, in which, at the same time, one detects a vague emulation of
the rich examples by which their authors were surrounded. There is a
certain element of style in all the pagan things; there is not a hint
of it in the early Christian relics, among which, according to M.
Joanne, of the Guide, are to be found more fine sarcophagi than in any
collection but that of St. John Lateran. In two or three of the Roman
fragments there is a noticeable distinction; principally in a charming
bust of a boy, quite perfect, with those salient eyes that one sees in
antique portraits, and to which the absence of vision in the marble mask
gives a look, often very touching, as of a baffled effort to see; also
in the head of a woman, found in the ruins of the theatre, who, alas!
has lost her nose and whose noble, simple contour, barring this
deficiency, recalls the great manner of the Venus of Milo. There are
various rich architectural fragments which indicate that that edifice
was a very splendid affair. This little Museum at Arles, in short, is
the most Roman thing I know of out of Rome.
[Illustration: ARLES--THE CLOISTERS]
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxii
[Les Baux]
I find that I declared one evening, in a little journal I was keeping at
that time, that I was weary of writing (I was probably very sleepy), but
that it was essential I should make some note of my visit to Les Baux. I
must have gone to sleep as soon as I had recorded this necessity, for I
search my small diary in vain for any account of that enchanting spot. I
have nothing but my memory to consult--a memory which is fairly good in
regard to a general impression, but is terribly infirm in the matter of
details and items. We knew in advance, my companion and I, that Les Baux
was a pearl of picturesqueness; for had we not read as much in the
handbook of Murray, who has the testimony of an English nobleman as to
its attractions? We also knew that it lay some miles from Arles, on the
crest of the Alpilles, the craggy little mountains which, as I stood on
the breezy platform of Beaucaire, formed to my eye a charming, if
somewhat remote, background to Tarascon; this assurance having been
given us by the landlady of the inn at Arles, of whom we hired a rather
lumbering conveyance. The weather was not promising, but it proved a
good day for the mediæval Pompeii; a grey, melancholy, moist, but
rainless, or almost rainless day, with nothing in the sky to flout, as
the poet says, the dejected and pulverised past. The drive itself was
charming, for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the grey-green
landscape of Provence. It is never absolutely flat and yet is never
really ambitious, and is full both of entertainment and repose. It is in
constant undulation, and the bareness of the soil lends itself easily to
outline and profile. When I say the bareness I mean the absence of woods
and hedges. It blooms with heath and scented shrubs and stunted olive,
and the white rock shining through the scattered herbage has a
brightness which answers to the brightness of the sky. Of course it
needs the sunshine, for all southern countries look a little false under
the ground-glass of incipient bad weather. This was the case on the day
of my pilgrimage to Les Baux. Nevertheless I was glad to keep going, as
I was to arrive; and as I went it seemed to me that true happiness would
consist in wandering through such a land on foot, on September
afternoons, when one might stretch one's self on the warm ground in some
shady hollow and listen to the hum of bees and the whistle of melancholy
shepherds; for in Provence the shepherds whistle to their flocks. I saw
two or three of them, in the course of this drive to Les Baux,
meandering about, looking behind and calling upon the sheep in this way
to follow, which the sheep always did, very promptly, with ovine
unanimity. Nothing is more picturesque than to see a slow shepherd
threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside, with his
flock close behind him, necessarily expanded, yet keeping just at his
heels, bending and twisting as it goes and looking rather like the tail
of a dingy comet.
About four miles from Arles, as you drive northward towards the
Alpilles, of which Alphonse Daudet has spoken so often and, as he might
say, so intimately, stand on a hill that overlooks the road the very
considerable ruins of the abbey of Montmajour, one of the innumerable
remnants of a feudal and ecclesiastical (as well as an architectural)
past that one encounters in the south of France; remnants which, it must
be confessed, tend to introduce a certain confusion and satiety into the
passive mind of the tourist. Montmajour, however, is very impressive and
interesting; the only trouble with it is that, unless you have stopped
and returned to Arles, you see it in memory over the head of Les Baux,
which is a much more absorbing picture. A part of the mass of buildings
(the monastery) dates only from the last century; and the stiff
architecture of that period does not lend itself very gracefully to
desolation: it looks too much as if it had been burnt down the year
before. The monastery was demolished during the Revolution, and it
injures a little the effect of the very much more ancient fragments that
are connected with it. The whole place is on a great scale; it was a
rich and splendid abbey. The church, a vast basilica of the eleventh
century and of the noblest proportions, is virtually intact; I mean as
regards its essentials, for the details have completely vanished. The
huge solid shell is full of expression; it looks as if it had been
hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a
cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one
meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution;
and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something
beautiful and precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must
also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! Beneath the
church of Montmajour is a most extraordinary crypt, almost as big as the
edifice above it and making a complete subterranean temple, surrounded
with a circular gallery, or deambulatory, which expands at intervals
into five square chapels. There are other things, of which I have but a
confused memory: a great fortified keep; a queer little primitive chapel
hollowed out of the rock beneath these later structures and recommended
to the visitor's attention as the confessional of Saint Trophimus, who
shares with so many worthies the glory of being the first apostle of the
Gauls. Then there is a strange, small church, of the dimmest antiquity,
standing at a distance from the other buildings. I remember that after
we had let ourselves down a good many steepish places to visit crypts
and confessionals, we walked across a field to this archaic cruciform
edifice and went thence to a point farther down the road, where our
carriage was awaiting us. The chapel of the Holy Cross, as it is called,
is classed among the historic monuments of France; and I read in a
queer, rambling, ill-written book which I picked at Avignon, and in
which the author, M. Louis de Laincel, has buried a great deal of
curious information on the subject of Provence under a style inspiring
little confidence, that the "délicieuse chapelle de Sainte-Croix" is a
"véritable bijou artistique." He speaks of "a piece of lace in stone"
which runs from one end of the building to the other, but of which I am
obliged to confess that I have no recollection. I retain, however, a
sufficiently clear impression of the little superannuated temple, with
its four apses and its perceptible odour of antiquity--the odour of the
eleventh century.
The ruins of Les Baux remain quite indistinguishable even when you are
directly beneath them, at the foot of the charming little Alpilles,
which mass themselves with a kind of delicate ruggedness. Rock and ruin
have been so welded together by the confusions of time that as you
approach it from behind--that is, from the direction of Arles--the place
presents simply a general air of cragginess. Nothing can be prettier
than the crags of Provence; they are beautifully modelled, as painters
say, and they have a delightful silvery colour. The road winds round the
foot of the hills on the top of which Les Baux is planted, and passes
into another valley, from which the approach to the town is many degrees
less precipitous and may be comfortably made in a carriage. Of course
the deeply inquiring traveller will alight as promptly as possible, for
the pleasure of climbing into this queerest of cities on foot is not the
least part of the entertainment of going there. Then you appreciate its
extraordinary position, its picturesqueness, its steepness, its
desolation and decay. It hangs--that is, what remains of it--to the
slanting summit of the mountain. Nothing would be more natural than for
the whole place to roll down into the valley. A part of it has done
so--for it is not unjust to suppose that in the process of decay the
crumbled particles have sought the lower level, while the remainder
still clings to its magnificent perch.
If I called Les Baux a city, just above, it was not that I was
stretching a point in favour of the small spot which to-day contains but
a few dozen inhabitants. The history of the place is as extraordinary as
its situation. It was not only a city, but a state; not only a state,
but an empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself
sovereign of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties,
with which its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords
of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a
time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places
nearer home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid them homage. The
chronicle of this old Provençal house has been written, in a style
somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the
little book--a modest pamphlet--at the establishment of the good
sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest parts of Les
Baux. The sisters have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom I
heard piping their lessons while I waited in the cold _parloir_ for one
of the ladies to come and speak to me. Nothing could have been more
perfect than the manner of this excellent woman when she arrived; yet
her small religious house seemed a very out-of-the-way corner of the
world. It was spotlessly neat, and the rooms looked as if they had
lately been papered and painted: in this respect, at the mediæval
Pompeii, they were rather a discord. They were, at any rate, the newest,
freshest thing at Les Baux. I remember going round to the church after I
had left the good sisters, and to a little quiet terrace which stands in
front of it, ornamented with a few small trees and bordered with a wall,
breast-high, over which you look down steep hillsides, off into the air
and all about the neighbouring country. I remember saying to myself that
this little terrace was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist
of taste keeps in his mind as a picture. The church was small and brown
and dark, with a certain rustic richness. All this, however, is no
general description of Les Baux.
I am unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple
reason that it is a mere confusion of ruin. It has not been preserved in
lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and castle,
have become fragmentary not through the sudden destruction, but through
the gradual withdrawal, of a population. It is not an extinguished, but
a deserted city; more deserted far than even Carcassonne and
Aigues-Mortes, where I found so much entertainment in the grass-grown
element. It is of very small extent, and even in the days of its
greatness, when its lords entitled themselves counts of Cephalonia and
Neophantis, kings of Arles and Vienne, princes of Achaia and emperors of
Constantinople--even at this flourishing period, when, as M. Jules
Canonge remarks, "they were able to depress the balance in which the
fate of peoples and kings is weighed," the plucky little city contained
at the most no more than thirty-six hundred souls. Yet its lords (who,
however, as I have said, were able to present a long list of subject
towns, most of them, though a few are renowned, unknown to fame) were
seneschals and captains-general of Piedmont and Lombardy, grand admirals
of the kingdom of Naples, and its ladies were sought in marriage by half
the first princes in Europe. A considerable part of the little narrative
of M. Canonge is taken up with the great alliances of the House of Baux,
whose fortunes, matrimonial and other, he traces from the eleventh
century down to the sixteenth. The empty shells of a considerable number
of old houses, many of which must have been superb, the lines of certain
steep little streets, the foundations of a castle, and ever so many
splendid views, are all that remains to-day of these great titles. To
such a list I may add a dozen very polite and sympathetic people who
emerged from the interstices of the desultory little town to gaze at the
two foreigners who had driven over from Arles and whose horses were
being baited at the modest inn. The resources of this establishment we
did not venture otherwise to test, in spite of the seductive fact that
the sign over the door was in the Provençal tongue. This little group
included the baker, a rather melancholy young man, in high boots and a
cloak, with whom and his companions we had a good deal of conversation.
The Baussenques of to-day struck me as a very mild and agreeable race,
with a good deal of the natural amenity which, on occasions like this
one, the traveller who is waiting for his horses to be put in or his
dinner to be prepared observes in the charming people who lend
themselves to conversation in the hill-towns of Tuscany. The spot where
our entertainers at Les Baux congregated was naturally the most
inhabited portion of the town; as I say, there were at least a dozen
human figures within sight. Presently we wandered away from them, scaled
the higher places, seated ourselves among the ruins of the castle, and
looked down from the cliff overhanging that portion of the road which I
have mentioned as approaching Les Baux from behind. I was unable to
trace the configuration of the castle as plainly as the writers who have
described it in the guide-books, and I am ashamed to say that I did not
even perceive the three great figures of stone (the three Marys, as they
are called; the two Marys of Scripture, with Martha) which constitute
one of the curiosities of the place and of which M. Jules Canonge speaks
with almost hyperbolical admiration. A brisk shower, lasting some ten
minutes, led us to take refuge in a cavity of mysterious origin, where
the melancholy baker presently discovered us, having had the _bonne
pensée_ of coming up for us with an umbrella which certainly belonged,
in former ages, to one of the Stéphanettes or Berangères commemorated by
M. Canonge. His oven, I am afraid, was cold so long as our visit lasted.
When the rain was over we wandered down to the little disencumbered
space before the inn, through a small labyrinth of obliterated things.
They took the form of narrow, precipitous streets bordered by empty
houses with gaping windows and absent doors, through which we had
glimpses of sculptured chimney-pieces and fragments of stately arch and
vault. Some of the houses are still inhabited, but most of them are open
to the air and weather. Some of them have completely collapsed; others
present to the street a front which enables one to judge of the
physiognomy of Les Baux in the days of its importance. This importance
had pretty well passed away in the early part of the sixteenth century,
when the place ceased to be an independent principality. It became--by
bequest of one of its lords, Bernardin des Baux, a great captain of his
time--part of the appanage of the kings of France, by whom it was placed
under the protection of Arles, which had formerly occupied with regard
to it a different position. I know not whether the Arlesians neglected
their trust, but the extinction of the sturdy little stronghold is too
complete not to have begun long ago. Its memories are buried under its
ponderous stones. As we drove away from it in the gloaming my friend and
I agreed that the two or three hours we had spent there were among the
happiest impressions of a pair of tourists very curious of the
picturesque. We almost forgot that we were bound to regret that the
shortened day left us no time to drive five miles farther, above a pass
in the little mountains--it had beckoned to us in the morning, when we
came in sight of it, almost irresistibly--to see the Roman arch and
mausoleum of Saint Remy. To compass this larger excursion (including the
visit to Les Baux) you must start from Arles very early in the morning;
but I can imagine no more delightful day.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxiii
[Avignon]
I had been twice at Avignon before, and yet I was not satisfied. I
probably am satisfied now; nevertheless I enjoyed my third visit. I
shall not soon forget the first, on which a particular emotion set an
indelible stamp. I was creeping northward, in 1870, after four months
spent, for the first time, in Italy. It was the middle of January, and I
had found myself unexpectedly forced to return to England for the rest
of the winter. It was an insufferable disappointment; I was wretched and
broken-hearted. Italy appeared to me at that time so much better than
anything else in the world, that to rise from table in the middle of the
feast was a prospect of being hungry for the rest of my days. I had
heard a great deal of praise of the south of France; but the south of
France was a poor consolation. In this state of mind I arrived at
Avignon, which under a bright, hard winter sun was tingling--fairly
spinning--with the _mistral_. I find in my journal of the other day a
reference to the acuteness of my reluctance in January 1870. France,
after Italy, appeared in the language of the latter country _poco
simpatica_; and I thought it necessary, for reasons now inconceivable,
to read the _Figaro_, which was filled with descriptions of the horrible
Troppmann, the murderer of the _famille_ Kink. Troppmann, Kink, _le
crime de Pantin_--the very names that figured in this episode seemed to
wave me back. Had I abandoned the sonorous south to associate with
vocables so base?
It was very cold the other day at Avignon, for though there was no
mistral, it was raining as it rains in Provence, and the dampness had a
terrible chill in it. As I sat by my fire late at night--for in genial
Avignon, in October, I had to have a fire--it came back to me that
eleven years before I had at that same hour sat by a fire in that same
room and, writing to a friend to whom I was not afraid to appear
extravagant, had made a vow that at some happier period of the future I
would avenge myself on the _ci-devant_ city of the Popes by taking it in
a contrary sense. I suppose that I redeemed my vow on the occasion of my
second visit better than on my third; for then I was on my way to Italy,
and that vengeance, of course, was complete. The only drawback was that
I was in such a hurry to get to Ventimiglia (where the Italian
custom-house was to be the sign of my triumph), that I scarcely took
time to make it clear to myself at Avignon that this was better than
reading the _Figaro_. I hurried on almost too fast to enjoy the
consciousness of moving southward. On this last occasion I was
unfortunately destitute of that happy faith. Avignon was my southernmost
limit, after which I was to turn round and proceed back to England. But
in the interval I had been a great deal in Italy, and that made all the
difference. I had plenty of time to think of this, for the rain kept me
practically housed for the first twenty-four hours. It had been raining
in these regions for a month, and people had begun to look askance at
the Rhone, though as yet the volume of the river was not exorbitant. The
only excursion possible, while the torrent descended, was a kind of
horizontal dive, accompanied with infinite splashing, to the little
_musée_ of the town, which is within a moderate walk of the hotel. I had
a memory of it from my first visit; it had appeared to me more pictorial
than its pictures. I found that recollection had flattered it a little,
and that it is neither better nor worse than most provincial museums. It
has the usual musty chill in the air, the usual grass-grown forecourt,
in which a few lumpish Roman fragments are disposed, the usual red tiles
on the floor and the usual specimens of the more livid schools on the
walls. I rang up the _gardien_, who arrived with a bunch of keys, wiping
his mouth; he unlocked doors for me, opened shutters, and while (to my
distress, as if the things had been worth lingering over) he shuffled
about after me, he announced the names of the pictures before which I
stopped in a voice that reverberated through the melancholy halls and
seemed to make the authorship shameful when it was obscure and grotesque
when it pretended to be great. Then there were intervals of silence,
while I stared absent-mindedly, at haphazard, at some indistinguishable
canvas and the only sound was the downpour of the rain on the skylights.
The museum of Avignon derives a certain dignity from its Roman
fragments. The town has no Roman monuments to show; in this respect,
beside its brilliant neighbours, Arles and Nîmes, it is a blank. But a
great many small objects have been found in its soil--pottery, glass,
bronzes, lamps, vessels and ornaments of gold and silver. The glass is
especially charming--small vessels of the most delicate shape and
substance, many of them perfectly preserved. These diminutive, intimate
things bring one near to the old Roman life; they seems like pearls
strung upon the slender thread that swings across the gulf of time. A
little glass cup that Roman lips have touched says more to us than the
great vessel of an arena. There are two small silver _casseroles_, with
chiselled handles, in the museum of Avignon, that struck me as among the
most charming survivals of antiquity.
[Avignon the Palace of the Popes]
I did wrong, just above, to speak of my attack on this establishment as
the only recreation I took that first wet day; for I remember a terribly
moist visit to the former palace of the Popes, which could have taken
place only in the same tempestuous hours. It is true that I scarcely
know why I should have gone out to see the Papal palace in the rain, for
I had been over it twice before, and even then had not found the
interest of the place so complete as it ought to be; the fact
nevertheless remains that this last occasion is much associated with an
umbrella, which was not superfluous even in some of the chambers and
corridors of the gigantic pile. It had already seemed to me the
dreariest of all historical buildings, and my final visit confirmed the
impression. The place is as intricate as it is vast, and as desolate as
it is dirty. The imagination has, for some reason or other, to make more
than the effort usual in such cases to restore and repeople it. The fact
indeed is simply that the palace has been so incalculably abused and
altered. The alterations have been so numerous that, though I have duly
conned the enumerations, supplied in guide-books, of the principal
[Illustration: AVIGNON--THE CHURCH]