whole impression is best conveyed by that very expressive French epithet
_morne_. There are the very fragmentary ruins of a castle (of one of the
bishops of Cavaillon) on a high spur of the mountain, above the river;
and there is another remnant of a feudal habitation on one of the more
accessible ledges. Having half an hour to spare before my omnibus was to
leave (I must beg the reader's pardon for this atrociously false note;
call the vehicle a _diligence_, and for some undiscoverable reason the
offence is minimised), I clambered up to this latter spot and sat among
the rocks in the company of a few stunted olives. The Sorgues, beneath
me, reaching the plain, flung itself crookedly across the meadows like
an unrolled blue ribbon. I tried to think of the _amant de Laure_, for
literature's sake; but I had no great success, and the most I could do
was to say to myself that I must try again. Several months have elapsed
since then, and I am ashamed to confess that the trial has not yet come
off. The only very definite conviction I arrived at was that Vaucluse is
indeed cockneyfied, but that I should have been a fool, all the same,
not to come.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxvi
[Orange]
Mounted into my diligence at the door of the Hôtel de Pétrarque et de
Laure, and we made our way back to Isle-sur-Sorgues in the fading light.
This village, where at six o'clock every one appeared to have gone to
bed, was fairly darkened by its high, dense plane-trees, under which the
rushing river, on a level with its parapets, looked unnaturally, almost
wickedly, blue. It was a glimpse which has left a picture in my mind:
the little closed houses, the place empty and soundless in the autumn
dusk but for the noise of waters, and in the middle, amid the blackness
of the shade, the gleam of the swift, strange tide. At the station every
one was talking of the inundation being in many places an accomplished
fact, and, in particular, of the condition of the Durance at some point
that I have forgotten. At Avignon, an hour later, I found the water in
some of the streets. The sky cleared in the evening, the moon lighted up
the submerged suburbs, and the population again collected in the high
places to enjoy the spectacle. It exhibited a certain sameness, however,
and by nine o'clock there was considerable animation in the Place
Crillon, where there is nothing to be seen but the front of the theatre
and of several cafés--in addition indeed to a statue of this celebrated
brave, whose valour redeemed some of the numerous military disasters of
the reign of Louis XV. The next morning the lower quarters of the town
were in a pitiful state: the situation seemed to me odious. To express
my disapproval of it I lost no time in taking the train to Orange,
which, with its other attractions, had the merit of not being seated on
the Rhone. It was destiny to move northward; but even if I had been at
liberty to follow a less unnatural course I should not then have
undertaken it, inasmuch as the railway between Avignon and Marseilles
was credibly reported to be (in places) under water. This was the case
with almost everything but the line itself on the way to Orange. The day
proved splendid, and its brilliancy only lighted up the desolation.
Farmhouses and cottages were up to their middle in the yellow liquidity;
haystacks looked like dull little islands; windows and doors gaped open,
without faces; and interruption and flight were represented in the
scene. It was brought home to me that the _populations rurales_ have
many different ways of suffering, and my heart glowed with a grateful
sense of cockneyism. It was under the influence of this emotion that I
alighted at Orange to visit a collection of eminently civil monuments.
The collection consists of but two objects, but these objects are so
fine that I will let the word pass. One of them is a triumphal arch,
supposedly of the period of Marcus Aurelius; the other is a fragment,
magnificent in its ruin, of a Roman theatre. But for these fine Roman
remains and for its name, Orange is a perfectly featureless little town,
without the Rhone--which, as I have mentioned, is several miles
distant--to help it to a physiognomy. It seems one of the oddest things
that this obscure French borough--obscure, I mean, in our modern era,
for the Gallo-Roman Arausio must have been, judging it by its arches and
theatre, a place of some importance--should have given its name to the
heirs-apparent of the throne of Holland and been borne by a king of
England who had sovereign rights over it. During the Middle Ages it
formed part of an independent principality; but in 1531 it fell, by the
marriage of one of its princesses, who had inherited it, into the family
of Nassau. I read in my indispensable Murray that it was made over to
France by the treaty of Utrecht. The arch of triumph, which stands a
little way out of the town, is rather a pretty than an imposing vestige
of the Romans. If it had greater purity of style one might say of it
that it belonged to the same family of monuments as the Maison Carrée at
Nîmes. It has three passages--the middle much higher than the
others--and a very elevated attic. The vaults of the passages are richly
sculptured, and the whole structure is covered with friezes and military
trophies. This sculpture is rather mixed; much of it is broken and
defaced, and the rest seemed to me ugly, though its workmanship is
praised. The arch is at once well preserved and much injured. Its
general mass is there, and as Roman monuments go it is remarkably
perfect; but it has suffered, in patches, from the extremity of
restoration. It is not, on the whole, of absorbing interest. It has a
charm, nevertheless, which comes partly from its soft, bright yellow
colour, partly from a certain elegance of shape, of expression; and on
that well-washed Sunday morning, with its brilliant tone, surrounded by
its circle of thin poplars, with the green country lying beyond it and a
low blue horizon showing through its empty portals, it made, very
sufficiently, a picture that hangs itself to one of the lateral hooks of
the memory. I can take down the modest composition and place it before
me as I write. I see the shallow, shining puddles in the hard, fair
French road; the pale blue sky, diluted by days of rain; the
disgarnished autumnal fields; the mild sparkle of the low horizon; the
solitary figure in sabots, with a bundle under its arm, advancing along
the _chaussée_; and in the middle I see the little ochre-coloured trio
of apertures, which, in spite of its antiquity, looks bright and gay, as
everything must look in France of a fresh Sunday morning.
It is true that this was not exactly the appearance of the Roman
theatre, which lies on the other side of the town; a fact that did not
prevent me from making my way to it in less than five minutes, through a
succession of little streets concerning which I have no observations to
record. None of the Roman remains in the south of France are more
impressive than this stupendous fragment. An enormous mound rises above
the place, which was formerly occupied--I quote from Murray--first by a
citadel of the Romans, then by a castle of the princes of Nassau, razed
by Louis XIV. Facing this hill a mighty wall erects itself, thirty-six
metres high and composed of massive blocks of dark brown stone simply
laid one on the other; the whole naked, rugged
[Illustration: ORANGE--THE THEATRE.]
surface of which suggests a natural cliff (say of the Vaucluse order)
rather than an effort of human or even of Roman labour. It is the
biggest thing at Orange--it is bigger than all Orange put together--and
its permanent massiveness makes light of the shrunken city. The face it
presents to the town--the top of it garnished with two rows of brackets
perforated with holes to receive the staves of the _velarium_--bears the
traces of more than one tier of ornamental arches; though how these flat
arches were applied, or incrusted, upon the wall, I do not profess to
explain. You pass through a diminutive postern--which seems in
proportion about as high as the entrance of a rabbit-hutch--into the
lodge of the custodian, who introduces you to the interior of the
theatre. Here the mass of the hill affronts you, which the ingenious
Romans treated simply as the material of their auditorium. They inserted
their stone seats, in a semicircle, in the slope of the hill, and
planted their colossal wall opposite to it. This wall, from the inside,
is, if possible, even more imposing. It formed the back of the stage,
the permanent scene, and its enormous face was coated with marble. It
contains three doors, the middle one being the highest and having above
it, far aloft, a deep niche apparently intended for an imperial statue.
A few of the benches remain on the hillside, which, however, is mainly a
confusion of fragments. There is part of a corridor built into the hill,
high up, and on the crest are the remnants of the demolished castle. The
whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any
details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the
back of the scene, the space left between it and the chord of the
semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather
less than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very
shallow, and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers
placed in a line like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent
skeleton, however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and
wonder about as by what it tells you. It has not the sweetness, the
softness of melancholy, of the theatre at Aries; but it is more
extraordinary, and one can imagine only tremendous tragedies being
enacted there--
"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."
At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing--immense
in height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the
other dimensions are not remarkable. The division to the right, _as you_
face the stage, is pointed out as the green-room; its portentous
altitude and the open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The
compartment on the left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the
traces of other chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to
the theatre. Various fragments are visible which refer themselves
plausibly to such an establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome
would appear to have been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is all
I saw, and all there was to see, of Orange, which had a very rustic,
bucolic aspect, and where I was not even called upon to demand breakfast
at the hotel. The entrance of this resort might have been that of a
stable of the Roman days.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxvii
[Macon]
I have been trying to remember whether I fasted all the way to Macon,
which I reached at an advanced hour of the evening, and think I must
have done so except for the purchase of a box of nougat at Montélimart
(the place is famous for the manufacture of this confection, which, at
the station, is hawked at the windows of the train) and for a bouillon,
very much later, at Lyons. The journey beside the Rhone--past Valence,
past Tournon, past Vienne--would have been charming, on that luminous
Sunday, but for two disagreeable accidents. The express from Marseilles,
which I took at Orange, was full to overflowing; and the only refuge I
could find was an inside angle in a carriage laden with Germans who had
command of the windows, which they occupied as strongly as they have
been known to occupy other strategical positions. I scarcely know,
however, why I linger on this particular discomfort, for it was but a
single item in a considerable list of grievances--grievances dispersed
through six weeks of constant railway-travel in France. I have not
touched upon them at an earlier stage of this chronicle, but my reserve
is not owing to any sweetness of association. This form of locomotion,
in the country of the amenities, is attended with a dozen discomforts;
almost all the conditions of the business are detestable. They force the
sentimental tourist again and again to ask himself whether, in
consideration of such mortal annoyances, the game is worth the candle.
Fortunately a railway journey is a good deal like a sea-voyage; its
miseries fade from the mind as soon as you arrive. That is why I
completed, to my great satisfaction, my little tour in France. Let this
small effusion of ill-nature be my first and last tribute to the whole
despotic _gare_: the deadly _salle d'attente_, the insufferable delays
over one's luggage, the porterless platform, the overcrowded and
illiberal train. How many a time did I permit myself the secret
reflection that it is in perfidious Albion that they order this matter
best! How many a time did the eager British mercenary, clad in velveteen
and clinging to the door of the carriage as it glides into the station,
revisit my invidious dreams! The paternal porter and the responsive
hansom are among the best gifts of the English genius to the world. I
hasten to add, faithful to my habit (so insufferable to some of my
friends) of ever and again readjusting the balance after I have given it
an honest tip, that the bouillon at Lyons, which I spoke of above, was,
though by no means an idea bouillon, much better than any I could have
obtained at an English railway-station. After I had imbibed it I sat in
the train (which waited a long time at Lyons) and, by the light of one
of the big lamps on the platform, read all sorts of disagreeable things
in certain
[Illustration: LYONS.]
radical newspapers which I had bought at the bookstall. I gathered from
these sheets that Lyons was in extreme commotion. The Rhone and the
Saone, which form a girdle for the splendid town, were almost in the
streets, as I could easily believe from what I had seen of the country
after leaving Orange. The Rhone, all the way to Lyons, had been in all
sorts of places where it had no business to be, and matters were
naturally not improved by its confluence with the charming and copious
stream which, at Macon, is said once to have given such a happy
opportunity to the egotism of the capital. A visitor from Paris (the
anecdote is very old), being asked on the quay of that city whether he
didn't admire the Saone, replied good-naturedly that it was very pretty,
but that in Paris they spelled it with the _ei_. This moment of general
alarm at Lyons had been chosen by certain ingenious persons (I credit
them perhaps with too sure a prevision of the rise of the rivers) for
practising further upon the apprehensions of the public. A bombshell
filled with dynamite had been thrown into a café, and various votaries
of the comparatively innocuous _petit verre_ had been wounded (I am not
sure whether any one had been killed) by the irruption. Of course there
had been arrests and incarcerations, and the _Intransigeant_ and the
_Rappel_ were filled with the echoes of the explosion. The tone of these
organs is rarely edifying, and it had never been less so than on this
occasion. I wondered as I looked through them whether I was losing all
my radicalism; and then I wondered whether, after all, I had any to
lose. Even in so long a wait as that tiresome delay at Lyons I failed to
settle the question, any more than I made up my mind as to the probable
future of the militant democracy, or the ultimate form of a
civilisation which should have blown up everything else. A few days
later the water went down at Lyons; but the democracy has not gone down.
I remember vividly the remainder of that evening which I spent at
Macon--remember it with a chattering of the teeth. I know not what had
got into the place; the temperature, for the last day of October, was
eccentric and incredible. These epithets may also be applied to the
hotel itself--an extraordinary structure, all façade, which exposes an
uncovered rear to the gaze of nature. There is a demonstrative, voluble
landlady, who is of course part of the façade; but everything behind her
is a trap for the winds, with chambers, corridors, staircases all
exhibited to the sky as if the outer wall of the house had been lifted
off. It would have been delightful for Florida, but it didn't do for
Burgundy even on the eve of November 1, so that I suffered absurdly from
the rigour of a season that had not yet begun. There was something in
the air; I felt it the next day, even on the sunny quay of the Saone,
where in spite of a fine southerly exposure I extracted little warmth
from the reflection that Alphonse de Lamartine had often trodden the
flags. Macon struck me, somehow, as suffering from a chronic numbness,
and there was nothing exceptionally cheerful in the remarkable extension
of the river. It was no longer a river--it had become a lake; and from
my window, in the painted face of the inn, I saw that the opposite bank
had been moved back, as it were, indefinitely. Unfortunately the various
objects with which it was furnished had not been moved as well, the
consequence of which was an extraordinary confusion in the relations of
things. There were always poplars to be seen, but the poplar had become
an aquatic plant. Such phenomena, however, at Macon attract but little
attention, as the Saone, at certain seasons of the year, is nothing if
not expansive. The people are as used to it as they appeared to be to
the bronze statue of Lamartine, which is the principal monument of the
_place_, and which, representing the poet in a frogged overcoat and
top-boots, improvising in a high wind, struck me as even less casual in
its attitude than monumental sculpture usually succeeds in being. It is
true that in its present position I thought better of this work of art,
which is from the hand of M. Falguière, than when I had seen it through
the factitious medium of the Salon of 1876. I walked up the hill where
the older part of Macon lies, in search of the natal house of the _amant
d'Elvire_, the Petrarch whose Vaucluse was the bosom of the public. The
Guide-Joanne quotes from "Les Confidences" a description of the
birthplace of the poet, whose treatment of the locality is indeed
poetical. It tallies strangely little with the reality, either as
regards position or other features; and it may be said to be not an aid,
but a direct obstacle, to a discovery of the house. A very humble
edifice, in a small back street, is designated by a municipal tablet,
set into its face, as the scene of Lamartine's advent into the world. He
himself speaks of a vast and lofty structure, at the angle of a _place_,
adorned with iron clamps, with a _porte haute et large_ and many other
peculiarities. The house with the tablet has two meagre storeys above
the basement, and (at present, at least) an air of extreme shabbiness;
the _place_, moreover, never can have been vast. Lamartine was accused
of writing history incorrectly, and apparently he started wrong at
first; it had never become clear to him where he was born. Or is the
tablet wrong? If the house is small, the tablet is very big.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxviii
[Bourg-en-Bresse]
The foregoing reflections occur, in a cruder form, as it were, in my
note-book, where I find this remark appended to them: "Don't take leave
of Lamartine on that contemptuous note; it will be easy to think of
something more sympathetic!" Those friends of mine, mentioned a little
while since, who accuse me of always tipping back the balance, could not
desire a paragraph more characteristic; but I wish to give no further
evidence of such infirmities, and will therefore hurry away from the
subject--hurry away in the train which, very early on a crisp, bright
morning, conveyed me, by way of an excursion, to the ancient city of
Bourg-en-Bresse. Shining in early light, the Saone was spread, like a
smooth white tablecloth, over a considerable part of the flat country
that I traversed. There is no provision made in this image for the long,
transparent screens of thin-twigged trees which rose at intervals out of
the watery plain; but as, in all the conditions, there seemed to be no
provision for them in fact, I will let my metaphor go for what it is
worth. My journey was (as I remember it) of about an hour and a half;
but I passed no object of interest, as the phrase is, whatever. The
phrase hardly applies even to Bourg itself, which is simply a town
_quelconque_, as M. Zola would say. Small, peaceful, rustic, it stands
in the midst of the great dairy-feeding plains of Bresse, of which fat
county, sometime property of the house of Savoy, it was the modest
capital. The blue masses of the Jura give it a creditable horizon, but
the only nearer feature it can point to is its famous sepulchral church.
This edifice lies at a fortunate distance from the town, which, though
inoffensive, is of too common a stamp to consort with such a treasure.
All I ever knew of the church of Brou I had gathered, years ago, from
Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem which bears its name. I remember
thinking, in those years, that it was impossible verses could be more
touching than these; and as I stood before the object of my pilgrimage,
in the gay French light (though the place was so dull), I recalled the
spot where I had first read them and where I had read them again and yet
again, wondering whether it would ever be my fortune to visit the church
of Brou. The spot in question was an armchair in a window which looked
out on some cows in a field; and whenever I glanced at the cows it came
over me--I scarcely know why--that I should probably never behold the
structure reared by the Duchess Margaret. Some of our visions never come
to pass; but we must be just--others do. "So sleep, for ever sleep, O
princely pair!" I remembered that line of Matthew Arnold's, and the
stanza about the Duchess Margaret coming to watch the builders on her
palfrey white. Then there came to me something in regard to the moon
shining on winter nights through the cold clere-storey. The tone of the
place at that hour was not at all lunar; it was cold and bright, but
with the chill of an autumn morning; yet this, even with the fact of the
unexpected remoteness of the church from the Jura added to it, did not
prevent me from feeling that I looked at a monument in the production of
which--or at least in the effect of which on the tourist-mind of
to-day--Matthew Arnold had been much concerned. By a pardonable licence
he has placed it a few miles nearer to the forests of the Jura than it
stands at present. It is very true that, though the mountains in the
sixteenth century can hardly have been in a different position, the
plain which separates the church from them may have been bedecked with
woods. The visitor to-day cannot help wondering why the beautiful
building, with its splendid works of art, is dropped down in that
particular spot, which looks so accidental and arbitrary. But there are
reasons for most things, and there were reasons why the church of Brou
should be at Brou, which is a vague little suburb of a vague little
town.
[The Church of Brou]
The responsibility rests, at any rate, upon the Duchess
Margaret--Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian and
his wife Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold. This lady has a
high name in history, having been regent of the Netherlands in behalf of
her nephew, the Emperor Charles V., of whose early education she had had
the care. She married in 1501 Philibert the Handsome, Duke of Savoy, to
whom the province of Bresse belonged, and who died two years later. She
had been betrothed, as a child, to Charles VIII. of France, and was kept
for some time at the French court--that of
[Illustration: BROU--THE CHURCH.]