Of all the rivers which, being navigable, do serious work in the world
the Rhone is the most devil-may-care and light-hearted. In its five
hundred mile dash down hill from the Lake of Geneva to the Mediterraenean
its only purpose--other than that of doing all the mischief
possible--seems to be frolic fun. And yet for more than two thousand
years this apparently frivolous, and frequently malevolent, river has
been very usefully employed in the service of mankind.
In the misty barbaric ages before history fairly began, and in the early
times of the Roman domination, the Rhone was the sole highway into
northern Gaul from the Mediterraenean; later, when the Gallic system of
Roman roads had been constructed, it held its own fairly well against
the two roads which paralleled it--that on the east bank throughout
almost its entire length, and that on the west bank from Lyons southward
to a point about opposite to the present Montelimar; in the
semi-barbarous Middle Ages--when the excitements of travel were
increased by the presence of a robber-count at every ford and in every
mountain-pass--it became again more important than the parallel highways
on land; and in our own day the conditions of Roman times, relatively
speaking, are restored once more by steamboats on the river and
railways on the lines of the ancient roads. And so, having served these
several masters, the Rhone valley of the present day is stored
everywhere with remnants of the barbarism, of the civilization, and of
the semi-barbarism which successively have been ploughed under its
surface before what we have the temerity to call our own civilization
began. Keltic flints and pottery underlie Roman ruins; just beneath the
soil, or still surviving above it, are remains of Roman magnificence;
and on almost all the hill-tops still stand the broken strongholds of
the robber nobles who maintained their nobility upon what they were
lucky enough to be able to steal. Naturally--those ruined castles, and
the still-existent towns of the same period, being so conspicuously in
evidence--the flavour of the river is most distinctly Mediaeval; but a
journey in this region, with eyes open to perceive as well as to see, is
a veritable descent into the depths of the ancient past.
Indeed, the _Gladiateur_ had but little more than swung clear from
Lyons--around the long curve where the Saone and the Rhone are united
and the stream suddenly is doubled in size--than we were carried back to
the very dawn of historic times. Before us, stretching away to the
eastward, was the broad plain of Saint-Fons--once covered with an oak
forest to which Druid priests bearing golden sickles came from the Ile
Barbe at Yule-tide to gather mistletoe for the great Pagan feast; later,
a battle-field where Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus came to a
definite understanding in regard to the rulership of Gaul; later still,
the site of a pleasure castle of the Archbishops of Lyons, and of the
Villa Longchene to which light-hearted Lyons' nobles came. Palace and
Villa still are there--the one a Dominican school, the other a hospital
endowed by the Empress Eugenie: but the oaks and the Druids and the
battle are only faint legends now.
I am forced to admit that never a thought was given to that aggregation
of antiquities by the too-frivolous passengers aboard the _Gladiateur_.
At the very moment when we were steaming through those Gallo-Roman and
Mediaeval latitudes there was a burst of music from the piano that fired
our light-headed company as a spark fires a mine. The music was the air
of "La Coupe," the Felibrien Anthem, and instantly a hundred voices took
up the song. When this rite was ended, the music shifted to a livelier
key and straightway a farandole was formed. On the whole, a long and
narrow steamboat is not an especially good place for a farandole; but
the leader of that one--a young person from the Odeon, whose hair came
down repeatedly but whose exceptionally high spirits never came down at
all--was not one of the sort whom difficulties deter. At the head of the
long line of dancers--a living chain held together by clasped hands--she
caracoled and curveted up and down the narrow passes of the boat; and
after her, also caracoling and curveting, came the chain: that each
moment grew in length as volunteers joined it, or (in keeping with
farandole customs) as the less vivacious members of the party were
seized upon and forcibly impressed into its ranks. And so we farandoled
clear away to Givors.
It took the place of a master of ceremonies, our farandole, and acted
as an excellent solvent of formalities. Yet even without it there would
have been none of the stiffness and reserve which would have chilled a
company assembled under like conditions in English-speaking lands.
Friendliness and courtesy are characteristics of the French in general;
and especially did our American contingent profit by those amiable
traits that day on the Rhone. Save for a slight correspondence with a
single member of the party, all aboard the boat were strangers to us;
but in that kindly atmosphere, before we had time to fancy that we were
outsiders, we found ourselves among friends.
Givors slipped by almost unnoticed in the thick of the farandole: a
little town hung out to sun in long strips upon terraces rising from the
water-side; the walls and tiled roofs making a general effect of warm
greys and yellows dashed with the bright greens of shrubs and trees and
gardens and the yellow green of vines. 'Tis a town of some commercial
pretensions: the gateway of a canal a dozen miles long leading up
through the valley of the little river Gier to iron-works and
coke-works and glass-works tucked away in the hills. The canal was
projected almost a century and a half ago as a connecting channel
between the Rhone and the Loire, and so between the Atlantic and the
Mediterraenean; wherefore the Canal of the Two Oceans was, and I suppose
continues to be, its high-sounding name. But the Revolution came, and
the digging never extended beyond that first dozen miles; and thus it is
that the Canal of the Two Oceans, as such, is a delusion, and that the
golden future which once lay ahead of Givors now lies a long way astern.
Yet the town has an easy and contented look: as though it had saved
enough from the wreck of its magnificent destiny to leave it still
comfortably well to do.
Before we fairly had passed it, and while the farandole was dying out
slowly, there crashed down upon us a thunderous outburst of song: as
though an exceptionally large-lunged seraph were afloat immediately
above us in the open regions of the air. Yet the song was of a gayer
sort than seraphs, presumably, are wont to sing; and its method,
distinctly, was that of the modern operatic stage. In point of fact,
the singer was not a seraph, but an eminent professor in a great
institution of learning and a literary authority of the first
rank--whose critical summary of French literature is a standard, and
whose studies of Beaumarchais and Le Sage have been crowned by the
Academy. In sheer joyousness of spirit that eminent personage had
betaken himself to the top of the port paddle-box, and thence was
suffering his mountain-cleaving voice to go at large: so quickening was
the company in which he found himself; so stimulating was the racy
fervour of his own Southern sun!