IV

From Givors the river runs almost in a straight line to Vienne. On both

shores rise round-crested wooded hills--the foothills of the parallel

ranges of mountains by which the wide valley is shut in. Down this

perspective, commandingly upon a height, is seen the city--misty and

uncertain at first, but growing clearer and clearer, as the boat nears

it, until the stone-work of man and the rock-work of nature become

distinct and the picture is complete in all its parts: the time-browned

mass of houses on the hill-top; the tower of Philip the Fair; over all,

the huge facade of Saint Maurice--an ogival wonder that for centuries

was the cathedral church of the Primates of Gaul.

After Marseille, Vienne makes as handsome pretensions to age as are made

by any town in France. The tradition of its founding lies hidden in the

mists of heroic legend, and is the more momentous because it is so

impressively vague. Over its very name the etymologists wrangle with

such violence that one is lost in amazement at their ill-tempered

erudition; and over its structure the archaeologists--though a bit more

civil to each other--are almost as violently at cross-purposes. The best

esteemed of those antiquary gentry--at least the one whom I esteem the

most, because I like the fine boldness of his claim--is the Dominican

chronicler Lavinius: who says flatly that Vienne was founded thirteen

centuries before the dawn of the Christian era by a contemporary of

Moses, one King Allobrox--a Keltic sovereign descended from Hercules in

a right line! That is a good beginning; and it has the merit of

embodying the one fact upon which all of the testy antiquaries are

agreed: that Vienne the Strong, as folk called it in those days, was a

flourishing town long before Lyons was built or Paris even thought of,

and an age or two before the Romans came over into Gaul.

When at last they did come, the Romans transformed the town into a great

city--the metropolis of the region lying between Geneva and Marseille;

and so adorned it with noble buildings--temples, forum, circus, theatre,

aqueducts, baths--and so enriched it with all manner of works of art,

that it came to be known as Vienne the Beautiful throughout the

civilized world. One temple, approximately perfect, has survived to us

from that time; and one statue--the famous Crouching Venus: and it seems

fair enough to accept Vienne's beauty as proved by these. Moreover,

painting and music were cultivated there, together with the other arts:

and from all that the historians have to tell us it would appear that

the Roman citizens of that city lived softly and well.

In the dark ages of Mediaeval Christianity most of the beauties of Vienne

vanished: being destroyed outright, or made over into buildings

pertaining to the new faith and the new times. A pathetic little

attempt, to be sure, was made by the Viennese to hold fast to their

comfortable Paganism--when Valentinian II. was slain, and the old rites

were restored, at the end of the fourth century; but it was a mere flash

in the pan. The tendencies of the times were too strong to be resisted,

and presently the new creed rode down the old. Then it was that Vienne

was called Vienne the Holy--because, while losing nothing of her

splendours temporal, she gained great store of splendours spiritual:

whereof the culmination was that famous Council, at the beginning of the

fourteenth century, which crushed the Templars and gave over their

possessions to the Crown. While the Council deliberated, Philip the Fair

"watched his case," as the lawyers would put it, from the village of

Sainte-Colombe--across the river--where he was quartered with his court

in the convent of the Cordeliers; and in Sainte-Colombe, the next year,

he built the tower that was to safeguard the royal domains against the

aggressions of the Archbishops: whose too-notorious holiness was making

them overbold.

And nowadays Vienne is a mean little town; a withered kernel in the

shell of its former grandeur; a mere sousprefecture; scarcely more than

a manufacturing suburb of Lyons. In the tower of Philip the Fair are a

cheap restaurant, and a factory of macaroni, and a carpenter-shop. It is

enough to make the spirits of the Roman emperors indignant and the bones

of the Archbishops rattle dismally in their graves. No longer either

strong, or beautiful, or holy, they call it Vienne the Patriotic, now. A

city must be something, of course--and patriotism is an attribute that

may be had for the claiming, in these days.

But the saving grace of poetry, at least of the love of poetry, still

abides in Vienne: as was proved in a manner mightily tickling to our

self-complacency as we swept past the town. Taking the place of the

stone bridge that was built in Roman times--and so well built that it

was kept in service almost down to our own day--a suspension bridge here

spans the stream: and the poets and the poet-lovers of Vienne were all

a-swarm upon it, their heads and shoulders rising in an animated

crenellation above its rail, in waiting for our galley to go by. While

we still were a hundred yards away up stream there was a bustling

movement among them; and then a bouquet, swinging at the end of a light

line, was lowered away swiftly--the bright flowers flashing in the

sunlight as they swayed and twirled. Our brethren had calculated to a

nicety where our boat would pass. Right over the bow came the bouquet,

and fairly into the eager hands stretched out for it--while a great

cheer went up from the grateful poets in the boat that was echoed by the

generous poets in the air. And the prettiest touch of all was the

garland of verses that came to us with the flowers: to bid us welcome

and to wish us God-speed on our way. Truly, 'twas a delicately fine bit

of poetic courtesy. No troubadour in the days of Vienne the Holy (the

holiness was not of an austere variety) could have cast a more graceful

tribute upon the passing galley of the debonaire Queen Jeanne.

V

Before Vienne the river cuts its way narrowly through the rock, and on

each side the banks lift high above the stream. Far above us was the

town, rising in terraces to where was the citadel in the days of Vienne

the Strong. We had a flying glimpse of it all as we flashed past, sped

by the current and our great wheels; and then the valley widened again,

and soft meadows bordered by poplars and gay with yellow flowers lay

between us and the mountain ranges rising to right and left against the

sky. Here and there along the banks, where an outcrop of rock gave good

holding-ground, were anchored floating grist-mills carrying huge

water-wheels driven by the current--the wooden walls so browned with age

that they seemed to have held over from the times when the archbishops,

lording it in Vienne, took tithes of millers' toll.

We were come into a country of corn and wine. The mills certified to the

corn; and as we swung around the curves of the river or shot down its

reaches we met long lean steamboats fighting against the current under

heavy ladings of big-bellied wine-casks--on their genial way northward

to moisten thirsty Paris throats. Off on the right bank was the ancient

manor of Mont-Lys, where begins the growth of the Cotes-Roties: the

famous red and white wines, called the _brune_ and the _blonde_, which

have been dear to bottle-lovers for nearly two thousand years: from the

time when the best of them (such as now go northward to Paris) went

southward to the Greek merchants of Marseille and so onward to Rome to

be sold for, literally, their weight in gold. And as to the melons and

apricots which grow hereabouts, 'tis enough to say that Lyons bereft of

them would pine and die.

The softly-swelling banks, capped by the long lines of yellow-green

poplars, slipped by us at a gallop; while the mountains in the

background, seen through the haze of flickering leaves, seemed to stand

still. It was the most peaceful of landscapes: but there was endless

fighting thereabouts in former times. In an Early Christian way the

archbishops of Vienne ravaged among the Protestants; between whiles the

robber-counts, without respect to creed, ravaged among the travelling

public with a large-minded impartiality; and, down in the lowest rank of

ravagers, the road-agents of the period stole all that their betters

left for them to steal. As we passed the little town of Condrieu--where

a lonely enthusiast stood up on the bank and waved a flag at us--we saw

overtopping it, on a fierce little craggy height, the ruined stronghold

of its ancient lords. Already, in the thirty miles or thereabouts that

we had come since leaving Lyons, we had passed a half-dozen or more

warlike remnants of a like sort; and throughout the run to Avignon they

continued at about the rate of one in every five miles.

Singly, the histories of these castles are exceedingly interesting

studies in Mediaeval barbarism; but collectively they become a

wearisomely monotonous accumulation of horrors. Yet it is unfair to

blame the lords of the castles for their lack of originality in crime.

With the few possible combinations at their command, the Law of

Permutation literally compelled them to do the same things over and over

again: maintaining or sustaining sieges ending in death with or without

quarter for the besieged; leading forays for the sake of plunder, with

or without the incentive of revenge; crushing peasant rebellions by

hanging such few peasants as escaped the sword; and at all times robbing

every unlucky merchant who chanced to come their way. It was a curious

twist, that reversion to savagery, from the Roman epoch: when the Rhone

Valley was inhabited by a civilized people who encouraged commerce and

who had a genuine love for the arts. And, after all--unless they had

some sort of pooling arrangement--the robber lords in the mid-region of

the Rhone could not have found their business very profitable. Merchants

travelling south from Lyons must have been poor booty by the time that

they had passed Vienne; and merchants travelling north from Avignon,

similarly, must have been well fleeced by the time that they were come

to the Pont-Saint-Esprit. Indeed, the lords in the middle of the run

doubtless were hard put to it at times to make any sort of a living at

all. Nor could the little local stealing that went on have helped them

much--since, their respective castles being not more than five miles

asunder, each of them in ordinary times was pulled up short in his

ravaging at the end of two miles and a half. In brief, the business was

overcrowded in all its branches, and badly managed beside. The more that

I look into the history of that time the more am I convinced that

mediaevalism, either as an institution or as an investment, was not a

success.

Condrieu is a dead little town now. As a seat of thieving industry its

importance disappeared centuries ago; and its importance as a boating

town--whence were recruited a large proportion of the Rhone

boatmen--vanished in the dawn of the age of steam. They were good

fellows, those Condrieu boatmen, renowned for their bravery and their

honesty throughout the river's length. Because of their leather-seated

breeches they were nicknamed "Leather-tails"; but their more

sailor-like distinction was their tattooing: on the fore-arm a flaming

heart pierced with an arrow, symbol of their fidelity and love; on the

breast a cross and anchor, symbols of their faith and craft. From Roman

times downward until railways came, the heavy freighting of central

France has been done by boat upon the Rhone--in precisely the same

fashion that flat-boat freighting was carried on upon the Mississippi

and its tributaries--and three or four of the river towns were peopled

mainly by members of the boating guilds. Trinquetaille, the western

suburb of Arles, still shows signs of the nautical tastes of its

inhabitants in the queer sailor-like exterior and interior adornments of

its houses: most noticeable of which is the setting up on a house-top of

a good-sized boat full-rigged with mast and sails.

The survivors of the boating period nowadays are few. Five years ago I

used to see whenever I crossed to Trinquetaille a little group of old

boatmen sitting at the end of the bridge on a long bench that was their

especial property. They moved stiffly and slowly; their white heads were

bowed breastward; their voices were cracked with age. Yet they seemed

to be cheery together, as they basked in the hot sunshine--that warmed

only comfortably their lean old bodies--and talked of ancient victories

over sand-bars and rapids: and the while looked southward over the broad

Rhone water toward the sea. No doubt they held in scorn their few

successors--one where of old were a hundred--who navigate the Rhone of

to-day, clipped of its perils by dykes and beacons, in boats driven by

steam.

Yet these modern mariners, charged with the care of the great steamboats

two and three hundred feet long, are more heroic characters than were

the greatest of the old-time navigators. The finest sight that I saw in

all that day aboard the _Gladiateur_ was our pilot at his post as he

swung us around certain of the more dangerous of the curves: where rocks

or sand-bars narrowed the channel closely and where a fall in the

river-bed more than usually abrupt made the current fiercely strong. In

such perilous passes he had behind him in a row at the long

tiller--these boats are not steered by a wheel forward, but by a tiller

at the stern--two, three, and at one turn four men. He himself, at the

extreme end of the tiller, stood firmly posed and a little leaning

forward, his body rigid, his face set in resolute lines, his eyes

fixedly bent upon the course ahead; behind him the others, elately

poised in readiness to swing their whole weight with his on the instant

that his tense energy in repose flashed into energy in action as the

critical turn was made--the whole group, raised above us on the high

quarter-deck, in relief against the deep blue sky. Amy, or another of

the Southern sculptors, will be moved some day, I hope, to seize upon

that thrilling group and to fasten it forever in enduring bronze.