Long before we came abreast of it by the windings of the river we saw
high up against the sky-line, a clear three hundred feet above the
water, all that is left of the stronghold of Crussol--still called by
the Rhone boatmen "the Horns of Crussol," although the two towers no
longer shoot out horn-like from the mountain-top with a walled war-town
clinging about their flanks. One Geraud Bartet, a cadet of the great
house of Crussol--of which the representative nowadays is the Duc
d'Uzes--built this eagle's nest in the year 1110; but it did not become
a place of importance until more than four hundred years later, in the
time of the religious wars.
On the issue of faiths the Crussols divided. The head of the house was
for the Pope and the King; the two cadets were for God and the Reform.
Then it was that the castle (according to an over-sanguine chronicler of
the period) was "transformed into an unconquerable stronghold"; and
thereafter--always for the advancement of Christianity of one sort or
another--a liberal amount of killing went on beneath its walls. In the
end, disregarding the fact that it was unconquerable, the castle was
captured by the Baron des Adrets--who happened at the moment to be on
the Protestant side--and in the interest of sound doctrine all of its
defenders were put to the sword. Tradition declares that "the streams of
blood filled one of the cisterns, in which this terrible Huguenot had
his own children bathed 'in order,' as he said, 'to give them strength
and force and, above all, hatred of Catholicism.'" And then "the castle
was demolished from its lowest to its highest stone."
This final statement is a little too sweeping, yet essentially it is
true. All that now remains of Crussol is a single broken tower, to which
some minor ruins cling; and a little lower are the ruins of the
town--whence the encircling ramparts have been outcast and lie in
scattered fragments down the mountain-side to the border of the Rhone.
It was on this very mountain--a couple of thousand years or so earlier
in the world's history--that a much pleasanter personage than a battling
baron had his home: a good-natured giant of easy morals who was the
traditional founder of Valence. Being desirous of founding a town
somewhere, and willing--in accordance with the custom of his time--to
leave the selection of a site a little to chance, he hurled a javelin
from his mountain-top with the cry, "Va lance!": and so gave Valence its
name and its beginning, on the eastern bank of the river two miles away,
at the spot where his javelin fell. At a much later period the Romans
adopted and enlarged the giant's foundation; but nearly every trace of
their occupation has disappeared. Indeed, even the ramparts, built only
a few hundred years ago by Francis I., have utterly vanished; and the
tendency of the town has been so decidedly toward pulling down and
building up again that it now wears quite a modern and jauntily youthful
air.
Valence was our next stopping-place, and we had a world of work to do
there during the hour or so that we remained ashore. Very properly
believing that we, being poets, could dedicate their local monuments for
them far better than they could do such work for themselves, the
excellent people of this town had accumulated a variety of monuments in
expectation of our coming; and all of these it was our pleasant duty to
start upon their immortal way.
Our reception was nothing short of magnificent. On the suspension bridge
which here spans the river half the town was assembled watching for us;
and the other half was packed in a solid mass on the bank above the
point where our landing was made. The landing-stage was a glorious blaze
of tri-colour; and there the Mayor, also gloriously tri-coloured, stood
waiting for us in the midst of a guard of honour of four firemen whose
brazen helmets shone resplendent in the rays of the scorching sun. A
little in the background was the inevitable band; that broke with a
crash, at the moment of our landing, into the inevitable "Marseillaise."
And then away we all marched for half a mile, up a wide and dusty and
desperately hot street, into the heart of the town. The detachment of
welcoming townsfolk from the bank closed in around us; and around them,
presently, closed in the detachment of welcoming townsfolk from the
bridge. We poets (I insist upon being known by the company I was
keeping) were deep in the centre of the press. The heat was prodigious.
The dust was stifling. But, upheld by a realizing sense of the
importance and honour of the duties confided to us, we never wavered in
our march.
Our first halt was before a dignified house on which was a
flag-surrounded tablet reading: "Dans cette maison est ne General
Championnet. L'an MDCCLXII." M. Faure and Sextius Michel made admirable
speeches. The band played the "Marseillaise." We cheered and cheered.
But what in the world we poets had to do with this military person--who
served under the lilies at the siege of Gibraltar that ended so badly
in the year 1783, and who did a great deal of very pretty fighting later
under the tri-colour--I am sure I do not know! Then on we went, to the
quick tap of the drums, the Mayor and the glittering firemen preceding
us, to the laying of a corner-stone that really was in our line: that of
a monument to the memory of the dramatist Emile Augier. Here, naturally,
M. Jules Claretie came to the fore. In the parlance of the Academy,
Augier was "his dead man"; and not often does it happen that a finer, a
more discriminating, eulogy is pronounced in the Academy by the
successor to a vacant chair than was pronounced that hot day in Valence
upon Emile Augier by the Director of the Comedie Francaise. When it was
ended, there was added to the contents of the leaden casket a final
paper bearing the autographs of the notables of our company; and then
the cap-stone, swinging from tackles, was lowered away.
We had the same ceremony over again, ten minutes later, when we laid the
corner-stone of the monument to the Comte de Montalivet: who was an
eminent citizen and Mayor of Valence, and later was a Minister under
the first Napoleon--whom he had met at Madame Colombier's, likely
enough, in the days when the young artillery officer was doing fitful
garrison-duty in that little town. Again it seemed to me that we poets
were not necessarily very closely associated with the matter in hand;
but we cheered at the proper places, and made appropriate and
well-turned speeches, and contributed a valuable collection of
autographs to the lead box in the corner-stone: and did it all with the
easily off-hand air of thorough poets of the world. In the matter of the
autographs there was near to being a catastrophe. Everything was going
at a quick-step--our time being so short--and in the hurry of it all the
lead box was closed and the cap-stone was lowered down upon it while yet
the autographs remained outside! It was by the merest chance, I fancy,
in that bustling confusion, that the mistake happened to be noticed; and
I cannot but think--the autographs, with only a few exceptions, being
quite illegible--that no great harm would have come had it passed
unobserved. However, the omission being discovered, common courtesy to
the autographists required that the cap-stone should be raised again and
the much-signed paper put where it belonged.
Having thus made what I believe to be a dedicatory record by dedicating
three monuments, out of a possible four, in considerably less than an
hour, we were cantered away to the Hotel de Ville to be refreshed and
complimented with a "Vin d'honneur." That ceremony came off in the
council chamber--a large, stately room--and was impressive. M. le Maire
was a tall man, with a cherubic face made broader by wing-like little
whiskers. He wore a white cravat, a long frock-coat, appositely black
trousers, and a far-reaching white waistcoat over which wandered
tranquilly his official tri-coloured scarf. The speech which he
addressed to us was of the most flattering. He told us plainly that we
were an extraordinarily distinguished company; that our coming to
Valence was an event to be remembered long and honourably in the history
of the town; that he, personally and officially, was grateful to us; and
that, personally and officially, he would have the pleasure of drinking
to our very good health. And then (most appropriately by the
brass-helmeted firemen) well-warmed champagne was served; and in that
cordial beverage, after M. Edouard Lockroy had made answer for us, we
pledged each other with an excellent good will.
I am sorry to say that we "scamped" our last monument. To be sure, it
was merely a tablet in a house-front setting forth the fact that Emile
Augier had been born there; and already Augier had had one of the best
speeches of the day. But that was no excuse for us. Actually, we
scarcely waited to see the veil of pink paper torn away by a man on a
step-ladder before we broke for the boat--and not a speech of any sort
was made! Yet they bore us no malice, those brave Valencois. All the way
down to the river, under the blaze of the sun, they crowded closely
around us--with a well-meant but misapplied friendliness--and breathed
what little air was stirring thrice over before it had a chance to get
to our lungs. They covered again in a black swarm the bank and the
bridge in our honour. Their band, through that last twenty minutes,
blared steadfastly the "Marseillaise." From his post upon the
landing-stage the cherubic Mayor beamed to us across his nobly
tri-coloured stomach a series of parting smiles. The brass-helmeted
firemen surrounded him--a little unsteadily, I fancied--smiling too. And
as we slipped away from them all, into the rush of the river, they sent
after us volley upon volley of cheers. Our breasts thrilled and
expanded--it is not always that we poets thus are mounted upon high
horses in the sight of all the world--and we cheered back to those
discriminating and warm-hearted towns-folk until we fairly were under
way down-stream. To the very last the cherubic Mayor, his hat raised,
regarded us smilingly. To the very last--rivalling the golden glory of
the helmet of Mambrino--the slightly-wavering head-gear of his attendant
firemen shot after us golden gleams.