Below Viviers the Rhone breaks out from its broad upper valley into its
broader lower valley through the Defile of Donzere. Here the foothills
of the Alps and the foothills of the Cevennes come together, and behind
this natural dam there must have been anciently a great lake which
extended to the northward of where now is Valence. The Defile is a
veritable canon that would be quite in place in the Sierra Madre. On
each side of the sharply-narrowed river the walls of rock rise sheer to
a height of two hundred feet. The rush of the water is tumultuous. In
mid-stream, surrounded by eddies and whirling waves, is the
Roche-des-Anglais--against which the boat of a luckless party of English
travellers struck and was shattered a hundred years ago. Indeed, so
dangerous was this passage held to be of old--when faith was stronger
and boats were weaker than in our day of skepticism and
compound-engines--that it was customary to tie-up at the head of the
Defile and pray for grace to come through it safely; and sincerely
faithful travellers tied-up again when the passage was ended to offer a
service of grateful praise. But nowadays they clap five men on the
tiller and put on more steam--and the practical result is the same.
The cliffs bordering the canon, being of a crumbling nature, are known
as the Maraniousques; but usually are called by the Rhone boatmen the
Monkey Rocks--because of the monkeys who dwelt in them in legendary
times and stoned from their heights the passing travellers. It was a
long while ago that the monkeys were in possession--in the time
immediately succeeding the Deluge. During the subsidence of the waters
it seems that the Ark made fast there for the night, just before laying
a course for Ararat; and the monkey and his wife--desperately bored by
their long cooping-up among so many uncongenial animals--took advantage
of their opportunity to pry a couple of tiles off the roof and get away.
The tradition hints that Noah had been drinking; at any rate, their
absence was not noticed, and the Ark went on without them the next day.
By the time that the Deluge fairly was ended, and the Rhone reopened to
normal navigation, a large monkey family was established on the
Maraniousques; and the monkeys thenceforward illogically revenged
themselves upon Noah's descendants by stoning everybody who came along.
Later, the ill-tempered monkeys were succeeded by more ill-tempered men.
In the fighting times the Defile of Donzere was a famous place in which
to bring armies to a stand. Fortifications upon the cliffs entirely
commanded the river; and at the lower end of the Defile the castle and
the walled town of Donzere, capping a defiant little hill-top, commanded
both the river and the plain. Even the most fire-eating of captains were
apt to stop and think a little before venturing into the Defile in those
days.
All of those perils are ended now. The dangers of the river are so shorn
by steam that the shooting of the canon rapids yields only a pleasurable
excitement, that is increased by the extraordinary wild beauty of that
savage bit of nature in the midst of a long-tamed land; and the ramparts
and the castle of Donzere, having become invitingly picturesque ruins,
are as placable remnants of belligerency as are to be found anywhere in
the world. Indeed, as we saw them--with the afternoon sunlight slanting
down in a way to bring out delectably the warm greys and yellows of the
stone-work and to produce the most entrancing effects of
light-and-shade--it was not easy to believe that people had been killing
each other all over them not so very long ago.
[Illustration: THE DEFILE OF DONZERE]
Having escaped from the Defile of Donzere, the river wanders away
restfully into a wilderness of islands--a maze so unexplored and so
unexplorable that otters still make their home in it, and through the
thick foliage poke out their snub noses at passing boatmen now and then.
Thence onward for a long way islands are plentiful--past Pierrelatte,
and Bourg-Saint-Andeol, (a very ancient and highly Roman flavoured
town), and the confluence of the Rhone and the Ardeche--to the still
larger archipelago across which the Bridge Building Brothers, with God
himself helping them, built the Pont-Saint-Esprit.
Modern engineers--possibly exalting their own craft at the expense of
that of the architects--declare that this bridge was the greatest piece
of structural work of the Middle Ages; certainly it was the greatest
work of the Freres Pontifes: that most practical of brotherhoods which,
curiously anticipating one phase of modern doctrine, paid less attention
to faith than to works and gave itself simply to ministering to the
material welfare of mankind. In the making of it they spent near half a
century. From the year 1265 steadily onward until the year 1307 the
Brothers labored: and then the bridge was finished--a half-mile miracle
in stone. In view of the extraordinary difficulties which the engineer
in charge of the work overcame--founding piers in bad holding-ground and
in the thick of that tremendous current, with the work broken off short
by the frequent floods and during the long season of high water in the
spring--it is not surprising that the miracle theory was adopted to
explain his eventual victory. Nor is it surprising that the popular
conviction presently began to sustain itself by crystalizing into a
definite legend--based upon the recorded fact that the Brothers worked
under the vocation of the Holy Spirit--to the effect that the Spirit of
God, taking human form, was the designer of the fabric and the actual
director under whose guidance the work went on. And so the genesis of
the bridge was accounted for satisfactorily; and so it came by its holy
name.
Personally, I like miracles; and this miracle is all the more patent, I
think, now that the bridge has been in commission for almost six hundred
years and still is entirely serviceable. Yet while its piers and
arches, its essential parts, remain nearly as the Brothers built them,
the bridge has undergone such modifications in the course of the past
century--in order to fit it to the needs of modern traffic--that its
picturesqueness has been destroyed. The chapel of St. Nicholas upon one
of its piers, and the tower at its centre, were razed about the end of
the last century; a little later the fortified approaches were removed;
in the year 1854, to provide for the increasing river navigation, the
first two arches from the right bank were replaced by a single iron arch
of two hundred feet span over the main channel; and in the year 1860 the
entire superstructure on the north side, with a part of the
superstructure on the south side, was torn down--and in place of the old
narrow roadway, with turn-outs on each pier, there was built a roadway
uniformly twenty-two feet wide. In a sentimental way, of course, these
radical changes are to be regretted; but I am sure that the good
Brothers, could they have been consulted in the premises, would have
been the first to sanction them. For they were not sentimentalists, the
Brothers; they were practical to the last degree. What they wanted was
that their bridge, living up to their own concept of duty, should do the
greatest amount of good to the greatest number of men.
Almost as we came out from beneath that monument to practical
Christianity, we saw over on the left bank two monuments to the
theoretical Christianity of three hundred years ago: the grisly ruins of
Mornas and Montdragon--each on a hill dark green with a thick growth of
_chene vert_, and each having about it (not wholly because of its dark
setting, I fancied) a darkly sinister air. In truth, the story of Mornas
is sombre enough to blacken not merely a brace of hill-tops but a whole
neighbourhood. In the early summer of the year 1565, a day or two before
the Fete-Dieu, the Papists surprised and seized the town and castle and
put the entire Huguenot garrison to the sword. Then, as now, it was the
custom in honour of the Fete-Dieu to adorn the house-fronts with
garlands and draperies; and by way of variant upon this pretty custom
"certain of the conquerors, more fanatical than the rest, flayed the
dead Huguenots and draped their houses bravely with Protestant skins."
Thereupon the Baron des Adrets, the Huguenot commander in that region,
sent one of his lieutenants, Dupuy-Montbrun, to avenge that deviltry. At
the end of a three-days' siege Mornas was conquered again, and then came
the vengeance: "for which the castle of Mornas, whereof the battlements
overhung a precipice falling sheer two hundred feet to broken rocks
below, offered great advantages." In a grave and orderly fashion, the
survivors of the conquered garrison were assembled in the castle
court-yard; were taken in orderly squads of ten up to the battlements;
and thence were thrust over into that awful depth. And so the account
was squared.
It is instructive to note that des Adrets, who ordered the vengeance on
Mornas, a little later abjured the Reformed religion and became a
Papist; and that Dupuy-Montbrun, who carried out his orders and who
succeeded him upon his recantation in the command of the Protestant
army, but a little while before had renounced Papacy to become a
Huguenot. So the leaders, the worst of them, shifted from side to side
as they happened to be swayed by pay or policy; and to such creatures of
no real faith were due the direst of the atrocities of those hideous
times. But the Huguenots of the rank and file were of another sort.
Their singleness and sincerity in their fight for their faith were
beyond question. They died for it willingly. Failing the happiness of
death, yet being conquered, they still held fast to it. In the end,
rather than relinquish it, they unhesitatingly elected--at a stroke
giving up country, rank, fortune--to be outcast from France.
For me the history of those desperate wars has a very vital interest:
for my own ancestors took the share in them that was becoming to
faithful gentlemen vowed to the Reform, and I owe my American birthright
to the honourable fact that they fought on the losing side. As I myself
am endowed with a fair allowance of stubbornness, and with a strong
distaste to taking my opinions at second hand, I certainly should have
been with my kinsfolk in that fight had I lived in their day; and since
my destiny was theirs to determine I am strongly grateful to them for
having shaped it so well.
X
But I was glad when Mornas, vivid with such bitter memories, dropped out
of sight astern. Sleeping dogs of so evil a sort very well may lie;
though it is difficult not to waken a few of them when they lie so
thickly as here in the Rhone Valley, where almost every town and castle
has a chapter of nightmare horrors all its own.
Even Chateauneuf-du-Pape--which we saw a half hour later off to the
eastward, rising from a little hill-top and thence overlooking the wide
vineyard-covered valley--came to its present ruin at the hands of des
Adrets; who, having captured and fired it, left standing only its tall
square tower and some fragments of its walls. This was an unfairly lurid
ending for a castle which actually came into existence for gentle
purposes and was not steeped to its very battlements in crime; for
Chateauneuf was built purely as a pleasure-place, to which the
Popes--when weary with ruling the world and bored by their strait-laced
duties as Saint Peter's earthly representatives--might come from Avignon
with a few choice kindred spirits and refreshingly kick up their heels.
As even in Avignon, in those days, the Popes and cardinals did not keep
their heels any too fast to the ground, it is an inferential certainty
that the kicking up at Chateauneuf must have been rather prodigiously
high; but the people of the Middle Ages were too stout of stomach to be
easily scandalized, and the Pope's responsibilities in the premises were
all the lighter because the doctrine of his personal infallibility had
not then been formulated officially. And so things went along
comfortably in a cheerfully reprehensible way.
It was in those easy-going days that the vineyards were planted, on the
slopes below the castle, which were destined to make the name of
Chateauneuf-du-Pape famous the toping world over long after the New
Castle should be an old ruin and the Avignon Popes a legend of the past.
Only within the present generation did those precious vines perish,
when the phylloxera began among them its deadly work in France; and even
yet may be found, tucked away here and there in the favoured cellars of
Provence and Languedoc, a few dust-covered bottles of their rich
vintage: which has for its distinguishing taste a sublimated spiciness
due to the alternate dalliance of the bees with the grape-blossoms and
with the blossoms of the wild thyme. It is a wine of poets, this
bee-kissed Chateauneuf, and its noblest association is not with the
Popes who gave their name to it but with the seven poets--Mistral,
Roumanille, Aubanel, Matthieu, Brunet, Giera, Tavan--whose chosen drink
it was in those glorious days when they all were young together and were
founding the Felibrige: the society that was to restore the golden age
of the Troubadours and, incidentally, to decentralize France. One of the
sweetest and gentlest of the seven, Anselme Matthieu, was born here at
Chateauneuf; and here, with a tender love-song upon his lips, only the
other day he died. The vineyards have been replanted, and in the fulness
of time may come to their glory again; but the greater glories of
Chateauneuf--which belonged to it once because of its Popes, and again
because of its sweet-souled Poet--must be only memories forevermore.
[Illustration: THE ROUMANILLE MONUMENT]
The castles over on the right bank, Montfaucon and Roquemaure, are of
the normal painful sort again. Roquemaure is a crooked, narrow,
up-and-down old dirty town, where old customs and old costumes and old
forms of speech still live on; and, also, its people have a very pretty
taste in the twisting and perverting of historic fact into picturesque
tradition--as is shown by the way in which they have rearranged the
unpleasant details of the death of Pope Clement V. into a bit of
melodramatic moral decoration for their own town. Their ingeniously
compiled legend runs in this wise: Clement's death in the castle of
Roquemaure occurred while he was on his way homeward from the Council of
Vienne; where--keeping with the King the bargain which had won for him
the Papal throne--he had abolished the Order of the Templars and had
condemned their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, to be burned alive. When
that sentence was passed, the Grand Master, in turn, had passed
sentence of death upon the Pope: declaring that within forty days they
should appear together, in the spirit, to try again that cause misjudged
on earth before the Throne of God. And the forty days were near ended
when Pope Clement came to Roquemaure--with the death-grip already so
strong upon him that even the little farther journey to Avignon was
impossible, and he could but lay him down there and die. While yet the
breath scarce was out of his body, his servants fell to fighting over
his belongings with a brutal fierceness: in the midst of which fray a
lighted torch fell among and fired the hangings of the bed whereon lay
the dead Pope--and before any of the pillagers would give the rest an
advantage by stopping in their foul work to extinguish the flames his
body was half-consumed. And so was Clement burned in death even as the
Grand Master had been burned in life; and so was executed upon him the
Grand Master's summons to appear before the Judgment Seat on high!
It is interesting to note that this tradition does very little violence
to the individual facts of the case, and yet rearranges them in such a
fashion that they are at sixes and sevens with the truth as a whole.
When, in my lighter youth, I entered upon what I fancied was antiquarian
research I was hot for the alluring theory that oral tradition is a
surer preserver of historic fact than is written record; and as I was
not concerned with antiquities of a sort upon which my pretty borrowed
theory could be tested I got along with it very well. But I am glad now
to cite this capital instance in controversion of my youthful
second-hand belief--because it entirely accords with my more mature
conviction that oral tradition, save as a tenacious preserver of
place-names, is not to be trusted at all. And as unsupported written
record rarely is to be trusted either, it would seem that a certain
amount of reason was at the root of King David's hasty generalization as
to the untruthfulness of mankind.
The day was nearly ended as we passed that town with a stolen moral
history: and so swept onward, in and out among the islands, toward
Avignon. Already the sun had fallen below the crest of the Cevennes;
leaving behind him in the sky a liquid glory, and still sending far
above us long level beams which gilded radiantly--far off to the
eastward--the heights of Mont-Ventour. But we, deep in the deep valley,
threaded our swift way among the islands in a soft twilight which gently
ebbed to night.
And then, as the dusk deepened to the westward, there came slowly into
the eastern heavens a pale lustre that grew brighter and yet brighter
until, all in a moment, up over the Alpilles flashed the full moon--and
there before us, almost above us, the Rocher-des-Doms and the Pope's
Palace and the ramparts of Avignon stood out blackly against the
moon-bright sky. So sudden was this ending to our journey that there was
a wonder among us that the end had come!
* * * * *
All the Felibres of Avignon were at the water-side to cheer us welcome
as the _Gladiateur_, with reversed engines, hung against the current
above the bridge of Saint-Benezet and slowly drew in to the bank. Our
answering cheers went forth to them through the darkness, and a stave
or two of "La Coupe" was sung, and there was a mighty clapping of hands.
And then the gang-plank was set ashore, and instantly beside
it--standing in the glare of a great lantern--we saw our Capoulie, the
head of all the Felibrige, Felix Gras, waiting for us, his subjects and
his brethren, with outstretched hands. From him came also, a little
later, our official welcome: when we all were assembled for a _ponch
d'honneur_ at the Hotel du Louvre--in the great vaulted chamber that
once served the Templars as a refectory, and that has been the
banquet-hall of the Felibrige ever since this later and not less
honorable Order was founded, almost forty years ago.
[Illustration: AVIGNON]
Not until those formalities were ended could we of America get away to
receive the personal welcome to which through all that day we had been
looking forward with a warm eagerness--yet also sorrowing: because we
knew that among the welcoming voices there would be a silence, and that
a face would be missing from among those we loved. Roumanille was dead;
and in meeting again in Avignon those who had been closest and
dearest to him, and who to us were close and dear, there was heartache
with our joy.
SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE,
_August, 1894._