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A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE HOUSE OF MERRILEES
RICHARD BALDOCK
EXTON MANOR
THE SQUIRE'S DAUGHTER
THE ELDEST SON
THE HONOUR OF THE CLINTONS
THE GREATEST OF THESE
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
WATERMEADS
UPSIDONIA
ABINGTON ABBEY
THE GRAFTONS
THE CLINTONS, AND OTHERS
SIR HARRY
MANY JUNES
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
PEGGY IN TOYLAND
[Illustration: EVENING AMONG THE OLIVES]
A SPRING WALK IN
PROVENCE
BY
ARCHIBALD MARSHALL
AUTHOR OF "EXTON MANOR," "SIR
HARRY," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
To
SIR OWEN SEAMAN
PREFACE
The following pages owe a considerable debt to what others who have
been over the same ground have written. Mr. T. A. Cook's[1] "Old
Provence" (London: Rivington's, 2 vols.) is a most valuable record of
the history of the country as it attaches to the innumerable places
of interest to be visited, and his taste and knowledge when brought
to bear upon its architectural remains have greatly enhanced my own
appreciation of those rich treasures. I know of no book, either in
French or English, from which a visitor to Provence could get so much
to supplement his own observation, and I have made constant use of it.
To Mr. Thomas Okey's[2] "Avignon" in Dent's "Mediæval Towns" series, I
also owe a great debt of gratitude. The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould's "In
Troubadour Land" (London: W. H. Allen), though slighter than those two
works, contains much interesting information. Mistral's "Mes Origines"
(Paris: Libraire Plon), translated from the Provençal, is of course
invaluable for its pictures of Provençal life, and from that book and
from M. Paul Mariéton's "La Terre Provençale" (Paris: Ollendorf) one
can get the best information about the movement of the Félibrige,
which has done so much to revivify the old life of Provence. A good
deal of desultory information is afforded by M. Louis de Laincel's
"La Provence" (Paris: Oudin), and some of the stories that linger
on Provençal soil are well told in M. Charles-Roux's "Légendes de
Provence" (Paris: Bloud). These books, and the French translation of
Mistral's "Mirèio," which is a mine of Provençal lore, besides being a
noble poem, have been my chief "authorities," but they have been very
usefully supplemented by the various pamphlets to be picked up locally.
Some of these have been excellent, and I have made mention of their
authors in the following pages.
The photographs are of my own taking, except those very kindly given
to me by Mr. Hope Macey, whom I was fortunate enough to come across in
Avignon in the course of an expedition that coincided with mine at many
points. The one of Mistral's birthplace I bought at Arles, and those of
the picture and tapestry at Aix in Paris.[3]
This account of my spring journey has been finished under the shadow
of the great war, which might have caused me to look upon the _jours
de conscription_ with which I fell in on the early days of the walk in
a light much sadder, if I could have foreseen it. I left Provence in a
train full of young soldiers going to their homes in various distant
parts of France for their Easter furlough. Of those who crowded the
carriage in which I travelled from Arles to Lyons the faces come before
me as clearly as if I saw them in the flesh, and I can hear their
songs and jokes and laughter. They seemed to have been drawn from all
classes, but to mix in the readiest frankest comradeship. Whenever I
read now of the French in action I think of those light-hearted boys
in their holiday mood, and wonder what they are doing, and how many of
them are still alive. One has somewhat changed one's view of the toll
that France has taken of her manhood since those days that now seem so
far off.
CHATEAU D'OEX, _August, 1914_.
* * * * *
The world has changed since this book was written, but I hope that the
record of an expedition made in the happy days before the war may still
be read with pleasure, now that the great shadow is in part removed. I
have been over the manuscript again and made a few alterations here and
there, but have altered nothing that shows it to have been written five
years ago.
BURLEY, HANTS, _August, 1919_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HILLS AND OLIVES 1
II. FLOWERS AND SCENTS 18
III. IN OLD PROVENCE 31
IV. DRAGUIGNAN AND SAINT-MAXIMIN 48
V. THE CHURCH OF SAINT-MAXIMIN 68
VI. CAIUS MARIUS AND THE GREAT BATTLE 85
VII. AIX 97
VIII. SALON AND THE CRAU 116
IX. LES BAUX 127
X. LES BAUX (_Continued_) 143
XI. MISTRAL 158
XII. SAINT-REMY 168
XIII. AVIGNON 175
XIV. THE PALACE OF THE POPES 190
XV. VAUCLUSE 209
XVI. NIMES AND THE PONT DU GARD 227
XVII. AIGUES-MORTES AND THE CAMARGUE 239
XVIII. SAINTES-MARIES DE LA MER 252
XIX. SAINT-GILLES AND MONTMAJOUR 266
XX. THE LAST WALK. ST. MICHEL DE FRIGOLET 282
XXI. VILLENEUVE-SUR-AVIGNON 301
XXII. ARLES 311
ILLUSTRATIONS
Evening among the olives _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
The road downhill "looks just like a temperature chart" 10
I "posed" him among the ruins 11
A Provençal shepherd 44
Fayence could be seen on its own hillside 44
How they prune the plane-trees 45
The dolmen near Draguignan 45
Altar of the Crucifixion, Saint-Maximin 74
The Field of the Great Battle, with Mount Olympus in the background 75
The Canterbury Tapestry 106
The famous "Tarasque" 107
Le Buisson Ardent 110
Porte d'Eyguières 111
The Castle Ruins, Les Baux 130
The Castle Dovecot, Les Baux 131
Pavillon de la Reine Jeanne 140
Huguenot Chapel in Les Baux 141
Les Baux from the Castle Ruins 150
One of the beauties of Les Baux 151
Mistral's birthplace, Mas du Juge 160
Fresco in the Palace of the Popes at Avignon 161
The Mausoleum, Saint-Remy 170
The Triumphal Arch, Saint-Remy 171
Sixteenth century doors and Virgin and Child of
Eighteenth Century, St. Pierre, Avignon 182
The Pont Benezet 183
The Cathedral, Avignon 194
"The Popes' Palace is most like those almost
brutally strong buildings that the Romans left" 195
The "fountain," Vaucluse 212
The caves above the "fountain" 213
The Pont du Gard 228
The Fountains, Nîmes 229
The Maison Carrée 234
The Amphitheatre, Nîmes 235
Aigues-Mortes, the Ramparts 244
"Looked away to the desolate salt marshes" 245
Saintes-Maries, the Fortress Church 256
Saint-Gilles, the Central Porch 257
The Maison-Romaine 276
The staircase in the farmyard at Montmajour 277
Saint-Michel de Frigolet 284
The Coronation of the Virgin, Villeneuve-Sur-Avignon 285
A courtyard in Villeneuve 308
The Rotunda at Villeneuve 309
The Arena at Arles 312
The Greek Theatre, Arles 313
The Cloisters, South walk, St. Trophime 316
The Cloisters, North walk, St. Trophime 317
Arles, the Alyscamps 320
Boy's head in marble, Musée Lapidaire, Arles 321
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
CHAPTER I
_Hills and Olives_
I was to walk through the country from the Italian border, but it
rained so heavily on the first day that I went to Mentone and took the
mountain tramway to Sospel, where in any case I had intended to spend
the night.
Two years ago, before this tram-line was quite finished, I motored
up to Sospel to play golf. It was a pleasant experience, though not
without its thrills, for the road zigzags and corkscrews up mountain
sides and across deep gorges in a way to make one thankful for strong
brakes and a reliable driver, especially on the return journey. The
hillsides are cultivated everywhere. The precipitous slopes have been
terraced with infinite labour, and orange and lemon groves surrounding
pretty little lodges and cottages, only give way as one mounts higher
to the grey-green of olive plantations.
When you have climbed up 2,300 feet, the road, as if tired of twisting
and turning, boldly attacks the mountain side, runs through a tunnel
pierced in the solid rock and comes out on the other side of the peak.
Then it takes a turn so sharp that not long ago a car coming too fast
through the tunnel went over the precipitous edge and all its occupants
were killed.
The crowning danger safely surmounted, you drop down into a green
mountain valley, surrounded by what Smollett, who passed through Sospel
on his way from Nice to Italy a hundred and fifty years ago, described
as "prodigious high and barren mountains." The valley is all verdant
pasture, watered by a broad, shallow, tree-shaded river, which, to
quote the same authority, "forms a delightful contrast with the hideous
rocks surrounding it." All mountains were "hideous" and "horrid" in the
eyes of our ancestors. We, as we play along the grassy meadows, and
cross here and there the clear river rippling over its pebbles, have
come to think that the towering rock-ramparts, upon which the sun and
the clouds play with infinite gradations of light and colour, have as
much to do with the beauty of the scene as the verdant valley itself,
or the little old huddled Italian-looking town which hugs both banks of
the river.
It was that little old town, which the golfer coming up from Mentone
only skirts on his way to the links, that had remained in my memory,
even more than the unusual charm of the links and the excellence of
the greens. It stands curiously aside from the wave of modernity that
has washed up to it from the wealthy delocalized coast. Turn to the
right when you reach the corner, and you are still in the atmosphere of
the Côte d'Azur, although you are fifteen miles inland from Mentone;
turn to the left and you are in southern provincial France, in a street
of little shops and little _cafés_ and _buvettes_, and pick your way
amongst a crowd of peasants and townspeople, buying and selling,
talking of their crops and their commerce, and as little concerned with
what is going on half a mile away as if they had never seen a mashie
or a putter, and none of them had ever shouldered a bag of clubs for a
curiously-garbed curiously-spoken foreigner.
Probably it is only the caddies or the ex-caddies who ever mention golf
in the town of Sospel. It stands so aloof that even its prices have not
yet been affected by the lavish ways of the holiday coast, with which
it has formed this late new connection.
So I turned to the left. I wanted to have done for a time with
everything English, and more particularly with the sort of hotel that
has an English-speaking waiter, or indeed a waiter at all. Sospel was
to provide me with my first genuine experience of a French inn, as used
by the people of the country and not by the tourist.
Sospel rose adequately to the occasion, as I had thought it would. I
found an hotel facing the market stalls and the river beyond them. I
went up a flight of stone stairs and into a kitchen, which was also
the bureau of the _patronne_. Yes, I could have a room for the night,
and the charge would be two francs. I went up to see the room. It had
a tiled floor, which was very clean, a large four-poster bed hung
round with muslin curtains, and a few old cumbrous pieces of furniture
besides--just the sort of room I wanted.
I had a good dinner, which I ate in company with four _commis
voyageurs_ and an engineer, all of whom were cordially interested in
my coming expedition, and none of whom had a word of English or seemed
to have any idea in their minds of connecting Sospel with golf. I felt
that I had fallen plumb into it by taking that left-hand turn, and
it needed an effort to call to mind the great new hotel at the other
end of the links two miles away, where no diner had tucked his napkin
inside his collar, or would soak his dessert biscuits in his wine;
where the waiter brought a clean knife and fork for every course, and
the proprietor would have requested me to leave if I had sat down in
the clothes in which I intended to walk on the morrow. I felt happy, as
I went to bed at nine o'clock, after a look at the rapid-flowing river
on which the moon was now shining through the parting clouds. The fun
had begun.
I felt happier still at six o'clock the next morning, when I took
the road with my pack on my back. The clouds had blown away from the
mountain tops, though wisps of them hung about the lower slopes, and
the cup of the valley still held a light mist. It was going to be a
lovely day, and perhaps hotter than would be altogether comfortable
for a walker habited and burdened as I was. For it was still early
in March, and I had come down from Alpine snows. Moreover, the
replenishments of clothing that I had sent on ahead were at least a
week away, and I carried "changes" to a rather nervous extent; also
some reading matter, which is a mistake, for books weigh heavy, however
light their contents, and if your day on the road is not filled with
walking, eating and sleeping, and whatever recreation in the way of
talk may come to you, you are not throwing yourself enough into the
spirit of your adventure.
The road wound and turned and twisted, always going uphill, but never
very steeply. I was on the old high road from the north, where it
enters on its last stage of about five and twenty miles to Nice. I
thought I must have come near to its highest point when I had climbed
up on a level with the heavy fort that frowned on me from a hill near
by, and sat down to take my last look at the green valley now lying far
beneath me.
It showed as a level carpet of vivid green, broken by the grey mass
and outlying buildings of the town, with the river threading it
lengthwise. The hills rose up sheer on every side. Their lower slopes
were so regularly terraced that at this distance they had the effect
of horizontal "shadings" in a pencil drawing. Above that they were
grey, and dark green, and red as with heather, and the summits of some
of them still held snow. White roads jagged them here and there, but
the flat valley floor had the effect of being completely cupped and
confined by the rugged heights, as indeed it is, except just where the
river, having filled up the bottom of the cup with a rich layer of
alluvium, must have broken through at some time, and left the fertile
plain all ready and waiting for cultivation. It was like looking down
on a miniature Promised Land, so marked was the contrast between the
fresh green of the valley and the sombre tones of its encircling hills.
This southern country flushes to tender spring green only here and
there. The cultivated hillsides keep their darker colours, though they
may be most sweetly lit with the pink of almonds. March would be a
glorious month in Provence if it were only for the almond blossom.
Mixed with the soft grey of the olives it makes delicious pictures, and
it is to be found everywhere. And the wild rosemary is in flower--great
bushes of it, lighting up the rocky hillsides with their delicate blue.
They were all around me as I sat on this height, and there were brooms
getting ready to flower, and wild lavender, and thyme. The air held
an aromatic fragrance, and as I walked on between the pines and the
deciduous trees, not yet in leaf, the birds were singing and the water
rushing down its channels from the snowy heights very musically. There
were primroses and violets by the roadside, as if it had been spring
in England, and juicy little grape hyacinths to remind one that it was
not. There was something to look at and enjoy at every step.
I was nowhere near the top of the pass, as I had thought, but reached
it at last at the Col de Braus, where I found a rude little inn, and
entered it not without reluctance in search of refreshment.
I found myself in a vaulted stone kitchen, its floor below the level of
the ground outside. An elderly woman sat by the hearth, winding wool,
with a child playing at her knee; a younger woman brought me wine and
bread and cheese. The place was very dirty, but the wine was good and
the viands eatable.
The older woman was a picture of grief as she sat under the great stone
chimney and told me how hard life was in that exposed spot, especially
in the winter, when they were sometimes flooded out of the lower rooms.
And now they had taken away her only son, for his military service, and
what she should do without him she could not think. It was a hard tax
on poor mothers. In three years, when he had done with the army, who
knew? She might be dead.
"But you have a husband, madame, isn't it so? Otherwise they could not
take him."
Yes; she had a husband. She nodded her head slowly with infinite
meaning, and as if to interpret it there entered the room an extremely
unattractive person, dirtier even than his dirty surroundings, who
addressed her, or the younger woman, or perhaps me, in a flood of
intemperate speech, of which I could not make out a single word. Nobody
answered him, and he slouched out of the room again.
"Is that your husband, madame?"
She nodded her head slowly up and down, without speaking. I could see
for myself.
We talked about the little child, and her face lighted up. Presently
the husband came in again, and expressed himself in his unrecognizable
tongue with as much freedom and fervour as before. Again nobody took
any notice of him, and again he went out. I don't know whether he was
drunk or not, but am inclined now to think that he only wanted to be.
I was sure that he was annoyed with me, for some reason, by the way
he glared at me, and as I was a customer and prepared to pay for my
entertainment it must either have been because I did not offer him any
or because I was interfering with the hour of his own repast. I think
it is likely that his bark, which was strident enough, was worse than
his bite, that he was merely a ne'er-do-well with an unusual gift of
self-expression, which had ceased to interest those about him. His wife
took no steps to carry out whatever may have been his wishes at this
particular juncture of circumstances, and her attitude of frozen grief,
effective at the time, thawed enough to enable her to make a mild
overcharge when I came to settle up. She gave me permission to take a
photograph of the room and its occupants if I wished to do so, but I
said that the light was not good enough, and came away.
Now I changed my view for a different set of hills, and began to
descend on roads that zigzagged more than ever. There was a good deal
of quarrying going on. Great blocks of stone were lying by the roadside
ready to be built up into the parapet, and presently I came upon a
group of Italian workmen busy with their picks and crowbars. I don't
know why, after all these years, the enormous work of protecting this
old road should be taken in hand, but certainly there are places in
it at which a fall over the edge can hardly be thought of without a
shudder, and with the surface in the muddy state in which I found it
a motor-car might easily skid with danger. At one place, if you stand
where it rounds a point and look down to where it takes another slope,
it looks just like a temperature chart, where the thermometer has taken
a series of rises and drops and at last runs off steadily downwards.
This long downward slope led me at last to welcome shade, and I found a
little lawn under olive boughs, below the road and above a river gorge
which was an ideal place for a siesta. If food and drink are so good
when one is on the long steady tramp, sleep is no less so. There are
those who scorn it except at night between sheets, but when one has
made an early start, and has covered many miles by the time the sun has
reached its greatest power, it is pleasant enough to sleep for an hour
under the shade of a tree, and to wake up refreshed for what remains to
be done of the day's journey.
The sound of the river beneath me, and the birds singing all around,
lulled me to sleep. But for this there was no sound, except a very rare
noise of wheels, and once a motor-car, on the road above, to arouse me
for a moment and to make the sinking back into sleep more blissful.
The first time, on an expedition of this sort, that you take your pack
for a pillow, mother earth for your bed and green leaves for your
canopy, there is something that falls away from you of the troubles and
irritations of the world. You are as near to nature as you are ever
likely to be in this sophisticated age, and nature will smooth things
out for you if you trust yourself to her.
[Illustration: THE ROAD DOWNHILL "LOOKS JUST LIKE A TEMPERATURE CHART"]
[Illustration: I "POSED" HIM AMONG THE RUINS
_Page 20_]
I dropped down to L'Escaréne, a picturesque old town with an ancient
bridge straddling across the quick-flowing river. But before I reached
it I was met by a man with a drum and several intoxicated youths
carrying a flag, who cried "Vive la République" and "Vive l'armée,"
with the most patriotic fervour. I had begun my walk just at the
time when the conscripts were being called up from their homes all
over France, and lived in the thick of the concomitant disturbances
during the next few days. These rather pathetic little processions
of service-old boys, usually accompanied by middle-aged men more
drunk than they were, trailing out of a town and back again, became a
commonplace. They shouted at me frequently, but never rudely.
I sat under a naked vine-trellis on a raised terrace outside an inn and
drank wine. A talkative damsel, with needlework to occupy her hands,
but nothing to keep her fine eyes from noting everything that happened
in the _place_, for the observation of which this was a vantage-ground,
kept me company. She explained to me, with much shrugging of shapely
shoulders, some of the differences between the _patois_ used in
this part of the country and the true French, but she disclaimed
knowledge of Provençal. I was in Provence, but not yet among the true
Provençals--unless I mistook her altogether, which is quite possible.
She gave me excited and exhaustive instructions how to reach the hill
town of Berre, where I had thought to spend the night. I had had a
description of it from the engineer in whose company I had dined the
evening before, and when I came within sight of it, perched on its rock
summit, an hour or two later, its high walls and dominating church
tower lit by the westering sun, it gave me a little thrill--it was so
beautiful, and so just right.
It was just right to look at from a distance, or for a walk through its
narrow twisting alleys, part staircase, part passage, part drain. There
is nothing more picturesque than these little rock-perched towns and
villages that lie behind the Italian and French Rivieras. They are as
untouched as anything in the way of congregated buildings can be in
these days, and carry your imagination right back into the past. And
I had thought that a night spent in some old inn in one of them would
strengthen that touch of romance for me.
But in Berre there was no inn such as I had pictured, where one would
sleep in such a room as I had slept in the night before and awake to a
glorious view as from some commanding tower. There were two _cafés_,
and I penetrated one of them in search of dinner and a bed. Militarism
was being celebrated with much consumption of fluid, and much singing
and shouting, and the place was very dirty, and had that air of hard
discomfort and newness which is the peculiar property of French
_buvettes_ of the poorer sort. I was not sorry to be told that it was
impossible for me to have a bed there. I think I could have got one by
pressing for it, but I did not press. The romance of Berre was oozing
out fast, and I still had in me the four miles or so that would take me
to Contes, in the valley below.
The revellers here were all men of middle age, or at any rate long
past the age at which the new three years' service could affect them
personally, but their enthusiasm for it was very great. One of them,
who had detached himself from the rest while I had been making my
enquiries and was reeling down the road waving a branch of mimosa and
singing loudly, showed me the way to Contes; for I already knew better
than to follow the road, which always approaches these high-perched
villages in an over-deliberate fashion for pedestrians. He was very
amiable about it, and I rather feared that he would offer to go with
me. But he only came a little way, to where he could point me out
a mule-track, and during our walk together I understood him to be
persuading me, and possibly himself, that he was on the eve of gaining
much military glory. But he was bald and pot-bellied, and I think that
he was only touched by that noble and unselfish enthusiasm which takes
patriotic men when there is question of other people doing their duty.
Dusk was falling, and I went down stony paths between olive gardens,
which are very peaceful and mysterious in twilight. I met some of the
inhabitants of Berre mounting slowly to their little town after their
day's work. Most of the women carried cut olive boughs on their heads,
and some of the men drove asses laden with them. It was the time of
pruning, and olive leaves are very acceptable to most animals as food.
By and bye I had the track to myself, and sometimes lost it, but I did
not much mind. I could see the lights of Contes below me, and whenever
I found myself on a path that seemed to lead aside from them I took
a straight line over the terraces till I found a more suitable one. I
was rather tired, but rest and refreshment were not far off, and it
was soothing to the spirit to walk in this odorous dusk, and in such
quietness.
It was quite dark by the time I came to Contes, and I was quite ready
for my dinner. But I did not reach it for some time yet. When I had
gone down long, steep, paved paths between walls to what seemed to
be the heart of the town I had to go down much farther still until I
thought I should never come to the end of things. But at last, there
was the bottom of the hill, and an hotel, no less, with a garden in
front of it.
I sat down in the _café_, since, although a room was promised me, there
was no suggestion of taking me to it, and at the moment I had no wish
to mount stairs even for the sake of a wash. There are certain habits
of civilization that are very easily dropped. One comes to the end of a
day's march, and one's first desire is for rest, one's second for food
and drink; and in these little inns this sequence of desire seems to
be well understood. It seemed quite natural to exchange my heavy dusty
boots for a pair of slippers out of my pack, sitting by the table, to
pass at once to the consumption of wine, and as soon as might be to
the consumption of food, without any further preparation.
The wine was very good, with a slight tang that was almost a sparkle in
it, and as I sat blissfully at rest with it the room was invaded first
by a man with a drum, then by a man with a cornet, then by several
more men with very loud voices. I was immediately whisked away by the
youth who had received me, and who seemed to be in sole charge of the
place, into another little room across a passage, where he presently
served me with dinner, consisting of soup, an omelette, beef, potatoes
and carrots, cheese, oranges, and biscuits, and another litre of
the good wine. Soon after that he showed me a clean little room, in
which I slept deeply, hardly disturbed by the voices of the _jour de
fête_ beneath me, and was only once thoroughly awakened, at about one
o'clock, by a great bustle of arrival in a room adjoining mine.
The busy young man was still as active as possible at that hour, but he
was quite ready to give me my coffee at six o'clock the next morning,
at a little table in the garden. He had also thoroughly cleaned my
boots, but before I left I heard him called a marauder for something or
other he had omitted to do for the two gentlemen who had arrived in the
night.
For the whole of this entertainment I paid five francs and a half, and
the helpful and willing young man explained that the charge was rather
high because I had drunk two litres of wine.
And so I came happily to my second day, in the bright spring sunshine.