_In Old Provence_
I now finally left behind me the cosmopolitan coast, and came into the
true Provence.
My objective was the old city of Aix, which lay almost due east, across
country in which there are not many places standing out on the map as
of any importance, but which seemed to me rather more attractive on
that account.
Once at Aix, one would be in the thick of it. Avignon, Nîmes, Arles,
and a score of points of interest lie within a few miles of one
another. When I reached this rich and crowded corner, the adventure of
walking through unknown country would take second place. But at least
as long as the weather held I wanted to be on foot, and in the country
that lies apart from the main tourist routes.
When I had passed beyond the sphere of the villas with their flowery
gardens the road became rather lonely. The fields of blossom became
rarer, but there were vines and olives everywhere. The earth was
red, and looked rich, and the hills on either side of me took on all
sorts of lovely shades of orange and purple and blue, as the light
changed and shifted during the day. I could still see, when I turned
round, some of the higher mountains from among which I had come, and
the country did not sensibly change its character until I had crossed
another pass later on in the day.
I walked for some miles, hoping to come across an inn where I could get
something to drink. I had had nothing since the bread and coffee of the
early morning, and had walked straight through Grasse, only stopping to
get my letters and buy some provisions.
I believe that most people on the tramp find it enough to have one good
meal at the end of the day. Some of them find it necessary to start
with a stout breakfast, but that is hardly possible outside England,
and for my part the coffee and roll of France or Switzerland carries me
on very well for two or three hours, when I am ready for something more
substantial.
You need not trust to an inn for this second collation, and if you do
they will only send out to get for you what you could have got for
yourself, and charge you rather more for it. They quite understand
your bringing your own _vivres_ with you, and eating them to the
accompaniment of their wine. Even the wine you can buy and carry with
you, but it is hardly necessary to do that as long as you are in a
country where you can get it anywhere.
You go to a _boulangerie_ and buy a crisp, newly baked loaf for a
penny. Then you go to an _épicerie_ and buy cheese or sausage, or both;
also oranges and chocolate to amuse yourself with at odd moments during
the day. Here is food fit for the gods, and all you want is wine to
wash it down with. My own preference is for a great deal of wine at
such times, but there are some who may be content with water. I want
water, too, and a great deal of that, and carry an aluminum folding cup
with me, filling it almost anywhere without regard to possible germs.
It may be dangerous in some places, and possibly so in Provence; but I
have never taken any harm from it, there or anywhere.
It was on this morning that I realized for the first time that it was
not necessary to find an inn in order to find wine. Everybody makes
wine in Provence and almost anybody will sell it to you. I got my
litre at a blacksmith's; they brought me out a chair under a tree,
and I ate and drank to the ring of the anvil. The wine cost fourpence
halfpenny--I like to present these little sums in English money--and
was drinkable, but no more. I was beginning to get rather tired of the
ordinary red wine of the country, though I never drank white that was
not good. But it is mostly red wine that the peasants make, and it is
only occasionally that it is anything more than a mere beverage.
That afternoon I came to a beautiful place. The road had been falling
for some time, and at last entered a deep and narrow valley of verdant
meadows through which flowed a very clear river. I had walked a long
way, and it was very hot. The idea came to me to find a sheltered spot
and bathe in these clear waters. Perhaps fortunately, there was an
inn at the point at which the road crossed a bridge and doubled back
on the other side of the gorge, and when I had refreshed myself there
bathing did not seem such a reasonable undertaking. The river, though
invitingly clear, was rapid, and must have been fed by snows not so
very far away; and it was still early March, in spite of the hot sun.
There were motor-cars in front of this inn, and a party had finished a
late and from evidence a long _déjeuner_ at a table in the open. They
were flushed with food and wine and other liquors, and chattered like
parrots before they packed themselves into their cars and made off
in the direction of the coast. I disliked them one and all, and felt
vastly superior to them--a feeling which no doubt they also experienced
towards me, if they took any notice of me at all. Their sensation
of superiority would be based upon the fact that they were showing
themselves in command of quite a lot of money, and would be heightened
by the mild delirium that comes from over-feeding and being carried
along swiftly in that state, with no call for bodily or mental effort.
Mine arose from the pride of living frugally and feeling particularly
well from having walked a good many miles and being ready to walk a
good many more in about half an hour's time. I'm not sure, now that I
have drawn the comparison, that the one feeling was any more laudable
than the other.
I crossed the bridge, which was called the Pont de la Saigne, and began
the long ascent to the Colle Noire. When I had reached it the scenery
began to show a change. I had left the high rugged hills behind me at
last, and was dropping down into a fertile valley, which spread out
into a plain. The hills, more rounded now, bounded this plain to the
north, and were dotted at intervals with little towns that showed up
picturesquely from a distance on their blue and purple slopes. I was
making for one of them--Fayence, where I had been assured that I should
find a good inn. It was still a long way off after a few hours' walk,
and still hidden from me by an intervening hill, and I had walked quite
far enough that day.
I sat down on the coping of a bridge as the dusk began to steal over
the fields and hills. It was a peaceful, soothing scene. An old
shepherd came slowly towards me with his flock following him to their
night's shelter. It was like a picture by Millet. There was not enough
light for a photograph, but I took one of another shepherd with his
flock later on. They watch their sheep as the Swiss watch their cattle
in the mountain pastures, never leaving them alone; and I never saw a
flock of sheep in Provence that numbered above thirty.
When I had walked on a little farther I got a lift in a cart drawn by
an old white horse that was jogging along my way. It was driven by a
good-looking young man with a wonderful set of teeth and a pleasant
smile. He was a sort of general carrier. He dropped a large bundle of
what looked like washing at one cottage and a basket of provisions at
another, and a man stopped him on the road to hand in a lantern for
repair, and a woman at a railway crossing asked for medicine to be
brought the next day. There was a little conversation on general topics
at every stop, and the tongue was the true Provençal, which he told me
they all talked among themselves, though most of them talked French as
well.
Provençal is soft and sweet. It is not difficult to make out its
meaning in print if one knows some Latin and some French, but I never
succeeded in catching more than the glimmer of an idea of what was
being talked about. Of Provençal as a literary language there will be
more to say later on.
As we rounded the hill that had hidden Fayence, there came into view
a castle with two towers that stood most imposingly on a summit
overlooking the valley; but as we approached it turned out to be, not
an ancient ruined keep as it had seemed in the dusk, but a not very
ancient unfinished château of enormous proportions. It had been built
so far, my friend informed me, by a General Fabre, or Favre, and, as I
afterwards learnt, about the year 1836. I made up my mind to visit it
the next day, for it showed up as a most lordly pleasure house, with
terraced gardens commanding the great stretch of country between the
range of hills on which it stood, and the mountains of the Estérel and
the Maures towards the sea.
Fayence lay just beyond it. My carrier was going on to Seillans, and
dropped me at the foot of the hill, and I made my way slowly up a
winding road to my night's shelter.
I found a good inn where they gave me an excellent dinner and a
delicious white wine. The dinner consisted of pea soup, a spit upon
which was impaled alternate morsels of liver and bacon, a dish of
little sausages with succulent cabbage, a dish founded on beef or
mutton, I forget which, cream cheese, biscuits, oranges, and nuts,
and the charge for this, including the wine, of which I drank a large
quantity, was two francs. My bed, in a small clean room, was also two
francs, and coffee and rolls the next morning fifty centimes. This
comes to about three shillings and ninepence for a day's living, apart
from what one consumes upon the road; and this was the chief hotel in a
town of fifteen hundred inhabitants.
Such hotels are common all over southern France, and easy enough
to find in a town not too large or too small. They are not so well
furnished or so comfortable as an English inn of the same class, but it
would be rare indeed to find an English inn where the food would be so
good. An evening meal would have to be ordered or cooked specially, and
one would consider oneself charged moderately in a bill that came to no
more than three times as much. In the bigger towns such hotels are more
difficult to find, but they are there if one knows where to look for
them, and has learnt exactly what to look for. In the smaller places to
which tourists go, and there is no choice, the charges are considerably
higher; but one can usually get a bath, which is an unknown luxury in
the ordinary way of things.
I wish very much that I had not left these wanderings on foot over
foreign countries until middle age. I can imagine no more delightful
experience for a young man, either alone or in company. If I could go
back to undergraduate days, I would spend some part of every spring and
summer vacation on foot in this way. Ready money is apt to be scarce at
that happy age, but it need cost so little.
My own experiences, for various reasons, are no particular guide,
but Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who is pastmaster in the art of seeing fresh
country, is worth quoting on the subject. He wrote to me when I asked
him for advice before setting out on this expedition:
"I think the thing is quite easy if one only remembers that the
conditions, upon the Western Continent at least, that is, in France,
Italy and Spain, are so different from those in England that no one
asks questions and no one dreams of interfering with one's liberty.
The rule is as simple as possible. Any inn whatsoever in France and
almost any inn north of Naples in Italy gives you a tolerable bed,
and on entering it you ask the price of a room and of coffee the next
morning. They are accustomed to the process and bargain with you. I
have been to dozens of places where I was charged no more than a franc.
"For your mid-day meal you will be wise to carry a leather bottle
which the French call a _Gourde_ and the Spaniards a _Bota_, holding
wine, which again you must have filled in shops where wine is sold
retail. You will again do well to ask before it is filled at what
price the wine is sold. I have carried a half-gallon _gourde_ of this
kind over many journeys. It is slung from the shoulders by a strap and
is purchasable in all the mountain countries. Bread is purchasable
everywhere, and that kind of sausage which the French call by various
names, which the Spaniards call 'Salpicon' and the Italians 'Salami'
is common to all countries and is with cheese the accompaniment of the
meal. Your night meal you must make the principal meal of the day,
and if you wish to save money eat it at some place different from the
place where you sleep. Thus accoutred you can live indefinitely at a
rate of five francs a day and see all that there is to be seen. Always
carry upon your person in such countries one good 'piece,' as they
call it, for identification, the best of which is a passport issued
by the British authorities wherever you are. Be careful to have it
_viséd_ by the consul of the countries where you are to travel. It
is the _visa_ that counts more than the passport. For instance, if
you are starting from Switzerland get such a document _viséd_ by the
consul in some principal towns of France, Italy and Spain, then you
have nothing to fear.
"Remember that telegrams or letters sent to you at one place _poste
restante_ do not tie you to going to that place. You have but to send
a message to the post office to have them forwarded to another, and
it will be done. But you cannot get your letters, still less your
registered letters, at a _poste restante_ without some such 'piece' as
I mentioned.
"It is a good rule not to carry personal luggage except in the
smallest amount in your sack, and to buy things as you need them. It
is cheaper in the long run."
Now five francs a day is not quite thirty shillings a week, and for
the price of a few days' revel "in town" an enterprising youngster
might spend a fortnight walking through almost any beautiful stretch
of country in nearer Europe, including his journey there and back to
England. However it may have been in the past, it is now possible to
travel third class on the Continent in no more discomfort than in
England, and indeed in the holiday season third class is apt to be
a good deal less crowded than second, on the fast trains in which
third-class passengers are carried. They are not carried, of course,
in all trains; but where the saving of shillings is an object it is no
particular hardship to spend a few hours more on the way, and unless
the journey is a very long one the time lost is small and the money
saved considerable.
The burden to be carried is a more debatable matter. Mr. Belloc's
advice is worth a good deal more than mine, but his early training in
arms must have used him to a less fearful regard of discomfort than is
possible with most of us. The less you carry the easier your walking
will be, and I would never hamper myself with any protection against
rain. Unless you can keep your legs as well as your body protected you
must occasionally expect to be under the necessity of having something
dried before a fire, and while you are about it you may as well go to
bed and have everything dried. But I should not care to be without a
spare shirt, at least one pair of spare socks, and a pair of light felt
slippers, and with other small necessaries for comfort and a reasonable
degree of cleanliness this already makes up a fair weight. Let every
one choose for himself. My experience is that one very quickly gets
used to a moderate pack strapped upon one's shoulders, and hardly
notices it, except for a time after one may have taken a day off and
walked about carrying nothing.
I took a day off at Fayence. It was Sunday, although I had no idea of
it until well on into the morning.
I came down at about half past seven, and found that the three _commis
voyageurs_ in whose company I had dined the night before had already
finished their breakfast and gone out; but two of them came in again
as I was finishing mine, and transacted serious business with some
townspeople whom they brought with them. They keep early hours in
France.
I walked up to the top of the hill upon which the town is built, and
found an old and very solid tower with a clock in its face and a bell
in a cage of wrought iron on the top of it. The clock had a date on
it--1908--and I took some little trouble to discover whether it could
be seen from any part of the town except by climbing up to it as I had
done. I found that it could not. Then I made my way to the Château du
Puy.
I approached it along a sort of drive, and stood in a doorway looking
down three stories deep into the stone-built husks of enormous rooms,
and up into three or four stories more. There was a series of great
halls, one above the other, in the main part of the building, and many
rooms opening out of them in both wings, which were carried up into
imposing towers; and there were lateral extensions besides. The house
seemed to have been designed for the accommodation of a regiment
rather than one solitary general.
The gardens to the south of it were on a level two stories lower, and
the gate to them was locked; but by a little scrambling I reached them.
The terraces had been laid out on a grand scale, and gardening had been
begun at some date or other. There were overgrown beds of iris getting
ready to flower, and in one corner a _pièce d'eau_, without which no
French garden is complete. A tall palm grew in one corner, and there
were fig-trees and bushes of hibiscus. In an extension of the main
building there were signs of habitation, and an orange-tree bright with
fruit grew in the middle of a chicken-run. Olives and almonds had been
planted where the ordered garden should have been, and most of the
ground had been made use of.
I had been able to get no information about the building of this great
pile; the tradition seemed to have departed. I do not know whether
it had been stopped by the death of the owner, or, as seems not
improbable, by a lack of money to go on. I imagined him, as I sat and
smoked in the deserted garden, as having thought continually of this
glorious site in his native country, and coming back to it when his
fighting was done to build himself the finest house for many miles
around. I think he must have enjoyed himself enormously while it was in
the building, but not without some doubts as to the way in which it was
to be lived in when it should at last be finished.
[Illustration: A PROVENÇAL SHEPHERD
_Page 36_]
[Illustration: FAYENCE COULD BE SEEN ON ITS OWN HILLSIDE
_Page 45_]
[Illustration: HOW THEY PRUNE THE PLANE-TREES
_Page 50_]
[Illustration: THE DOLMEN NEAR DRAGUIGAN
_Page 53_]
His site must have given him continual pleasure. From his terraced
garden the wide fertile plain was spread out before him, in front and
on either side. As I saw it, it was all browns and greens, threaded
with white roads, and punctuated by dark cypress spires. Miles away it
was bounded by pine-clad mountain slopes, beyond which lay the sea. At
the back of the house the little town of Tourettes showed its huddle
of old roofs and walls a mile away, and behind it the hills rose until
snow could be seen on distant summits. From the little side garden with
the fish pond, Fayence could be seen on its own hillside, and a range
of blue and purple hills beyond it. The sun came out as I sat there,
and the shadows of clouds played all over the beautiful scene. It was
the true Provence, which gets into the blood of those who are born in
it, and makes them think that no country in the world is fairer.
I walked back to the town and went into the church, a large eighteenth
century structure of some dignity, with an unornamented tower that
looks much older. The curé came in as I was looking about me. He was
as handsome and dignified as his church, with his white hair and
portly presence, and reminded me of Parson Irvine in "Adam Bede." He
was inclined to deprecate my admiration of his church. It was large,
yes, not particularly fine, he thought. But I was judging by other
standards. A church as large as this would hardly have been built in
England in the eighteenth century for a thriving town; for one of the
size of Fayence the idea of it would have been laughed at.
It would hardly have been built in Fayence a few years later. When I
had gone out on to the little _place_ in front of it, where there were
busy market stalls under a row of giant planes, and a view past the
Château du Puy to the rich plain and the mountains beyond it, I went
back into the church and watched the congregation arrive for Mass.
It was not until then that I made it out to be Sunday. One enjoys a
blessed disregard of the calendar on such expeditions as mine, walking
on from day to day.
Women and children--they filled about a quarter of the seats provided,
and these filled hardly more than half the church. There were two old
men besides, and one middle-aged one, who came in with his family with
an air of importance. The rest of the male population of Fayence was
buying and selling outside in the market, or in the shops, or talking
together on the terrace steps above the _place_, or in the _cafés_, or
walking up and down the steep streets.
In the late afternoon I walked over to Seillans, and saw the populace
of that town enjoying themselves on a fine promenade that they have on
the edge of their hill. It is planted with the ubiquitous shady plane,
and overlooks the magnificent view to the south.
A good many of the men were playing their game of _boule_, which needs
only a few yards of hard ground, and some wooden balls about the size
of a cricket ball, studded closely with nails. They throw a "jack"
about fifteen or twenty yards and then follow closely the rules of our
game of bowls. But they throw the ball with the back of the hand up,
and give it a spin which makes it run on after it has fallen. When
all of them do no more than this the game is dull enough, at least to
watch, although the inequalities of the ground give it some interest to
the players. But the good players will aim at coming right down upon
an adversary's ball and punching it away out of danger. They bend down
very low with the right leg curiously crooked, and then run forward
fast and spin the ball in the air. It looks a most difficult shot, but
I saw it brought off many times by these players at Seillans.