_The Last Walk. St. Michel de Frigolet_
I walked on from Montmajour through the most delightful country. The
road dipped up and down, crossed thymy, brambly, rocky heaths, and
gave promise of pleasant villages to come. One begins here to get out
of the plain, and on the low heights the comfortable land, dotted with
nestling farms and towers and steeples, can be seen stretching away to
the white Alpilles, upon which Les Baux perches and makes its romantic
presence felt, though it cannot be seen.
This little corner is full of curiosities, but I had a long walk before
me and a fair one behind, and turned aside to see none of them. There
are the remains of the Roman aqueduct, built to carry the waters of
Vaucluse into the Arena at Arles. It is still called Ouide de Sarrasin
(stonework of the Saracens) by the country people, because the Spanish
Moors marched along it to attack Arles. At the foot of the Montagne
de Cordes are the remains of fortifications, contemporary and perhaps
built by the invading Saracens. On the top of the same hill is the
Grotto of the Fairies, with its curious pavement and stones which were
cut in prehistoric times. And there are other megalithic remains
in the little hill of Castellet, and a cavern in which were found a
hundred skeletons, and among other objects ornaments of a stone only to
be found in the Indies and the Caucasus. The French call it _calaïs_; I
do not know its English name. All these things are to be seen within a
mile or two of Montmajour.
But two of the sights I did see, because they lay right on my road, and
the second of them I would have gone out of it a reasonable distance to
see in any case.
The first was the "_allées couvertes_," of which signposts obligingly
give notice, at so many metres from the road. They are subterranean
passages, running at a short distance beneath the surface, on either
side of the road and parallel to it, broken into here and there, and
their entrances covered with brambles. When they were constructed, or
what for, I have not the slightest idea, and no book that I have been
able to get hold of tells me. My impression is that they extend for
some miles, but I don't know where I got it from, and perhaps I am
wrong. The "_allées couvertes_" are a mystery of which I am content to
be without the key.
But nearly halfway between Arles and Tarascon is the charming little
village of Fontvieille, and there is something to see there that I
would not willingly have missed. It is the disused mill which Alphonse
Daudet bought to retire to as a young man, and from which he wrote
that delightful collection of tales and essays about his beloved
native country to which he gave the title "Lettres de Mon Moulin."
They breathe Provence, as nothing modern does, except the works of
Mistral and his brother Félibres, and some of the tales of Jean Aicard,
and if one wanted to make a pilgrimage to the heart of it, one would
come either to the "Mas" at Maillane in which Mistral was born, or to
Daudet's mill at Fontvieille.
Nevertheless when I came within sight of it I was a trifle
disappointed. There it stood on its thymy hill overlooking the village,
familiar enough in its aspect from the photograph in my edition of this
book. But there were two other mills exactly like it on the little
hill, and all three quite close together; and it was in full view of
the village, and not very far from it. I had imagined a place of more
reflective solitude. I was glad to have seen it, but did not trouble to
go up and examine it more closely.
[Illustration: SAINT-MICHEL DE FRIGOLET]
[Illustration: THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN, VILLENEUVE-SUR-AVIGNON
_Page 303_]
In the evening I came to the roadside chapel of St. Gabriel, which
was marked on my map with a cross, showing it to be something worth
looking at, but was left without mention alike by the German Baedeker
and the French Joanne. It is just a single, heavily buttressed nave
with a richly carved porch, within the arch of which is a curious
relief representing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It stands in an
olive garden by the side of the road and there are no other buildings
quite near to it, so that it comes as something of a surprise. It is
important, as I have learnt since from Mr. T. A. Cook, as a link in the
progression of early Provençal architecture, and is certainly worth
seeing on its own account.
A little farther on was an _auberge_, before which some great wagons
were standing while their drivers refreshed themselves within. It was
in a quiet and pleasant corner, where four roads met, all overshadowed
by trees now in their full leafage. I should have liked to get a bed
and a dinner there, as by this time I had walked quite far enough, and
it was the sort of peaceful countrified place that it is pleasant to
wake up in. But they did not want me, and after sitting there for a
time I tramped the three or four miles into Tarascon.
It was dark by the time I got there, and I saw very little of the
immortal Tartarin's town. I went up under an old gateway, and wandered
about the streets on the lookout for an inn. I would have taken the
first that came, for I was very tired by this time. But I could not
find one at all. At last I was directed to a large hotel, where they
gave me a bad dinner and charged me preposterously.
But I got a good deal of fun out of it. Tarascon is a military town,
and the big dining-room in a corner of which I sat was providing
entertainment for many of the soldiers of the regiments quartered
there, and their friends among the townspeople. There were cavalry
officers in natty little Cambridge-blue tunics, and troopers with
tunics of a deeper shade of blue. They did not mix, but their friends
were all of the same class, and of course a trooper of a French cavalry
regiment may be just as well bred as his officers. It seemed to me,
remembering the character that Daudet fixed upon the Tarasconnais,
that he had done them no injustice. There was a sort of theatrical
swagger about those that came within my view that marked them off
from their companions of the military even more than their civilian
garb. I remember Sir Henry Irving in "The Lyons Mail" taking a meal
with his back to the audience. He seemed to be eating chiefly with his
shoulders, and that was exactly the way in which these gentlemen of
Tarascon ate, as if they were in the limelight, and everything must be
done for effect. When they talked, they did so with terrific emphasis
and gesticulation, and when somebody else was talking they would
suddenly withdraw themselves from the conversation and reflectively
twirl their moustaches. And when my waiter, who was tremendously
overworked, did bring my long pauses of reflection to an end, he served
me with a flourishing air that would have made it almost indecent to
complain of being kept waiting, since my reward was to be attended to
with an amount of pomp and circumstance that must warm the coldest of
victuals.
I was up early next morning and walked out of the town by a roundabout
way, which gave me a sight of its quaint arcaded streets, King René's
castle, which would have been worth a visit if I had had time for it,
and the suspension bridge across the river to Beaucaire. I passed along
a plane-shaded boulevard on the outskirts of the town, always on the
lookout for Tartarin's villa, which I think I saw, though there were no
signs of the india-rubber tree in its elegant little garden.
I was on a literary pilgrimage. You remember Daudet's story "L'Elixir
du Révérend Père Gaucher"--how the monastery of the White Canons had
fallen upon such evil times that even the belfry was as silent as a
deserted dovecot, and the monks, for lack of money, were obliged to
sound to matins with rattles of almond-wood; how the humble cowherd
restored them to affluence by the cordial cunningly distilled from
Provençal herbs, of which he had learnt the secret from the naughty
old woman who had brought him up; and the dreadful things that followed
when the wonderful elixir proved too seductive for his soul's health.
Now this monastery was St. Michel de Frigolet, up in the hills a mile
or two off the road from Tarascon to Avignon, and there is a good deal
more attached to it than Daudet's story.
To begin with, Mistral went to school there, and I will make use of
another chapter of his Memoirs to describe its situation and tell its
story.
It was nearly eighty years ago that he was taken there from Maillane
in the farm cart, together with a small folding bed, a deal box to
hold his papers and a bristly pigskin trunk containing his books and
belongings.
"At the Revolution, the lands of Saint-Michel had been sold piece by
piece for paper money, and the despoiled abbey, deserted and solitary,
remained up there, bereft in the wilds, open to the four winds and the
wild animals. Sometimes smugglers would use it to make their powder
in. When it rained the shepherds would shelter their sheep in the
church. The gamblers of the neighbourhood would hide there in winter
at midnight to avoid the police, and there by the pale light of a few
candles, as the gold followed the movement of the cards, the vaulted
roof echoed with oaths and blasphemies instead of psalms. Then when
their game was finished these rakes ate and drank and revelled and
rioted until dawn.
"About 1832 some mendicant friars established themselves there. They
had put a bell in the old Roman belfry, and rang it on Sundays. But
they rang in vain; nobody came up the hill to their offices, for they
had no faith in them. The Duchess de Berry about this time had come to
Provence to raise the Carlists against Louis Philippe, and I remember
it being whispered that these runaway friars were nothing but Spanish
bandits under their black robes plotting some dubious intrigue.
"Following these friars a worthy native of Cavaillon, M. Donnat, came
and started a boarding-school for boys at the Convent of Saint-Michel,
which he had bought on credit.
"He was an old bachelor, yellow and swarthy in complexion, with lank
hair, flat nose, large mouth with prominent teeth, in a long black
frock-coat and tanned shoes. Very devout, and as poor as a church
mouse, he had made shift to start his school and to find pupils
without a penny to bless himself with.
"For instance, he would go to Graveson, or Tarascon, or Barbentane or
Saint-Pierre to a farmer who had boys.
"'I have come to tell you,' he would say, 'that I have opened a school
at Saint-Michel de Frigolet. You have thus at your very door an
excellent institution to which you can send your sons and have them
prepared for their examinations.'
"'My dear sir,' the father of the family would reply, 'that may be all
very well for rich people, but we are not the sort of folk to give our
boys so much learning. They will have quite enough for working on the
land.'
"'Look here,' M. Donnat would say, 'there is nothing better than a
good education. Don't worry about payment. Give me every year so many
measures of corn, so many casks of wine, so many drums of oil, and
arrange matters in that way.'
"So the worthy farmer would send his children to Saint-Michel de
Frigolet.
"Then I suppose M. Donnat would go to a tradesman and begin thus:
"'What a fine boy you have there! He looks sharp enough, too. I
suppose you are not going to turn him into a counter-jumper.'
"'Oh, sir, if we only could, we should be glad to give him a little
education, but schools are dear, and when there isn't much money----!'
"'If it's a question of a school,' M. Donnat would reply, 'send him to
mine at Saint-Michel de Frigolet. We will teach him Latin and make a
man of him. As for payment, let it come out of the shop. You will have
an extra customer in me, and a very good customer too.'
"And then and there the shopkeeper would promise him his son.
"Another time he would pass a carpenter's house, and supposing he saw
a child playing in the gutter who looked pale, he would say to his
mother: 'What's the matter with this pretty little fellow? He looks
very white. Is he ill, or has he been eating cinders?'
"'Oh, no,' she would reply, 'it is always playing about that makes him
look like that. Play is meat and drink to him, sir.'
"'Well, then, why not send him to my school at Saint-Michel de
Frigolet?' M. Donnat would say. 'The good air alone will give him rosy
cheeks in a fortnight. And he will be watched over and taught his
lessons; and when he has been well educated he will find an easier
occupation than a carpenter's.'
"'Ah, sir! But when one is poor!'
"'Don't trouble about that. We have up there I don't know how many
doors and windows to mend. I can promise your husband more work as
a carpenter than he will know how to get through; and so, my good
woman, we shall settle the matter of fees.'
"So this child would also find himself at Saint-Michel, with those
of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker, and by these
means M. Donnat collected into his school about forty boys, of whom I
was one. Out of them all, I and a few others were there for a money
payment, but three-quarters of them were paid for in kind, or by the
labour of their parents. In a word, M. Donnat had solved the problem
of the Bank of Exchange, quite simply and without any fuss, which the
celebrated Proudhom tried in vain to establish in Paris in 1848....
"In those days Saint-Michel was of much less importance than it has
since become. There was left just the cloister of the Augustinian
monks, with its green in the middle of the court; to the south the
refectory and chapter-house; then the dilapidated church of St.
Michael, with its frescoes of the damned, and of demons armed with
forks, and the battle between the devil and the great archangel in the
middle; and then the kitchen and stables.
"But apart from this little group of buildings there was a buttressed
chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of Succour, with a porch in front of
it. Masses of ivy covered the walls, and the interior was lined
with gilded carvings which enclosed pictures said to be by Mignard
representing scenes in the life of the Virgin. Anne of Austria, mother
of Louis XIV, had given these decorations in accordance with a vow she
had made to the Virgin if she should bear a son.
"This chapel, a real gem, hidden in the mountains, had been saved
during the Revolution by the good people who piled up fagots under the
porch and hid the entrance. It was there that every morning in the
year, at five o'clock in summer and six in winter, we were taken to
hear Mass; it was there that I prayed, I remember--we all prayed--with
a faith that was really angelic....
"The little hills all around were covered with thyme, rosemary,
asphodel, box and lavender. In odd corners there were vines, which
produced a wine of some repute-the wine of Frigolet; patches of olives
on the lower slopes; plantations of almond-trees, twisted, dark and
stunted, on the stony ground; and wild fig-trees in the clefts of the
rocks. This sparse vegetation was all that these rugged hills could
show; the rest was nothing but waste and scattered rocks. But how
delicious it smelt! The scent of the mountains at sunrise intoxicated
us....
"We became as rugged as a troop of gipsies. But how we revelled in
these hills and gorges and ravines, with their sonorous Provençal
names ... eternal monuments of the country and its language, all
embalmed in thyme and rosemary and lavender, all illumined in gold
and azure. Oh, sweet land of scents and colours and delights and
illusions, what happiness, what dreams of paradise thou didst reveal
to my childhood!"[31]
This idyllic existence came suddenly to an end. M. Donnat, being
frequently away collecting pupils, neglected to educate them when he
had found them, and being anxious to increase his numbers took pupils
who paid little or nothing, and they were not those who ate the least.
One morning the cook disappeared.
"No cook, no broth for us. The masters left us in the lurch one after
the other. M. Donnat had disappeared. His poor old mother boiled us
some potatoes for a few days, and then his father said to us one
morning, 'Children, there is nothing more to eat; you had better go
home.'"[32]
This was the end of poor M. Donnat's experiment, and he finally died in
an almshouse.
The old monastery was abandoned for twelve years, and was then bought
by a Premonstrant, who restored it under the rules of his order, which
had ceased to exist in France.
"Thanks to the activity and preaching and begging of this ardent
zealot, the little monastery grew enormously. Numerous crenellated
buildings were added to it, a new, magnificently decorated church was
built, with a nave and two aisles and two towers. A hundred monks
or novices occupied its cells, and every Sunday the neighbouring
people drove up to admire the elaborate pomp of their offices. The
abbey of the White Fathers became so popular that when in 1880 the
Republic ordered the convents to be closed a thousand peasants or
inhabitants of the plains shut themselves up in it to protest against
the execution of the decree. And it was then that we saw a whole army
on the march--cavalry, infantry, generals and captains, with their
commissariat and all the apparatus of war--and encamping round the
Convent of Saint-Michel de Frigolet, seriously undertaking the siege
of a comic-opera citadel, which would have given in to four or five
gendarmes."[33]
It may be remembered that the romantic heart of the immortal Tartarin
was stirred within him to take part in these proceedings. Equipped
with a regular arsenal of weapons, he led his followers up the hill
one dark night and taking immense pains to circumvent the investing
troops crawled laboriously to the gates of the monastery. As he was
crouching behind a stone, an officer on guard, who had often met him
at his club, called out affably, "Bon soir, M. Tartarin," and made no
difficulty whatever about his proceeding. The more people there were
inside the monastery to consume its stock of provisions the quicker the
siege would end. It has been made the basis of other stories and poems,
but Mistral assures us that none of them are half as comic as were the
facts themselves. I have read elsewhere that two thousand soldiers,
horse and foot, united to expel twenty recalcitrant but unarmed monks,
who were finally reduced by hunger and led triumphantly between two
files of dragoons to Tarascon.
I do not know when or how the monks came back to their monastery, but
they were finally expelled with all the rest ten years ago, and settled
themselves somewhere in Belgium.
Well, you will agree that Saint-Michel de Frigolet was a place to see.
I got up to it by a winding track among the hills. It was a clear,
sunny morning, and the bees were humming among the scented herbs that
give such a character to these stony hills, just as they did in the
poet's happy childhood. On this side of the hill were a few olives
here and there, but no other sign of cultivation until I came to the
top of a hill, where there was a patch of dug ground, and beyond it a
collection of pinnacles and walls conveying the impression that I had
unexpectedly hit upon a large modern cemetery.
The first building I came to was a tall, jerry-built structure which
seemed to have been used as a sort of factory. Its doors were open and
its chambers empty and already beginning to fall to pieces. I walked
down the hill between this and another building of the same sort,
modern, hideous and deserted, and came to a large church, which looked
on the outside much like a pretentious Nonconformist chapel in a London
suburb. The west doors stood open, and I looked over an iron railing
to find the interior blazing with gold and bright blues and reds and
greens on every inch of wall and roof, and with coloured windows to
match. At first sight it looked gorgeous, at second, its gorgeousness
was seen to be mere garish vulgarity. The sacristan was inside, and
I pushed open the iron gate and went in. He showed me the glories of
the church with pride. He said that the decorations alone had cost one
million six hundred thousand francs, which is £64,000, and the more I
looked the more depressed I became at the senseless, conscienceless
waste of it all. This was the building that the Premonstrants had
erected in 1854, the "magnificently decorated church" to which Mistral
describes all the neighbouring countryside flocking to admire the
elaborate pomp of its offices. But all Mistral's artistic genius went
into his poetry. He seems to have been incapable of appreciating
the art that surrounded him so richly. I was told that the tomb he
had erected for himself in the churchyard at Maillane was a close
copy of the Pavillon de la Reine Jeanne at Les Baux, but that he
had substituted the heads of favourite dogs for the carvings on the
keystones of the arches; and I came across another instance of his lack
of artistic understanding later on in his Musée Arlaten.
The Premonstrants have for their object the celebration of the
ceremonies of the Church with the highest possible degree of
elaboration, and I suppose that when they acquired this monastery money
was lavished upon them for enriching it. It was the same spirit, one
would have said, that had created the treasures of ecclesiastical art
and architecture of which Provence is so full, but if so, what had
become of its creative force? And yet the people--the uncontaminated
sons of the soil, to whom the latest doctrine would have us look for
the truest appreciation of art--flocked to this pinchbeck shrine, and
took its gaudy ignorance for a true revival of ancient splendours.
The sacristan took me over the rest of the buildings. They had all been
bought a few years before by a rich priest who admirably uses them
for the training of boys whom he sends out to the colonies. He has
bought farms and large tracts of land all around, and the score or so
of youths that he looks after work on them. I should have liked a chat
with him, but he was away for the day, and I suppose the boys were all
out at work, for I did not see any of them.
Some of the buildings that were used by the original monks--and I
suppose also by M. Donnat--are used now; others, even of the newer
ones, are empty and some of them dilapidated. I was shown the
library--two big rooms fitted up with painted deal shelves from which
all the books had been removed. They looked poor and desolate, and
there was not a trace of architectural dignity about anything else
I saw that had been built in the last century, though it was all
convenient enough for its purpose.
And yet there was the old church which these aspiring religionists had
left to its quiet decay while they built their vulgar modern one, the
sweet little peaceful cloister, the chapel of Our Lady of Succour,
which Mistral has described, with its gilded Louis XIV _boiseries_
round the altar, from which, however, the pictures had been removed.
They had models around them, if they had had the wit to use them.
I went down the expensively embanked road towards Graveson, when I
had seen all that there was to see. It was lined on either side with
heavily built shrines exhibiting the Stations of the Cross, which
looked like the rooks of a set of clumsy chessmen. And the last thing I
saw of this derelict monument of bad taste, before the windings of the
road hid it, was a large cross toppling over sideways, as if even that
had not been built to last.