one could imagine no holiday more enjoyable than a few days passed
here, for--Oh, ye romantic and practical Frenchmen!--the castle has
been transformed into an hotel, where all the appointments and even
the costumes of the servants recall the Middle Ages in which it was
built. As we approached, one of our boatmen took up a large conch and,
blowing into it, set the gorge echoing as from a foghorn; but we had
decided not to visit the château, as it was our purpose to lunch
farther down at La Malene, and the sounding of the conch was meant
only to attract the attention of some of the servants, to whom our
boatmen shouted that we had thrown on the river-bank about a quarter
of a mile above the castle a sack of loaves for its inmates.
V.
Between Ste. Enimie and La Malène there are four or five points at
which we have to change our barque, where the river leaps over
dangerous weirs, and several changes are necessary on the lower beach.
It is due to this manoeuvring and to a wait of nearly two hours at La
Malène, while the bateliers lunch and gossip boisterously at one of the
hotels--the voyageurs also being not unmindful of refreshment--that
Le Rozier is not reached until six o'clock, despite the rapid course
of the river.
La Malène is one of the three places south of Ste. Enimie, and still
in the real cañon of the Tarn, where the river is crossed by bridges;
all splendid structures, designed to withstand the spring floods when
the current carries with it many a mighty block of ice and all sorts
of debris from the hills. The first and newest of the bridges is
passed at St. Chely, a small and dirty, but extremely picturesque,
hamlet half-way between Ste. Enimie and La Malène, where we explored a
wonderful series of ancient cave dwellings, and where, by the way, an
enterprising photographer has joined the modern to the prehistoric by
painting an advertisement of his wares on the face of the cliff
overlooking the former haunts of the Troglodites.
La Malène is, to my thinking, one of the most beautiful points on the
route. The little town sits in the mouth of a great ravine that
reaches far into the Causse de Sauveterre, and on the opposite side
the majestic mass of the Causse Méjan climbs to well-nigh 1,800 feet
above the river, the mountain road wriggling upward from the bridge in
a series of wonderful twists and turns, "exactly like an apple paring
thrown over the shoulder of the engineer," as Mr. Crockett has said of
another highway in the farther south. It takes a man, walking at his
best, more than an hour to climb that same road, as I can testify, and
never for a moment during the ascent is the little town at the foot
out of view. This will convey some idea of the barrenness of the
mountain-side, where cattle and sheep crop a scanty herbage on fields
that slope like the roof of a house and are thickly strewn with stones
and boulders. At La Malène also there is a mediæval castle, which,
like La Caze, is the property of that great tourist agency, "La France
Pittoresque," and now serves as a hotel; but we were more interested
in the old church of Romanesque design, where we saw the common grave
of the thirty-nine villagers who were slain by the Republican troops
during the Terror, and are remembered throughout the Cevennes as "the
Martyrs of La Malène." It is striking proof of the terrible
thoroughness of that bloody regime that even to this remote and
sequestered nook the gory hand of the Terror stretched out.
[Illustration: PEYRELAU, IN THE VALLEY OF THE JONTE]
The French are the best of all road-makers; more than any of the
Latin peoples they have retained and fostered this gift of their Roman
forebears. The highway they are now constructing along the Tarn was
almost completed between St. Enimie and La Malène, at the time of our
passing, and a splendid road it promised to be, here running like a
gallery along the face of a cliff and there tunnelling some mighty
bluff that juts out into the cañon. But the river will always remain
the real highway, as the scenery can only be viewed to full advantage
from a seat in a barque, and the bateliers need not fear the
competition of the road that is in the making.
VI.
If one were innocent enough to believe the boatmen who live by the
tourist traffic, it would be difficult to know which part of the Tarn
is the most beautiful. At St. Enimie you would be assured, in the
event of your being undecided as to the whole trip, that the stretch
between that town and La Malène was by far the best; while at La
Malène you would find the local boatmen emphatic as to the unrivalled
beauty of the cañon between that point and Les Vignes, where the third
bridge stands; and as surely when you arrived there you would be told
the Tarn was only beginning to be worth seeing from there to Le
Rozier! Naturally, it is impossible for two boatmen to take you a
voyage which, occupying twelve hours, requires more than double that
time and many times more energy, to bring the empty boats back to the
starting-places. Thus the bateliers are prejudiced in favour of their
own particular part of the journey, and the only way is to make the
entire trip; but indeed that is for all who do not cycle imperative,
as the expense of reaching a railway station from any of the places
mentioned before Le Rozier would be prohibitive, and one must continue
the journey from the last-named place to Millau by coach and train,
for which only a small charge is made.
My own impression, if one can distinguish among scenes so differently
beautiful, is that the cañon between La Malène and Les Vignes presents
its most surprising aspect. At Les Detroits the giant walls lean
forward in a bold and menacing way, and further on, at the Cirque des
Baumes and Les Baumes Basses, we see some of Nature's most picturesque
effects, while the Pas de Soucy is a wild and thrilling part of the
journey, where the great basaltic masses are scattered about as if an
awful earthquake had but recently shaken them into their fantastic
positions.
But really there seems to be no end to the beauty of the Tarn, and
when one has arrived at Le Rozier fresh wonders await the eye, and
scenes rivalling anything we have witnessed are still to behold, if we
will make a short detour into the valley of the Jonte, where the
ancient town of Peyreleau sits like a queen enthroned among enfolding
hills. If one can go a little farther along this tributary of the Tarn
and visit the famous grotto of Dargilan, discovered by M. Martel in
1884, a strange and beautiful underworld, before which the most
extravagant fantasies of the Arabian Nights pale into insignificance,
will be revealed. There, by the light of torches, we can wander
through gigantic caverns of stalactite greater and more awe-inspiring
than any cathedral, and journey by canoe on underground rivers, in
what--those practical Frenchmen once again!--is "the property of the
Society 'La France Pittoresque.'"
Even that part of the Tarn between Le Rozier and Millau, no longer a
gorge, but broadening into a smiling and fruitful valley, with the
great impregnable wall of the Causse Noir frowning along its eastern
length, is full of beautiful vistas; but the wild and rugged grandeur
of the cañon has given place to scenes of pleasant pastoral life, and
we cycle along a highway fringed with cherry trees in fruit, passing
many a populous little town before we enter the leafy boulevards of
the historic and prosperous city of Millau.
[Illustration: BEAUCAIRE: SHOWING CASTLE AND BRIDGE ACROSS THE RHONE
TO TARASCON]
The Town of "Tartarin"
I.
The custom observed by English authors of giving fictitious names to
places described in works of romance--as for example, Mr. Hardy's
"Casterbridge" (Dorchester) and Mr. Barrie's "Thrums" (Kirriemuir)--has
so brought their readers to accept the most faithful realism for
romance, that when they take up a French novel they are apt to think
the places mentioned therein are treated in the same way. But those
who have any acquaintance with French fiction will know that the
novelists across the Channel follow a method entirely opposed to ours.
An English reader who may have enjoyed to the full the famous trilogy
of "Tartarin" books may well be excused if he supposes that the town
of Tarascon is largely a creation of their author, Alphonse Daudet. It
is true that if he has ever travelled from Paris to Marseilles by way
of Lyons and Avignon he will have passed through Tarascon, with its
wide and open station perched high on a viaduct, and the porter
bawling in his rich, southern tongue, "Tarascon, stop five minutes.
Change for Nîmes, Montpellier, Cette." And if he has--as he cannot
fail to have--delightful memories of the incomparable Tartarin, his
feet will itch to be out and wander the dusty streets in the hope of
looking upon the scenes of the hero's happy days; to peep perchance at
his tiny white-washed villa on the Avignon Road with its green
Venetian shutters, where the little bootblacks used to play about the
door and hail the great man as his portly figure stepped forth, bound
for the Alpine Club "down town." There would certainly be small other
reasons for tarrying at this ancient town of France; it owes such
interest as it possesses chiefly to the genius of Daudet, whose
inimitable humour has vivified and touched it with immortality.
I had been wandering a-wheel over many a league of these fair southern
roads one summer before I found myself at the ancient Roman city of
Nîmes, the rarest treasure of France, and it was a visit to Daudet's
birthplace there that suggested the idea of going on to Tarascon a
desire intensified by the ardour of a gentleman from that town whom I
met at a hotel, and who perspired with indignation as he denounced
"that Daudet" for libelling the good folk of Tarascon. "Tartarin! The
whole thing's a farce. There never was such a man!" But he asserted
that the town was well worth seeing, if I could only forget Daudet's
ribald nonsense.
It went well with my plans for reaching the main route back to Paris
to make a little journey through the fragrant olive groves along the
high road to Remoulins in order to visit the world-famous Roman
aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard, near to which a gipsy told
Tartarin he would one day be a king, and thence by the banks of the
river Gardon to Beaucaire and Tarascon. Not often have I made a
literary pilgrimage of so pleasant or profitable a nature.
II.
You must know, of course, what a rare fellow this Tartarin
was--_Coquin de bon sort_! I am not sure that I should speak of him in
the past tense; although his creator eventually gathered him to his
fathers, Tartarin was built for immortality, and at most his passing
was a translation; he is for all time the archetype of southern
character, and Tarascon is alive with him to-day. Of medium height,
stout of body, scant of hair on his head, but bushy-whiskered and
jovial-faced, you will see his like sipping absinth at any café on
the promenade of the sleepy old town, or playing a game of billiards
with the grand manner of a Napoleon figuring out a campaign.
Tartarin, blessed with all the imagination of the generous south, was
indeed an ineffectual Bonaparte, in the body of a good-natured
provincial. "We are both of the south," he observed to his devoted
admirer Pascalon, when that faithful henchman, at a crisis in
his hero's career, pointed out the similarity between him of
Corsica and him of Tarascon. Daudet makes him, in a bright flash of
self-knowledge, describe himself as "Don Quixote in the skin of Sancho
Panza," and Mr. Henry James has in this wise elaborated the point with
his usual deftness:
"There are two men in Tartarin, and there are two men in all of us;
only, of course, to make a fine case, M. Daudet has zigzagged the line
of their respective oddities. As he says so amusingly in _Tartarin of
Tarascon_, in his comparison of the very different promptings of these
inner voices, when the Don Quixote sounds the appeal, 'Cover yourself
with glory!' the Sancho Panza murmurs the qualification, 'Cover
yourself with flannel!' The glory is everything the imagination
regales itself with as a luxury of reputation--the _regardelle_ so
prettily described in the last pages of _Port Tarascon_; the flannel
is everything that life demands as a tribute to reality--a gage
of self-preservation. The glory reduced to a tangible texture too
often turns out to be mere prudent underclothing."
[Illustration: TARASCON: THE PUBLIC MARKET]
[Illustration: THE TARASQUE]
[Illustration: THE CASTLE OF TARASCON]
It is true that a good deal of the humour that attaches to Tartarin is
of the unconscious sort. He and his brethren of Provence stand in
relation to their fellow-countrymen much as the Irish to the English
in the matter of humour, but in that only. They are often the butt of
northern witticisms, and are said to be experts in drawing the long
bow. Tarascon in this respect no more than many a score of little
towns in the Midi; but it suited the author's purpose admirably to
locate the home of his hero there, as the place possesses many quaint
little peculiarities of its own which fitted in admirably with the
scheme of Tartarin's remarkable career.
III.
Since I visited the town the Tarasconians have proved worthy of their
reputation, as a picture post card has been put in circulation bearing
a photograph of "_La Maison de Tartarin_." It shows a square and
comfortable white house, flat-roofed, with a series of loop-hole
windows that give it a murderous look. In front is a large garden,
where an old baobab stretches forth its branches and innumerable
exotics mingle their strange leaves in the beautiful disorder of the
primeval forest. So, at least, I gather from a French journal. Yet,
while pointing out the mendacity of the picture post card, the journal
in question publishes with every evidence of sincerity an equally
apocryphal account of the real Tartarin, who we are told, was a person
named originally Jean Pittalouga, a native of the south of Sardinia,
not a Frenchman at all. He was bought out of slavery by the
Brotherhood of the Trinity, and came to Tarascon to manage the
property of the fraternity in that town. As Sidi-Mouley-Abdallah was
the superior of Morocco and that country was part of Barbary,
Pittalouga became known in Tarascon, because of his romantic
experience among the Moors, first as _Sidi-Barbari_, and then as
_Barbarin_. The time came when the Trinity fraternity had to clear
out, and with them Barbarin, who now rented a neighbouring farm on the
outskirts of the town--the veritable "_Maison de Tartarin_" of the
post card. But he did not die there. He went away with the Trinity
fathers into Africa, and is believed to have been devoured entirely by
some terrible wild beast, with whom he had disputed the sovereignty of
the desert. To all of which, as Daudet remarks of the member of the
Jockey Club travelling _avec sa nièce_, "Hum! hum!"
One may note here that the author did first write of his comic hero as
Barbarin; but as the French law affords the fullest measure of
protection to living people whose names may be introduced in works of
fiction, and as there lived in Tarascon a certain M. Barbarin, who
wrote to Daudet a letter worthy of his hero, wherein he threatened the
utmost rigour of the law unless the novelist ceased to make sport of
"what was dearer to him than life itself, the unspotted name of his
ancestors," Daudet altered the name to Tartarin, and was inclined to
think in after years, when the fame of his creation had travelled
around the globe, that his hero would never have been so popular under
his original name. It may have been a case of "apt alliteration's
artful aid"; but one may suppose that Tartarin would have been equally
popular by any other name. He embodies the extravagant, and not the
least lovable, side of French character, as truly as Uriah Heep and
Mr. Pecksniff represent English humbug and hypocrisy; he has many
points of similarity with Mr. Pickwick, but the last-mentioned can
hardly be compared with him as reality seen through the eye of kindly
caricature.
IV.
Tartarin was, in a word, an epitomy of innocent vanities;
large-hearted, generous, he had the Cæsarian ambition to be the first
man in his town; he was imbued with the national hunger for "_la
Gloire_," and many were the amusing ways in which he sought to
demonstrate his prowess. To impress his townsmen, the dear old humbug
surrounded himself with all sorts of foreign curiosities. His garden
was stuffed with exotics from every clime, most notable of all the
wonderful baobab, which he grew in a flower-pot, although that is the
unmatched giant of the tree kingdom! His study was decked with the
weapons of many strange and savage people, and, like a miniature
museum, his possessions were ticketed thus: "Poisoned arrows! Do not
touch!" "Weapons loaded! Have a care!"
His earliest exploits were as chief of the "cap-hunters," for, you
see, in those days the good folk of Tarascon were great sports, and
the whole country-side having been denuded of game, they were reduced
to the device of going forth in hunting-parties, and after a jolly
picnic they would throw up their caps in the air and shoot at them as
they fell! "The man whose hat bears the greatest number of shot
marks is hailed as champion of the chase, and in the evening, with his
riddled cap stuck on the end of his rifle, he makes a triumphal entry
into Tarascon, midst the barking of dogs and fanfares of trumpets."
[Illustration: TARASCON: THE MAIRIE]
Tartarin, however, determined to cover himself with glory--as well as
flannel--by making an expedition into Algeria and Morocco, there to
try his prowess on the lions of the Atlas. His ludicrous adventures on
this great enterprise--how he shot a donkey and a blind lion, and
returned to Tarascon pursued by his devoted camel--form the theme of
the first of Daudet's three charming stories. The years pass with
Tartarin lording it at Baobab House, and at the club every evening
spinning his untruthful yarns, beginning: "Picture to yourself a
certain evening in the open Sahara." Then comes the further adventures
of "Tartarin in the Alps," and I confess that when, a good many years
ago, I first clambered up a portion of Mont Blanc it was of Tartarin's
famous ascent I thought rather than of Jacques Balmat's; the fiction
was more vivid in my mind than the fact; and again at the Castle of
Chillon--I say it fairly--the comic figure of Tartarin imprisoned
there was more engaging to the imagination than that of Bonnivard;
and, by the bye, in the famous dungeon one can see scratched on the
wall the signatures of both Lord Byron and Alphonse Daudet.
The last, and in some respects the best, of all the Tartarin
books--like Mulvaney, the mighty Tarasconian has his fame "dishpersed
most notoriously in sev'ril volumes"--is _Port Tarascon_, wherein are
detailed the mirthful misadventures of the great man, and many of his
townsmen who, under his direction, set sail to found a colony in
Polynesia, an undertaking that proved fatal to his fame, and ended
eventually in his self-exile across the river to Beaucaire, where he
died soon after; of sheer melancholy we may suppose.
V.
It was into the busy little town of Beaucaire, which lies around its
ancient castle of Bellicardo, on the west bank of the broad Rhone,
glaring across at Tarascon, that I wheeled one bright day in June.
Beaucaire, for all its canal, wharves, and signs of prosperous
industry, is as tidy a town as I have seen, and the fine old castle,
ruined by Richelieu, where in the golden age of Languedoc's poesy the
troubadors sang their ballads at the Court of Love, is beautifully
situated on a little hill by the river-side, quite near to the
magnificent suspension bridge which figures so humorously in _Port
Tarascon_. The rivalry between the two towns, their mutual jealousies,
furnished Daudet with many an opportunity to poke fun at them.
"Separated by the whole breadth of the Rhone, the two cities regard
each other across the river as irreconcilable enemies. The bridge that
has been thrown between them has not brought them any nearer. This
bridge is never crossed--in the first place, because it's very
dangerous. The people of Beaucaire no more go to Tarascon than those
of Tarascon go to Beaucaire." As the gentleman I met at Nîmes would
have said, "Zut! It is not true." But that is neither here nor there.
Tartarin, up to his forty-ninth year, had never spent a night away
from his own home. "The very limit of his travels was Beaucaire, and
yet Beaucaire is not far from Tarascon, as there is only the bridge to
cross. Unhappily that beastly bridge had been so often swept away by
the storms; it is so long, so rickety, and the Rhone so broad there
that--zounds, you understand!... Tartarin preferred to have a firm
grip of the ground." But this must have referred to the old bridge
that made way for the present magnificent structure, which crosses the
river in four spans and is 1,456 feet in length. However, it was this
suspension bridge, and no other, across which the hero's cronie
Bompard came with such bravery to witness for his friend, when
Tartarin, fallen from his high estate, was on trial at the court of
Tarascon for having been party to a gigantic swindle in the great
colonising fraud of Port Tarascon, a charge from which, as we know, he
was rightly acquitted. Bompard at the time of the trial was in hiding
at Beaucaire, where he had become conservator of the Castle and warden
of the Fair Grounds--Beaucaire's annual fair is famed all over
France--"but when I saw that Tartarin was really dragged into the dock
between the myrmidons of the law, then I could hold out no longer; I
let myself go--I crossed the bridge! I crossed it this morning in a
terrible tempest. I was obliged to go down on all fours the same way
as when I went up Mont Blanc.... When I tell you that the bridge was
swinging like a pendulum, you'll believe I had to be brave. I was, in
fact, heroic."
VI.
The view from the bridge as one crosses to Tarascon is as pleasant a
picture as may be seen in any part of old France. The noble stream,
broken by sedgy inlands, sweeps on between its low banks, and rising
sheer from the water's edge on a firm rock-base, almost opposite the
picturesque mass of Bellicardo, are the massive walls of the
ancient castle of Tarascon, founded by Count Louis II. in the
fourteenth century and finished by King Réné of Anjou in the
fifteenth, and at one time tenanted by Pope Urbain II., but now, like
many another palace of kings, fallen to the condition of a common
prison. Within these grim walls Tartarin passed some of his inglorious
days, but days not lacking romance, for was not Bompard from the
opposite height signalling o' nights to him by means of mysterious
lights?
[Illustration: A WOMAN OF TARASCON
(_Summer costume_)]
If one has never seen photographs of Tarascon it will be a surprise,
as it is surely a pleasure, to note how faithfully the artists who
illustrated Daudet's books have reproduced in their charming little
vignettes the chief features of the actual town. There to the south of
the bridge is the tiny quay from which we are to suppose the
_Tootoopumpum_ sailed away with the flower of Tarascon's aristocracy
on that ill-starred expedition to the South Seas. Daudet is careful to
preserve some slight respect for the truth by explaining that the
vessel was of shallow draft; but, even so, the Rhone is here not
navigable to ocean-going steamers.
Proceeding straight into the town, we arrive in a minute or so at the
Promenade, with its long rows of plane trees, as in most French towns,
only in Tarascon the trees seem to grow higher and leafier than
anywhere else. It opens out a short distance from the riverside, and
although it cannot be strictly called the "Walk Round" for the reason
which the author gives--that it encircles the town--it certainly
traverses a goodly portion of Tarascon, and takes in _en route_ that
"bit of a square" to which he makes so many sly allusions.