TARASCON
"Amo de longo renadivo,
Amo jouiouso e fièro a vivo,
Qu'endibes dins lou brut dóu Rose e dóu Rousau!
Amo di séuvo armouniouso
E di calanco souleiouso,
De la patrio amo piouso,
T'apelle! encarno-te dins mi vers prouvençau!"
"CALENDAU"--MISTRAL.
("Soul of my country ever new,
Joyous and fiery, gallant, true,
Who laughest in the waves of the Rhone,
Upstirred by Rousau on his throne,
Soul of the pine's wood harmony,
And of each sun-creek of the sea;
Soul of my Fatherland's dear shrine,
Inspire Provençal verses mine.")
TRANSLATION BY DUNCAN CRAIG.
"You seem to have found a very interesting book," said Barbara, with an
amused smile, to which I had grown accustomed.
"You have been poring over it for half an hour. I suppose it's poetry,"
Barbara went on, with philosophical but not at all disdainful aloofness
from that particular form of human aberration.
"No--o; not conventionally speaking, poetry."
In truth it was the local time-table.
But it was poetry after all. Consider the list of names: Avignon,
Tarascon, Beaucaire, Arles, Nimes, Montpellier, Béziers, Carcassonne,
Albi, Aigues Mortes, Carpentras, Cabestaing, Uzès, Vaucluse, L'Isle sur
Sorgue, Aix-en-Provence--all printed irreverently in heartless columns,
as if they were not worth mentioning except for their relation to time
and tide.
"Now which of all these desecrated shrines of history shall we go to?"
Barbara said they were one and all Greek to her at present, and she
would be happy with any of them.
"Suppose we just drift along this line--this bejewelled line--and let
things happen to the south-east, with only a few tooth-brushes in a
hand-bag?"
Barbara was perfectly willing, but said she _must_ take a night-gown
and a comb as well.
* * * * *
It was a glorious morning when the train puffed out of the station at
Avignon and took a sharp swerve in order to give us a fine last view of
that "little city of colossal aspect," as Victor Hugo calls it. Always
that dominating palace on the height stretching long and massive across
the hillside. The high mountains to the south-east stood entrancingly
blue, Mont Ventoux looking as heavenly and innocent as if the bare
thought of harbouring--much more of deliberately producing a mistral
were a baseness of which she was utterly incapable. She would hesitate
at so much as a stiff breeze! Yet we had caught her in the act but
yesterday and had left behind in our boxes damning proof of her guilt
in the remnants of two once quite respectable hats which her _protégé_
had playfully divided into segments as we crossed the street to post
our letters.
[Illustration: TARASCON FROM BEAUCAIRE, SHOWING KING RENÉ'S CASTLE.
_By E. M. Synge._]
"Let us go to Tarascon!"
Barbara jumped at it, and we centred our hopes and imaginings on that
most Provençal of Provençal cities as the train puffed along on its
leisurely way.
The towers of Chateau Renard in the middle distance have a romantic,
mysterious effect, standing as they do on a rocky little hill just far
enough away to look strangely mysterious, with the soft bloom of the
spaces and the peaked ranges behind it. The station of Barbentane is
on the line, but we did not succeed in making out the village on the
hill-top.
Ardouin-Dumazet writes:--
"Les cultures enveloppent jusqu'au Rhone le petit massif sur lequel se
dresse la haute Tour de Barbentane."
This gives one at once the character of the country. Further on we
come to La Montagnette de Tarascon, which "contrasts its bare slopes
with the opulent plain. It is like an island rising out of verdure--the
white calcined rock takes in an amusing fashion, the airs of a chain of
rocky mountains. The Montagnette is a miniature of the Alpilles, those
miniature Alps."
The Alpilles--strange little knobbly mountains--grow into greater
prominence as we move eastward and the outline shows itself more than
ever eccentric and altogether out of fashion, as one imagines fashion
among mountains.
They have a style of their own, a marked personality that is very
fascinating. They were yet to explore, with their memories of the
campaign of Marius, their Courts of Love, their rock-hewn city of Les
Baux, their Trou d'Enfer, their haunts of the famous witch Tavèn and
her demon-companies. We had half a mind to divert from our route at once
and take the little local train up into the heart of the range, but not
liking to think ourselves lacking in decision of character, we nailed
our colours to the mast, and resolved to see Tarascon first.
The famous town lies charmingly on the river-side; a mass of roofs and
towers, with its castle of King René--that most delightful and lively
of monarchs; a real drawing-master castle, absurdly picturesque, with
two vast round machicolated towers (very troublesome to shade), and a
frowning entrance between them. (Surely all drawing-masters have taken
this castle as their model since time began!) On the landward side is
a dry moat and a stretch of grass and weeds (the weeds worked in with a
sharp professional touch in the foreground). Just across the Rhone the
vast bridge, which Tartarin thought too long and slender, leads to the
town and high up on the hill, proud and desolate, the rival castle of
Beaucaire.
"Embarras de Beaucaire!"
Ardouin-Dumazet says that in his childhood his family had a neighbour,
a good woman, whose exclamation on the smallest obstacle was invariably
"Embarras de Beaucaire!" And that, he adds, "gave us a grand idea of
the encumbered state of this famous town."
"Si vous aviez vu Beaucaire pendant la foire!"
As we looked across that stupendous bridge, the phrase brought with it
the picture of a mass of booths along the quay, shipping and flags and
merchandise; and crowds in holiday costumes of every colour, for people
flocked from all countries to buy and sell at the great fair "celebrated
even beyond the Syrian deserts."
"Lougres difformes,
Galéaces énormes,
Vaisseaux de toutes formes...."
Dumazet records a conversation he had with one old man who remembered
the great fair in his childhood.
"Then one should see Beaucaire!"
He described the coming of hundreds of ships, carrying each a whole
stable full of horses for towing up the river on the return journey;
and how the great canal brought boats from Aigues Mortes and Albi, and
the sea brought Turks, Algerians, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, with
silk, pearls, figs, and a thousand objects of merchandise. Then the good
people of Beaucaire were inundated with heretics and pagans. When there
were disputes between the merchants, a tribunal on the spot settled the
matter. All was arranged in departments: silks, wools, cottons, whole
streets of booths devoted to jewellery, spices, coffee, and so forth.
In the evening the company cooked their dinners between stones on the
shores of the river; "and one shouted and one laughed, and the physicians
and the acrobats and the bear-tamers called to the crowd with loud cries
amid the noise of cymbals and tambourines. Fine ladies and gentlemen
came from long distances to see all that!"
We heave a sigh of regret at the passing away of so many bright and
cheering things, such as fairs and picturesque shipping, and turn to
wander, as the fancy takes us, about the pleasant streets of Tarascon,
visiting the tomb of St. Martha, but, through misdirection, missing
the Tarasque. However, we knew all about his very singular personal
appearance from descriptions and drawings. Tarascon is now probably more
associated with Tartarin in our minds than with St. Martha, but it is
a beautiful legend of the gentle saint who by sheer force of lovingness
was able to change the ravaging Tarasque--a creature certainly born with
no hereditary turn for polite usages--into a pleasant, regenerate animal
of gentlemanly manners. Along the bright ways of the city, as the legend
goes, the procession moved: a crowd of excited people, a beautiful woman
with a light playing round her head, leading by a silken cord the reformed
monster who ambles after her as quietly as if he were a pet-lamb: this
huge hybrid of a creature, with the body of an alligator, the legs of
a grand-piano, the head of a dragon, and a "floreat tail" of heraldic
design which he flourishes affably in response to the plaudits of the
multitude.
And never again did he ravage the country round Tarascon or carry off
so much as a single babe, after St. Martha had pointed out to him, with
her usual sweet reasonableness, how wrong-headed and how essentially
immoral such conduct had been.
It is disappointing to be told by an innovating savant that this sweet
lady was not St. Martha at all, but merely the Christianised form of the
ancient Phœnician goddess Martis, the patroness of sailors, who had for
her symbols a ship and a dragon. What _is_ one to be allowed to believe?
The Phœnicians, one has to admit, plied a busy trade along these coasts.
Their language has left traces in the Provençal dialects, and images
have been found at Marseilles of Melkarth and Melita, or Hercules and
Venus, known in the Bible as Baal and Ashtaroth. There has even been
discovered a tariff for sacrifices in the temple of Baal, giving a list
of dues legally established for the payments of the priests.
(Barbara was utterly confounded to find these distinctly Biblical deities
figuring so far from home.)
The tariff is a long affair, and goes into all possible details. But
the following extract maybe worth quoting:--
"For an entire ox, the ordinary sacrifice, the priests are to receive
10 shekels. At the sacrifice, in addition, 300 shekels of flesh," and
so on.
But it does not follow, from all this, that St. Martha did not subdue
the Tarasque. Moreover, Tarasques are being subdued every day by Marthas
not by any means arrived at saintship. The old legend, be its origin
Christian, Phœnician, Celtic or classic, reads almost like a parable
by which to convey the old truth that love and kindness have power to
subdue evil which force has failed to overcome.
St. Martha's tomb and shrine are in the church dedicated to her at
Tarascon, and, until lately, there were yearly processions through the
city, in which the gigantic creature was paraded in triumph, the legs
of the man inside being ingeniously "dissimulated by a band of stuff."
"... les porteurs dansent et cabriolent de façon à faire agiter
le queue et a renverser les curieux trop voisins. (Pour queue
une poutre droite.)"
The Tarasque is furious on the second Sunday after Pentecost. But later,
on the day of St. Martha, he passes, gentle as a lamb, led by a young
girl. The man inside, with his "dissimulated legs," curvets and gambols
amiably. And the people sing the "Lagagdigadeu," a song invented, it is
said, by King René himself, inspired perhaps by the tumult of the _fête_
passing his castle down by the Rhone. Or just the swish of the waters as
they sweep past the walls of the donjon might easily set fancies ringing
in a head like King René's, who saw things as they are, with the song
and the radiance in them.
And the people went following the procession, shouting:--
"Lagagdigadeu!
La Tarasco!
Lagagdigadeu
La Tarasco!
De Casteu!
Laissas la passa,
La vieio masco!
Laissas la passa--
Che vai dansa...."
And the Tarasque wags his tail (a straight beam, be it remembered)
and overturns some of the crowd. And the people are delighted with the
prowess of their beast. If one is injured they cry:
"A qua ben fe, la tarascoa rou un bré" ("Well done, the tarasque has
broken his arm").
And the clumsy procession moves away and the crowds sing and shout:
"Voulen mai nostro tarasco" ("We wish again for our tarasque"). And so
they let off any amount of superfluous energy.
[Illustration: THE CHÂTEAU OF KING RENÉ, TARASCON.
_By Joseph Pennell._]
It is a subject for reflection among sociologists whether the dying out
of pageants and dancing, festivals of harvest and seed-time--all the
natural expressions of human joy--does not constitute a serious danger
to the modern state. For either that joy will find some less healthy
kind of expression or it will be killed altogether; and in that case
the race, as a race, must be killed also, as a flower deprived of the
sunshine and the airs of heaven. It is not joy, but the lack of it that
drives a nation mad!
So much for Puritanism!
No one can be in the South, above all in Provence, knowing of its ancient
festivals, its music, its farandoles and Saracenic dances, and fail to
be startled into new realisation of this element that has passed out of
our life, the menace that lies in the pervading dullness, that benumbed
worship of sorrow, of "work" and "duty" without understanding and without
freshness, that absence of fantasy and outcry that binds the modern world
in a terrible and unnatural silence. Of what avail is it that the people
are law-abiding at the cost of the very spring and essence of being?
There is a Nemesis that follows this sort of virtue: and it visits the
virtues of the fathers upon the children for many a hapless generation.
There is a curious example of this in the experience of the Society of
Friends who took upon themselves to banish colour and music from their
lives, for righteousness' sake, and have now succeeded--according to
the testimony of one of their number--in also destroying all response
to those artistic appeals, so that whole realms of being are shut off
from the children of a race that was afraid to accept their complete
inheritance as human beings. It is to be hoped that the heart too has
been atrophied, for it is difficult to imagine a hotter hell than that
must be for a man or woman capable of the full tide of emotional life
and yet unable to find expression for it in heaven or earth!
For the vast majority of mankind there are now no recurrent pleasures
worthy of the name, no balance to the dead weight of mere toil and
_ennui_, no taste of that mysterious magnetism that dwells in throngs bent
on the same object, inspired by the same joyous idea. With the world of
to-day has come a dulling of the aspect of things, a loss of _élan_ and
fire; a perilous deprivation of the primitive form of artistic outpouring.
And it is more than doubtful whether mankind can exist without it. Is
there indeed any object in trying that dangerous experiment?
Why are the majority of moralists, who are so much concerned for the
"good of humanity," so terrified at the sight of humanity a little happy
and spontaneous?
* * * * *
It is at Tarascon, for some unknown Provençal reason, that the famous
Arles sausages are made. We wondered if the accomplished city also
provided Arles with its beautiful women.
There is some difficulty in persuading oneself of the great antiquity
of the cheerful, sleepy little town. It looks indeed by no means new,
but the wear and tear seems rather that of the life of to-day than of
centuries ago. Yet Strabo (says Paul Mariéton) mentions ταραςκον
as much frequented in his time. Moreover, at Beaucaire, just across
the Rhone, there is a quarter called _Rouanesse_, which is said to be
a corruption of _Rhodanusia_, an ancient Greek colony.
For some reason or other we happened, in our wanderings, to return and
return again to the place till at last all strangeness seemed to depart
from it. It was beginning to have for us more or less the aspect that it
probably had for the natives, allowing, of course, always for the effect
upon them of never having seen much besides the sunny main street and
broad square, with their hotels and homely houses, and the plane-trees
whose thin shade is grateful even on a November morning. To see a place
too much is never to see it at all.
We grew familiar even with the faces of the people as they came and went
along the ample pavement which sets back the houses pleasantly far from
the road.
In the middle of this spreading, easy-going, desultory main street a
row of carriages for hire stand waiting under a few small trees for
the chance traveller who descends to see the sights of Tarascon between
trains.
"Voulez-vous une voiture, Mesdames, pour voir la ville? l'Église de Ste.
Marthe, le Château du Roi René, la tarasque, et Beaucaire; tout dans
une heure et quart, ou vingt minutes sans Beaucaire."
We made this classic round on our first visit, including Beaucaire, and
a wonderful circlet of picturesque mediævalism it is; but afterwards we
preferred to find our own way; to wander through the great stone gate
on the left and glance or saunter down dozens of alluring byways, where
one would come upon fine old doors, carved lintels, canopies, shrines at
the street corners, flowers on the window-sills, the quick perspective
of street line dark against the sky, and everywhere the sharp lights
and shadows of the south.
Sometimes, indeed, we would take a drive if only to please the
good-natured "_Tartarins_" who drove the carriages. Their black eyes and
bronzed skin were very impressive at first, but when the effect of these
had begun to wear off, we realised that close resemblance to the tenor
of an opera did not involve anything dramatic in type of character. They
were quiet, industrious, polite fellows, earning their meagre living by
a somewhat precarious industry. But of that presently.
Our particular Tartarin was somewhat shocked that we had not yet seen
the tarasque, so there was nothing for it but to set forth in quest of
the monster.
There is in the museum at Avignon a strange, uncanny beast carved in
stone which is called the tarasque, but the effigy that is, or used to be,
carried round the town at Tarascon is quite a young and giddy creature,
built of painted wood, and passes its existence during the intervals of
public function in a sort of large stable which is kept under lock and
key.
We were driven solemnly through the narrow streets, till at length the
fly drew up and we alighted at a stately portal, where, after a few
moments of waiting, the custodian appeared with his keys, and then back
the doors scrooped on their hinges.
Laughter was out of keeping with the occasion; our poor _cocher_ would
have been cut to the heart, but it was hard work to behave decorously.
Out of an old-Dutch-master gloom of background loomed forth a grotesquely
terrible monster, whose proper sphere was certainly the pantomime.
Enormous red-rimmed eyes stared ferociously at the intruders from a
round, cat-like face rayed with bristling white whiskers. There was
also a touch of hippopotamus in the cast of countenance, only it lacked
the sweeter expression of that more philosophic beast. The creature had
evidently had a new coat of paint--black with red facings--for the huge
body was beautifully glossy.
"La voilà, la tarasque!" said our coachman, with pardonable pride.
We hesitated in our comments. Barbara, rather from lack of familiarity
with the _nuances_ of the language than from any want of frankness,
murmured something about "très jolie"; and Tartarin said, "En effet,
Madame, mais on devait la voir quand on fait le tour de la ville au jour
de fête, mais c'est épatant!"
"Je le crois bien," I murmured appreciatively.
Tartarin suggested that we might like to see the rest of the animal before
leaving, and so we made the round (he extended far into the depths of
his gloomy dwelling), admiring the pose and the noble proportions of the
creature--rather like an old-fashioned locomotive--and the formidable
nature of the tail. Then we felt that without indiscretion we might
depart. As we drove off we caught a last glimpse of that unspeakably
ridiculous beast who stood glaring at nothing in the darkness, silent
and steadily ferocious to the last. Then the great doors were swung
together and the pride of Tarascon was hidden from our view.
One could but laugh, and yet that absurd effigy was the representative
of the beginnings of our history as a race!
The Christian version of the story is of yesterday: the arrival of the
saints on the shores of pagan Gaul and the conversion of Tarascon to the
new faith by St. Martha. Some trace the legend to Phœnician sources, as
has been already mentioned; more frequently the animal is regarded as
a Celtic deity or demon, and there are stories of Hercules and a giant
named Taras or Tauriskos: the classic form of the tradition. In any case
it belongs to the Twilight of the Gods, and if one could really trace
the family tree of that mongrel monster to its roots one would possibly
acquire a good deal of knowledge that would startle archæologists.
It was not till late in the fifteenth century, however, that the _fête_
of the tarasque was instituted by King René, that most artistic of
monarchs, who loved to see his people gay and happy; so it was somewhat
later than the real troubadour days that our cat-hippopotamus began
to enjoy a sort of established position; which shows that no one need
despair of appreciation if only he will wait long enough.
We visited more than once the shrine of the gentle conqueror of the
tarasque: standing--it was startling to remember--on the very spot
where Clovis, King of the Franks, once stood, when newly converted to
Christianity by his saintly wife Clothilde. The shrine is in a quiet,
half-subterranean chapel in the church of her name. The tomb is under
a low vault and the marble figure of the saint rests on the big stone
slab with joined hands and a look of deep peace on her beautiful face.
Certainly it is the face of a woman who might win over ravaging monsters
to sweetness and light. Above the tomb is the inscription:
_Solicita non turbima._
Broad steps flecked with colour from the stained-glass window opposite
lead down to the dim little crypt where she sleeps, and one hanging
lamp burns in the twilight and the silence which seems too deep and
too far below the surface of the life of the moment to be disturbed by
the irrelevant steps and voices of visitors, or by the troops of little
girls who come under the care of a nun to visit the shrine.
* * * * *
The regions down by the Castle of King René are delightful to loiter in on
a warm day. Of vast size and solidity, this fourteenth-century fortress
is full of the atmosphere of romance. The southern wall plunges sheer
into the Rhone; at right angles to this river front stretches the mass
of the building; tower and barbican and battlement in splendid array,
the dry moat and the road running alongside.
What observant traveller passing at the foot of some ancient tower has
not noticed the magical aspect of its line of luminous contact with the
fields of the air?
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO KING RENÉ'S CASTLE, TARASCON
_By E. M. Synge._]
The immense block of masonry from its roots in the soil to its battlements
in the sky stands clear against the mysterious spaces, and presently
it seems to stir and lean forward, as if it might fall or drift away
in emulation of some free-born cloud that swims over its head. It is
delightful to loiter in the road by the moat just below the hillock that
rises to the river-bank and opposite the last of the towers, which stands
at the angle of the castle between land and water. At this spot nothing
can be seen of hill and river, only the tower and sky. They meet at the
magic line--inexorable stone and quivering ether; substance enthralled
and infinity in motion!
Floods of light from the steady tumult of the waters are reflected upon
the cream-white walls and fill the whole atmosphere. It seems to tremble
against the tower as one watches. And one knows that more obviously than
usual one stands at the gate of the Eternal Mystery.
* * * * *
At the top of the hillock the river bursts into view, incredibly broad,
hurrying, joyous, with Beaucaire on its opposite shore watched over by
the ruined keep on the height: the scene of that most charming of old
French romances, "Aucassin and Nicolette."
Just before the eye, a little below King René's Castle, is the famous
bridge; it might be the bridge between this world and the next, between
Good and Evil, between Heaven and Hell, so long it is. The great whisper
of the tide is audible now to any one who elects to pause here in
the sunshine and listen. There is a little hidden corner at the angle
between the castle and a curtain of wall that meets it into which the
water sweeping along the castle side is flung and repulsed with a great
back-surge, meeting, as it returns, the edges of the main current and so
falling into an immense conflict, fascinating to watch with its hundred
whirlpools and hollows, swellings and eddies, and all the babbling and
complaining of torrents detained in their ever-pressing errand. One
could spend hours on the spot, and in adventurous moods might yield to
the temptation of walking along the broad ledge of the curtain-wall till
one stood just above the dizzy spot where the waters swing together and
hurl themselves back with anger and trembling into the great stream.
"Mais radieux
Et ivre de votre lumière du Rhone,
Haussez les verres à la cause vaincue."
Truly the spot in which to drink to lost causes!