A Little Tour in France Part 6

Of course the deeply inquiring traveller will alight as promptly as possible; for the pleasure of climbing into this queerest of cities on foot is not the least part of the entertainment of going there. Then you appreciate its extraordinary position, its picturesque- ness, its steepness, its desolation and decay. It hangs - that is, what remains of it - to the slanting summit of the mountain. Nothing would be more natural than for the whole place to roll down into the valley. A part of it has done so - for it is not unjust to suppose that in the process of decay the crumbled particles have sought the lower level; while the remainder still clings to its magnificent perch.

If I called Les Baux a city, just, above, it was not that I was stretching a point in favor of the small spot which to-day contains but a few dozen inhabi- tants. The history of the plate is as extraordinary as its situation. It was not only a city, but a state; not only a state, but an empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself sovereign of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties, with which its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal pro- prietors; and there-was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and Ma.r.s.eilles, paid them homage. The chronicle of this old Provencal house has been written, in a style somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the little book - a modest pamphlet - at the establishment of the good sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest parts of Les Baux. The sisters have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom I heard piping their lessons, while I waited in the cold _parloir_ for one of the ladies to come and speak to me. Nothing could have been more perfect than the manner of this excellent woman when she arrived; yet her small religious house seemed a very out-of-the-way corner of the world. It was spotlessly neat, and the rooms looked as if they had lately been papered and painted: in this respect, at the mediaeval Pompeii, they were rather a discord.

They were, at any rate, the newest, freshest thing at Les Baux. I remember going round to the church, after I had left the good sisters, and to a little quiet terrace, which stands in front of it, ornamented with a few small trees and bordered with a wall, breast- high, over which you look down steep hillsides, off into the air and all about the neighbouring country.

I remember saying to myself that this little terrace was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist of taste keeps in his mind as a picture. The church was small and brown and dark, with a certain rustic richness. All this, however, is no general description of Les Baux.

I am unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple reason that it is a mere con- fusion of ruin. It has not been preserved in lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and castle, have become fragmentary, not through the sudden destruction, but through the gradual with- drawal, of a population. It is not an extinguished, but a deserted city; more deserted far than even Carca.s.sonne and Aigues-Mortes, where I found so much entertainment in the gra.s.s-grown element. It is of very small extent, and even in the days of its greatness, when its lords ent.i.tled themselves counts of Cephalonia and Neophantis, kings of Arles and Vienne, princes of Achaia, and emperors of Constan- tinople, - even at this flourishing period, when, as M.

Jules Canonge remarks, "they were able to depress the balance in which the fate of peoples and kings is weighed," the plucky little city contained at the most no more than thirty-six hundred souls. Yet its lords (who, however, as I have said, were able to present a long list of subject towns, most of them, though a few are renowned, unknown to fame) were seneschals and captains-general of Piedmont and Lombardy, grand admirals of the kingdom of Naples, and its ladies were sought in marriage by half the first princes in Europe. A considerable part of the little narrative of M. Canonge is taken up with the great alliances of the House of Baux, whose fortunes, ma- trimonial and other, he traces from the eleventh cen- tury down to the sixteenth. The empty sh.e.l.ls of a considerable number of old houses, many of which must have been superb, the lines of certain steep little streets, the foundations of a castle, and ever so many splendid views, are all that remains to-day of these great t.i.tles. To such a list I may add a dozen very polite and sympathetic people, who emerged from the interstices of the desultory little town to gaze at the two foreigners who had driven over from Arles, and whose horses were being baited at the modest inn. The resources of this establishment we did not venture otherwise to test, in spite of the seductive fact that the sign over the door was in the Provencal tongue. This little group included the baker, a rather melancholy young man, in high boots and a cloak, with whom and his companions we had a good deal of conversation. The Baussenques of to-day struck me as a very mild and agreeable race, with a good deal of the natural amenity which, on occasions like this one, the traveller, who is, waiting for his horses to be put in or his dinner to be prepared, observes in the charming people who lend themselves to con- versation in the hill-towns of Tuscany. The spot where our entertainers at Les Baux congregated was naturally the most inhabited portion of the town; as I say, there were at least a dozen human figures within sight. Presently we wandered away from them, scaled the higher places, seated ourselves among the ruins of the castle, and looked down from the cliff overhanging that portion of the road which I have mentioned as approaching Les Baux from behind. I was unable to trace the configuration of the castle as plainly as the writers who have described it in the guide-books, and I am ashamed to say that I did not even perceive the three great figures of stone (the three Marys, as they are called; the two Marys of Scripture, with Martha), which const.i.tute one of the curiosities of the place, and of which M. Jules Canonge speaks with almost hyperbolical admiration. A brisk shower, lasting some ten minutes, led us to take refuge in a cavity, of mysterious origin, where the melancholy baker presently discovered us, having had the _bonne pensee_ of coming up for us with an umbrella which certainly belonged, in former ages, to one of the Ste- phanettes or Berangeres commemorated by M. Canonge.

His oven, I am afraid, was cold so long as our visit lasted. When the rain was over we wandered down to the little disenc.u.mbered s.p.a.ce before the inn, through a small labyrinth of obliterated things. They took the form of narrow, precipitous streets, bordered by empty houses, with gaping windows and absent doors, through which we had glimpses of sculptured chimney-pieces and fragments of stately arch and vault.

Some of the houses are still inhabited; but most of them are open to the air and weather. Some of them have completely collapsed; others present to the street a front which enables one to judge of the physiognomy of Les Baux in the days of its importance. This im- portance had pretty well pa.s.sed away in the early part of the sixteenth century, when the place ceased to be an independent princ.i.p.ality. It became - by bequest of one of its lords, Bernardin des Baux, a great cap- tain of his time - part of the appanage of the kings of France, by whom it was placed under the protection of Arles, which had formerly occupied with regard to it a different position. I know not whether the Arle- sians neglected their trust; but the extinction of the st.u.r.dy little stronghold is too complete not to have begun long ago. Its memories are buried under its ponderous stones. As we drove away from it in the gloaming, my friend and I agreed that the two or three hours we had spent there were among the happiest impressions of a pair of tourists very curious in the picturesque. We almost forgot that we were bound to regret that the shortened day left us no time to drive five miles further, above a pa.s.s in the little mountains - it had beckoned to us in the morning, when we came in sight of it, almost irresistibly - to see the Ro- man arch and mausoleum of Saint Remy. To compa.s.s this larger excursion (including the visit to Les Baux) you must start from Arles very early in the morning; but I can imagine no more delightful day.

x.x.xIII.

I had been twice at Avignon before, and yet I was not satisfied. I probably am satisfied now; neverthe- less, I enjoyed my third visit. I shall not soon forget the first, on which a particular emotion set indelible stamp. I was travelling northward, in 1870, after four months spent, for the first time, in Italy. It was the middle of January, and I had found myself, unexpected- ly, forced to return to England for the rest of the winter. It was an insufferable disappointment; I was wretched and broken-hearted. Italy appeared to me at that time so much better than anything else in the world, that to rise from table in the middle of the feast was a prospect of being hungry for the rest of my days. I had heard a great deal of praise of the south of France; but the south of France was a poor consolation. In this state of mind I arrived at Avignon, which under a bright, hard winter sun was tingling - fairly spinning - with the _mistral_. I find in my journal of the other day a reference to the acuteness of my reluctance in January, 1870. France, after Italy, ap- peared, in the language of the latter country, _poco sim- patica_; and I thought it necessary, for reasons now in- conceivable, to read the "Figaro," which was filled with descriptions of the horrible Troppmann, the mur- derer of the _famille_ Kink. Troppmann, Kink, _le crime do Pantin_, very names that figured in this episode seemed to wave me back. Had I abandoned the so- norous south to a.s.sociate with vocables so base?

It was very cold, the other day, at Avignon; for though there was no mistral, it was raining as it rains in Provence, and the dampness had a terrible chill in it. As I sat by my fire, late at night - for in genial Avignon, in October, I had to have a fire - it came back to me that eleven years before I had at that same hour sat by a fire in that same room, and, writ- ing to a friend to whom I was not afraid to appear extravagant, had made a vow that at some happier period of the future I would avenge myself on the _ci- devant_ city of the Popes by taking it in a contrary sense. I suppose that I redeemed my vow on the oc- casion of my second visit better than on my third; for then I was on my way to Italy, and that vengeance, of course, was complete. The only drawback was that I was in such a hurry to get to Ventimiglia (where the Italian custom-house was to be the sign of my triumph), that I scarcely took time to make it clear to myself at Avignon that this was better than reading the "Figaro."

I hurried on almost too fast to enjoy the consciousness of moving southward. On this last occasion I was un- fortunately dest.i.tute of that happy faith. Avignon was my southernmost limit; after which I was to turn round and proceed back to England. But in the interval I had been a great deal in Italy, and that made all the difference.

I had plenty of time to think of this, for the rain kept me practically housed for the first twenty-four hours. It had been raining in, these regions for a month, and people had begun to look askance at the Rhone, though as yet the volume of the river was not exorbitant. The only excursion possible, while the torrent descended, was a kind of horizontal dive, ac- companied with infinite splashing, to the little _musee_ of the town, which is within a moderate walk of the hotel. I had a memory of it from my first visit; it had appeared to me more pictorial than its pictures.

I found that recollection had flattered it a little, and that it is neither better nor worse than most provincial museums. It has the usual musty chill in the air, the usual gra.s.s-grown fore-court, in which a few lumpish Roman fragments are disposed, the usual red tiles on the floor, and the usual specimens of the more livid schools on the walls. I rang up the _gardien_, who ar- rived with a bunch of keys, wiping his mouth; he un- locked doors for me, opened shutters, and while (to my distress, as if the things had been worth lingering over) he shuffled about after me, he announced the names of the pictures before which I stopped, in a voice that reverberated through the melancholy halls, and seemed to make the authorship shameful when it was obscure, and grotesque when it pretended to be great. Then there were intervals of silence, while I stared absent-mindedly, at hap-hazard, at some indis- tinguishable canvas, and the only sound was the down- pour of the rain on the skylights. The museum of Avignon derives a certain dignity from its Roman frag- ments. The town has no Roman monuments to show; in this respect, beside its brilliant neighbors, Arles and Nimes, it is a blank. But a great many small objects have been found in its soil, - pottery, gla.s.s, bronzes, lamps, vessels and ornaments of gold and silver. The gla.s.s is especially chaming, - small vessels of the most delicate shape and substance, many of them perfectly preserved. These diminutive, intimate things bring one near to the old Roman life; they seem like pearls strung upon the slender thread that swings across the gulf of time. A little gla.s.s cup that Roman lips have touched says more to us than the great vessel of an arena. There are two small silver _ca.s.seroles_, with chi- selled handles, in the museum of Avignon, that struck me as among the most charming survivals of anti- quity.

I did wrong just above, to speak of my attack on this establishment as the only recreation I took that first wet day; for I remember a terribly moist visit to the former palace of the Popes, which could have taken place only in the same tempestuous hours. It is true that I scarcely know why I should have gone out to see the Papal palace in the rain, for I had been over it twice before, and even then had not found the interest of the place so complete as it ought to be; the fact, nevertheless, remains that this last occasion is much a.s.sociated with an umbrella, which was not superfluous even in some of the chambers and cor- ridors of the gigantic pile. It had already seemed to me the dreariest of all historical buildings, and my final visit confirmed the impression. The place is as intricate as it is vast, and as desolate as it is dirty.

The imagination has, for some reason or other, to make more than the effort usual in such cases to re- store and repeople it. The fact, indeed, is simply that the palace has been so incalculably abused and altered.

The alterations have been so numerous that, though I have duly conned the enumerations, supplied in guide- books, of the princ.i.p.al perversions, I do not pretend to carry any of them in my head. The huge bare ma.s.s, without ornament, without grace, despoiled of its battlements and defaced with sordid modern windows, covering the Rocher des Doms, and looking down over the Rhone and the broken bridge of Saint-Benazet (which stops in such a sketchable manner in mid- stream), and across at the lonely tower of Philippe le Bel and the ruined wall of Villeneuve, makes at a dis- tance, in spite of its poverty, a great figure, the effect of which is carried out by the tower of the church be- side it (crowned though the latter be, in a top-heavy fashion, with an immense modern image of the Virgin) and by the thick, dark foliage of the garden laid out on a still higher portion of the eminence. This garden recalls, faintly and a trifle perversely, the grounds of the Pincian at Rome. I know not whether it is the shadow of the Papal name, present in both places, combined with a vague a.n.a.logy between the churches, - which, approached in each case by a flight of steps, seemed to defend the precinct, - but each time I have seen the Promenade des Doms it has carried my thoughts to the wider and loftier terrace from which you look away at the Tiber and Saint Peter's.

As you stand before the Papal palace, and espe- cially as you enter it, you are struck with its being a very dull monument. History enough was enacted here: the great schism lasted from 1305 to 1370, dur- ing which seven Popes, all Frenchmen, carried on the court of Avignon on principles that have not com- mended themselves to the esteem of posterity. But history has been whitewashed away, and the scandals of that period have mingled with the dust of dilapi- dations and repairs. The building has for many years been occupied as a barrack for regiments of the line, and the main characteristics of a barrack - an extreme nudity and a very queer smell - prevail throughout its endless compartments. Nothing could have been more cruelly dismal than the appearance it presented at the time of this third visit of mine. A regiment, changing quarters, had departed the day before, and another was expected to arrive (from Algeria) on the morrow.

The place had been left in the befouled and belittered condition which marks the pa.s.sage of the military after they have broken carnp, and it would offer but a me- lancholy welcome to the regiment that was about to take possession. Enormous windows had been left carelessly open all over the building, and the rain and wind were beating into empty rooms and pa.s.sages; making draughts which purified, perhaps, but which scarcely cheered. For an arrival, it was horrible. A handful of soldiers had remained behind. In one of the big vaulted rooms several of them were lying on their wretched beds, in the dim light, in the cold, in the damp, with the bleak, bare walls before them, and their overcoats, spread over them, pulled up to their noses. I pitied them immensely, though they may have felt less wretched than they looked. I thought not of the old profligacies and crimes, not of the funnel-shaped torture-chamber (which, after exciting the shudder of generations, has been ascertained now, I believe, to have been a mediaeval bakehouse), not of the tower of the _glaciere_ and the horrors perpetrated here in the Revolution, but of the military burden of young France. One wonders how young France en- dures it, and one is forced to believe that the French conscript has, in addition to his notorious good-humor, greater toughness than is commonly supposed by those who consider only the more relaxing influences of French civilization. I hope he finds occasional com- pensation for such moments as I saw those damp young peasants pa.s.sing on the mattresses of their hideous barrack, without anything around to remind them that they were in the most civilized of countries.

The only traces of former splendor now visible in the Papal pile are the walls and vaults of two small chapels, painted in fresco, so battered and effaced as to be scarcely distinguishable, by Simone Memmi. It offers, of course, a peculiarly good field for restoration, and I believe the government intend to take it in hand. I mention this fact without a sigh; for they cannot well make it less interesting than it is at present.

x.x.xIV.

Fortunately, it did not rain every day (though I believe it was raining everywhere else in the depart- ment); otherwise I should not have been able to go to Villeneuve and to Vaucluse. The afternoon, indeed, was lovely when I walked over the interminable bridge that spans the two arms of the Rhone, divided here by a considerable island, and directed my course, like a solitary horseman - on foot, to the lonely tower which forms one of the outworks of Villeneuve-les- Avignon. The picturesque, half-deserted little town lies a couple of miles further up the river. The im- mense round towers of its old citadel and the long stretches of ruined wall covering the slope on which it lies, are the most striking features of the nearer view, as you look from Avignon across the Rhone. I spent a couple of hours in visiting these objects, and there was a kind of pictorial sweetness in the episode; but I have not many details to relate. The isolated tower I just mentioned has much in common with the detached donjon of Montmajour, which I had looked at in going to Les Baux, and to which I paid my respects in speaking of that excursion. Also the work of Philippe le Bel (built in 1307), it is amazingly big and stubborn, and formed the opposite limit of the broken bridge, whose first arches (on the side of Avignon) alone remain to give a measure of the oc- casional volume of the Rhone. Half an hour's walk brought me to Villeneuve, which lies away from the river, looking like a big village, half depopulated, and occupied for the most part by dogs and cats, old women and small children; these last, in general, re- markably pretty, in the manner of the children of Provence. You pa.s.s through the place, which seems in a singular degree vague and unconscious, and come to the rounded hill on which the ruined abbey lifts its yellow walls, - the Benedictine abbey of Saint- Andre, at once a church, a monastery, and a fortress.

A large part of the crumbling enceinte disposes itself over the hill; but for the rest, all that has preserved any traceable cohesion is a considerable portion, of the citadel. The defence of the place appears to have been intrusted largely to the huge round towers that flank the old gate; one of which, the more complete, the ancient warden (having first inducted me into his own dusky little apartment, and presented me with a great bunch of lavender) enabled me to examine in detail. I would almost have dispensed with the privi- lege, for I think I have already mentioned that an ac- quaintance with many feudal interiors has wrought a sad confusion in my mind. The image of the outside always remains distinct; I keep it apart from other images of the same sort; it makes a picture sufficiently ineffaceable. But the guard-rooms, winding staircases, loop-holes, prisons, repeat themselves and intermingle; they have a wearisome family likeness. There are always black pa.s.sages and corners, and walls twenty feet thick; and there is always some high place to climb up to for the sake of a "magnificent" view.

The views, too, are apt to get muddled. These dense gate-towers of Philippe le Bel struck me, however, as peculiarly wicked and grim. Their capacity is of the largest, and they contain over so many devilish little dungeons, lighted by the narrowest slit in the pro- digious wall, where it comes over one with a good deal of vividness and still more horror that wretched human beings ever lay there rotting in the dark. The dungeons of Villeneuve made a particular impression on me, - greater than any, except those of Loches, which must surely be the most grewsome in Europe.

I hasten to add that every dark hole at Villeneuve is called a dungeon; and I believe it is well established that in this manner, in almost all old castles and towers, the sensibilities of the modern tourist are un- scrupulously played upon. There were plenty of black holes in the Middle Ages that were not dungeons, but household receptacles of various kinds; and many a tear dropped in pity for the groaning captive has really been addressed to the spirits of the larder and the f.a.ggot-nook. For all this, there are some very bad corners in the towers of Villeneuve, so that I was not wide of the mark when I began to think again, as I had often thought before, of the stoutness of the human composition in the Middle Ages, and the tranquillity of nerve of people to whom the groaning captive and the blackness of a "living tomb" were familiar ideas, which did not at all interfere with their happiness or their sanity. Our modern nerves, our irritable sym- pathies, our easy discomforts and fears, make one think (in some relations) less respectfully of human nature.

Unless, indeed, it be true, as I have heard it main- tained, that in the Middle Ages every one did go mad, - every one _was_ mad. The theory that this was a period of general insanity is not altogether indefensible.

Within the old walls of its immense abbey the town of Villeneuve has built itself a rough faubourg; the fragments with which the soil was covered having been, I suppose, a quarry of material. There are no streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random over the uneven ground. The only im- portant feature is a convent of cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls) behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down into, or down at simply, from the battlements of the citadel. One or two of the nuns were pa.s.sing in and out of the house; they wore gray robes, with a bright red cape. I thought their situation most pro- vincial. I came away, and wandered a little over the base of the hill, outside the walls. Small white stones cropped through the gra.s.s, over which low olive-trees were scattered. The afternoon had a yellow bright- ness. I sat down under one of the little trees, on the gra.s.s, - the delicate gray branches were not much above my head, - and rested, and looked at Avignon across the Rhone. It was very soft, very still and pleasant, though I am not sure it was all I once should have expected of that combination of elements: an old city wall for a background, a canopy of olives, and, for a couch, the soil of Provence.

When I came back to Avignon the twilight was already thick; but I walked up to the Rocher des Doms. Here I again had the benefit of that amiable moon which had already lighted up for me so many romantic scenes. She was full, and she rose over the Rhone, and made it look in the distance like a silver serpent. I remember saying to myself at this mo- ment, that it would be a beautiful evening to walk round the walls of Avignon, - the remarkable walls, which challenge comparison with those of Carca.s.sonne and Aigues-Mortes, and which it was my duty, as an observer of the picturesque, to examine with some at- tention. Presenting themselves to that silver sheen, they could not fail to be impressive. So, at least, I said to myself; but, unfortunately, I did not believe what I said. It is a melancholy fact that the walls of Avignon had never impressed me at all, and I had never taken the trouble to make the circuit. They are continuous and complete, but for some mysterious reason they fail of their effect. This is partly because they are very low, in some places almost absurdly so; being buried in new acc.u.mulations of soil, and by the filling in of the moat up to their middle. Then they have been too well tended; they not only look at present very new, but look as if they had never been old. The fact that their extent is very much greater makes them more of a curiosity than those of Carcas- sonne; but this is exactly, as the same time, what is fatal to their pictorial unity. With their thirty-seven towers and seven gates they lose themselves too much to make a picture that will compare with the ad- mirable little vignette of Carca.s.sonne. I may mention, now that I am speaking of the general ma.s.s of Avignon, that nothing is more curious than the way in which, viewed from a distance, it is all reduced to nought by the vast bulk of the palace of the Popes. From across the Rhone, or from the train, as you leave the place, this great gray block is all Avignon; it seems to occupy the whole city, extensive, with its shrunken population, as the city is.

x.x.xV.

It was the morning after this, I think (a certain Sat.u.r.day), that when I came out of the Hotel de l'Europe, which lies in a shallow concavity just within the city gate that opens on the Rhone, - came out to look at the sky from the little _place_ before the inn, and see how the weather promised for the obligatory excursion to Vaucluse, - I found the whole town in a terrible taking. I say the whole town advisedly; for every inhabitant appeared to have taken up a position on the bank of the river, or on the uppermost parts of the promenade of the Doms, where a view of its course was to be obtained. It had risen surprisingly in the night, and the good people of Avignon had reason to know what a rise of the Rhone might signify.

The town, in its lower portions, is quite at the mercy of the swollen waters; and it was mentioned to me that in 1856 the Hotel de l'Europe, in its convenient hollow, was flooded up to within a few feet of the ceiling of the dining-room, where the long board which had served for so many a table d'hote floated dis- reputably, with its legs in the air. On the present occasion the mountains of the Ardeche, where it had been raining for a month, had sent down torrents which, all that fine Friday night, by the light of the innocent-looking moon, poured themselves into the Rhone and its tributary, the Durance. The river was enormous, and continued to rise; and the sight was beautiful and horrible. The water in many places was already at the base of the city walls; the quay, with its parapet just emerging, being already covered.

The country, seen from the Plateau des Doms, re- sembled a vast lake, with protrusions of trees, houses, bridges, gates. The people looked at it in silence, as I had seen people before - on the occasion of a rise of the Arno, at Pisa - appear to consider the prospects of an inundation. "Il monte; il monte toujours," - there was not much said but that. It was a general holiday, and there was an air of wishing to profit, for sociability's sake, by any interruption of the common- place (the popular mind likes "a change," and the element of change mitigates the sense of disaster); but the affair was not otherwise a holiday. Suspense and anxiety were in the air, and it never is pleasant to be reminded of the helplessness of man. In the presence of a loosened river, with its ravaging, unconquerable volume, this impression is as strong as possible; and as I looked at the deluge which threatened to make an island of the Papal palace, I perceived that the scourge of water is greater than the scourge of fire.

A blaze may be quenched, but where could the flame be kindled that would arrest the quadrupled Rhone?

For the population of Avignon a good deal was at stake, and I am almost ashamed to confess that in the midst of the public alarm I considered the situation from the point of view of the little projects of a senti- mental tourist. Would the prospective inundation inter- fere with my visit to Vaucluse, or make it imprudent to linger twenty-four hours longer at Avignon? I must add that the tourist was not perhaps, after all, so sentimental. I have spoken of the pilgrimage to the shrine of Petrarch as obligatory, and that was, in fact, the light in which it presented itself to me; all the more that I had been twice at Avignon without under- taking it. This why I was vexed at the Rhone - if vexed I was - for representing as impracticable an ex- cursion which I cared nothing about. How little I cared was manifest from my inaction on former oc- casions. I had a prejudice against Vancluse, against Petrarch, even against the incomparable Laura. I was sure that the place was c.o.c.kneyfied and threadbare, and I had never been able to take an interest in the poet and the lady. I was sure that I had known many women as charming and as handsome as she, about whom much less noise had been made; and I was convinced that her singer was fact.i.tious and literary, and that there are half a dozen stanzas in Wordsworth that speak more to the soul than the whole collection of his _fioriture_. This was the crude state of mind in which I determined to go, at any risk, to Vaucluse.

Now that I think it over, I seem to remember that I had hoped, after all, that the submersion of the roads would forbid it. Since morning the clouds had gathered again, and by noon they were so heavy that there was every prospect of a torrent. It appeared absurd to choose such a time as this to visit a fountain - a fountain which, would be indistinguishable in the general cataract. Nevertheless I took a vow that if at noon the rain should not have begun to descend upon Avignon I would repair to the head-spring of the Sorgues. When the critical moment arrived, the clouds were hanging over Avignon like distended water-bags, which only needed a p.r.i.c.k to empty themselves. The p.r.i.c.k was not given, however; all nature was too much occupied in following the aberration of the Rhone to think of playing tricks elsewhere. Accordingly, I started for the station in a spirit which, for a tourist who sometimes had prided himself on his unfailing supply of sentiment, was shockingly perfunctory.

"For tasks in hours of insight willed May be in hours of gloom fulfilled."

I remembered these lines of Matthew Arnold (written, apparently, in an hour of gloom), and carried out the idea, as I went, by hoping that with the return of in- sight I should be glad to have seen Vaucluse. Light has descended upon me since then, and I declare that the excursion is in every way to be recommended.

The place makes a great impression, quite apart from Petrarch and Laura.

There was no rain; there was only, all the after- noon, a mild, moist wind, and a sky magnificently black, which made a _repoussoir_ for the paler cliffs of the fountain. The road, by train, crosses a flat, ex- pressionless country, toward the range of arid hills which lie to the east of Avignon, and which spring (says Murray) from the ma.s.s of the Mont-Ventoux. At Isle-sur-Sorgues, at the end of about an hour, the fore- ground becomes much more animated and the distance much more (or perhaps I should say much less) actual.

I descended from the train, and ascended to the top of an omnibus which was to convey me into the re- cesses of the hills. It had not been among my pre- visions that I should be indebted to a vehicle of that kind for an opportunity to commune with the spirit of Petrarch; and I had to borrow what consolation I could from the fact that at least I had the omnibus to myself. I was the only pa.s.senger; every one else was at Avignon, watching the Rhone. I lost no time in perceiving that I could not have come to Vaucluse at a better moment. The Sorgues was almost as full as the Rhone, and of a color much more romantic. Rush- ing along its narrowed channel under an avenue of fine _platanes_ (it is confined between solid little embank- ments of stone), with the good-wives of the village, on the brink, washing their linen in its contemptuous flood, it gave promise of high entertainment further on.

The drive to Vaucluse is of about three quarters of an hour; and though the river, as I say, was promis- ing, the big pale hills, as the road winds into them, did not look as if their slopes of stone and shrub were a nestling-place for superior scenery. It is a part of the merit of Vaucluse, indeed, that it is as much as possible a surprise. The place has a right to its name, for the valley appears impenetrable until you get fairly into it. One perverse twist follows another, until the omnibus suddenly deposits you in front of the "cabinet"

of Petrarch. After that you have only to walk along the left bank of the river. The cabinet of Petrarch is to-day a hideous little _cafe_, bedizened, like a sign- board, with extracts from the ingenious "Rime." The poet and his lady are, of course, the stock in trade of the little village, which has had for several generations the privilege of attracting young couples engaged in their wedding-tour, and other votaries of the tender pa.s.sion. The place has long been familiar, on festal Sundays, to the swains of Avignon and their attendant nymphs. The little fish of the Sorgues are much esteemed, and, eaten on the spot, they const.i.tute, for the children of the once Papal city, the cla.s.sic sub- urban dinner. Vaucluse has been turned to account, however, not only by sentiment, but by industry; the banks of the stream being disfigured by a pair of hideous mills for the manufacture of paper and of wool. In an enterprising and economical age the water-power of the Sorgues was too obvious a motive; and I must say that, as the torrent rushed past them, the wheels of the dirty little factories appeared to turn merrily enough. The footpath on the left bank, of which I just spoke, carries one, fortunately, quite out of sight of them, and out of sound as well, inasmuch as on the day of my visit the stream itself, which was in tremendous force, tended more and more, as one approached the fountain, to fill the valley with its own echoes. Its color was magnificent, and the whole spectacle more like a corner of Switzerland than a nook in Provence. The protrusions of the mountain shut it in, and you penetrate to the bottom of the re- cess which they form. The Sorgues rushes and rushes; it is almost like Niagara after the jump of the cataract.

There are dreadful little booths beside the path, for the sale of photographs and _immortelles_, - I don't know what one is to do with the immortelles, - where you are offered a brush dipped in tar to write your name withal on the rocks. Thousands of vulgar persons, of both s.e.xes, and exclusively, it appeared, of the French nationality, had availed themselves of this implement; for every square inch of accessible stone was scored over with some human appellation. It is not only we in America, therefore, who besmirch our scenery; the practice exists, in a more organized form (like every- thing else in France), in the country of good taste.

You leave the little booths and stalls behind; but the bescribbled crag, bristling with human vanity, keeps you company even when you stand face to face with the fountain. This happens when you find yourself at the foot of the enormous straight cliff out of which the river gushes. It rears itself to an extraordinary height, - a huge forehead of bare stone, - looking as if it were the half of a tremendous mound, split open by volcanic action. The little valley, seeing it there, at a bend, stops suddenly, and receives in its arms the magical spring. I call it magical on account of the mysterious manner in which it comes into the world, with the huge shoulder of the mountain rising over it, as if to protect the secret. From under the mountain it silently rises, without visible movement, filling a small natural basin with the stillest blue water. The contrast between the stillness of this basin and the agitation of the water directly after it has overflowed, const.i.tutes half the charm of Vaucluse.

The violence of the stream when once it has been set loose on the rocks is as fascinating and indescribable as that of other cataracts; and the rocks in the bed of the Sorgues have been arranged by a master-hand.

The setting of the phenomenon struck me as so simple and so fine - the vast sad cliff, covered with the after- noon light, still and solid forever, while the liquid ele- ment rages and roars at its base - that I had no diffi- culty in understanding the celebrity of Vaucluse. I understood it, but I will not say that I understood Petrarch. He must have been very self-supporting, and Madonna Laura must indeed have been much to him.

The aridity of the hills that shut in the valley is complete, and the whole impression is best conveyed by that very expressive French epithet _morne_. There are the very fragmentary ruins of a castle (of one of the bishops of Cavaillon) on a high spur of the moun- tain, above the river; and there is another remnant of a feudal habitation on one of the more accessible ledges. Having half an hour to spare before my omnibus was to leave (I must beg the reader's pardon for this atrociously false note; call the vehicle a _dili- gence_, and for some undiscoverable reason the offence is minimized), I clambered up to this latter spot, and sat among the rocks in the company of a few stunted olives. The Sorgues, beneath me, reaching the plain, flung itself crookedly across the meadows, like an un- rolled blue ribbon. I tried to think of the _amant de Laure_, for literature's sake; but I had no great success, and the most I could, do was to say to myself that I must try again. Several months have elapsed since then, and I am ashamed to confess that the trial has not yet come off. The only very definite conviction I arrived at was that Vaucluse is indeed c.o.c.kneyfied, but that I should have been a fool, all the same, not to come.

x.x.xVI.

I mounted into my diligence at the door of the Hotel de Petrarque et de Laure, and we made our way back to Isle-sur-Sorgues in the fading light. This village, where at six o'clock every one appeared to have gone to bed, was fairly darkened by its high, dense plane-trees, under which the rushing river, on a level with its parapets, looked unnaturally, almost wickedly blue. It was a glimpse which has left a picture in my mind: the little closed houses, the place empty and soundless in the autumn dusk but for the noise of waters, and in the middle, amid the blackness of the shade, the gleam of the swift, strange tide. At the station every one was talking of the inundation being in many places an accomplished fact, and, in particular, of the condition of the Durance at some point that I have forgotten. At Avignon, an hour later, I found the water in some of the streets. The sky cleared in the evening, the moon lighted up the submerged suburbs, and the population again collected in the high places to enjoy the spectacle. It exhibited a certain sameness, however, and by nine o'clock there was considerable animation in the Place Crillon, where there is nothing to be seen but the front of the theatre and of several cafes - in addition, indeed, to a statue of this celebrated brave, whose valor redeemed some of the numerous military disasters of the reign of Louis XV. The next morning the lower quarters of the town were in a pitiful state; the situation seemed to me odious. To express my disapproval of it, I lost no time in taking the train for Orange, which, with its other attractions, had the merit of not being seated on the Rhone. It was my destiny to move northward; but even if I had been at liberty to follow a less un- natural course I should not then have undertaken it, inasmuch, as the railway between Avignon and Mar- seilles was credibly reported to be (in places) under water. This was the case with almost everything but the line itself, on the way to Orange. The day proved splendid, and its brilliancy only lighted up the desola- tion. Farmhouses and cottages were up to their middle in the yellow liquidity; haystacks looked like dull little islands; windows and doors gaped open, without faces; and interruption and flight were represented in the scene. It was brought home to me that the _popula- tions rurales_ have many different ways of suffering, and my heart glowed with a grateful sense of c.o.c.kney- ism. It was under the influence of this emotion that I alighted at Orange, to visit a collection of eminently civil monuments.

The collection consists of but two objects, but these objects are so fine that I will let the word pa.s.s. One of them is a triumphal arch, supposedly of the period of Marcus Aurelius; the other is a fragment, magnifi- cent in its ruin, of a Roman theatre. But for these fine Roman remains and for its name, Orange is a perfectly featureless little town; without the Rhone - which, as I have mentioned, is several miles distant - to help it to a physiognomy. It seems one of the oddest things that this obscure French borough - obscure, I mean, in our modern era, for the Gallo- Roman Arausio must have been, judging it by its arches and theatre, a place of some importance - should have given its name to the heirs apparent of the throne of Holland,and been borne by a king of England who had sovereign rights over it. During the Middle Ages it formed part of an independent princ.i.p.ality; but in 1531 it fell, by the marriage of one of its princesses, who had inherited it, into the family of Na.s.sau. I read in my indispensable Mur- ray that it was made over to France by the treaty of Utrecht. The arch of triumph, which stands a little way out of the town, is rather a pretty than an im- posing vestige of the Romans. If it had greater purity of style, one might say of it that it belonged to the same family of monuments as the Maison Carree at Nimes. It has three pa.s.sages, - the middle much higher than the others, - and a very elevated attic.

The vaults of the pa.s.sages are richly sculptured, and the whole monument is covered with friezes and military trophies. This sculpture is rather mixed; much of it is broken and defaced, and the rest seemed to me ugly, though its workmanship is praised. The arch is at once well preserved and much injured. Its general ma.s.s is there, and as Roman monuments go it is remarkably perfect; but it has suffered, in patches, from the extremity of restoration. It is not, on the whole, of absorbing interest. It has a charm, never- theless, which comes partly from its soft, bright yellow color, partly from a certain elegance of shape, of ex- pression; and on that well-washed Sunday morning, with its brilliant tone, surrounded by its circle of thin poplars, with the green country lying beyond it and a low blue horizon showing through its empty portals, it made, very sufficiently, a picture that hangs itself to one of the lateral hooks of the memory. I can take down the modest composition, and place it before me as I write. I see the shallow, shining puddles in the hard, fair French road; the pale blue sky, diluted by days of rain; the disgarnished autumnal fields; the mild sparkle of the low horizon; the solitary figure in sabots, with a bundle under its arm, advancing along the _chaussee_; and in the middle I see the little ochre- colored monument, which, in spite of its antiquity, looks bright and gay, as everything must look in France of a fresh Sunday morning.

It is true that this was not exactly the appearance of the Roman theatre, which lies on the other side of the town; a fact that did not prevent me from making my way to it in less than five minutes, through a suc- cession of little streets concerning which I have no observations to record. None of the Roman remains in the south of France are more impressive than this stupendous fragment. An enormous mound rises above the place, which was formerly occupied - I quote from Murray - first by a citadel of the Romans, then by a castle of the princes of Na.s.sau, razed by Louis XIV.

Facing this hill a mighty wall erects itself, thirty-six metres high, and composed of ma.s.sive blocks of dark brown stone, simply laid one on the other; the whole naked, rugged surface of which suggests a natural cliff (say of the Vaucluse order) rather than an effort of human, or even of Roman labor. It is the biggest thing at Orange, - it is bigger than all Orange put to- gether, - and its permanent ma.s.siveness makes light of the shrunken city. The face it presents to the town - the top of it garnished with two rows of brackets, perforated with holes to receive the staves of the _vela- rium_ - bears the traces of more than one tier of orna- mental arches; though how these flat arches were applied, or incrusted, upon the wall, I do not profess to explain. You pa.s.s through a diminutive postern - which seems in proportion about as high as the en- trance of a rabbit-hutch - into the lodge of the custo- dian, who introduces you to the interior of the theatre.

Here the ma.s.s of the hill affronts you, which the in- genious Romans treated simply as the material of their auditorium. They inserted their stone seats, in a semicircle, in the slope of the lull, and planted their colossal wall opposite to it. This wall, from the inside, is, if possible, even more imposing. It formed the back of the stage, the permanent scene, and its enormous face was coated with marble. It contains three doors, the middle one being the highest, and having above it, far aloft, a deep niche, apparently intended for an imperial statue. A few of the benches remain on the hillside which, however, is mainly a confusion of fragments. There is part of a corridor built into the hill, high up, and on the crest are the remnants of the demolished castle. The whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the back of the scene, the s.p.a.ce left be- tween it and the chord of the semicircle (of the audi- torium) which formed the proscenium is rather less than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very shallow, and appears to have been ar- ranged for a number of performers standing in a line, like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent skeleton, however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and wonder about as by what it tells you.

It has not the sweetness, the softness of melancholy, of the theatre at Arles; but it is more extraordinary, and one can imagine only tremendous tragedies being enacted there, -

"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."

At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing, - immense in height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the other dimen- sions are not remarkable. The division to the right, as you face the stage, is pointed out as the green- room; its portentous att.i.tude and the open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The compartment on the left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the traces of other chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to the theatre. Various fragments are visible which refer themselves plausibly to such an establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome would appear to have been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is all I saw, and all there was to see, of Orange, which had a very rustic, bucolic aspect, and where I was not even called upon to demand break- fast at the hotel. The entrance of this resort might have been that of a stable of the Roman days.

x.x.xVII.

I have been trying to remember whether I fasted all the way to Macon, which I reached at an advanced hour of the evening, and think I must have done so except for the purchase of a box of nougat at Monte- limart (the place is famous for the manufacture of this confection, which, at the station, is hawked at the windows of the train) and for a bouillon, very much later, at Lyons. The journey beside the Rhone - past Valence, past Tournon, past Vienne - would have been charming, on that luminous Sunday, but for two disagreeable accidents. The express from Ma.r.s.eilles, which I took at Orange, was full to over- flowing; and the only refuge I could find was an inside angle in a carriage laden with Germans, who had command of the windows, which they occupied as strongly as they have been known to occupy other strategical positions. I scarcely know, however, why I linger on this particular discomfort, for it was but a single item in a considerable list of grievances, - grievances dispersed through six weeks of constant railway travel in France. I have not touched upon them at an earlier stage of this chronicle, but my re- serve is not owing to any sweetness of a.s.sociation.

This form of locomotion, in the country of the ameni- ties, is attended with a dozen discomforts; almost all the conditions of the business are detestable. They force the sentimental tourist again and again to ask himself whether, in consideration of such mortal an- noyances, the game is worth the candle. Fortunately, a railway journey is a good deal like a sea voyage; its miseries fade from the mind as soon as you arrive.

That is why I completed, to my great satisfaction, my little tour in France. Let this small effusion of ill-nature be my first and last tribute to the whole despotic _gare_: the deadly _salle d'attente_, the insuffer- able delays over one's luggage, the porterless platform, the overcrowded and illiberal train. How many a time did I permit myself the secret reflection that it is in perfidious Albion that they order this matter best! How many a time did the eager British mer- cenary, clad in velveteen and clinging to the door of the carriage as it glides into the station, revisit my invidious dreams! The paternal porter and the re- sponsive hansom are among the best gifts of the Eng- lish genius to the world. I hasten to add, faithful to my habit (so insufferable to some of my friends) of ever and again readjusting the balance after I have given it an honest tip, that the bouillon at Lyons, which I spoke of above, was, though by no means an ideal bouillon, much better than any I could have obtained at an English railway station. After I had imbibed it, I sat in the train (which waited a long time at Lyons) and, by the light of one of the big lamps on the platform, read all sorts of disagreeable things in certain radical newspapers which I had bought at the book-stall. I gathered from these sheets that Lyons was in extreme commotion. The Rhone and the Saone, which form a girdle for the splendid town, were almost in the streets, as I could easily be- lieve from what I had seen of the country after leav- ing Orange. The Rhone, all the way to Lyons, had been in all sorts of places where it had no business to be, and matters were naturally not improved by its confluence with the charming and copious stream which, at Macon, is said once to have given such a happy opportunity to the egotism of the capital. A visitor from Paris (the anecdote is very old), being asked on the quay of that city whether he didn't ad- mire the Saone, replied good-naturedly that it was very pretty, but that in Paris they spelled it with the _ei_. This moment of general alarm at Lyons had been chosen by certain ingenious persons (I credit them, perhaps, with too sure a prevision of the rise of the rivers) for practising further upon the appre- hensions of the public. A bombsh.e.l.l filled with dynamite had been thrown into a cafe, and various votaries of the comparatively innocuous _pet.i.t verre_ had been wounded (I am not sure whether any one had been killed) by the irruption. Of course there had been arrests and incarcerations, and the "Intransi- geant" and the "Rappel" were filled with the echoes of the explosion. The tone of these organs is rarely edifying, and it had never been less so than on this occasion. I wondered, as I looked through them, whether I was losing all my radicalism; and then I wondered whether, after all, I had any to lose. Even in so long await as that tiresome delay at Lyons I failed to settle the question, any more than I made up my mind as to the probable future of the militant democracy, or the ultimate form of a civilization which should have blown up everything else. A few days later, the waters went down it Lyons; but the de- mocracy has not gone down.

I remember vividly the remainder of that evening which I spent at Macon, - remember it with a chatter- ing of the teeth. I know not what had got into the place; the temperature, for the last day of October, was eccentric and incredible. These epithets may also be applied to the hotel itself, - an extraordinary structure, all facade, which exposes an uncovered rear to the gaze of nature. There is a demonstrative, voluble landlady, who is of course part of the facade; but everything behind her is a trap for the winds, with chambers, corridors, staircases, all exhibited to the sky, as if the outer wall of the house had been lifted off. It would have been delightful for Florida, but it didn't do for Burgundy, even on the eve of November 1st, so that I suffered absurdly from the rigor of a season that had not yet begun. There was something in the air; I felt it the next day, even on the sunny quay of the Saone, where in spite of a fine southerly exposure I extracted little warmth from the reflection that Alphonse de Lamartine had often trod- den the flags. Macon struck me, somehow, as suffer- ing from a chronic numbness, and there was nothing exceptionally cheerful in the remarkable extension of the river. It was no longer a river, - it had become a lake; and from my window, in the painted face of the inn, I saw that the opposite bank had been moved back, as it were, indefinitely. Unfortunately, the various objects with which it was furnished had not been moved as well, the consequence of which was an extraordinary confusion in the relations of thing.