In Troubadour-Land: A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc Part 4

We have s.p.a.ce to notice only one or two inscriptions. One is the sign of Athenades, son of Dioscorides, professor of Latin grammar, probably set up two thousand years ago over his door; another is a notice of a young lad, Cleudemos, son of Dionysius, having gained a prize. A curious Greek inscription is found at Carpentras, a colony from Ma.r.s.eilles, that ill.u.s.trates the manner in which foreign religions got mixed up with those that were proper to the Greeks.

"Blessed be Thebe, daughter of Thelhui, laden with oblations for the G.o.d Osiris--she never jawed her husband--she was blameless in the eyes of Osiris, and receives his benediction."

Truly such a wife deserved that her conduct towards her husband should be commemorated through ages upon ages, and we may thank good fortune that it has preserved to us the name of this incomparable lady.

As I am on the subject of Greek inscriptions, I may quote the following touching one, that has been found built into the wall of a house at Aix.

"On the banks, beaten by the waves, a youth appeals to thee, voyager! I, beloved by G.o.d, am no more subject to the domination of Death. I pa.s.sed my life sailing on the sea, myself a sailor, like to the youthful G.o.ds, the Amyclaeans, saviours of sailors, free from the yoke of matrimony. Here in my tomb, which I owe to the piety of my masters, I rest sheltered from all maladies, free from toil, from cares, from pains; whereas in life, all these woes fall on our gross envelopes of matter. The dead, on the other hand, are divided into two cla.s.ses, of which one returns to the earth, whereas the other rises to join the dance with the celestial choirs; and it is to this latter cla.s.s that I belong, having had the good fortune to range myself under the banners of the Divinity."

Clearly this was the tomb of a young sailor-boy, a native of Aix, who had served in a merchant vessel of Ma.r.s.eilles. There is something graceful and pathetic in the monument.

But enough of the past. Now for the present, and in considering the present let us attend to that which feeds and builds up that gross envelope of matter the young Greek sailor had laid aside.

At Ma.r.s.eilles I put up at the Hotel des Negociants, in the Cours Belzunce.

Let me observe that I do not see the fun of going to hotels of the first cla.s.s. Not only is one's expense doubled, but one is thrown among English and American travellers, and sees nothing whatever of the people in whose country one is travelling. Now, here in this commercial inn, I had for dinner the following dishes, which I am quite sure I should not have had in the Grand Hotel de Noailles, where a dinner is six francs, whereas at my inn I paid just half. I must also observe that the dinners were abundant and excellent, but among the dishes were some that were peculiar to the Provencal cuisine, for instance:--

Bread slices sopped in saffron, with fish, garnished with small crabs, to be chewed up, sh.e.l.l and all.

Artichokes, raw, with oil and vinegar.

Oranges with pepper and salt.

On the table were gla.s.s jugs with tar-water, and I observed that over half those present drank their wine diluted with this tar-water.

One day in summer I was at table-d'hote in France when I saw a very fine melon on the table. Said I, in my heart of hearts, "I'll have some of you by-and-by!" But, to my consternation, the melon was taken round with stewed conger eel, and eaten with salt and pepper. I could not summon up courage to try the mixture, and the whole melon was consumed before the next course came on.

I was at Ma.r.s.eilles when M. Carnot, the President of the Republic visited it, April 16th. Great efforts were made to give him a splendid reception.

Venetian masts were set up, strings of fairy lamps were suspended between them, and tricolours were hung as banners to the masts, or grouped together in trophies. But alas! No sooner were all preparations made, than a furious gale broke over the coast, the venetian masts swayed in the wind and were upset or thrown out of the perpendicular, the little lamps jingled against each other and were broken, such as were not shivered were filled with rain, the banners were lashed with the broken wires and torn to shreds, and when M. Carnot arrived, in a pouring rain, it was amidst a very wreckage of festival preparations, and he was received by a crowd of umbrellas. Under such circ.u.mstances enthusiasm was damped and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of welcome were m.u.f.fled. The President occupied an open landau, and drove along the boulevards without umbrella or waterproof, bowing to right and left in a slashing rain. A deputation of flower women presented him with a sodden bouquet, by the hand of a dripping little girl in white that clung to her as a bathing gown. The President insisted on the maid being lifted to him into the carriage, where he hugged and kissed her, whilst the moisture ran out of her garments like a squeezed sponge, and this demonstration provoked some damp cheers.

I bought Henri Rochefort's paper next day, to see what his correspondent had to say about the visit. Some pa.s.sages from it are too racy not to be quoted.

"Il faisait un temps a ne pas mettre un ministre dehors, lorsque le train presidentiel est arrive en gare, et le defile a la detrempe etait pitieux a voir dans _le gargouillement et la transsudation de ce degorgement cataractal_. Sadi Carnot avait donne l'ordre de laisser son landau decouvert, afin de recevoir les ovations enthousiastes des parapluies.

"Bref, la Presidence est arrivee a la prefecture _trempee comme une soupe a l'oignon et fortement dessalee_."

Verily there is no tongue like the French for saying nasty things in a nasty way.

I do not know whether it is fair for one to pa.s.s an opinion on a man from a sight of his face overrun with rain-water, and with his nose acting like a shoot from a roof; but certainly the impression produced on me by M.

Sadi Carnot was that his features were wooden, and that he was but a very ordinary man--intellectually. I pa.s.s this opinion with hesitation. When dried possibly the sparks of genius may be discovered and may flare up; they were all but extinguished in the downpour when I saw him.

That cheerful king, Rene of Anjou and Provence, paid a visit to Ma.r.s.eilles in 1437, and made his royal entry on Sunday, December 15th. He was delighted with the reception accorded him, and in a gush of kindly feeling promised to make Ma.r.s.eilles his headquarters. But he forgot his promise, or circ.u.mstances were against his keeping it. He never revisited Ma.r.s.eilles.

On January 22, 1516, Francis I. entered the town and was received by children carrying banners and garlands, and troupes of young girls in white, then followed archers, arquebusiers, the consuls, and the clergy bearing the relics of S. Lazarus and S. Victor. A theatre was erected at every street corner, on which were presented to his sight incidents from the life of S. Louis. The procession ended with a battle of oranges and lemons, in which the king gave and received a good many blows on the head with the golden fruit.

At the head of the Allees des Capucins, a fine street planted with trees and with a handsome fountain in the place where the Allees de Meilhan unites with it, is a really fine modern Gothic church with twin west spires of open tracery. They are perhaps too thin, a usual fault with modern work, but otherwise the church is very good and stately. It is as fine within as without, but sorely disfigured by the coloured gla.s.s, which is garish.

French painted gla.s.s is very bad. It is precisely the sort of stuff that was turned out by English gla.s.s-painters about thirty years ago, the colours crude and distressing to the eye--windows that our more cultured taste cannot now endure. But the French artists have not advanced, the windows put in to-day are as detestable as those they put in at the beginning of the revival. Unfortunately, every cathedral is crowded through the length and breadth of France with this abominable stuff, that is only tolerable in a modern tasteless church, vulgar in its architecture and insipid in its sculpture, but is painfully out of place in a venerable minster.

The city of Ma.r.s.eilles has been lucky in securing a good architect for the Church of S. Vincent de Paul, but in another architectural venture Ma.r.s.eilles has been unfortunate. She was resolved to have a cathedral, and she gave the designing of it to a man void of taste, who has built a hideous erection on the quay in what he is pleased to call Byzantine style.

I am quite sure any Byzantine architect would cheerfully have jumped into the Bosphorus rather than disfigure a city with such a structure as Notre Dame.

The Germans have a saying that the higher a monkey climbs the more he exposes his monkeyishness; and unfortunately this architect has been allowed to climb very high. He was given the peak of Notre Dame de la Garde, that towers over Ma.r.s.eilles, on which to erect a church. The site is exceptionally good, one on which a man of ordinary genius would have done something, could hardly have failed to have done something, that would have been picturesque. But such is the perversity of this unfortunate man's talent that he has erected a structure on the limestone crag, of almost miraculous hideousness. It is also in so-called Byzantine architecture.

There is a dish-cover which serves as a dome, and a tower which would be comical if it were not irritating. It resembles the handle of a renaissance knife or fork stuck into a sheath and standing upright with a figure at top. We have made a blunder at South Kensington in setting side by side a depressed dome--the Albert Hall, and the acute pinnacle of the Albert Memorial; but a road runs between them, and it is possible to shut one eye and see one of these two structures apart from the other. But in Notre Dame de la Garde the two are combined in one building, and tease the eye from every point in Ma.r.s.eilles.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Abbey of S. Victor, Ma.r.s.eilles]

I ascended the steep crag to the church and found it full of a devout congregation. The service was the "Salut," and the Host was being elevated to the strains of "The Last Rose of Summer," on the hautbois stop of the organ.

The view from the platform of the church, of Ma.r.s.eilles, the coast, the blue Mediterranean and the islands is beautiful. Below Notre Dame de la Garde, and above the old port, stands the ancient Abbey of S. Victor; this abbey, of which the church alone remains, occupies a site where the successive generations of Ma.s.saliots buried their dead from the earliest pagan times, and here the first Christians formed catacombs of which some traces remain under the church, subterranean pa.s.sages bearing some resemblance to those in the outskirts of Rome. The abbey itself was founded by Ca.s.sian, in the fourth century, over these galleries containing the bones of the first Christians, but his monastery was wrecked by the Saracens four hundred years later, and it was rebuilt in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. What remains of this famous Abbey of S. Victor has rather the appearance of a fortress than a church; the walls and ramparts date from 1350, and were the work of William de Grimoard, who was prior of the monastery before he was elevated to be pope under the t.i.tle of Urban V.

The heavy, clumsy pile is a type of the architecture, at once military and ecclesiastical, that characterises most of the churches along the coast.

Externally the venerable church is devoid of beauty. No attempt at decoration has been made. It seems a shapeless pile of towers and machicolated and battlemented curtains, falling into almost complete ruin. But on pa.s.sing through the single entrance, one finds oneself in a well-proportioned church of nave and side aisles, a south chapel, and an apse. Each b.u.t.tress of the apse is battlemented outside and forms a turret, and two strong towers are adapted internally to serve as a transept and a porch.

Ma.r.s.eilles claims to have had as its first apostle Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead. The foundation of this myth is that in the fourth century it perhaps had a prelate of the name of Lazarus, though the earliest known bishop was Orestius, A.D. 314. The fact is that the existence of S. Lazarus at Ma.r.s.eilles was unsuspected till the eleventh century. When Ca.s.sian founded his abbey he dedicated it to S. Victor. If he had known anything about Lazarus, almost certainly he would have dedicated the church to him; he erected moreover, two other chapels, one to SS. Peter and Paul, the other to the Blessed Virgin and S. John the Baptist. When, in 1010, Benedict IX. enumerates the glories of the abbey restored after the destruction by the Saracens, he does not make the most transient allusion to S. Lazarus. However, Benedict IX., in 1040, does mention the pa.s.sion of this Lazarus raised from the dead by Christ, as one of the causes why the abbey was venerable. His relics were said to have been transported thence to Athens, to preserve them from the Saracens. We shall learn more about this fable when we come to the Camargue.

CHAPTER V.

THE CRAU.

The Basin of Berre--A neglected harbour--The diluvium--Formation of the Crau--The two Craus--Ca.n.a.l of c.r.a.ponne--Climate of the Crau--The Bise and Mistral--Force of the wind--Cypresses--A vision of kobolds.

On leaving Ma.r.s.eilles by train for Arles, the line cuts through the limestone ridge of the Estaque, and the traveller pa.s.ses from the basin of Ma.r.s.eilles into the much more extensive basin of Berre, surrounded by hills on all sides, a wide bowl like a volcanic crater, with the great inland salt lake of the Etang de Berre occupying its depths. This is a great natural harbour, seven times the size of the port of Toulon, and varying in depth from 28 to 32 feet; it is perfectly sheltered from every wind, and entire fleets might anchor there in security, not only out of reach, but out of sight of an enemy, for the chain of l'Estaque intervenes between it and the sea. It would seem as though Nature herself had designed Berre as a safe harbour for the merchant vessels that visit the south coast of France.

It is almost inconceivable how this sheet of water, communicating with the sea by the channel of Martignes, can have been neglected; how it is that its still blue waters are not crowded with ships, and its smiling sh.o.r.es not studded with a chain of industrial and populous towns. "The neglect of this little inland sea as a port of refuge," says M. Elisee Reclus, "is an economic scandal. Whilst on dangerous coasts harbours are constructed at vast expense, here we have one that is perfect, and which has been neglected for fifteen centuries." But though the Romans or Greeks had a station here, they did not utilise the lagoon. At S. Chamas are remains of the masters of the ancient world, but no evidence that they had there a naval station.

The line cuts again through the lip of the basin, and we are in the Crau.

At a remote period, but, nevertheless, in one geologically modern, the vast floods of the diluvial age that flowed from the Alps brought down incredible quant.i.ties of rolled stones, the detritus of the Alps. This filled up a great bay now occupied by the mouths of the Rhone, and spread in a triangle from Avignon as the apex, to Cette in the west, and Fos in the east. This rubble, washed down from the Alps, forms the substratum of the immense plain that inclines at a very slight angle into the Mediterranean, and extends for a considerable distance below the sea. Not only did the Rhone bring down these boulders, but also the Durance, which enters the Rhone above Arles, and formed between the chain of Les Alpines and the Luberon another triangular plain of rolled stones, with the apex at Cavaillon and the base between Tarascon and Avignon. But the Durance did more. There is a break in the chain on the south, between the limestone Alpines and the sandstone Trevaresse; and the br.i.m.m.i.n.g Durance, unable to discharge all her water, choked with rubble, into the Rhone, burst through the open door or natural waste-pipe, by Salon, and carried a portion of her pebbles into the sea directly, without asking her sister the Rhone to help her. Now the two great plains formed by the delta of the Rhone, and that of the Durance into the Rhone, are called the great and little Craus. They were known to the ancients, and puzzled them not a little. Strabo says of the Great Crau: "Between Ma.r.s.eilles and the mouth of the Rhone, at about a hundred stadia from the sea, is a plain, circular in form, and a hundred stadia in diameter, to which a singular event obtained for it the name of the Field of Pebbles. It is, in fact, covered with pebbles, as big as the fist, among which grows some gra.s.s in sufficient abundance to pasture herds of oxen."

Then we are given the legend that accounts for it. Here Hercules fought against the Ligurians, when the son of Jove, having exhausted his arrows, was supplied with artillery by a discharge of stones from the sky, showered on his enemies by Jupiter.

This desert, a little Sahara in Europe, occupies 30,000 acres. "It is composed entirely of shingle," says Arthur Young, "being so uniform a ma.s.s of round stones, some to the size of a man's head, but of all sizes less, that the newly thrown up shingle of a seash.o.r.e is hardly less free from soil; beneath these surface-stones is not so much a sand as a cemented rubble, with a small admixture of loam. Vegetation is rare and miserable, some of the absinthium and lavender so low and poor as scarcely to be recognised, and two or three miserable gra.s.ses, with _Centaurea calycitropes_ and _solst.i.tialis_, were the princ.i.p.al plants I could find." A mineralogical examination of the rolled stones presents peculiar interest. In the Little Crau, the mouth of the Durance, are found prodigious numbers of green and crystalline rocks, granite and variolite brought down from the Alps of Briancon, but nine-tenths of the pebbles of the Great Crau are white quartz brought from the great chain of the Alps, together with mica-slate and calcareous stones, and only a few of the variolites of Mont Genevre. One may say that the Great Crau is a complete mineralogical collection of all the rocks that form the chain of the Alps, whence flow the Rhone and its tributaries.

The aspect of the Crau is infinitely desolate, but it is no longer as barren as it was formerly. It is in fact, undergoing gradual but sure transformation. This is due to a gentleman of Provence, named Adam de c.r.a.ponne, born in 1525 at Salon, who conceived the idea of bringing some of the waters of the Durance through the gap where some of its overspill had flowed in the diluvial epoch, by a ca.n.a.l, into the Great Crau, so that it might deposit its rich alluvium over this desert of stones. He spent his life and his entire fortune in carrying out his scheme, and it is due to this that year by year the barren desert shrinks, and cultivation advances. There are to-day other ca.n.a.ls, those of Les Alpines, of Langlade, and d'Istres, besides that of c.r.a.ponne that a.s.sist in fertilising the waste. Wherever the water reaches, the soil is covered with trees, with pasture-land, with fields of corn; and in another century probably the sterility of the Crau will have been completely conquered.

In its present condition, the Crau may be divided into two parts, that which is watered, and which has been converted into a garden, and that which is not as yet reached by the rich loamy waters of the Durance, and is therefore parched and desolate, overrun by herds of sheep and cattle, driven down in winter from the Alps, when a certain amount of herbage is found on the desert, which in summer is utterly dry and barren. These migrations date back to a remote epoch, for they are mentioned by Pliny.

Previous to the construction of the ca.n.a.l by c.r.a.ponne, who began it in 1554, the desert reached to Arles; the whole of the plain south of the chain of the Alpines was either marsh lagoon, or a waste of stones, where now grow and luxuriate mulberries, olives, almond trees and vines. The ca.n.a.l of c.r.a.ponne was carried by the originator for thirty-three miles, sending out branches at Salon, Eyguieres, and elsewhere. In winter the meadows are green as those of Devon in spring, and the fields yield heavy crops. Indeed, the Durance acts to this region in the same way as does the Nile to Egypt. "The meadows I viewed," says Young, "are among the most extraordinary spectacles the world can afford in respect to the amazing contrast between the soil in its natural and in its watered state, covered richly and luxuriantly with clover, chicory, rib-gra.s.s, and _Avena elatior_."

The climate of the Crau presents contrasts most extreme. In winter the thermometer falls and remains below zero for many nights in succession, and the glacial _bise_ sweeps over the face of the desert, curdling the blood; the flocks and herds seek shelter from this blast behind the long walls of dry stones, which sometimes the violence of the wind throws down upon them.

During the summer the phenomenon of the mirage is almost continuous. The bed of air in contact with the surface of stones scorched by the blazing sun becomes rarified and dilated, so that the horizon appears to be fringed on all sides with lakes of rippling water, most deceptive and tantalising to the eye of the traveller.

The troops of wandering bulls and wild horses, flights of rose-coloured flamingoes, of partridges and wild ducks give this region a p.r.o.nounced oriental physiognomy, and however painful it may be at such a time to traverse this burning plain, it affords a curious picture of the Sahara in miniature nowhere else to be seen in Europe.

The great scourge of the Crau is the north-west wind, the _bise_, the black boreas of the ancients, so violent as to roll over the pebbles, and to blow away the roofs of houses, and tear up trees by the roots. In fact, the Crau may be regarded as the Home of the Winds.