The Christmas Kalends of Provence Part 6

In the misty barbaric ages before history fairly began, and in the early times of the Roman domination, the Rhone was the sole highway into northern Gaul from the Mediterraenean; later, when the Gallic system of Roman roads had been constructed, it held its own fairly well against the two roads which paralleled it--that on the east bank throughout almost its entire length, and that on the west bank from Lyons southward to a point about opposite to the present Montelimar; in the semi-barbarous Middle Ages--when the excitements of travel were increased by the presence of a robber-count at every ford and in every mountain-pa.s.s--it became again more important than the parallel highways on land; and in our own day the conditions of Roman times, relatively speaking, are restored once more by steamboats on the river and railways on the lines of the ancient roads. And so, having served these several masters, the Rhone valley of the present day is stored everywhere with remnants of the barbarism, of the civilization, and of the semi-barbarism which successively have been ploughed under its surface before what we have the temerity to call our own civilization began. Keltic flints and pottery underlie Roman ruins; just beneath the soil, or still surviving above it, are remains of Roman magnificence; and on almost all the hill-tops still stand the broken strongholds of the robber n.o.bles who maintained their n.o.bility upon what they were lucky enough to be able to steal. Naturally--those ruined castles, and the still-existent towns of the same period, being so conspicuously in evidence--the flavour of the river is most distinctly Mediaeval; but a journey in this region, with eyes open to perceive as well as to see, is a veritable descent into the depths of the ancient past.

Indeed, the _Gladiateur_ had but little more than swung clear from Lyons--around the long curve where the Saone and the Rhone are united and the stream suddenly is doubled in size--than we were carried back to the very dawn of historic times. Before us, stretching away to the eastward, was the broad plain of Saint-Fons--once covered with an oak forest to which Druid priests bearing golden sickles came from the ile Barbe at Yule-tide to gather mistletoe for the great Pagan feast; later, a battle-field where Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus came to a definite understanding in regard to the rulership of Gaul; later still, the site of a pleasure castle of the Archbishops of Lyons, and of the Villa Longchene to which light-hearted Lyons' n.o.bles came. Palace and Villa still are there--the one a Dominican school, the other a hospital endowed by the Empress Eugenie: but the oaks and the Druids and the battle are only faint legends now.

I am forced to admit that never a thought was given to that aggregation of antiquities by the too-frivolous pa.s.sengers aboard the _Gladiateur_.

At the very moment when we were steaming through those Gallo-Roman and Mediaeval lat.i.tudes there was a burst of music from the piano that fired our light-headed company as a spark fires a mine. The music was the air of "La Coupe," the Felibrien Anthem, and instantly a hundred voices took up the song. When this rite was ended, the music shifted to a livelier key and straightway a farandole was formed. On the whole, a long and narrow steamboat is not an especially good place for a farandole; but the leader of that one--a young person from the Odeon, whose hair came down repeatedly but whose exceptionally high spirits never came down at all--was not one of the sort whom difficulties deter. At the head of the long line of dancers--a living chain held together by clasped hands--she caracoled and curveted up and down the narrow pa.s.ses of the boat; and after her, also caracoling and curveting, came the chain: that each moment grew in length as volunteers joined it, or (in keeping with farandole customs) as the less vivacious members of the party were seized upon and forcibly impressed into its ranks. And so we farandoled clear away to Givors.

It took the place of a master of ceremonies, our farandole, and acted as an excellent solvent of formalities. Yet even without it there would have been none of the stiffness and reserve which would have chilled a company a.s.sembled under like conditions in English-speaking lands.

Friendliness and courtesy are characteristics of the French in general; and especially did our American contingent profit by those amiable traits that day on the Rhone. Save for a slight correspondence with a single member of the party, all aboard the boat were strangers to us; but in that kindly atmosphere, before we had time to fancy that we were outsiders, we found ourselves among friends.

Givors slipped by almost unnoticed in the thick of the farandole: a little town hung out to sun in long strips upon terraces rising from the water-side; the walls and tiled roofs making a general effect of warm greys and yellows dashed with the bright greens of shrubs and trees and gardens and the yellow green of vines. 'Tis a town of some commercial pretensions: the gateway of a ca.n.a.l a dozen miles long leading up through the valley of the little river Gier to iron-works and c.o.ke-works and gla.s.s-works tucked away in the hills. The ca.n.a.l was projected almost a century and a half ago as a connecting channel between the Rhone and the Loire, and so between the Atlantic and the Mediterraenean; wherefore the Ca.n.a.l of the Two Oceans was, and I suppose continues to be, its high-sounding name. But the Revolution came, and the digging never extended beyond that first dozen miles; and thus it is that the Ca.n.a.l of the Two Oceans, as such, is a delusion, and that the golden future which once lay ahead of Givors now lies a long way astern.

Yet the town has an easy and contented look: as though it had saved enough from the wreck of its magnificent destiny to leave it still comfortably well to do.

Before we fairly had pa.s.sed it, and while the farandole was dying out slowly, there crashed down upon us a thunderous outburst of song: as though an exceptionally large-lunged seraph were afloat immediately above us in the open regions of the air. Yet the song was of a gayer sort than seraphs, presumably, are wont to sing; and its method, distinctly, was that of the modern operatic stage. In point of fact, the singer was not a seraph, but an eminent professor in a great inst.i.tution of learning and a literary authority of the first rank--whose critical summary of French literature is a standard, and whose studies of Beaumarchais and Le Sage have been crowned by the Academy. In sheer joyousness of spirit that eminent personage had betaken himself to the top of the port paddle-box, and thence was suffering his mountain-cleaving voice to go at large: so quickening was the company in which he found himself; so stimulating was the racy fervour of his own Southern sun!

IV

From Givors the river runs almost in a straight line to Vienne. On both sh.o.r.es rise round-crested wooded hills--the foothills of the parallel ranges of mountains by which the wide valley is shut in. Down this perspective, commandingly upon a height, is seen the city--misty and uncertain at first, but growing clearer and clearer, as the boat nears it, until the stone-work of man and the rock-work of nature become distinct and the picture is complete in all its parts: the time-browned ma.s.s of houses on the hill-top; the tower of Philip the Fair; over all, the huge facade of Saint Maurice--an ogival wonder that for centuries was the cathedral church of the Primates of Gaul.

After Ma.r.s.eille, Vienne makes as handsome pretensions to age as are made by any town in France. The tradition of its founding lies hidden in the mists of heroic legend, and is the more momentous because it is so impressively vague. Over its very name the etymologists wrangle with such violence that one is lost in amazement at their ill-tempered erudition; and over its structure the archaeologists--though a bit more civil to each other--are almost as violently at cross-purposes. The best esteemed of those antiquary gentry--at least the one whom I esteem the most, because I like the fine boldness of his claim--is the Dominican chronicler Lavinius: who says flatly that Vienne was founded thirteen centuries before the dawn of the Christian era by a contemporary of Moses, one King Allobrox--a Keltic sovereign descended from Hercules in a right line! That is a good beginning; and it has the merit of embodying the one fact upon which all of the testy antiquaries are agreed: that Vienne the Strong, as folk called it in those days, was a flourishing town long before Lyons was built or Paris even thought of, and an age or two before the Romans came over into Gaul.

When at last they did come, the Romans transformed the town into a great city--the metropolis of the region lying between Geneva and Ma.r.s.eille; and so adorned it with n.o.ble buildings--temples, forum, circus, theatre, aqueducts, baths--and so enriched it with all manner of works of art, that it came to be known as Vienne the Beautiful throughout the civilized world. One temple, approximately perfect, has survived to us from that time; and one statue--the famous Crouching Venus: and it seems fair enough to accept Vienne's beauty as proved by these. Moreover, painting and music were cultivated there, together with the other arts: and from all that the historians have to tell us it would appear that the Roman citizens of that city lived softly and well.

In the dark ages of Mediaeval Christianity most of the beauties of Vienne vanished: being destroyed outright, or made over into buildings pertaining to the new faith and the new times. A pathetic little attempt, to be sure, was made by the Viennese to hold fast to their comfortable Paganism--when Valentinian II. was slain, and the old rites were restored, at the end of the fourth century; but it was a mere flash in the pan. The tendencies of the times were too strong to be resisted, and presently the new creed rode down the old. Then it was that Vienne was called Vienne the Holy--because, while losing nothing of her splendours temporal, she gained great store of splendours spiritual: whereof the culmination was that famous Council, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, which crushed the Templars and gave over their possessions to the Crown. While the Council deliberated, Philip the Fair "watched his case," as the lawyers would put it, from the village of Sainte-Colombe--across the river--where he was quartered with his court in the convent of the Cordeliers; and in Sainte-Colombe, the next year, he built the tower that was to safeguard the royal domains against the aggressions of the Archbishops: whose too-notorious holiness was making them overbold.

And nowadays Vienne is a mean little town; a withered kernel in the sh.e.l.l of its former grandeur; a mere sousprefecture; scarcely more than a manufacturing suburb of Lyons. In the tower of Philip the Fair are a cheap restaurant, and a factory of macaroni, and a carpenter-shop. It is enough to make the spirits of the Roman emperors indignant and the bones of the Archbishops rattle dismally in their graves. No longer either strong, or beautiful, or holy, they call it Vienne the Patriotic, now. A city must be something, of course--and patriotism is an attribute that may be had for the claiming, in these days.

But the saving grace of poetry, at least of the love of poetry, still abides in Vienne: as was proved in a manner mightily tickling to our self-complacency as we swept past the town. Taking the place of the stone bridge that was built in Roman times--and so well built that it was kept in service almost down to our own day--a suspension bridge here spans the stream: and the poets and the poet-lovers of Vienne were all a-swarm upon it, their heads and shoulders rising in an animated crenellation above its rail, in waiting for our galley to go by. While we still were a hundred yards away up stream there was a bustling movement among them; and then a bouquet, swinging at the end of a light line, was lowered away swiftly--the bright flowers flashing in the sunlight as they swayed and twirled. Our brethren had calculated to a nicety where our boat would pa.s.s. Right over the bow came the bouquet, and fairly into the eager hands stretched out for it--while a great cheer went up from the grateful poets in the boat that was echoed by the generous poets in the air. And the prettiest touch of all was the garland of verses that came to us with the flowers: to bid us welcome and to wish us G.o.d-speed on our way. Truly, 'twas a delicately fine bit of poetic courtesy. No troubadour in the days of Vienne the Holy (the holiness was not of an austere variety) could have cast a more graceful tribute upon the pa.s.sing galley of the debonaire Queen Jeanne.

V

Before Vienne the river cuts its way narrowly through the rock, and on each side the banks lift high above the stream. Far above us was the town, rising in terraces to where was the citadel in the days of Vienne the Strong. We had a flying glimpse of it all as we flashed past, sped by the current and our great wheels; and then the valley widened again, and soft meadows bordered by poplars and gay with yellow flowers lay between us and the mountain ranges rising to right and left against the sky. Here and there along the banks, where an outcrop of rock gave good holding-ground, were anch.o.r.ed floating grist-mills carrying huge water-wheels driven by the current--the wooden walls so browned with age that they seemed to have held over from the times when the archbishops, lording it in Vienne, took t.i.thes of millers' toll.

We were come into a country of corn and wine. The mills certified to the corn; and as we swung around the curves of the river or shot down its reaches we met long lean steamboats fighting against the current under heavy ladings of big-bellied wine-casks--on their genial way northward to moisten thirsty Paris throats. Off on the right bank was the ancient manor of Mont-Lys, where begins the growth of the Cotes-Roties: the famous red and white wines, called the _brune_ and the _blonde_, which have been dear to bottle-lovers for nearly two thousand years: from the time when the best of them (such as now go northward to Paris) went southward to the Greek merchants of Ma.r.s.eille and so onward to Rome to be sold for, literally, their weight in gold. And as to the melons and apricots which grow hereabouts, 'tis enough to say that Lyons bereft of them would pine and die.

The softly-swelling banks, capped by the long lines of yellow-green poplars, slipped by us at a gallop; while the mountains in the background, seen through the haze of flickering leaves, seemed to stand still. It was the most peaceful of landscapes: but there was endless fighting thereabouts in former times. In an Early Christian way the archbishops of Vienne ravaged among the Protestants; between whiles the robber-counts, without respect to creed, ravaged among the travelling public with a large-minded impartiality; and, down in the lowest rank of ravagers, the road-agents of the period stole all that their betters left for them to steal. As we pa.s.sed the little town of Condrieu--where a lonely enthusiast stood up on the bank and waved a flag at us--we saw overtopping it, on a fierce little craggy height, the ruined stronghold of its ancient lords. Already, in the thirty miles or thereabouts that we had come since leaving Lyons, we had pa.s.sed a half-dozen or more warlike remnants of a like sort; and throughout the run to Avignon they continued at about the rate of one in every five miles.

Singly, the histories of these castles are exceedingly interesting studies in Mediaeval barbarism; but collectively they become a wearisomely monotonous acc.u.mulation of horrors. Yet it is unfair to blame the lords of the castles for their lack of originality in crime.

With the few possible combinations at their command, the Law of Permutation literally compelled them to do the same things over and over again: maintaining or sustaining sieges ending in death with or without quarter for the besieged; leading forays for the sake of plunder, with or without the incentive of revenge; crushing peasant rebellions by hanging such few peasants as escaped the sword; and at all times robbing every unlucky merchant who chanced to come their way. It was a curious twist, that reversion to savagery, from the Roman epoch: when the Rhone Valley was inhabited by a civilized people who encouraged commerce and who had a genuine love for the arts. And, after all--unless they had some sort of pooling arrangement--the robber lords in the mid-region of the Rhone could not have found their business very profitable. Merchants travelling south from Lyons must have been poor booty by the time that they had pa.s.sed Vienne; and merchants travelling north from Avignon, similarly, must have been well fleeced by the time that they were come to the Pont-Saint-Esprit. Indeed, the lords in the middle of the run doubtless were hard put to it at times to make any sort of a living at all. Nor could the little local stealing that went on have helped them much--since, their respective castles being not more than five miles asunder, each of them in ordinary times was pulled up short in his ravaging at the end of two miles and a half. In brief, the business was overcrowded in all its branches, and badly managed beside. The more that I look into the history of that time the more am I convinced that mediaevalism, either as an inst.i.tution or as an investment, was not a success.

Condrieu is a dead little town now. As a seat of thieving industry its importance disappeared centuries ago; and its importance as a boating town--whence were recruited a large proportion of the Rhone boatmen--vanished in the dawn of the age of steam. They were good fellows, those Condrieu boatmen, renowned for their bravery and their honesty throughout the river's length. Because of their leather-seated breeches they were nicknamed "Leather-tails"; but their more sailor-like distinction was their tattooing: on the fore-arm a flaming heart pierced with an arrow, symbol of their fidelity and love; on the breast a cross and anchor, symbols of their faith and craft. From Roman times downward until railways came, the heavy freighting of central France has been done by boat upon the Rhone--in precisely the same fashion that flat-boat freighting was carried on upon the Mississippi and its tributaries--and three or four of the river towns were peopled mainly by members of the boating guilds. Trinquetaille, the western suburb of Arles, still shows signs of the nautical tastes of its inhabitants in the queer sailor-like exterior and interior adornments of its houses: most noticeable of which is the setting up on a house-top of a good-sized boat full-rigged with mast and sails.

The survivors of the boating period nowadays are few. Five years ago I used to see whenever I crossed to Trinquetaille a little group of old boatmen sitting at the end of the bridge on a long bench that was their especial property. They moved stiffly and slowly; their white heads were bowed breastward; their voices were cracked with age. Yet they seemed to be cheery together, as they basked in the hot sunshine--that warmed only comfortably their lean old bodies--and talked of ancient victories over sand-bars and rapids: and the while looked southward over the broad Rhone water toward the sea. No doubt they held in scorn their few successors--one where of old were a hundred--who navigate the Rhone of to-day, clipped of its perils by d.y.k.es and beacons, in boats driven by steam.

Yet these modern mariners, charged with the care of the great steamboats two and three hundred feet long, are more heroic characters than were the greatest of the old-time navigators. The finest sight that I saw in all that day aboard the _Gladiateur_ was our pilot at his post as he swung us around certain of the more dangerous of the curves: where rocks or sand-bars narrowed the channel closely and where a fall in the river-bed more than usually abrupt made the current fiercely strong. In such perilous pa.s.ses he had behind him in a row at the long tiller--these boats are not steered by a wheel forward, but by a tiller at the stern--two, three, and at one turn four men. He himself, at the extreme end of the tiller, stood firmly posed and a little leaning forward, his body rigid, his face set in resolute lines, his eyes fixedly bent upon the course ahead; behind him the others, elately poised in readiness to swing their whole weight with his on the instant that his tense energy in repose flashed into energy in action as the critical turn was made--the whole group, raised above us on the high quarter-deck, in relief against the deep blue sky. Amy, or another of the Southern sculptors, will be moved some day, I hope, to seize upon that thrilling group and to fasten it forever in enduring bronze.

VI

As we approached the bridge of Serrieres it was evident that another demonstration in our honour was imminent. On the bridge a small but energetic crowd was a.s.sembled, and we could see a bouquet pendent from a cord descending toward the point where our boat was expected to pa.s.s.

The projectors of that floral tribute cheered us finely as we came dashing toward them; and up in our bows was great excitement--which suddenly was intensified into anguish as we perceived that our admirers had made a miscalculation: a fateful fact that was antic.i.p.ated and realized almost in the same instant--as we saw the bouquet level with our deck but forty feet away a-beam! Yet good luck saved the day to us.

As we shot the bridge we also rounded a curve, and a moment after the bow of the long _Gladiateur_ had gone wide of the bouquet the stern had swung around beneath it and it was brought safe aboard. In the same breath we had pa.s.sed under and beyond the bridge and were sending up stream to our benefactors our cheers of thanks.

When the discovery was made that a bottle was enshrined among the flowers, and that upon the bottle was an inscription--necessarily a sonnet, as we impulsively decided--our feeling toward Serrieres was of the warmest. Without question, those generous creatures had sent us of their best, and with a posy of verse straight from their honest hearts.

Only poets ministering to poets could have conceived so pretty a scheme.

But the eager group that surrounded the Majoral who held the bottle flew asunder in wrath as he read out loudly, in place of the expected sonnet, these words: "Quinine prepared by c.u.minat at Serrieres"! And then our feeling toward Serrieres grew much less warm. Yet I am not sure that c.u.minat was moved only by the sordid wish to advertise at our expense his preparation of quinine. I am disposed to credit him in part with a helpful desire to check the fever rising in the blood of our boat-load of Southerners who each moment--as they slid down that hill-side of a river--were taking deeper and stronger drafts of the heady sunshine of their own Southern sun. On the other hand, I am forced to admit that had his motive been pure benevolence his offering would not have been so pitiably scant.

But the people of Tournon--to which generous town, and to the breakfast provided by its cordial inhabitants, we came an hour before noon--entreated us with so prodigal a liberality in the matter of bottles that the questionable conduct of the Serrieres apothecary quickly faded from our minds. In ancient times Tournon had a black reputation for its evil-dealing with chance wayfarers along the Rhone, and one's blood runs cold with mere thought of the horrors which went on there in the times of the religious wars. But very likely because of an honest desire to live down its own bad record--which I mention here rather to its present credit than to its past shame--it now seems determined to balance matters by manifesting toward pa.s.sing travellers the most obliging courtesy in the world. Certainly, we poets--coming thither famished, and going thence full fed and sleekly satisfied--had cause that day to bless its name.

As we came galloping around a curve in the river--I cannot insist too strongly upon the dashing impetuosity that was the constant buoyant undertone of our voyage--this Tournon the blessed shot up before us perked out upon a bold little hill thrust forward into the stream: a crowd of heavily-built houses rising around a church or two and a personable campanile, with here and there bits of crenellated ramparts, and higher still the tough remnant of a castle still fit to do service in the wars. Indeed, it all was so good in colour--with its blendings of green and grey shot with warm yellow tones; and its composition was so excellent--with its sweep upward from the river to the castle battlements--that to my American fancy (used rather to Mediaeval semblances than to Mediaeval realities) it seemed to be temporarily escaped from an exceptionally well-set operatic stage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LANDING-PLACE AT TOURNON]

All Tournon was down at the water-side to meet us, and on the landing-stage was the very Mayor: a lean and tri-coloured man who took off his hat comprehensively to our whole company in a magnificent bow.

Notables were with him--the Sous-Prefect, the Mayor of Tain, the Adjoint, leading citizens--who also bowed to us; but not with a bow like his! Laurel garlands decorated the landing-stage; more laurel garlands and the national colours made gay the roadway leading up the bank; and over the roadway was a laurel-wreathed and tri-coloured triumphal arch--all as suitable to welcoming poets and patriots, such as we were, as suitable could be. As the _Gladiateur_ drew in to the bank there was a n.o.ble banging of _boites_--which ancient subst.i.tute for cannon in joy-firing still are esteemed warmly in rural France--and before the Mayor spoke ever a word to us the band bounded gallantly into the thick of the "Ma.r.s.eillaise."

With the _boite_ banging fitfully, with the band in advance playing "La Coupe," the tri-coloured Mayor led off with the most distinguished lady of our company upon his arm: and away we all went, under the triumphal arch and up the garlanded roadway two by two--as though Tournon were a Rhone-side Ararat and we were the animals coming out of the Ark. Our entry was a veritable triumph; and we endeavoured (I think successfully) to live up to it: walking stately through the narrow streets, made narrower by the close-packed crowds pressing to see so rare a poetic spectacle; through the cool long corridors of the Lycee; and so out upon a prettily dignified little park--where, at a triad of tables set within a garlanded enclosure beneath century-old plane-trees, our breakfast was served to us to the accompaniment of bangs from the _boite_ and musical remarks from the band. And all Tournon, the while, stood above us on a terrace and sympathetically looked on.

In its adaptation to the needs of travelling poets the breakfast was a master-stroke. It was simple, substantial, delicious; and in its accompanying prodigal outpouring of red and white Hermitage, Cornas, and Saint-Peray, the contrast with the bottle-n.i.g.g.ardliness of Serrieres was bravely marked. The Hermitage, from the hill-sides directly across the river from Tournon, around the town of Tain, scarcely lives up to its heroic tradition just now--the phylloxera having destroyed the old vines, planted by the hermit of blessed memory, and the new vines having in them still the intemperate strength of youth. Yet is it a sound rich wine, in a fair way to catch up again with its ancient fame.

While we feasted, the _boite_ and the band took turns in exploding with violence; and when, with the filet, the band struck up "La Coupe" away we all went with it in a chorus that did not die out entirely until well along in the galantine. The toasts came in with the ices, and on the basis of the regional champagne, Saint-Peray--sweet, but of good flavour--that cracked its corks out with the irregular volleyings of a line of skirmishers firing in a fog. The tri-coloured Mayor on behalf of Tournon, and Paul Arene and delightful s.e.xtius Michel on behalf of the Felibrige and the Cigaliers, and M. Maurice Faure, the Deputy, on behalf of the Nation at large, exchanged handsome compliments in the most pleasing way; and the toasts which they gave, and the toasts which other people gave, were emphasized by a rhythmic clapping of hands in unison by the entire company--in accordance with the custom that obtains always at the feasts of the Felibres.

But that was no time nor place for extended speech-making. All in a whiff our feast ended; and in another whiff we were up and off--whisking through the Lycee corridors and the crowded streets and under the triumphal arch and so back on board the _Gladiateur_. The Mayor, always heroically ablaze with his patriotic scarf of office, stood on the landing-stage--like a courteous Noah in morning dress seeing the animals safely up the Ark gang-plank--and made to each couple of us one of his stately bows; the _boite_ fired a final salvo of one round; the band saluted us with a final outburst of the "Ma.r.s.eillaise"; everybody, ash.o.r.e and afloat, cheered--and then the big wheels started, the current caught us and wrenched us apart from all that friendliness, and away we dashed down stream.

VII

Long before we came abreast of it by the windings of the river we saw high up against the sky-line, a clear three hundred feet above the water, all that is left of the stronghold of Crussol--still called by the Rhone boatmen "the Horns of Crussol," although the two towers no longer shoot out horn-like from the mountain-top with a walled war-town clinging about their flanks. One Geraud Bartet, a cadet of the great house of Crussol--of which the representative nowadays is the Duc d'Uzes--built this eagle's nest in the year 1110; but it did not become a place of importance until more than four hundred years later, in the time of the religious wars.

On the issue of faiths the Crussols divided. The head of the house was for the Pope and the King; the two cadets were for G.o.d and the Reform.

Then it was that the castle (according to an over-sanguine chronicler of the period) was "transformed into an unconquerable stronghold"; and thereafter--always for the advancement of Christianity of one sort or another--a liberal amount of killing went on beneath its walls. In the end, disregarding the fact that it was unconquerable, the castle was captured by the Baron des Adrets--who happened at the moment to be on the Protestant side--and in the interest of sound doctrine all of its defenders were put to the sword. Tradition declares that "the streams of blood filled one of the cisterns, in which this terrible Huguenot had his own children bathed 'in order,' as he said, 'to give them strength and force and, above all, hatred of Catholicism.'" And then "the castle was demolished from its lowest to its highest stone."

This final statement is a little too sweeping, yet essentially it is true. All that now remains of Crussol is a single broken tower, to which some minor ruins cling; and a little lower are the ruins of the town--whence the encircling ramparts have been outcast and lie in scattered fragments down the mountain-side to the border of the Rhone.

It was on this very mountain--a couple of thousand years or so earlier in the world's history--that a much pleasanter personage than a battling baron had his home: a good-natured giant of easy morals who was the traditional founder of Valence. Being desirous of founding a town somewhere, and willing--in accordance with the custom of his time--to leave the selection of a site a little to chance, he hurled a javelin from his mountain-top with the cry, "Va lance!": and so gave Valence its name and its beginning, on the eastern bank of the river two miles away, at the spot where his javelin fell. At a much later period the Romans adopted and enlarged the giant's foundation; but nearly every trace of their occupation has disappeared. Indeed, even the ramparts, built only a few hundred years ago by Francis I., have utterly vanished; and the tendency of the town has been so decidedly toward pulling down and building up again that it now wears quite a modern and jauntily youthful air.

Valence was our next stopping-place, and we had a world of work to do there during the hour or so that we remained ash.o.r.e. Very properly believing that we, being poets, could dedicate their local monuments for them far better than they could do such work for themselves, the excellent people of this town had acc.u.mulated a variety of monuments in expectation of our coming; and all of these it was our pleasant duty to start upon their immortal way.

Our reception was nothing short of magnificent. On the suspension bridge which here spans the river half the town was a.s.sembled watching for us; and the other half was packed in a solid ma.s.s on the bank above the point where our landing was made. The landing-stage was a glorious blaze of tri-colour; and there the Mayor, also gloriously tri-coloured, stood waiting for us in the midst of a guard of honour of four firemen whose brazen helmets shone resplendent in the rays of the scorching sun. A little in the background was the inevitable band; that broke with a crash, at the moment of our landing, into the inevitable "Ma.r.s.eillaise."

And then away we all marched for half a mile, up a wide and dusty and desperately hot street, into the heart of the town. The detachment of welcoming townsfolk from the bank closed in around us; and around them, presently, closed in the detachment of welcoming townsfolk from the bridge. We poets (I insist upon being known by the company I was keeping) were deep in the centre of the press. The heat was prodigious.

The dust was stifling. But, upheld by a realizing sense of the importance and honour of the duties confided to us, we never wavered in our march.

Our first halt was before a dignified house on which was a flag-surrounded tablet reading: "Dans cette maison est ne General Championnet. L'an MDCCLXII." M. Faure and s.e.xtius Michel made admirable speeches. The band played the "Ma.r.s.eillaise." We cheered and cheered.

But what in the world we poets had to do with this military person--who served under the lilies at the siege of Gibraltar that ended so badly in the year 1783, and who did a great deal of very pretty fighting later under the tri-colour--I am sure I do not know! Then on we went, to the quick tap of the drums, the Mayor and the glittering firemen preceding us, to the laying of a corner-stone that really was in our line: that of a monument to the memory of the dramatist emile Augier. Here, naturally, M. Jules Claretie came to the fore. In the parlance of the Academy, Augier was "his dead man"; and not often does it happen that a finer, a more discriminating, eulogy is p.r.o.nounced in the Academy by the successor to a vacant chair than was p.r.o.nounced that hot day in Valence upon emile Augier by the Director of the Comedie Francaise. When it was ended, there was added to the contents of the leaden casket a final paper bearing the autographs of the notables of our company; and then the cap-stone, swinging from tackles, was lowered away.

We had the same ceremony over again, ten minutes later, when we laid the corner-stone of the monument to the Comte de Montalivet: who was an eminent citizen and Mayor of Valence, and later was a Minister under the first Napoleon--whom he had met at Madame Colombier's, likely enough, in the days when the young artillery officer was doing fitful garrison-duty in that little town. Again it seemed to me that we poets were not necessarily very closely a.s.sociated with the matter in hand; but we cheered at the proper places, and made appropriate and well-turned speeches, and contributed a valuable collection of autographs to the lead box in the corner-stone: and did it all with the easily off-hand air of thorough poets of the world. In the matter of the autographs there was near to being a catastrophe. Everything was going at a quick-step--our time being so short--and in the hurry of it all the lead box was closed and the cap-stone was lowered down upon it while yet the autographs remained outside! It was by the merest chance, I fancy, in that bustling confusion, that the mistake happened to be noticed; and I cannot but think--the autographs, with only a few exceptions, being quite illegible--that no great harm would have come had it pa.s.sed un.o.bserved. However, the omission being discovered, common courtesy to the autographists required that the cap-stone should be raised again and the much-signed paper put where it belonged.

Having thus made what I believe to be a dedicatory record by dedicating three monuments, out of a possible four, in considerably less than an hour, we were cantered away to the Hotel de Ville to be refreshed and complimented with a "Vin d'honneur." That ceremony came off in the council chamber--a large, stately room--and was impressive. M. le Maire was a tall man, with a cherubic face made broader by wing-like little whiskers. He wore a white cravat, a long frock-coat, appositely black trousers, and a far-reaching white waistcoat over which wandered tranquilly his official tri-coloured scarf. The speech which he addressed to us was of the most flattering. He told us plainly that we were an extraordinarily distinguished company; that our coming to Valence was an event to be remembered long and honourably in the history of the town; that he, personally and officially, was grateful to us; and that, personally and officially, he would have the pleasure of drinking to our very good health. And then (most appropriately by the bra.s.s-helmeted firemen) well-warmed champagne was served; and in that cordial beverage, after M. edouard Lockroy had made answer for us, we pledged each other with an excellent good will.