A Little Tour in France

XXX

There are two shabby old inns at Arles, which compete closely for your custom. I mean by this that if you elect to go to the Hotel du Forum, the Hotel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it (at a right angle) watches your arrival with ill-concealed dis- approval; and if you take the chances of its neighbor, the Hotel du Forum seems to glare at you invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that, it had been the other. The two stand together on the Place des Hommes, a little public square of Arles, which somehow quite misses its effect. As a city, indeed, Arles quite misses its effect in every way; and if it is a charming place, as I think it is, I can hardly tell the reason why. The straight-nosed Arlesiennes account for it in some degree; and the remainder may be charged to the ruins of the arena and the theatre. Beyond this, I remember with affection the ill-proportioned little Place des Hommes; not at all monumental, and given over to puddles and to shabby cafes. I recall with tenderness the tortuous and featureless streets, which looked like the streets of a village, and were paved with villanous little sharp stones, making all exercise penitential. Consecrated by association is even a tiresome walk that I took the evening I arrived, with the purpose of obtaining a view of the Rhone. I had been to Arles before, years ago, and it seemed to me that I remembered finding on the banks of the stream some sort of picture. I think that on the evening of which I speak there was a watery moon, which it seemed to me would light up the past as well as the present. But I found no pic- ture, and I scarcely found the Rhone at all. I lost my way, and there was not a creature in the streets to whom I could appeal. Nothing could be more pro- vincial than the situation of Arles at ten o'clock at night. At last I arrived at a kind of embankment, where I could see the great mud-colored stream slip- ping along in the soundless darkness. It had come on to rain, I know not what had happened to the moon, and the whole place was anything but gay. It was not what I had looked for; what I had looked for was in the irrecoverable past. I groped my way back to the inn over the infernal cailloux, feeling like a dis- comfited Dogberry. I remember now that this hotel was the one (whichever that may be) which has the fragment of a Gallo-Roman portico inserted into one of its angles. I had chosen it for the sake of this ex- ceptional ornament. It was damp and dark, and the floors felt gritty to the feet; it was an establishment at which the dreadful gras-double might have appeared at the table d'hote, as it had done at Narbonne. Never- theless, I was glad to get back to it; and nevertheless, too, – and this is the moral of my simple anecdote, – my pointless little walk (I don't speak of the pave- ment) suffuses itself, as I look back upon it, with a romantic tone. And in relation to the inn, I suppose I had better mention that I am well aware of the in- consistency of a person who dislikes the modern cara- vansary, and yet grumbles when he finds a hotel of the superannuated sort. One ought to choose, it would seem, and make the best of either alternative. The two old taverns at Arles are quite unimproved; such as they must have been in the infancy of the modern world, when Stendhal passed that way, and the lum- bering diligence deposited him in the Place des Hommes, such in every detail they are to-day. Vieilles auberges de France, one ought to enjoy their gritty floors and greasy window-panes. Let it be put on re- cord, therefore, that I have been, I won't say less com- fortable, but at least less happy, at better inns.

To be really historic, I should have mentioned that before going to look for the Rhone I had spent part of the evening on the opposite side of the little place, and that I indulged in this recreation for two definite reasons. One of these was that I had an opportunity of conversing at a cafe with an attractive young Eng- lishman, whom I had met in the afternoon at Tarascon, and more remotely, in other years, in London; the other was that there sat enthroned behind the counter a splendid mature Arlesienne, whom my companion and I agreed that it was a rare privilege to contem- plate. There is no rule of good manners or morals which makes it improper, at a cafe, to fix one's eyes upon the dame de comptoir; the lady is, in the nature of things, a part of your consommation. We were there- fore feee to admire without restriction the handsomest person I had ever seen give change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully rich and robust, and full of a certain phy- sical nobleness. Though she was not really old, she was antique, and she was very grave, even a little sad. She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Caesar. I have seen washerwomen in the Trastevere who were perhaps as handsome as she; but even the head-dress of the Roman contadina con- tributes less to the dignity of the person born to wear it than the sweet and stately Arlesian cap, which sits at once aloft and on the back of the head; which is accompanied with a wide black bow covering a con- siderable part of the crown; and which, finally, accom- modates itself indescribably well to the manner in which the tresses of the front are pushed behind the cars.

This admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar has distracted me a little; for I am still not sufficiently historical. Before going to the cafe I had dined, and before dining I had found time to go and look at the arena. Then it was that I discovered that Arles has no general physiognomy, and, except the delightful little church of Saint Trophimus, no architecture, and that the rugosities of its dirty lanes affect the feet like knife-blades. It was not then, on the other hand, that I saw the arena best. The second day of my stay at Arles I devoted to a pilgrimage to the strange old hill town of Les Baux, the mediaeval Pompeii, of which I shall give myself the pleasure of speaking. The even- ing of that day, however (my friend and I returned in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression of the way, in Rome itself, on evenings like that, the moonshine rests upon broken shafts and slabs of an- tique pavement. As we sat in the theatre, looking at the two lone columns that survive – part of the decora- tion of the back of the stage – and at the fragments of ruin around them, we might have been in the Roman forum. The arena at Arles, with its great magnitude, is less complete than that of Nimes; it has suffered even more the assaults of time and of the children of time, and it has been less repaired. The seats are almost wholly wanting; but the external walls minus the topmost tier of arches, are massively, rug- gedly, complete; and the vaulted corridors seem as solid as the day they were built. The whole thing is superbly vast, and as monumental, for place of light amusement – what is called in America a "variety- show" – as it entered only into the Roman mind to make such establishments. The podium is much higher than at Nimes, and many of the great white slabs that faced it have been recovered and put into their places. The proconsular box has been more or less recon- structed, and the great converging passages of approach to it are still majestically distinct: so that, as I sat there in the moon-charmed stillness, leaning my elbows on the battered parapet of the ring, it was not im- possible – to listen to the murmurs and shudders, the thick voice of the circus, that died away fifteen hun- dred years ago.

The theatre has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with a different music. The Roman theatre at Arles seemed to me one of the most charm- ing and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton, – the arena may be called a skeleton; for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the row of columns which formed the scene – the permanent back-scene – remain; two marble pillars – I just mentioned them – are upright, with a fragment of their entablature. Be fore them is the vacant space which was filled by the stage, with the line of the prosoenium distinct, marked by a deep groove, impressed upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a high screen had been in- tended to fit into it. The semicircle formed by the seats – half a cup – rises opposite; some of the rows are distinctly marked. The floor, from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by slabs of colored marble – red, yellow, and green – which, though terribly battered and cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the interior. Every- thing shows that it was on a great scale: the large sweep of its enclosing walls, the massive corridors that passed behind the auditorium, and of which we can still perfectly take the measure. The way in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the architects of our epoch, as also the immense size of the place is a proof of extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors. It was after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena that we came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin. The principal entrance was locked, but we effected an easy escalade, scaled a low parapet, and descended into the place behind file scenes. It was as light as day, and the solitude was complete. The two slim columns, as we sat on the broken benches, stood there like a pair of silent actors. What I called touching, just now, was the thought that here the human voice, the utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven armor, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short, one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems no profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of Arles, who use it to pass, by no means in great num- bers, from one part of the town to the other; treading the old marble floor, and brushing, if need be, the empty benches. This familiarity does not kill the place again; it makes it, on the contrary, live a little, – makes the present and the past touch each other.

XXXI

The third lion of Arles has nothing to do with the ancient world, but only with the old one. The church of Saint Trophimus, whose wonderful Romanesque porch is the principal ornament of the principal place, – a place otherwise distinguished by the presence of a slim and tapering obelisk in the middle, as well as by that of the Hotel de Ville and the museum – the interesting church of Saint Trophimus swears a little, as the French say, with the peculiar character of Arles. It is very remarkable, but I would rather it were in another place. Arles is delightfully pagan, and Saint Trophimus, with its apostolic sculptures, is rather a false note. These sculptures are equally re- markable for their primitive vigor and for the perfect preservation in which they have come down to us. The deep recess of a round-arched porch of the twelfth century is covered with quaint figures, which have not lost a nose or a finger. An angular, Byzan- tine-looking Christ sits in a diamond-shaped frame at the summit of the arch, surrounded by little angels, by great apostles, by winged beasts, by a hundred sacred symbols and grotesque ornaments. It is a dense embroidery of sculpture, black with time, but as uninjured as if it had been kept under glass. One good mark for the French Revolution! Of the in- terior of the church, which has a nave of the twelfth century, and a choir three hundred years more recent, I chiefly remember the odd feature that the Romanesque aisles are so narrow that you literally – or almost – squeeze through them. You do so with some eager- ness, for your natural purpose is to pass out to the cloister. This cloister, as distinguished and as per- fect as the porch, has a great deal of charm. Its four sides, which are not of the same period (the earliest and best are of the twelfth century), have an elaborate arcade, supported on delicate pairs of columns, the capitals of which show an extraordinary variety of device and ornament. At the corners of the quadrangle these columns take the form of curious human figures. The whole thing is a gem of lightness and preserva- tion, and is often cited for its beauty; but – if it doesn't sound too profane – I prefer, especially at Arles, the ruins of the Roman theatre. The antique element is too precious to be mingled with anything less rare. This truth was very present to my mind during a ramble of a couple of hours that I took just before leaving the place; and the glowing beauty of the morning gave the last touch of the impression. I spent half an hour at the Museum; then I took an- other look at the Roman theatre; after which I walked a little out of the town to the Aliscamps, the old Elysian Fields, the meagre remnant of the old pagan place of sepulture, which was afterwards used by the Christians, but has been for ages deserted, and now consists only of a melancholy avenue of cypresses, lined with a succession of ancient sarcophagi, empty, mossy, and mutilated. An iron-foundry, or some hor- rible establishment which is conditioned upon tall chimneys and a noise of hammering and banging, has been established near at hand; but the cypresses shut it out well enough, and this small patch of Elysium is a very romantic corner.

The door of the Museum stands ajar, and a vigilant custodian, with the usual batch of photographs on his mind, peeps out at you disapprovingly while you linger opposite, before the charming portal of Saint Trophimus, which you may look at for nothing. When you succumb to the silent influence of his eye, and go over to visit his collection, you find yourself in a desecrated church, in which a variety of ancient objects, disinterred in Arlesian soil, have been ar- ranged without any pomp. The best of these, I be- lieve, were found in the ruins of the theatre. Some of the most curious of them are early Christian sar- cophagi, exactly on the pagan model, but covered with rude yet vigorously wrought images of the apostles, and with illustrations of scriptural history. Beauty of the highest kind, either of conception or of execu- tion, is absent from most of the Roman fragments, which belong to the taste of a late period and a provincial civilization. But a gulf divides them from the bristling little imagery of the Christian sarcophagi, in which, at the same time, one detects a vague emulation of the rich examples by which their authors were surrounded. There is a certain element of style in all the pagan things; there is not a hint of it in the early Christian relics, among which, according to M. Joanne, of the Guide, are to be found more fine sarcophagi than in any collection but that of St. John Lateran. In two or three of the Roman fragments there is a noticeable distinction; principally in a charming bust of a boy, quite perfect, with those salient eyes that one sees in certain antique busts, and to which the absence of vision in the marble mask gives a look, often very touching, as of a baffled effort to see; also in the head of a woman, found in the ruins of the theatre, who, alas! has lost her nose, and whose noble, simple contour, barring this deficiency, recalls the great manner of the Venus of Milo. There are various rich architectural fragments which in- dicate that that edifice was a very splendid affair. This little Museum at Arles, in short, is the most Ro- man thing I know of, out of Rome.

XXXII

I find that I declared one evening, in a little journal I was keeping at that time, that I was weary of writing (I was probably very sleepy), but that it was essential I should make some note of my visit to Les Baux. I must have gone to sleep as soon as I had recorded this necessity, for I search my small diary in vain for any account of that enchanting spot. I have nothing but my memory to consult, – a memory which is fairly good in regard to a general impression, but is terribly infirm in the matter of details and items. We knew in advance, my companion and I that Les Baus was a pearl of picturesqueness; for had we not read as much in the handbook of Murray, who has the testimony of an English nobleman as to its attractions? We also knew that it lay some miles from Aries, on the crest of the Alpilles, the craggy little mountains which, as I stood on the breezy plat- form of Beaucaire, formed to my eye a charming, if somewhat remote, background to Tarascon; this as- surance having been given us by the landlady of the inn at Arles, of whom we hired a rather lumbering conveyance. The weather was not promising, but it proved a good day for the mediaeval Pompeii; a gray, melancholy, moist, but rainless, or almost rainless day, with nothing in the sky to flout, as the poet says, the dejected and pulverized past. The drive itself was charming; for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the gray-green landscape of Provence. It is never absolutely flat, and yet is never really ambitious, and is full both of entertainment and re- pose. It is in constant undulation, and the bareness of the soil lends itself easily to outline and profile. When I say the bareness, I mean the absence of woods and hedges. It blooms with heath and scented shrubs and stunted olive; and the white rock shining through the scattered herbage has a brightness which answers to the brightness of the sky. Of course it needs the sunshine, for all southern countries look a little false under the ground glass of incipient bad weather. This was the case on the day of my pil- grimage to Les Baux. Nevertheless, I was as glad to keep going as I was to arrive; and as I went it seemed to me that true happiness would consist in wandering through such a land on foot, on September afternoons, when one might stretch one's self on the warm ground in some shady hollow, and listen to the hum of bees and the whistle of melancholy shepherds; for in Provence the shepherds whistle to their flocks. I saw two or three of them, in the course of this drive to Les Baux, meandering about, looking behind, and calling upon the sheep in this way to follow, which the sheep always did, very promptly, with ovine unanimity. Nothing is more picturesque than to see a slow shepherd threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside, with his flock close be- hind him, necessarily expanded, yet keeping just at his heels, bending and twisting as it goes, and looking rather like the tail of a dingy comet.