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A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
BY ARCHIBALD MARSHALL AUTHOR OF "EXTON MANOR," "SIR HARRY," ETC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1920 Copyright, 1920, by DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc. The Quinn & Boden Company BOOK MANUFACTURERS RAHWAY NEW JERSEY To SIR OWEN SEAMAN...
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PREFACE
PREFACE
The following pages owe a considerable debt to what others who have been over the same ground have written. Mr. T. A. Cook's [1] "Old Provence" (London: Rivington's, 2 vols.) is a most valuable record of the history of the country as it attaches to the innumerable places of interest to be visited, and his taste and knowledge when brought to bear upon its architectural remains have greatly enhanced my own appreciation of those rich treasures. I know of no book, either in French or English, from w
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
The crowning danger safely surmounted, you drop down into a green mountain valley, surrounded by what Smollett, who passed through Sospel on his way from Nice to Italy a hundred and fifty years ago, described as "prodigious high and barren mountains." The valley is all verdant pasture, watered by a broad, shallow, tree-shaded river, which, to quote the same authority, "forms a delightful contrast with the hideous rocks surrounding it." All mountains were "hideous" and "horrid" in the eyes of our
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
Flowers and Scents If you look at a map of this coast, before it begins to run south from Cagnes and Villeneuve, you will see that the hills stretch down to the sea like the fingers of a hand spread out, and the main roads run down between them. I should have preferred to keep away from the coast and cross the remaining ranges by tracks and footpaths, but I wanted to see a relative who lives at Nice. Otherwise I should never have gone near such a place, for which I was quite unsuited, both in sp
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
In Old Provence I now finally left behind me the cosmopolitan coast, and came into the true Provence. My objective was the old city of Aix, which lay almost due east, across country in which there are not many places standing out on the map as of any importance, but which seemed to me rather more attractive on that account. Once at Aix, one would be in the thick of it. Avignon, Nîmes, Arles, and a score of points of interest lie within a few miles of one another. When I reached this rich and cro
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
Draguignan and Saint-Maximin Early on Monday morning I set out to walk to Draguignan, which lay on the other side of a range of hills to the southwest, at a distance of about twenty-two miles. I kept to the high road all the way, but did not pass a single village, although the land was cultivated almost everywhere, with olives, vines, mulberries and cereals. The only episode of a rather dull walk that remains in my memory is a chat with a very stout proprietor of vineyards, who sold me a litre o
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
The Church of Saint-Maximin So persuasive was M. Rostan that when I had read his account of all this, sitting in front of the fire at my inn, within a stone's throw of the great church that had been the scene of so many strange and moving happenings, it is small wonder that I was inclined to believe at least a good half of it. It was my first introduction to the legend, which was to colour so much of my future wanderings, and many of the facts that I have given were unknown to me then. I thought
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
Caius Marius and the Great Battle It was still early when I had finished with these sights and took the long straight road to Trets on my way to Aix. The sky was very clear and cold, and the country was flat and open. For a long time, whenever I looked back, I could see the great church standing up across the plain, and it was a long time before I ceased thinking about it. But gradually another interest began to take its place, for I was passing through country where scenes had been enacted that
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
Aix The rain began to fall as I sat outside the inn at Porcieux, and by the time I reached Trets I was wet through. So I went to bed in an inn until my clothes should be dry, and greatly daring ordered a cup of tea. When it came it was of a pale straw colour, and its flavour would not have satisfied the connoisseurs of Mincing Lane. But it was tea, with the astringent quality possessed by that beverage alone among all infusions of herbs or berries. Wine is one of the gifts of God that in this dr
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
Salon and the Crau Ever since I first saw Les Baux, on a motoring trip from the north to the south of France, I had wanted to get back to it. I saw Aix and Avignon and Nîmes and Arles at the same time, and I wanted to get back to them. But Les Baux was the bonne bouche . When I contemplated this spring walk it was what I was thinking of as the central point of interest of the whole expedition; and I was thinking of it all the time I was walking through the country during those first nine days. F
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
Les Baux As I got out of the train the rain ceased, though there looked to be more to come, and I walked the three miles to Les Baux with the sun shining, and the birds singing among the drenched leaves of the trees. I was faced by the craggy rampart of the Alpilles, which hang over the great plain, and were once sea cliffs washed by the Mediterranean. They are of white limestone, and rise in places to a height of close upon a thousand feet. Just at this point they thrust themselves forward in a
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
Les Baux (continued) Mr. Cook had written of the inn at Les Baux that lunch was "a perilous adventure, and any other form of hospitality impossible." This did not frighten me, because when one takes a pack on one's back one drops a good many prejudices. Read what the inns were like when Smollett travelled through France, or Casanova, or Arthur Young. Probably the inn at Les Baux, when Mr. Cook visited it, would have seemed to an eighteenth century traveller a most desirable place of entertainmen
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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
Mistral I started early on Monday morning to walk to Saint-Remy. It was fine and sunny again, but there was a touch of the mistral . The road winds up through the limestone crags to a col from which there is a view even more magnificent than that from Les Baux to the south. The undulating plain, all silver and delicate green and indigo and deep purple, stretches away on either hand, and very far away rise the snow peaks of the Pyrenees, like mountains in a dream. The Rhône and the Durance are at
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
Saint-Remy On the way up from Les Baux to the col , and for some distance beyond, the country is arid and cold; but the wealth of aromatic and flowering shrubs that carpet the ground in these stony regions, and the breathing spirit of the spring, gives them a charm of their own that is far removed from desolation. The road was lonely enough. A few flocks of sheep and goats clattered among the loose stones of the hillsides that were on either side, among the pines and the thyme and rosemary and t
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CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
Avignon Some one had told me that he had stayed at Avignon for a night while motoring down to the Riviera early in March, and had seen the Rhône under a full moon from the garden of the Popes' Palace, while the nightingales sang among the trees all around him. This information had been presented to me amidst the dreary days of clouds and thawing snow which come with the end of winter in the Swiss Alps, and the contrast was so entrancing that I had half a mind to make straight for Avignon first o
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CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
The Palace of the Popes "No one who did not see Avignon in the time of the Popes has seen anything. For gaiety, life, animation and one fête after the other, there was never a town like it. From morning till night there were processions, pilgrimages, streets strewn with flowers and hung with stuffs, disembarkings of cardinals from the Rhône, banners flying, galleys gay with flags, the soldiers of the Pope singing Latin in the squares, the begging friars swinging their rattles. And from top to bo
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CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
Vaucluse It was very pleasant to get on to the road again, with my pack on my back. I was not yet tuned up to the nearly twenty mile walk between Avignon and Vaucluse, though my damaged muscles were now giving me little trouble, so I took the train to L'Isle-sur-Sorgue, which is distant from Vaucluse between four and five miles. In 1789, Arthur Young made this pilgrimage to the shrine of Petrarch and Laura, and allowed himself to be more moved by sentimental interest than was his custom. L'Isle
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CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
Nîmes and the Pont du Gard The surpassing charm of Nîmes is provided by its waters, which are the chief feature of a garden as beautiful of its kind as is to be seen anywhere. But these waters were considered too sacred for common use in Roman times, and in order to provide this quite unimportant colonial town, which is not even mentioned by classical writers, with pure drinking water, an aqueduct was built to convey to it the waters of the springs five and twenty miles away; and the remains of
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CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
Aigues-Mortes and the Camargue Aigues-Mortes, like Les Baux, is one of those places which are apt to dawn upon the traveller only when he is in reach of them. I might hesitate to confess that I had never heard of Les Baux before my first journey in Provence, or of Aigues-Mortes even then, if I had not met so many well-informed and well-travelled people who had never heard of either of them. And yet Aigues-Mortes is a place of absorbing interest. It is romantically situated on the edge of the gre
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CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
Saintes-Maries de la Mer I was on the road early the next morning with a twenty-mile walk before me to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. I had to follow the canal for a couple of miles to the north, then to strike across the plain to the westward, then to follow the course of the Little Rhône to the south. This took me through country that has been for the most part reclaimed, and grows acres upon acres of vines. To the south and west of Aigues-Mortes it is nothing but étangs and unreclaimed marsh, and
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CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
Saint-Gilles and Montmajour This was to be the last full day's walk. I had to meet a friend at Avignon the next afternoon; then to Arles with no further time for walking; and then home. There was a lot of ground to cover. The first stage, after going halfway to Arles by train, was an eight-mile walk across the plain to Saint-Gilles. The train started at six, and soon after seven I was on the road, on a fine still spring morning, and in company with an old peasant woman who was also going to Sain
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CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
The Last Walk. St. Michel de Frigolet I walked on from Montmajour through the most delightful country. The road dipped up and down, crossed thymy, brambly, rocky heaths, and gave promise of pleasant villages to come. One begins here to get out of the plain, and on the low heights the comfortable land, dotted with nestling farms and towers and steeples, can be seen stretching away to the white Alpilles, upon which Les Baux perches and makes its romantic presence felt, though it cannot be seen. Th
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CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
Villeneuve-sur-Avignon My walking was done. I had another day and a half for Avignon and a day and a half for Arles, and that was to be the extent of this expedition. I wish it could have included Carcassonne, which is not, however, in Provence. But neither are Nîmes nor Aigues-Mortes, nor Saintes-Maries nor Saint-Gilles, strictly speaking. The old province of Provence ended with the Rhône, and Languedoc began on the other side of it. I should have liked, too, to renew my acquaintance with Orang
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CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXII
Arles Of all the larger towns in Provence, Arles is perhaps the one that creates the deepest impression upon the visitor. Avignon is much finer, and its interest is at least as great as that of Arles, although it lacks that of Roman remains. And the Roman remains of Nîmes are finer than those of Arles, although Nîmes has very little mediæval interest. But both Avignon and Nîmes are thriving modern cities, while Arles is a comparatively small provincial town. Its ancient remains are everything, a
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APPENDIX
APPENDIX
The Provençal Legend Dr. M. R. James has sent me a pamphlet, "Saint Lazare et Saint Maximin," by Dom G. Morin, which, although published in Paris in 1897, he considers to be the last word on the Provençe legends of St. Lazarus, etc. I summarize its conclusions shortly. 1. Dom Morin produces evidence that the cult of St. Lazarus by the Church of Marseilles, which dates at least from the eleventh century, has, for historic foundation, the burial of a bishop of that name in the crypt of the Abbey o
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