Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3

V >> Various >> Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3

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The fountain proper--the source of all these distributed waters--is the
prettiest thing in the world, a reduced copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up at
the foot of the Mont Cavalier, at a point where that eminence rises with a
certain cliff-like effect, and, like other springs in the same
circumstances, appears to issue from the rock with a sort of quivering
stillness. I trudge up the Mont Cavalier,--it is a matter of five
minutes,--and having committed this cockneyism enhanced it presently by
another. I ascended the stupid Tour Magne, the mysterious structure I
mentioned a moment ago. The only feature of this dateless tube, except the
inevitable collection of photographs to which you are introduced by the
doorkeeper, is the view you enjoy from its summit. This view is, of
course, remarkably fine but I am ashamed to say I have not the smallest
recollection of it; for while I looked into the brilliant spaces of the
air I seemed still to see only what I saw in the depths of the Roman
baths--the image, disastrously confused and vague, of a vanished world.
This world, however, has left at Nimes a far more considerable memento
than a few old stones covered with water-moss.

The Roman arena is the rival of those of Verona and of Arles; at a
respectful distance it emulates the Colosseum. It is a small Colosseum, if
I may be allowed the expression, and is in a much better preservation than
the great circus at Rome. This is especially true of the external walls,
with their arches, pillars, cornices. I must add that one should not speak
of preservation, in regard to the arena at Nimes, without speaking also of
repair. After the great ruin ceased to be despoiled, it began to be
protected, and most of its wounds have been drest with new material. These
matters concern the archeologist; and I felt here, as I felt afterward at
Arles, that one of the profane, in the presence of such a monument, can
only admire and hold his tongue. The great impression, on the whole, is an
impression of wonder that so much should have survived. What remains at
Nimes, after all dilapidation is estimated, is astounding.

I spent an hour in the Arenes on that same sweet Sunday morning, as I came
back from the Roman baths, and saw that the corridors, the vaults, the
staircases, the external casing, are still virtually there. Many of these
parts are wanting in the Colosseum, whose sublimity of size, however, can
afford to dispense with detail. The seats at Nimes, like those at Verona,
have been largely renewed; not that this mattered much, as I lounged on
the cool surface of one of them, and admired the mighty concavity of the
place and the elliptical sky-line, broken by uneven blocks and forming the
rim of the monstrous cup--a cup that had been filled with horrors, and yet
I made my reflections; I said to myself that tho a Roman arena is one of
the most impressive of the works of man, it has a touch of that same
stupidity which I ventured to discover in the Pont du Gard. It is brutal;
it is monotonous; it is not at all exquisite.

The Arenes at Nimes were arranged for a bull-fight--a form of recreation
that, as I was informed, is much dans les habitudes Nimoises and very
common throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it
is the usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nimes it has a
characteristic setting, but in the villages the patrons of the game make a
circle of carts and barrels, on which the spectators perch themselves. I
was surprised at the prevalence, in mild Provence, of the Iberian vice,
and hardly know whether it makes the custom more respectable that at Nimes
and Arles the thing is shabbily and imperfectly done. The bulls are rarely
killed, and indeed often are bulls only in the Irish sense of the term--
being domestic and motherly cows. Such an entertainment of course does not
supply to the arena that element of the exquisite which I spoke of as
wanting.

The exquisite at Nimes is mainly represented by the famous Maison Carree.
The first impression you receive from this delicate little building, as
you stand before it, is that you have already seen it many times.
Photographs, engravings, models, medals, have placed it definitely in your
eye, so that from the sentiment with which you regard it curiosity and
surprise are almost completely, and perhaps deplorably absent. Admiration
remains however--admiration of a familiar and even slightly patronizing
kind. The Maison Carree does not overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is
not one of the great sensations of antique art; but it is perfectly
felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts of incongruous
uses, marvelously preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate
proportions, its charming compactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the
century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges,
and give it the interest that vibrates from one age to another when the
note of taste is struck.

If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy production,
the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard that conducts
to it, adorned with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops. Here, in a
respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations, and with the
theater, of a classic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square
house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it
first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if it
were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of a
playing-card, and he expresses his admiration for it by the singular wish
that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris. He even goes as far
as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been rendered to
its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to "have" in
that city "le Pantheon de Rome, quelques temples de Grece." Stendhal found
it amusing to write in the character of a commis-voyageur, and sometimes
it occurs to his reader that he really was one.

Arles and Les Baux

By Henry James

[Footnote: From "A Little Tour in France." By special arrangement with,
and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright,
1884.]

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 disapproval; 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 theater. 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 villainous 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 picture,
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
provincial 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 slipping 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 discomfited 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 exceptional 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. Nevertheless, 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 pavement) 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 inconsistency of
a person who dislikes the modern caravansary, 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 lumbering
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 windowpanes. Let it be put on record, therefore, that I
have been, I won't say less comfortable, 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 Englishman, 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
comtemplate.

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 therefore free 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 physical nobleness. Tho 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 contributes 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 considerable part of the
crown; and which, finally, accomodates itself indescribably well to the
manner in which the tresses of the front are pushed behind the ears.

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 medieval Pompeii, of which I shall give
myself the pleasure of speaking.

The evening 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 antique
pavement. As we sat in the theater, looking at the two lone columns that
survive--part of the decoration 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
at 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, ruggedly complete; and the vaulted corridors seem as solid
as the day they were built. The whole thing is superbly vast, and as
monumental, for a 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 reconstructed, and the
great converging passages of approach to it are still majestically
distinct; so that, as I sat there in the moon-charm stillness, leaning my
elbows on the battered parapet of the ring, it was not impossible to
listen to the murmurs and shudders, the thick voice of the circus, that
died away fifteen hundred years ago.

The theater has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with a
different music. The Roman theater at Arles seemed to me one of the most
charming 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. Before them is the vacant space which was filled by the
stage, with the line of the proscenium distinct, marked by a deep groove,
imprest upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a high screen
had been intended 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, tho terribly battered and cracked
to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the interior.

Everything 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 the 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 numbers, 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.

If I called Les Baux a city, it was not that I was stretching a point in
favor of the small spot which to-day contains but a few dozen inhabitants.
The history of the place is as extraodinary as its situation. It was not
only a city, but a state; not only a state; but an empire; and on the
crest of its little mountain called itself sovereign of a territory, or at
least of scattered towns and counties, with which its present aspect is
grotesquely out of relation. The lords of Les Baux, in a word, were great
feudal proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of
Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and
Marseilles, paid them homage.

The chronicle of this old Provencal house has been written, in a style
somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the little
book--a modest pamphlet--at the establishment of the good sisters, just
beside the church, in one of the highest part of Les Baux. The sisters
have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom I heard piping their
lessons, while I waited in the cold parlor for one of the ladies to come
and speak to me. Nothing could have been more perfect than the manner of
this excellent woman when she arrived; yet her small religious house
seemed a very out-of-the-way corner of the world. It was spotlessly neat,
and the rooms looked as if they had lately been papered and painted; in
this respect, at the medieval Pompeii, they were rather a discord. They
were, at any rate, the newest, freshest thing at Les Baux.

I remember going round to the church, after I had left the good sisters,
and to a little quiet terrace, which stands in front of it, ornamented
with a few small trees and bordered with a wall, breast-high, over which
you look down steep hillsides, off into the air and all about the
neighboring country. I remember saying to myself that this little terrace
was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist of taste keeps in his
mind as a picture. The church was small and brown and dark, with a certain
rustic richness. All this however, is no general description of Les Baux.

I am unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple
reason that it is a mere confusion of ruin. It has not been preserved in
lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and castle,
have become fragmentary, not through the sudden destruction, but through
the gradual withdrawal, of a population. It is not an extinguished, but a
deserted city; more deserted far than even Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes,
where I found so much entertainment in the grass-grown element.

It is of very small extent, and even in the days of its greatness, when
its lords entitled themselves counts of Cephalonia and Neophantis, kings
of Arles and Vienne, princes of Achaia, and emperors of Constantinople--
even at this flourishing period, when, as M. Jules Canonge remarks, "they
were able to depress the balance in which the fate of peoples and kings is
weighed," the plucky little city contained at the most no more than
thirty-six hundred souls. Yet its lords (who, however, as I have said,
were able to present a long list of subject towns, most of them, tho a few
are renowned, unknown to fame) were seneschals and captains-general of
Piedmont and Lombardy, grand admirals of the kingdom of Naples, and its
ladies were sought in marriage by half the first princes in Europe.

A considerable part of the little narrative of M. Canonge is taken up with
the great alliances of the House of Baux, whose fortunes, matrimonial and
other, he traces from the eleventh century down to the sixteenth. The
empty shells of a considerable number of old houses, many of which must
have been superb, the lines of certain steep little streets, the
foundations of a castle, and ever so many splendid views, are all that
remains to-day of these great titles.

To such a list I may add a dozen very polite and sympathetic people, who
emerged from the interstices of the desultory little town to gaze at the
two foreigners who had driven over from Arles, and whose horses were being
baited at the modest inn. The resources of this establishment we did not
venture otherwise to test, in spite of the seductive fact that the sign
over the door was in the Provencal tongue. This little group included the
baker, a rather melancholy young man, in high boots and a cloak, with whom
and his companions we had a good deal of conversation.

The Baussenques of to-day struck me as a very mild and agreeable race,
with a good deal of the natural amenity which, on occasions like this one,
the traveler, who is waiting for his horses to be put in or his dinner to
be prepared, observes in the charming people who lend themselves to
conversation in the hilltowns of Tuscany. The spot where our entertainers
at Les Baux congregated was naturally the most inhabited portion of the
town; as I say, there were at least a dozen human figures within sight.
Presently we wandered away from them, scaled the higher places, seated
ourselves among the ruins of the castle, and looked down from the cliff
overhanging that portion of the road which I have mentioned as approaching
Les Baux from behind.

I was unable to trace the configuration of the castle as plainly as the
writers who have described it in the guide-books, and I am ashamed to say
that I did not even perceive the three great figures of stone (the three
Marys, as they are called; the two Marys of Scripture, with Martha), which
constitute one of the curiosities of the place, and of which M. Jules
Canonge speaks with almost hyperbolical admiration. A brisk shower,
lasting some ten minutes, led us to take refuge in a cavity, of mysterious
origin, where the melancholy baker presently discovered us, having had the
bonne pensee of coming up for us with an umbrella which certainly
belonged, in former ages, to one of the Stephanettes or Berangeres
commemorated by M. Canonge. His oven, I am afraid, was cold so long as our
visit lasted.

When the rain was over we wandered down to the little disencumbered space
before the inn, through a small labyrinth of obliterated things. They took
the form of narrow, precipitous streets, bordered by empty houses, with
gaping windows and absent doors, through which we had glimpses of
sculptured chimney-pieces and fragments of stately arch and vault. Some of
the houses are still inhabited; but most of them are open to the air and
weather. Some of them have completely collapsed; others present to the
street a front which enables one to judge of the physiognomy of Les Baux
in the days of its importance. This importance had pretty well passed away
in the early part of the sixteenth century, when the place ceased to be an
independent principality, It became--by request of one of its lords,
Bernardin des Baux, a great captain of his time--part of the appanage of
the kings of France, by whom it was placed under the protection of Arles,
which had formerly occupied with regard to it a different position. I know
not whether the Arlesians neglected their trust; but the extinction of the
sturdy little stronghold is too complete not to have begun long ago. Its
memories are buried under its ponderous stones.

As ve drove away from it in the gloaming, my friend and I agreed that the
two or three hours we had spent there were among the happiest impressions
of a pair of tourists very curious in the picturesque. We almost forgot
that we were bound to regret that the shortened day left us no time to
drive five miles further, above a pass in the little mountains--it had
beckoned to us in the morning, when we came in sight of it, almost
irresistibly--to see the Roman arch and mausoleum of Saint Remy. To
compass this larger excursion (including the visit to Les Baux) you must
start from Arles very early in the morning; but I can imagine no more
delightful day.

IV

Cathedrals and Chateaux

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