Читать книгу Rambles on the Riviera - M. F. Mansfield - Страница 5

Table of Contents

THE Pays d’Arles is one of those minor sub-divisions of undefined, or at least ill-defined, limits that are scattered all over France. Local feeling runs high in all of them, and the Arlesien professes a great contempt for the Martigaux or the inhabitant of the Pays de Cavaillon, even though their territories border on one another; though indeed all three join hands when it comes to standing up for their beloved Provence.

There are sixty towns and villages in the Pays d’Arles, extending from Tarascon and Beaucaire to Les Saintes Maries, St. Mitre, and Fos-sur-Mer on the Mediterranean, and eastward to Lambesc, the pays enveloping La Crau and the Étang de Berre within its imaginary borders. Avignon and Vaucluse are its neighbours on the north and northeast, and, taken all in all, it is as historic and romantic a region as may be found in all Europe.

The literary guide-posts throughout Provence are numerous and prominent, though they cannot all be enumerated here. One may wander with Petrarch in and around Avignon and Vaucluse; he may coast along Dante’s highway of the sea from the Genoese seaport to Marseilles; he may tarry with Tartarin at Tarascon; or may follow in the footsteps of Edmond Dantes from Marseilles to Beaucaire and Bellegarde; and in any case he will only be in a more appreciative mood for the wonderful works of Mistral and his fellows of the Félibres.

The troubadours and the “courts of love” have gone the way of all mediæval institutions and nothing has quite come up to take their place, but the memory of all the literary history of the old province is so plentifully bestrewn through the pages of modern writers of history and romance that no spot in the known world is more prolific in reminders of those idyllic times than this none too well known and travelled part of old France.

If the spirit of old romance is so dead or latent in the modern traveller by automobile or the railway that he does not care to go back to mediæval times, he can still turn to the pages of Daudet and find portraiture which is so characteristic of Tarascon and the country round about to-day that it may be recognized even by the stranger, though the inhabitant of that most interesting Rhône-side city denies that there is the slightest resemblance.

Then there is Felix Gras’s “Rouges du Midi,” first written in the Provençal tongue. One must not call the tongue a patois, for the Provençal will tell you emphatically that his is a real and pure tongue, and that it is the Breton who speaks a patois.

From the Provençal this famous tale of Felix Gras was translated into French and speedily became a classic. It is romance, if you like, but most truthful, if only because it proves Carlyle and his estimates of the celebrated “Marseilles Battalion” entirely wrong. Even in the English translation the tale loses but little of its originality and colour, and it remains a wonderful epitome of the traits and characters of the Provençaux.

Dumas himself, in that time-tried (but not time-worn) romance of “Monte Cristo,” rises to heights of topographical description and portrait delineations which he scarcely ever excelled.

Every one has read, and supposedly has at his finger-tips, the pages of this thrilling romance, but if he is journeying through Provence, let him read it all again, and he will find passages of a directness and truthfulness that have often been denied this author—by critics who have taken only an arbitrary and prejudiced view-point.

Marseilles, the scene of the early career of Dantes and the lovely Mercédès, stands out perhaps most clearly, but there is a wonderful chapter which deals with the Pays d’Arles, and is as good topographical portraiture to-day as when it was written.

Here are some lines of Dumas which no traveller down the Rhône valley should neglect to take as his guide and mentor if he “stops off”—as he most certainly should—at Tarascon, and makes the round of Tarascon, Beaucaire, Bellegarde, and the Pont du Gard.

“Such of my readers as may have made a pedestrian journey to the south of France may perhaps have noticed, midway between the town of Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde, a small roadside inn, from the front of which hung, creaking and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a rude representation of the ancient Pont du Gard.”

There is nothing which corresponds to this ancient inn sign to be seen to-day, but any one of a dozen humble houses by the side of the canal which runs from Beaucaire to Aigues Mortes might have been the inn in question, kept by the unworthy Caderousse, with whom Dantes, disguised as the abbé, had the long parley which ultimately resulted in his getting on the track of his former defamers.

Dumas’s further descriptions were astonishingly good, as witness the following:

“The place boasted of what, in these parts, was called a garden, scorched beneath the ardent sun of this latitude, with its soil giving nourishment to a few stunted olive and dingy fig trees, around which grew a scanty supply of tomatoes, garlic, and eschalots, with a sort of a lone sentinel in the shape of a scrubby pine.”

If this were all that there was of Provence, the picture might be thought an unlovely one, but there is a good deal more, though often enough one does see—just as Dumas pictured it—this sort of habitation, all but scorched to death by the dazzling southern sun.

At the time of which Dumas wrote, the canal between Beaucaire and Aigues Mortes had just been opened and the traffic which once went on by road between this vast trading-place (for the annual fair of Beaucaire, like that of Guibray in Normandy, and to some extent like that of Nijni Novgorod, was one of the most considerable of its kind in the known world) and the cities and towns of the southwest came to be conducted by barge and boat, and so Caderousse’s inn had languished from a sheer lack of patronage.

Dumas does not forget his tribute to the women of the Pays d’Arles, either; and here again he had a wonderfully facile pen. Of Caderousse and his wife he says:

“Like other dwellers of the southland, Caderousse was a man of sober habits and moderate desires, but fond of external show and display and vain to a degree. During the days of his prosperity, not a fête or a ceremonial took place but that he and his wife were participants. On these occasions he dressed himself in the picturesque costume worn at such times by the dwellers in the south of France, bearing an equal resemblance to the style worn by Catalans and Andalusians.

“His wife displayed the charming fashion prevalent among the women of Arles, a mode of attire borrowed equally from Greece and Arabia, with a glorious combination of chains, necklaces, and scarves.”

The women of the Pays d’Arles have the reputation of being the most beautiful of all the many types of beautiful women in France, and they are faithful, always, to what is known as the costume of the pays, which, it must be understood, is something more than the coiffe which usually marks the distinctive dress of a petit pays.

It is a common error among rhapsodizing tourists who have occasionally stopped at Arles, en route to the pleasures of the Riviera, to suppose that the original Arlesien costume is that seen to-day. As a matter of fact it dates back only about four generations, and it was well on in the forties of the nineteenth century when the ruban-diadème and the Phrygian coiffe came to be the caprice of the day. In this form it has, however, endured throughout all the sixty villages and towns of the pays.

The ruban-diadème, the coiffe, the corsage, the fichu, the jupon, and a chain bearing, usually, a Maltese cross, all combine to set off in a marvellous manner the loveliness of these large-eyed beauties of Provence.

Only after they have reached their thirteenth or fourteenth year do the young girls assume the coiffure,—when they have commenced to see beyond their noses, as the saying goes in French,—when, until old age carries them off, they are always as jauntily dressed as if they were toujours en fête.

There is a romantic glamour about Arles, its arena, its theatre, its marvellously beautiful Church of St. Trophime, and much else that is fascinating to all travelled and much-read persons; and so Arles takes the chief place in the galaxy of old-time Provençal towns, before even Nîmes, Avignon, and Aix-en-Provence.

Everything is in a state of decay at Arles; far more so, at least, than at Nîmes, where the arena is much better preserved, and the “Maison Carrée” is a gem which far exceeds any monument of Arles in its beauty and preservation; or at Orange, where the antique theatre is superb beyond all others, both in its proportions and in its existing state of preservation.

The charm of Arles lies in its former renown and in the reminders, fragmentary though some of them be, of its past glories. In short it is a city so rich in all that goes to make up the attributes of a “ville de l’art célèbre,” that it has a special importance.

Marseilles, among the cities of modern France, has usually been considered the most ancient; but even that existed as a city but six hundred years before the Christian era, whereas Anibert, a “savant Arlésien,” has stated that the founding of Arles dates back to fifteen hundred years before Christ, or nine hundred years before that of Marseilles. In the lack of any convincing evidence one way or another, one can let his sympathies drift where they will, but Arles certainly looks its age more than does Marseilles.

It would not be practicable here to catalogue all the monumental attractions of the Arles of a past day which still remain to remind one of its greatness. The best that the writer can do is to advise the traveller to take his ease at his inn, which in this case may be either the excellent Hôtel du Nord-Pinus—which has a part of the portico of the ancient forum built into its façade—or across the Place du Forum at the Hôtel du Forum. From either vantage-ground one will get a good start, and much assistance from the obliging patrons, and a day, a week, or a month is not too much to spend in this charming old-time capital.

Among the many sights of Arles three distinct features will particularly impress the visitor: the proximity of the Rhône, the great arena and its neighbouring theatre, and the Cathedral of St. Trophime.

It was in the thirteenth century that Arles first came to distinction as one of the great Latin ports. The Rhône had for ages past bathed its walls, and what more natural than that the river should be the highway which should bring the city into intercourse with the outside world?

Soon it became rich and powerful and bid fair to become a ship-owning community which should rival the coast towns themselves, and its “lion banners” flew masthead high in all the ports of the Mediterranean.

The navigation of the Rhône at this time presented many difficulties; the estuary was always shifting, as it does still, though the question of navigating the river has been solved, or made the easier, by the engineering skill of the present day.

The cargoes coming by sea were transshipped into a curious sort of craft known as an allege, from which they were distributed to all the towns along the Rhône. The carrying trade remained, however, in the hands of the Arlesiens. The great fair of Beaucaire, renowned as it was throughout all of Europe, contributed not a little to the traffic. For six weeks in each year it was a great market for all the goods and stuffs of the universe, and gave such a strong impetus to trade that the effects were felt throughout the year in all the neighbouring cities and towns.

The Cathedral of St. Trophime, as regards its portal and cloister, may well rank first among the architectural delights of its class. The decorations of its portal present a complicated drama of religious figures and symbols, at once austere and dignified and yet fantastic in their design and arrangement. There is nothing like it in all France, except its near-by neighbour at St. Gilles-du-Rhône, and, in the beauty and excellence of its carving, it far excels the splendid façades of Amiens and Reims, even though they are more extensive and more magnificently disposed.

The main fabric of the church, and its interior, are ordinary enough, and are in no way different from hundreds of a similar type elsewhere; but in the cloister, to the rear, architectural excellence again rises to a superlative height. Here, in a justly proportioned quadrangle, are to be seen four distinct periods and styles of architectural decoration, from the round-headed arches of the colonnade on one side, up through the primitive Gothic on the second, the later and more florid variety on the third, and finally the debasement in Renaissance forms and outlines on the fourth. The effect is most interesting and curious both to the student of architectural art and to the lover of old churches, and is certainly unfamiliar enough in its arrangement to warrant hazarding the opinion that it is unique among the celebrated mediæval cloisters still existing.

Immediately behind the cathedral are the remains of the theatre and the arena. Less well preserved than that at Orange, the theatre of the Arles of the Romans, a mere ruined waste to-day, gives every indication of having been one of the most important works of its kind in Gaul, although, judging from its present admirable state of preservation, that of Orange was the peer of its class.

To-day there are but a scattered lot of tumbled-about remains, much of the structure having gone to build up other edifices in the town, before the days when proper guardianship was given to such chronicles in stone. A great porte still exists, some arcades, two lone, staring columns,—still bearing their delicately sculptured capitals,—and numerous ranges of rising banquettes.

This old théâtre romain must have been ornamented with a lavish disregard for expense, for it was in the ruins here that the celebrated Venus d’Arles was discovered in 1651, and given to Louis XIV. in 1683.

The arena is much better preserved than the theatre. It is a splendid and colossal monument, surpassing any other of its kind outside of Rome. Its history is very full and complete, and writers of the olden time have recounted many odious combats and many spectacles wherein ferocious beasts and gladiators played a part. To-day bull-fights, with something of an approach to the splendour of the Spanish variety, furnish the bloodthirsty of Arles with their amusement. There is this advantage in witnessing the sport at Arles: one sees it amid a mediæval stage setting that is lacking in Spain.

It is in this arena that troops of wild beasts, brought from all parts of the empire, tore into pieces the poor unfortunates who were held captive in the prisons beneath the galleries. These dungeons are shown to-day, with much bloodthirsty recital, by the very painstaking guardian, who, for an appropriate, though small, fee, searches out the keys and opens the gateway to this imposing enclosure, where formerly as many as twenty-five thousand persons assemble to witness the cruel sacrifices.

A Young Arlesienne

Tiberius Nero—a name which has come to be a synonym of moral degradation—was one of the principal colonizers of Arles, and built, it is supposed, this arena for his savage pleasures. In its perfect state it would have been a marvel, but the barbarians partly ruined it and turned it into a sort of fortified camp. In a more or less damaged state it existed until 1825, when the parasitical structures which had been built up against its walls were removed, and it was freed to light and air for the traveller of a later day to marvel and admire.

Modern Arles has quite another story to tell; it is typical of all the traditions of the Provence of old, and it is that city of Provence that best presents the present-day life of southern France.

Even to-day the well-recognized type of Arlesienne ranks among the beautiful women of the world. Possessed of a carriage that would be remarked even on the boulevards of Paris, and of a beauty of feature that enables her to concede nothing to her sisters of other lands, the Arlesienne is ever a pleasing picture. As much as anything, it is the costume and the coiffe that contributes to her beauty, for the tiny white bonnet or cap, bound with a broad black ribbon, sets off her raven locks in a bewitching manner. Simplicity and harmony is the key-note of it all, and the women of Arles are not made jealous or conceited by the changing of Paris fashions.

The contrast between what is left of ancient Arles and the commercial aspect of the modern city is everywhere to be remarked, for Arles is the distributing-point for all the products of the Camargue and the Crau, and the life of the cafés and hotels is to a great extent that of the busy merchants of the town and their clients from far and near. All this gives Arles a certain air of metropolitanism, but it does not in the least overshadow the memories of its past.

In the open country northwest of Arles is the ancient Benedictine abbey of Montmajour, twice destroyed and twice reërected. Finally abandoned in the thirteenth century, it was carefully guarded by the proprietors, until now it ranks as one of the most remarkable of the historical monuments of its kind in all France.

It has quite as much the appearance of a fortress as of a religious establishment, for its great fourteenth-century tower, with its mâchicoulis and tourelles, suggest nothing churchly, but rather an attribute of a warlike stronghold.

The majestic church needs little in the way of rebuilding and restoration to assume the splendour that it must have had under its monkish proprietors of another day. Beneath is another edifice, much like a crypt, but which expert archæologists tell one is not a crypt in the generally accepted sense of the term. At any rate it is much better lighted than crypts usually are, and looks not unlike an earlier edifice, which was simply built up and another story added.

Abbey of Montmajour and Vineyard

The remains of the cloister are worthy to be classed in the same category as that wonderful work of St. Trophime, but whether the one inspired the other, or they both proceeded simultaneously, neither history nor the local antiquaries can state.

Besides the conventional buildings proper there are a primitive chapel and a hermitage once dedicated to the uses of St. Trophime. Since these minor structures, if they may be so called, date from the sixth century, they may be considered as among the oldest existing religious monuments in France. The “Commission des Monuments Historiques” guards the remains of this opulent abbey and its dependencies of a former day with jealous care, and if any restorations are undertaken they are sure to be carried out with taste and skill.

Near Montmajour is another religious edifice of more than passing remark, the Chapelle Ste. Croix. Its foundation has been attributed to Charlemagne, and again to Charles Martel, who gave to it the name which it still bears in commemoration of his victory over the Saracens. It is a simple but very beautiful structure, in the form of a Greek cross, and admirably vaulted and groined. There are innumerable sepulchres scattered about and many broken and separated funeral monuments, which show the prominence of this little commemorative chapel among those of its class.

Every seven years, that is to say whenever the 3d of May falls on a Friday (the anniversary of the victory of Charles Martel), the chapel becomes a place of pious pilgrimages for great numbers of the thankful and devout from all parts of France.