A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE HOUSE OF MERRILEES
RICHARD BALDOCK
EXTON MANOR
THE SQUIRE'S DAUGHTER
THE ELDEST SON
THE HONOUR OF THE CLINTONS
THE GREATEST OF THESE
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
WATERMEADS
UPSIDONIA
ABINGTON ABBEY
THE GRAFTONS
THE CLINTONS, AND OTHERS
SIR HARRY
MANY JUNES
A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE
PEGGY IN TOYLAND

EVENING AMONG THE OLIVES

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

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 which a visitor to Provence could get so much to supplement his own observation, and I have made constant use of it. To Mr. Thomas Okey's[2] "Avignon" in Dent's "Mediæval Towns" series, I also owe a great debt of gratitude. The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould's "In Troubadour Land" (London: W. H. Allen), though slighter than those two works, contains much interesting information. Mistral's "Mes Origines" (Paris: Libraire Plon), translated from the Provençal, is of course invaluable for its pictures of Provençal life, and from that book and from M. Paul Mariéton's "La Terre Provençale" (Paris: Ollendorf) one can get the best information about the movement of the Félibrige, which has done so much to revivify the old life of Provence. A good deal of desultory information is afforded by M. Louis de Laincel's "La Provence" (Paris: Oudin), and some of the stories that linger on Provençal soil are well told in M. Charles-Roux's "Légendes de Provence" (Paris: Bloud). These books, and the French translation of Mistral's "Mirèio," which is a mine of Provençal lore, besides being a noble poem, have been my chief "authorities," but they have been very usefully supplemented by the various pamphlets to be picked up locally. Some of these have been excellent, and I have made mention of their authors in the following pages.

The photographs are of my own taking, except those very kindly given to me by Mr. Hope Macey, whom I was fortunate enough to come across in Avignon in the course of an expedition that coincided with mine at many points. The one of Mistral's birthplace I bought at Arles, and those of the picture and tapestry at Aix in Paris.[3]

This account of my spring journey has been finished under the shadow of the great war, which might have caused me to look upon the jours de conscription with which I fell in on the early days of the walk in a light much sadder, if I could have foreseen it. I left Provence in a train full of young soldiers going to their homes in various distant parts of France for their Easter furlough. Of those who crowded the carriage in which I travelled from Arles to Lyons the faces come before me as clearly as if I saw them in the flesh, and I can hear their songs and jokes and laughter. They seemed to have been drawn from all classes, but to mix in the readiest frankest comradeship. Whenever I read now of the French in action I think of those light-hearted boys in their holiday mood, and wonder what they are doing, and how many of them are still alive. One has somewhat changed one's view of the toll that France has taken of her manhood since those days that now seem so far off.

Chateau d'Oex, August, 1914.

The world has changed since this book was written, but I hope that the record of an expedition made in the happy days before the war may still be read with pleasure, now that the great shadow is in part removed. I have been over the manuscript again and made a few alterations here and there, but have altered nothing that shows it to have been written five years ago.

Burley, Hants, August, 1919.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE

A SPRING WALK IN PROVENCE

CHAPTER I

Hills and Olives

I was to walk through the country from the Italian border, but it rained so heavily on the first day that I went to Mentone and took the mountain tramway to Sospel, where in any case I had intended to spend the night.

Two years ago, before this tram-line was quite finished, I motored up to Sospel to play golf. It was a pleasant experience, though not without its thrills, for the road zigzags and corkscrews up mountain sides and across deep gorges in a way to make one thankful for strong brakes and a reliable driver, especially on the return journey. The hillsides are cultivated everywhere. The precipitous slopes have been terraced with infinite labour, and orange and lemon groves surrounding pretty little lodges and cottages, only give way as one mounts higher to the grey-green of olive plantations.

When you have climbed up 2,300 feet, the road, as if tired of twisting and turning, boldly attacks the mountain side, runs through a tunnel pierced in the solid rock and comes out on the other side of the peak. Then it takes a turn so sharp that not long ago a car coming too fast through the tunnel went over the precipitous edge and all its occupants were killed.

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 ancestors. We, as we play along the grassy meadows, and cross here and there the clear river rippling over its pebbles, have come to think that the towering rock-ramparts, upon which the sun and the clouds play with infinite gradations of light and colour, have as much to do with the beauty of the scene as the verdant valley itself, or the little old huddled Italian-looking town which hugs both banks of the river.

It was that little old town, which the golfer coming up from Mentone only skirts on his way to the links, that had remained in my memory, even more than the unusual charm of the links and the excellence of the greens. It stands curiously aside from the wave of modernity that has washed up to it from the wealthy delocalized coast. Turn to the right when you reach the corner, and you are still in the atmosphere of the Côte d'Azur, although you are fifteen miles inland from Mentone; turn to the left and you are in southern provincial France, in a street of little shops and little cafés and buvettes, and pick your way amongst a crowd of peasants and townspeople, buying and selling, talking of their crops and their commerce, and as little concerned with what is going on half a mile away as if they had never seen a mashie or a putter, and none of them had ever shouldered a bag of clubs for a curiously-garbed curiously-spoken foreigner.

Probably it is only the caddies or the ex-caddies who ever mention golf in the town of Sospel. It stands so aloof that even its prices have not yet been affected by the lavish ways of the holiday coast, with which it has formed this late new connection.

So I turned to the left. I wanted to have done for a time with everything English, and more particularly with the sort of hotel that has an English-speaking waiter, or indeed a waiter at all. Sospel was to provide me with my first genuine experience of a French inn, as used by the people of the country and not by the tourist.

Sospel rose adequately to the occasion, as I had thought it would. I found an hotel facing the market stalls and the river beyond them. I went up a flight of stone stairs and into a kitchen, which was also the bureau of the patronne. Yes, I could have a room for the night, and the charge would be two francs. I went up to see the room. It had a tiled floor, which was very clean, a large four-poster bed hung round with muslin curtains, and a few old cumbrous pieces of furniture besides—just the sort of room I wanted.

I had a good dinner, which I ate in company with four commis voyageurs and an engineer, all of whom were cordially interested in my coming expedition, and none of whom had a word of English or seemed to have any idea in their minds of connecting Sospel with golf. I felt that I had fallen plumb into it by taking that left-hand turn, and it needed an effort to call to mind the great new hotel at the other end of the links two miles away, where no diner had tucked his napkin inside his collar, or would soak his dessert biscuits in his wine; where the waiter brought a clean knife and fork for every course, and the proprietor would have requested me to leave if I had sat down in the clothes in which I intended to walk on the morrow. I felt happy, as I went to bed at nine o'clock, after a look at the rapid-flowing river on which the moon was now shining through the parting clouds. The fun had begun.

I felt happier still at six o'clock the next morning, when I took the road with my pack on my back. The clouds had blown away from the mountain tops, though wisps of them hung about the lower slopes, and the cup of the valley still held a light mist. It was going to be a lovely day, and perhaps hotter than would be altogether comfortable for a walker habited and burdened as I was. For it was still early in March, and I had come down from Alpine snows. Moreover, the replenishments of clothing that I had sent on ahead were at least a week away, and I carried "changes" to a rather nervous extent; also some reading matter, which is a mistake, for books weigh heavy, however light their contents, and if your day on the road is not filled with walking, eating and sleeping, and whatever recreation in the way of talk may come to you, you are not throwing yourself enough into the spirit of your adventure.

The road wound and turned and twisted, always going uphill, but never very steeply. I was on the old high road from the north, where it enters on its last stage of about five and twenty miles to Nice. I thought I must have come near to its highest point when I had climbed up on a level with the heavy fort that frowned on me from a hill near by, and sat down to take my last look at the green valley now lying far beneath me.

It showed as a level carpet of vivid green, broken by the grey mass and outlying buildings of the town, with the river threading it lengthwise. The hills rose up sheer on every side. Their lower slopes were so regularly terraced that at this distance they had the effect of horizontal "shadings" in a pencil drawing. Above that they were grey, and dark green, and red as with heather, and the summits of some of them still held snow. White roads jagged them here and there, but the flat valley floor had the effect of being completely cupped and confined by the rugged heights, as indeed it is, except just where the river, having filled up the bottom of the cup with a rich layer of alluvium, must have broken through at some time, and left the fertile plain all ready and waiting for cultivation. It was like looking down on a miniature Promised Land, so marked was the contrast between the fresh green of the valley and the sombre tones of its encircling hills.

This southern country flushes to tender spring green only here and there. The cultivated hillsides keep their darker colours, though they may be most sweetly lit with the pink of almonds. March would be a glorious month in Provence if it were only for the almond blossom. Mixed with the soft grey of the olives it makes delicious pictures, and it is to be found everywhere. And the wild rosemary is in flower—great bushes of it, lighting up the rocky hillsides with their delicate blue. They were all around me as I sat on this height, and there were brooms getting ready to flower, and wild lavender, and thyme. The air held an aromatic fragrance, and as I walked on between the pines and the deciduous trees, not yet in leaf, the birds were singing and the water rushing down its channels from the snowy heights very musically. There were primroses and violets by the roadside, as if it had been spring in England, and juicy little grape hyacinths to remind one that it was not. There was something to look at and enjoy at every step.

I was nowhere near the top of the pass, as I had thought, but reached it at last at the Col de Braus, where I found a rude little inn, and entered it not without reluctance in search of refreshment.

I found myself in a vaulted stone kitchen, its floor below the level of the ground outside. An elderly woman sat by the hearth, winding wool, with a child playing at her knee; a younger woman brought me wine and bread and cheese. The place was very dirty, but the wine was good and the viands eatable.

The older woman was a picture of grief as she sat under the great stone chimney and told me how hard life was in that exposed spot, especially in the winter, when they were sometimes flooded out of the lower rooms. And now they had taken away her only son, for his military service, and what she should do without him she could not think. It was a hard tax on poor mothers. In three years, when he had done with the army, who knew? She might be dead.

"But you have a husband, madame, isn't it so? Otherwise they could not take him."

Yes; she had a husband. She nodded her head slowly with infinite meaning, and as if to interpret it there entered the room an extremely unattractive person, dirtier even than his dirty surroundings, who addressed her, or the younger woman, or perhaps me, in a flood of intemperate speech, of which I could not make out a single word. Nobody answered him, and he slouched out of the room again.

"Is that your husband, madame?"

She nodded her head slowly up and down, without speaking. I could see for myself.

We talked about the little child, and her face lighted up. Presently the husband came in again, and expressed himself in his unrecognizable tongue with as much freedom and fervour as before. Again nobody took any notice of him, and again he went out. I don't know whether he was drunk or not, but am inclined now to think that he only wanted to be. I was sure that he was annoyed with me, for some reason, by the way he glared at me, and as I was a customer and prepared to pay for my entertainment it must either have been because I did not offer him any or because I was interfering with the hour of his own repast. I think it is likely that his bark, which was strident enough, was worse than his bite, that he was merely a ne'er-do-well with an unusual gift of self-expression, which had ceased to interest those about him. His wife took no steps to carry out whatever may have been his wishes at this particular juncture of circumstances, and her attitude of frozen grief, effective at the time, thawed enough to enable her to make a mild overcharge when I came to settle up. She gave me permission to take a photograph of the room and its occupants if I wished to do so, but I said that the light was not good enough, and came away.

Now I changed my view for a different set of hills, and began to descend on roads that zigzagged more than ever. There was a good deal of quarrying going on. Great blocks of stone were lying by the roadside ready to be built up into the parapet, and presently I came upon a group of Italian workmen busy with their picks and crowbars. I don't know why, after all these years, the enormous work of protecting this old road should be taken in hand, but certainly there are places in it at which a fall over the edge can hardly be thought of without a shudder, and with the surface in the muddy state in which I found it a motor-car might easily skid with danger. At one place, if you stand where it rounds a point and look down to where it takes another slope, it looks just like a temperature chart, where the thermometer has taken a series of rises and drops and at last runs off steadily downwards.

This long downward slope led me at last to welcome shade, and I found a little lawn under olive boughs, below the road and above a river gorge which was an ideal place for a siesta. If food and drink are so good when one is on the long steady tramp, sleep is no less so. There are those who scorn it except at night between sheets, but when one has made an early start, and has covered many miles by the time the sun has reached its greatest power, it is pleasant enough to sleep for an hour under the shade of a tree, and to wake up refreshed for what remains to be done of the day's journey.

The sound of the river beneath me, and the birds singing all around, lulled me to sleep. But for this there was no sound, except a very rare noise of wheels, and once a motor-car, on the road above, to arouse me for a moment and to make the sinking back into sleep more blissful. The first time, on an expedition of this sort, that you take your pack for a pillow, mother earth for your bed and green leaves for your canopy, there is something that falls away from you of the troubles and irritations of the world. You are as near to nature as you are ever likely to be in this sophisticated age, and nature will smooth things out for you if you trust yourself to her.

10a

THE ROAD DOWNHILL "LOOKS JUST LIKE A TEMPERATURE CHART"

10a

I "POSED" HIM AMONG THE RUINS

Page [20]

I dropped down to L'Escaréne, a picturesque old town with an ancient bridge straddling across the quick-flowing river. But before I reached it I was met by a man with a drum and several intoxicated youths carrying a flag, who cried "Vive la République" and "Vive l'armée," with the most patriotic fervour. I had begun my walk just at the time when the conscripts were being called up from their homes all over France, and lived in the thick of the concomitant disturbances during the next few days. These rather pathetic little processions of service-old boys, usually accompanied by middle-aged men more drunk than they were, trailing out of a town and back again, became a commonplace. They shouted at me frequently, but never rudely.

I sat under a naked vine-trellis on a raised terrace outside an inn and drank wine. A talkative damsel, with needlework to occupy her hands, but nothing to keep her fine eyes from noting everything that happened in the place, for the observation of which this was a vantage-ground, kept me company. She explained to me, with much shrugging of shapely shoulders, some of the differences between the patois used in this part of the country and the true French, but she disclaimed knowledge of Provençal. I was in Provence, but not yet among the true Provençals—unless I mistook her altogether, which is quite possible.

She gave me excited and exhaustive instructions how to reach the hill town of Berre, where I had thought to spend the night. I had had a description of it from the engineer in whose company I had dined the evening before, and when I came within sight of it, perched on its rock summit, an hour or two later, its high walls and dominating church tower lit by the westering sun, it gave me a little thrill—it was so beautiful, and so just right.

It was just right to look at from a distance, or for a walk through its narrow twisting alleys, part staircase, part passage, part drain. There is nothing more picturesque than these little rock-perched towns and villages that lie behind the Italian and French Rivieras. They are as untouched as anything in the way of congregated buildings can be in these days, and carry your imagination right back into the past. And I had thought that a night spent in some old inn in one of them would strengthen that touch of romance for me.

But in Berre there was no inn such as I had pictured, where one would sleep in such a room as I had slept in the night before and awake to a glorious view as from some commanding tower. There were two cafés, and I penetrated one of them in search of dinner and a bed. Militarism was being celebrated with much consumption of fluid, and much singing and shouting, and the place was very dirty, and had that air of hard discomfort and newness which is the peculiar property of French buvettes of the poorer sort. I was not sorry to be told that it was impossible for me to have a bed there. I think I could have got one by pressing for it, but I did not press. The romance of Berre was oozing out fast, and I still had in me the four miles or so that would take me to Contes, in the valley below.

The revellers here were all men of middle age, or at any rate long past the age at which the new three years' service could affect them personally, but their enthusiasm for it was very great. One of them, who had detached himself from the rest while I had been making my enquiries and was reeling down the road waving a branch of mimosa and singing loudly, showed me the way to Contes; for I already knew better than to follow the road, which always approaches these high-perched villages in an over-deliberate fashion for pedestrians. He was very amiable about it, and I rather feared that he would offer to go with me. But he only came a little way, to where he could point me out a mule-track, and during our walk together I understood him to be persuading me, and possibly himself, that he was on the eve of gaining much military glory. But he was bald and pot-bellied, and I think that he was only touched by that noble and unselfish enthusiasm which takes patriotic men when there is question of other people doing their duty.

Dusk was falling, and I went down stony paths between olive gardens, which are very peaceful and mysterious in twilight. I met some of the inhabitants of Berre mounting slowly to their little town after their day's work. Most of the women carried cut olive boughs on their heads, and some of the men drove asses laden with them. It was the time of pruning, and olive leaves are very acceptable to most animals as food. By and bye I had the track to myself, and sometimes lost it, but I did not much mind. I could see the lights of Contes below me, and whenever I found myself on a path that seemed to lead aside from them I took a straight line over the terraces till I found a more suitable one. I was rather tired, but rest and refreshment were not far off, and it was soothing to the spirit to walk in this odorous dusk, and in such quietness.

It was quite dark by the time I came to Contes, and I was quite ready for my dinner. But I did not reach it for some time yet. When I had gone down long, steep, paved paths between walls to what seemed to be the heart of the town I had to go down much farther still until I thought I should never come to the end of things. But at last, there was the bottom of the hill, and an hotel, no less, with a garden in front of it.

I sat down in the café, since, although a room was promised me, there was no suggestion of taking me to it, and at the moment I had no wish to mount stairs even for the sake of a wash. There are certain habits of civilization that are very easily dropped. One comes to the end of a day's march, and one's first desire is for rest, one's second for food and drink; and in these little inns this sequence of desire seems to be well understood. It seemed quite natural to exchange my heavy dusty boots for a pair of slippers out of my pack, sitting by the table, to pass at once to the consumption of wine, and as soon as might be to the consumption of food, without any further preparation.

The wine was very good, with a slight tang that was almost a sparkle in it, and as I sat blissfully at rest with it the room was invaded first by a man with a drum, then by a man with a cornet, then by several more men with very loud voices. I was immediately whisked away by the youth who had received me, and who seemed to be in sole charge of the place, into another little room across a passage, where he presently served me with dinner, consisting of soup, an omelette, beef, potatoes and carrots, cheese, oranges, and biscuits, and another litre of the good wine. Soon after that he showed me a clean little room, in which I slept deeply, hardly disturbed by the voices of the jour de fête beneath me, and was only once thoroughly awakened, at about one o'clock, by a great bustle of arrival in a room adjoining mine.

The busy young man was still as active as possible at that hour, but he was quite ready to give me my coffee at six o'clock the next morning, at a little table in the garden. He had also thoroughly cleaned my boots, but before I left I heard him called a marauder for something or other he had omitted to do for the two gentlemen who had arrived in the night.

For the whole of this entertainment I paid five francs and a half, and the helpful and willing young man explained that the charge was rather high because I had drunk two litres of wine.

And so I came happily to my second day, in the bright spring sunshine.

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 spirit and attire.

Contes is only fourteen miles or so from Nice by a good road, and I thought I might pay my visit, and in the afternoon get back into the hills again. But crowning the ridge opposite to the one I had come down the night before was the old deserted town of Châteauneuf, and in the soft early morning sunshine it looked so attractive that I thought I would go up to it, and walk down to Nice along the valley on the other side.

It was a steep and stony climb. When I got a little way up I was already glad I had embarked upon it, for if I had gone down by the road I should have missed the glorious view I had looking back upon Contes, and upon Berre on its wooded height far above it. I saw now that Contes itself was a most picturesque little town on a hill of its own, crowned by the spire of its church, that its outlying houses ran straggling up the higher slope down which I had come, and that the inn at which I had slept was in another little group right at the bottom of the hill. It was not nearly so large as it had seemed to me in the dark, but it was wonderfully picturesque, from whatever shifting point of view I saw it.

I sat for half an hour outside a little inn before I climbed the last steep slope to the ruins above me. They loomed big and massive, and I asked why the place had been deserted. Owing to lack of water, they told me, but there was still a woman who inhabited it with her children, and had some small "lands" to cultivate thereabouts. There were a few little pocket handkerchiefs of terraced soil among the lower ruined walls, and some tall cypresses growing among the scattered stones. But it was a scene of desolation when one went along what had been a street or lane of the village. The ruin was too far advanced to tell many stories, and only the glorious view, which embraced the sea to the south and all the great panorama of the hills and distant mountains elsewhere, made the reward of the climb.

A ragged child came running towards me over the stones. I "posed" him among the ruins which were his habitation, and asked him questions about them, which he did not answer. I found his mother, with some smaller children, in a dwelling not so very uncomfortable, and she was pleasant with me, and said there was no lack of water at all in Châteauneuf, and it was a convenient enough place to live in, and cheap.

There was not much to stay there for. The ragged child was instructed to take me to some grotto or other which his mother said was well worth seeing, and he did accompany me a few hundred yards on my way down the other side of the hill; but I saw nothing of any grotto, and presently he went back again.

A depression of spirit came upon me as I walked down the road to Nice, which, however, was picturesque enough, passing for some distance through a narrow gorge with a foaming river running along the bottom of it. But there were people in carriages and motor-cars, and presently there were tram-lines and untidy-looking buildings such as always hang on to the skirts of a French town. I was coming into a sort of civilization that I wanted none of at that time. I cut short the approach by taking a tram, and I will say nothing more of Nice except that I spent the rest of the day and the night there.

It took me a long time to get out of it the next morning, and in fact its atmosphere seemed to hang about me all day. I walked along the pavement of the interminable Promenade des Anglais, drank coffee at an auberge somewhere at the end of it, and then took a tram to Cagnes, where they play golf. I must not be taken to throw scorn upon Nice because it did not happen to be the sort of place I wanted at that particular time. It is the chief of the pleasure cities of that sunny flowery coast, and was so when all the rest were mere fishing villages. It is bright and gay, and fronts its curving shore with a flaunting elaboration of architecture that spells wealth and luxury down to the smallest eccentric pavilion. And this wealth and luxury spreads its influence for miles around.

It was evident in the little café restaurant at which I rested early in the afternoon, which was just off the dusty high road to Grasse, and was continually passed by motor-cars speeding along in either direction. It was not a place at which any of them were ever likely to stop, but I was charged at least double prices for the mild refreshment that I took, and when I had paid for it was requested to leave as soon as possible, for the lady of the house wished to shut it up and go and wash at the fountain. I was sitting outside, and could only have carried off a chair and a table if I had been minded to carry off anything, but I was not to be allowed to sit there a little longer. She had got my money and wanted to see my back.

I walked on, into the land of flowers—flowers grown not for their beauty but for their scent, and grown in terraced fields, just like any other crop. Grasse, the centre of the industry, draws supplies for its scents and soaps, pomades and oils, from miles of country around it, and I was getting near to Grasse.

There were great plantations of roses, all carefully pruned and trained on low trellises, but not yet in flower. Sometimes the rows were interspersed with vines, and many of the fields were bordered with mulberries. There were ledges covered with the green foliage of violets, and great double heads of purple, scented bloom peeping out of it. There were fields of jasmine, of tuberoses; terraces of lavender, of lilies of the valley, carnations, mignonette; gardens of orange trees, grown more for their flowers than for their fruit; and of course groves of olives, of which the oil forms so important a part in the local manufactures. This day and the next day I walked for miles with the scent of flowers all about me.

I climbed up to another Châteauneuf; there must be a round dozen of them in Provence alone, and they are all very old. This was another most picturesque hill town, and again I thought I might get a bed there. But I could get no such thing, and after sitting for half an hour on a terrace and enjoying the wide view I set out again as the sun sank behind the hills to walk to Grasse.

I had come up by a wide sweeping road, and took a short cut down through the olive groves to where I thought I should strike it again. But my sense of direction, never very strong, failed me altogether, and I don't know where I might have wandered to if I had not frequently caught sight of the lights of Grasse in the distance. Presently I seemed to be going right away from them, but between me and them there was a deep valley, and I knew that the road which I ought to have taken, or found again, kept to the level on my right. So I turned, to round the slope of the hill which would take me on to it.

I wandered for an hour up paths and down paths and along the edges of terraces where there were no paths, but keeping my face generally to the right quarter. The lights of Grasse shone more and more plainly between the tree-trunks, but were still a very long way off. Sometimes I came across little secluded farms, and in the garden of one of them a great stretch of yellow jonquil shone in the dusk like a square of sunshine left behind from the departed day, and its fragrance followed me for a long way. From another a dog barked and somewhat alarmed me, for dogs are not to be lightly regarded in this country. Later on I should have been more alarmed still, for reasons which will presently appear. But this dog did no more than bark savagely, and bye and bye, when it was quite dark, I came out onto the road, not so very far from Châteauneuf, round which I had walked almost in full circle.

I was still four miles or so from Grasse, but had no wish to walk there if I could find my dinner and bed closer at hand, and just beyond where I had come out onto the road there was an inn, in which I got both. I think this place was called Pré du Lac, but am not sure.

I dined in the café, which was so large as to take up nearly the whole of the ground floor. There was a billiard table in it, but it was in a corner and seemed to make small impression on the floor space. As I sat at my table against a wall, the people of the inn dined at another one, pushed up against an iron stove, and at such a distance from mine that we had to raise our voices in talking to one another.

They were an interesting group, but I had some difficulty in making out their relationship. There was a woman at the head of things, bustling and voluble, who brought me one special dish, which she said was a plat du pays, and not given to every guest. I have forgotten all about it, except that it was good. There was a man with one eye who may have been her husband, but I think he was only a friend of the family. There was a married daughter, rather handsome, with a small child who went to sleep over his macaroni. These sat at the table. But there were besides, a son, who was to be off on his military service the next day, and a girl who may have been a younger daughter. She wore a boy's cloth cap and a black skirt, and looked very much like a Kentish hop-picker. These two hovered about the scene. There were also people coming in now and then, to bring something or to take something away, and they all stayed for a word or two before going out into the night, and slamming the door.

One man, who had just cut his beard very short, or else had not shaved for a week, came to fill a bottle with wine. He stood for a minute or two by the table, talking loudly, and then made for the door, still talking. By the time he reached it he had found something to say that took him back to the table, where he stayed for another two or three minutes. Then he went to the door again, stood there as before, and came back. He did this six or seven times. He first came in as I finished my soup, and finally left us as I was peeling my orange, and I am quite sure that he pictured himself as having stopped just to say a word, and told his wife so when he got home with the wine for their meal.

I watched them as they sat and stood there, talking vociferously, and frequently all at the same time, and thought how different they were from our northern peasantry. They live far better; the poorest of them have well-cooked food and wholesome natural wine as a matter of course. Their ideas flow more freely, and they take a great delight in imparting them. They are not so much under the domination of richer men. One could not, in England, walk through the country and drop down to the way of life of the peasantry without a conscious and possibly irksome process of self-adjustment—as irksome to them as to oneself. There one lives exactly as they do, and lives better than in most middle-class houses in England; and they will talk to you freely, and interest you.

I went over and sat at their table, while the one-eyed man and the married daughter played a game of cards, which they explained to me but I did not understand, and offered me most fragrant coffee, from the stove at the lady's elbow. The patronne came in, and gave me a liqueur glass of rum, which she said would be good for me. A handsome young man in the clothes of a plasterer came in and watched the card game, and another rather older man joined the circle, together with the son and the girl in the cloth cap, who had carried off the sleeping child and put him to bed. She was smoking a cigarette. I suggested that the rum should go round to my order, but only the patronne herself, the one-eyed man and the young plasterer accepted it. The budding soldier would have done so, but his mother forbade him.

The talk was of military service, as it had been throughout the evening. They all disliked the new three years' law, except the one-eyed man, who said that soldiering was all fun and no work, and you saw the world. But they cried out at him that he had never done military service, and he subsided and helped himself largely to counters out of the pool.

They were all as genial as possible with me, looked at my map with interest, and suggested various places that I might visit. The conscript presently showed me up to my room, which was bare but clean, and asked me how many handkerchiefs I had with me. I thought it was rather a personal question, but showed them to him, and he deluged each one with a different scent. He said they were the best scents that could be obtained in or around Grasse, and they were certainly very strong. For some days thereafter my "essences turned the live air sick," and one of the handkerchiefs now, after several washings, retains a faint commemorative odour. But the attention I valued, though the scent I came to dislike extremely.

They were nice people, all of them, though a little greedy, as next morning's settling up showed. But I was still on the high road between Nice and Grasse, and I suppose was fair game.

The weather was still lovely as I set out early in the morning, and Grasse was a sight to see, with its towers and roofs lit up by the sun, as it stood on its dominating height over the wide valley, in which the light mists still lingered.

I walked right through the town, but if I had not already seen something of the processes by which the scents from the miles of flowery fields through which I was passing are extracted and hoarded, I think I should have stayed to do so. For I am so constituted that every manufacturing process remains a complete and insoluble mystery to me until I have seen it, and yet arouses my curiosity and my willing interest.

It was about this time of the year that I had visited one of the light, airy factories of Grasse. I remember a huge, scented mass of the heads of violets heaped up on a white sheet on one of the upstairs floors. It was half as high as I was, and smelt divinely. These were the only flowers in evidence, for the full harvest, when all the great space of this chamber would be covered with gathered blossoms, was not yet. But there were sacks of lavender there besides, and bundles of sweet-scented roots—orris, and patchouli, and vétiver—which can be turned into essences as sweet as those taken from the flowers themselves.

I remember in other rooms boiling vats, very clean, and bright copper vessels, and great stills; and casks full of the fine grease which is used to catch and hold the distilled essences. It is spread on sheets of glass, framed in wood, like school slates, which are stacked in tiers; and other tiers hold the wooden trays for the flower-heads ready to be treated. And of course there were great stores of attractive flasks and bottles, all labelled and ribboned, and ready to take their places in the shops of Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix, and every other place where there is a market for them.

There was a room, too, with machinery for turning out scented soap. You saw a soft fat pink deliciously-smelling roll squeezed out of a press, and in no time sections were cut off and stamped in another press into cakes ready for the toilet table.

I must confess that I have only the dimmest idea now as to the actual details of the various processes by which the scent of the flowers is stoppered up into the aristocratic bottles, but I have seen it all done, and the impression remains on my mind that any scent that bears a label from Grasse does come from the flowers themselves, and with no adulteration that I could see anywhere.

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 crowded corner, the adventure of walking through unknown country would take second place. But at least as long as the weather held I wanted to be on foot, and in the country that lies apart from the main tourist routes.

When I had passed beyond the sphere of the villas with their flowery gardens the road became rather lonely. The fields of blossom became rarer, but there were vines and olives everywhere. The earth was red, and looked rich, and the hills on either side of me took on all sorts of lovely shades of orange and purple and blue, as the light changed and shifted during the day. I could still see, when I turned round, some of the higher mountains from among which I had come, and the country did not sensibly change its character until I had crossed another pass later on in the day.

I walked for some miles, hoping to come across an inn where I could get something to drink. I had had nothing since the bread and coffee of the early morning, and had walked straight through Grasse, only stopping to get my letters and buy some provisions.

I believe that most people on the tramp find it enough to have one good meal at the end of the day. Some of them find it necessary to start with a stout breakfast, but that is hardly possible outside England, and for my part the coffee and roll of France or Switzerland carries me on very well for two or three hours, when I am ready for something more substantial.

You need not trust to an inn for this second collation, and if you do they will only send out to get for you what you could have got for yourself, and charge you rather more for it. They quite understand your bringing your own vivres with you, and eating them to the accompaniment of their wine. Even the wine you can buy and carry with you, but it is hardly necessary to do that as long as you are in a country where you can get it anywhere.

You go to a boulangerie and buy a crisp, newly baked loaf for a penny. Then you go to an épicerie and buy cheese or sausage, or both; also oranges and chocolate to amuse yourself with at odd moments during the day. Here is food fit for the gods, and all you want is wine to wash it down with. My own preference is for a great deal of wine at such times, but there are some who may be content with water. I want water, too, and a great deal of that, and carry an aluminum folding cup with me, filling it almost anywhere without regard to possible germs. It may be dangerous in some places, and possibly so in Provence; but I have never taken any harm from it, there or anywhere.

It was on this morning that I realized for the first time that it was not necessary to find an inn in order to find wine. Everybody makes wine in Provence and almost anybody will sell it to you. I got my litre at a blacksmith's; they brought me out a chair under a tree, and I ate and drank to the ring of the anvil. The wine cost fourpence halfpenny—I like to present these little sums in English money—and was drinkable, but no more. I was beginning to get rather tired of the ordinary red wine of the country, though I never drank white that was not good. But it is mostly red wine that the peasants make, and it is only occasionally that it is anything more than a mere beverage.

That afternoon I came to a beautiful place. The road had been falling for some time, and at last entered a deep and narrow valley of verdant meadows through which flowed a very clear river. I had walked a long way, and it was very hot. The idea came to me to find a sheltered spot and bathe in these clear waters. Perhaps fortunately, there was an inn at the point at which the road crossed a bridge and doubled back on the other side of the gorge, and when I had refreshed myself there bathing did not seem such a reasonable undertaking. The river, though invitingly clear, was rapid, and must have been fed by snows not so very far away; and it was still early March, in spite of the hot sun.

There were motor-cars in front of this inn, and a party had finished a late and from evidence a long déjeuner at a table in the open. They were flushed with food and wine and other liquors, and chattered like parrots before they packed themselves into their cars and made off in the direction of the coast. I disliked them one and all, and felt vastly superior to them—a feeling which no doubt they also experienced towards me, if they took any notice of me at all. Their sensation of superiority would be based upon the fact that they were showing themselves in command of quite a lot of money, and would be heightened by the mild delirium that comes from over-feeding and being carried along swiftly in that state, with no call for bodily or mental effort. Mine arose from the pride of living frugally and feeling particularly well from having walked a good many miles and being ready to walk a good many more in about half an hour's time. I'm not sure, now that I have drawn the comparison, that the one feeling was any more laudable than the other.

I crossed the bridge, which was called the Pont de la Saigne, and began the long ascent to the Colle Noire. When I had reached it the scenery began to show a change. I had left the high rugged hills behind me at last, and was dropping down into a fertile valley, which spread out into a plain. The hills, more rounded now, bounded this plain to the north, and were dotted at intervals with little towns that showed up picturesquely from a distance on their blue and purple slopes. I was making for one of them—Fayence, where I had been assured that I should find a good inn. It was still a long way off after a few hours' walk, and still hidden from me by an intervening hill, and I had walked quite far enough that day.

I sat down on the coping of a bridge as the dusk began to steal over the fields and hills. It was a peaceful, soothing scene. An old shepherd came slowly towards me with his flock following him to their night's shelter. It was like a picture by Millet. There was not enough light for a photograph, but I took one of another shepherd with his flock later on. They watch their sheep as the Swiss watch their cattle in the mountain pastures, never leaving them alone; and I never saw a flock of sheep in Provence that numbered above thirty.

When I had walked on a little farther I got a lift in a cart drawn by an old white horse that was jogging along my way. It was driven by a good-looking young man with a wonderful set of teeth and a pleasant smile. He was a sort of general carrier. He dropped a large bundle of what looked like washing at one cottage and a basket of provisions at another, and a man stopped him on the road to hand in a lantern for repair, and a woman at a railway crossing asked for medicine to be brought the next day. There was a little conversation on general topics at every stop, and the tongue was the true Provençal, which he told me they all talked among themselves, though most of them talked French as well.

Provençal is soft and sweet. It is not difficult to make out its meaning in print if one knows some Latin and some French, but I never succeeded in catching more than the glimmer of an idea of what was being talked about. Of Provençal as a literary language there will be more to say later on.

As we rounded the hill that had hidden Fayence, there came into view a castle with two towers that stood most imposingly on a summit overlooking the valley; but as we approached it turned out to be, not an ancient ruined keep as it had seemed in the dusk, but a not very ancient unfinished château of enormous proportions. It had been built so far, my friend informed me, by a General Fabre, or Favre, and, as I afterwards learnt, about the year 1836. I made up my mind to visit it the next day, for it showed up as a most lordly pleasure house, with terraced gardens commanding the great stretch of country between the range of hills on which it stood, and the mountains of the Estérel and the Maures towards the sea.

Fayence lay just beyond it. My carrier was going on to Seillans, and dropped me at the foot of the hill, and I made my way slowly up a winding road to my night's shelter.

I found a good inn where they gave me an excellent dinner and a delicious white wine. The dinner consisted of pea soup, a spit upon which was impaled alternate morsels of liver and bacon, a dish of little sausages with succulent cabbage, a dish founded on beef or mutton, I forget which, cream cheese, biscuits, oranges, and nuts, and the charge for this, including the wine, of which I drank a large quantity, was two francs. My bed, in a small clean room, was also two francs, and coffee and rolls the next morning fifty centimes. This comes to about three shillings and ninepence for a day's living, apart from what one consumes upon the road; and this was the chief hotel in a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants.

Such hotels are common all over southern France, and easy enough to find in a town not too large or too small. They are not so well furnished or so comfortable as an English inn of the same class, but it would be rare indeed to find an English inn where the food would be so good. An evening meal would have to be ordered or cooked specially, and one would consider oneself charged moderately in a bill that came to no more than three times as much. In the bigger towns such hotels are more difficult to find, but they are there if one knows where to look for them, and has learnt exactly what to look for. In the smaller places to which tourists go, and there is no choice, the charges are considerably higher; but one can usually get a bath, which is an unknown luxury in the ordinary way of things.

I wish very much that I had not left these wanderings on foot over foreign countries until middle age. I can imagine no more delightful experience for a young man, either alone or in company. If I could go back to undergraduate days, I would spend some part of every spring and summer vacation on foot in this way. Ready money is apt to be scarce at that happy age, but it need cost so little.

My own experiences, for various reasons, are no particular guide, but Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who is pastmaster in the art of seeing fresh country, is worth quoting on the subject. He wrote to me when I asked him for advice before setting out on this expedition:

"I think the thing is quite easy if one only remembers that the conditions, upon the Western Continent at least, that is, in France, Italy and Spain, are so different from those in England that no one asks questions and no one dreams of interfering with one's liberty. The rule is as simple as possible. Any inn whatsoever in France and almost any inn north of Naples in Italy gives you a tolerable bed, and on entering it you ask the price of a room and of coffee the next morning. They are accustomed to the process and bargain with you. I have been to dozens of places where I was charged no more than a franc.

"For your mid-day meal you will be wise to carry a leather bottle which the French call a Gourde and the Spaniards a Bota, holding wine, which again you must have filled in shops where wine is sold retail. You will again do well to ask before it is filled at what price the wine is sold. I have carried a half-gallon gourde of this kind over many journeys. It is slung from the shoulders by a strap and is purchasable in all the mountain countries. Bread is purchasable everywhere, and that kind of sausage which the French call by various names, which the Spaniards call 'Salpicon' and the Italians 'Salami' is common to all countries and is with cheese the accompaniment of the meal. Your night meal you must make the principal meal of the day, and if you wish to save money eat it at some place different from the place where you sleep. Thus accoutred you can live indefinitely at a rate of five francs a day and see all that there is to be seen. Always carry upon your person in such countries one good 'piece,' as they call it, for identification, the best of which is a passport issued by the British authorities wherever you are. Be careful to have it viséd by the consul of the countries where you are to travel. It is the visa that counts more than the passport. For instance, if you are starting from Switzerland get such a document viséd by the consul in some principal towns of France, Italy and Spain, then you have nothing to fear.

"Remember that telegrams or letters sent to you at one place poste restante do not tie you to going to that place. You have but to send a message to the post office to have them forwarded to another, and it will be done. But you cannot get your letters, still less your registered letters, at a poste restante without some such 'piece' as I mentioned.

"It is a good rule not to carry personal luggage except in the smallest amount in your sack, and to buy things as you need them. It is cheaper in the long run."

Now five francs a day is not quite thirty shillings a week, and for the price of a few days' revel "in town" an enterprising youngster might spend a fortnight walking through almost any beautiful stretch of country in nearer Europe, including his journey there and back to England. However it may have been in the past, it is now possible to travel third class on the Continent in no more discomfort than in England, and indeed in the holiday season third class is apt to be a good deal less crowded than second, on the fast trains in which third-class passengers are carried. They are not carried, of course, in all trains; but where the saving of shillings is an object it is no particular hardship to spend a few hours more on the way, and unless the journey is a very long one the time lost is small and the money saved considerable.

The burden to be carried is a more debatable matter. Mr. Belloc's advice is worth a good deal more than mine, but his early training in arms must have used him to a less fearful regard of discomfort than is possible with most of us. The less you carry the easier your walking will be, and I would never hamper myself with any protection against rain. Unless you can keep your legs as well as your body protected you must occasionally expect to be under the necessity of having something dried before a fire, and while you are about it you may as well go to bed and have everything dried. But I should not care to be without a spare shirt, at least one pair of spare socks, and a pair of light felt slippers, and with other small necessaries for comfort and a reasonable degree of cleanliness this already makes up a fair weight. Let every one choose for himself. My experience is that one very quickly gets used to a moderate pack strapped upon one's shoulders, and hardly notices it, except for a time after one may have taken a day off and walked about carrying nothing.

I took a day off at Fayence. It was Sunday, although I had no idea of it until well on into the morning.

I came down at about half past seven, and found that the three commis voyageurs in whose company I had dined the night before had already finished their breakfast and gone out; but two of them came in again as I was finishing mine, and transacted serious business with some townspeople whom they brought with them. They keep early hours in France.

I walked up to the top of the hill upon which the town is built, and found an old and very solid tower with a clock in its face and a bell in a cage of wrought iron on the top of it. The clock had a date on it—1908—and I took some little trouble to discover whether it could be seen from any part of the town except by climbing up to it as I had done. I found that it could not. Then I made my way to the Château du Puy.

I approached it along a sort of drive, and stood in a doorway looking down three stories deep into the stone-built husks of enormous rooms, and up into three or four stories more. There was a series of great halls, one above the other, in the main part of the building, and many rooms opening out of them in both wings, which were carried up into imposing towers; and there were lateral extensions besides. The house seemed to have been designed for the accommodation of a regiment rather than one solitary general.

The gardens to the south of it were on a level two stories lower, and the gate to them was locked; but by a little scrambling I reached them. The terraces had been laid out on a grand scale, and gardening had been begun at some date or other. There were overgrown beds of iris getting ready to flower, and in one corner a pièce d'eau, without which no French garden is complete. A tall palm grew in one corner, and there were fig-trees and bushes of hibiscus. In an extension of the main building there were signs of habitation, and an orange-tree bright with fruit grew in the middle of a chicken-run. Olives and almonds had been planted where the ordered garden should have been, and most of the ground had been made use of.

I had been able to get no information about the building of this great pile; the tradition seemed to have departed. I do not know whether it had been stopped by the death of the owner, or, as seems not improbable, by a lack of money to go on. I imagined him, as I sat and smoked in the deserted garden, as having thought continually of this glorious site in his native country, and coming back to it when his fighting was done to build himself the finest house for many miles around. I think he must have enjoyed himself enormously while it was in the building, but not without some doubts as to the way in which it was to be lived in when it should at last be finished.

44a

A PROVENÇAL SHEPHERD

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44b

FAYENCE COULD BE SEEN ON ITS OWN HILLSIDE

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45a

HOW THEY PRUNE THE PLANE-TREES

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45a

THE DOLMEN NEAR DRAGUIGAN

Page [53]

His site must have given him continual pleasure. From his terraced garden the wide fertile plain was spread out before him, in front and on either side. As I saw it, it was all browns and greens, threaded with white roads, and punctuated by dark cypress spires. Miles away it was bounded by pine-clad mountain slopes, beyond which lay the sea. At the back of the house the little town of Tourettes showed its huddle of old roofs and walls a mile away, and behind it the hills rose until snow could be seen on distant summits. From the little side garden with the fish pond, Fayence could be seen on its own hillside, and a range of blue and purple hills beyond it. The sun came out as I sat there, and the shadows of clouds played all over the beautiful scene. It was the true Provence, which gets into the blood of those who are born in it, and makes them think that no country in the world is fairer.

I walked back to the town and went into the church, a large eighteenth century structure of some dignity, with an unornamented tower that looks much older. The curé came in as I was looking about me. He was as handsome and dignified as his church, with his white hair and portly presence, and reminded me of Parson Irvine in "Adam Bede." He was inclined to deprecate my admiration of his church. It was large, yes, not particularly fine, he thought. But I was judging by other standards. A church as large as this would hardly have been built in England in the eighteenth century for a thriving town; for one of the size of Fayence the idea of it would have been laughed at.

It would hardly have been built in Fayence a few years later. When I had gone out on to the little place in front of it, where there were busy market stalls under a row of giant planes, and a view past the Château du Puy to the rich plain and the mountains beyond it, I went back into the church and watched the congregation arrive for Mass. It was not until then that I made it out to be Sunday. One enjoys a blessed disregard of the calendar on such expeditions as mine, walking on from day to day.

Women and children—they filled about a quarter of the seats provided, and these filled hardly more than half the church. There were two old men besides, and one middle-aged one, who came in with his family with an air of importance. The rest of the male population of Fayence was buying and selling outside in the market, or in the shops, or talking together on the terrace steps above the place, or in the cafés, or walking up and down the steep streets.

In the late afternoon I walked over to Seillans, and saw the populace of that town enjoying themselves on a fine promenade that they have on the edge of their hill. It is planted with the ubiquitous shady plane, and overlooks the magnificent view to the south.

A good many of the men were playing their game of boule, which needs only a few yards of hard ground, and some wooden balls about the size of a cricket ball, studded closely with nails. They throw a "jack" about fifteen or twenty yards and then follow closely the rules of our game of bowls. But they throw the ball with the back of the hand up, and give it a spin which makes it run on after it has fallen. When all of them do no more than this the game is dull enough, at least to watch, although the inequalities of the ground give it some interest to the players. But the good players will aim at coming right down upon an adversary's ball and punching it away out of danger. They bend down very low with the right leg curiously crooked, and then run forward fast and spin the ball in the air. It looks a most difficult shot, but I saw it brought off many times by these players at Seillans.

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 of his bon vin for fourpence. He said that his wine was very wholesome, and I had no fault to find with any of its qualities, except possibly that of taste. He talked to me about Mistral, the poet. He had seen him, and said he was a very great man; but he did not seem to have read his poems. There was to be a big Provençal fête at Draguignan in May, and Mistral would be there, as gay as any of them, in spite of his eighty-four years. But alas! Mistral's death was to move all this country for which he had done so much in little more than a week from that time.

It was on that day that the wind, from which the poet's family took its name, and which so vexes the plains of Provence, began to blow. I did not recognize it at first. The sun still shone brightly in a blue sky, and I was rather glad of the strong clean wind that cooled me as I walked. There is something about the name mistral that had seemed to me to connote an unhealthful fever-bringing air. I suppose I had unconsciously connected it with the word "malarial." But the mistral of Provence is the magistral, the great master-wind from the north or the north-east, which rushes down from the Alps and Cevennes to replace the hot air that rises from the sun-baked plains in the great Rhône delta. It is like our east wind, keen and strong, and seems to deprive the air of all moisture, and to make even a cloudless sky look cold.

I first saw Draguignan some four miles away, as I rounded the shoulder of a hill. It is the capital of the Department of Var, having replaced Toulon, which now has more than ten times its population, at the end of the eighteenth century. Baedeker describes it as an assez belle ville, but it was not assez belle for me. I thought it the dullest possible sort of town, although there were picturesque "bits" in the streets of the older quarter. The first thing that struck the eye as I neared it was an enormous range of new barracks, with a huge barrack square. The bugles were blowing gaily, and when I came to the town it was alive with soldiers in dirty white, with dark-blue waist sashes, puttees and tam-o'-shanters. As I walked up the narrow streets of the old town into the untidy-looking newer part, I could not help comparing it with another French military city that I had visited some months before. This was Besançon, the brightest, cleanest, pleasantest large town that I have seen in the whole of France, and I have seen a good many. Perhaps it was hardly fair to compare the two, for I was in Besançon on a fine mellow September day, and Draguignan must have been about at its worst, with the mistral tearing along its streets, filling the eyes with dust and making the pavements look as if all the waste paper and light rubbish of the town were habitually thrown on to them.

And they were pruning the plane-trees. No one who has not visited the south of France when this operation is going on can form any idea of what it means. These trees are planted everywhere, and in summer give a most welcome shade to the hot streets and the wide squares of the bigger towns. They grow to an immense girth, and those in Draguignan were especially fine. The way they prune them, from the very first time of their planting, shows that they know very well what they are about, for they get a wide spread of branch and an even and impenetrable roof of green. The trees are never allowed to get out of hand, and are kept at school when they have passed the span of the longest human life. With ladders and saws and ropes they remove great branches with as little concern as one cuts into a rose-bush. The reward comes in the summer, but an avenue or a "square" of these trees in March, when the saws have been at work upon them, is a desolating sight. Those that I photographed the next morning are umbrageous compared with some. I have seen far bigger planes than these kept to three branches, each as big as a good-sized tree.

I read in the official Directory of the Department of Var that towards the end of the fifth century the town was infested by an enormous dragon (symbol of heresy). The inhabitants had recourse to St. Hermentaire, Bishop of Antibes, who delivered them from the monster. To perpetuate the memory of this happy disencumbrance the town changed its ancient name of Griminum to that of Dragonia, from which has come Draguignan. And St. Hermentaire has been regarded with affection in the locality ever since, though his name is little known outside of it.

I had been recommended by my friends among the commis voyageurs at Fayence to an hotel of the right sort. I should certainly have passed it by but for that, for it seemed to be nothing but a large restaurant, not of the first order nor even of the second, and there was nothing to show that it had much accommodation elsewhere. But when I asked for a bedroom, and suggested two francs for it instead of two and a half, I was introduced to a noble apartment, which reminded me of the pictures one sees in the illustrated papers, when His Majesty the King is put up for a few days at an Embassy abroad. It was very large, and the furniture was old, and some of it handsome, especially the bed, which had more in the way of canopy and curtains than I am accustomed to. The lady of the house told me afterwards that she kept a shop of antiquities in the town, which accounted for some of the unusual splendour. I felt ashamed at paying no more than one and eightpence for the privilege of sleeping in such a room.

The dinner was the same price, and included a bottle of white wine that was worth thinking about as one drank it. A good many men came in to dine, at any time between half past seven and half past eight. Very few of them looked to be above the rank of a workman, and all of them kept on their hats as they ate. They sat in groups at different tables, and enjoyed themselves in much the same way as men do in a club in London. Probably they paid even less for the same dinner than I did, and I hope their wives had as good a one at home.

The mistral blew as keenly as ever the next morning, and I determined to cut off a bit of the distance by train. I wanted to get to some of the interesting places, which are nearly all in the west of Provence. It was a two days' march to Saint-Maximin, where there is a noble church, but I thought I would sleep there that night.

The train did not start until half past nine. I had time to walk out a few miles on the other side of Draguignan to see a famous dolmen, the only remains of prehistoric life to be found in this immediate region.

It was a curious well-preserved structure, hard by a little farmhouse just off the road. I paid a youth who said he was the proprietor fifty centimes for the privilege of looking at it, but thought his demand for a further two francs because I had photographed it unreasonable. He blustered, but made no effort to detain me as I walked off the field with the two francs in my pocket instead of his. I had already been asked once or twice if I was travelling for the purpose of taking picture postcards, and probably that was his idea. But he was a potential robber all the same, and I doubt if he was the proprietor at all. I wish I had thought of threatening him with St. Hermentaire.

It took three hours to cover the thirty miles to Barjols, where I took the road again at half past twelve. Barjols is quite out of the beaten track, although this pottering little line, which eventually reaches Arles, passes near it. As I walked through a very wide place I stopped to ask a group of school children playing marbles which was my route. At the sound of my voice they scattered away with every sign of alarm, and I laughed at them and went on, with my vanity rather wounded at being regarded as an object of terror.

When I had gone a mile down the hill I met a man in his best clothes reading a newspaper. I had seen the start of a funeral procession in Barjols, and I supposed him to have the intention of joining it at his own convenience. He asked me where I was going, and told me I could cut off four kilometres if I followed the route he would describe to me. He took immense trouble about it, and it was a kindly thought, but I wished afterward that he had not had it, although I found his interest in me soothing after having so lately been run away from.

I left the road bye and bye and followed the path that he had indicated, but, as generally happens in such circumstances, it soon ceased to be a path at all, and I found myself wandering among the hills with a very small idea of where I was on the map. There was frequent cultivation, but very few signs of habitation, and I saw no living soul until I struck the high road again more than two hours later. It was not the high road I had expected, and left me about eleven miles to do out of what would have been a total of fifteen if my adviser had been punctual at the funeral. The road to Saint-Maximin was quite straight for the last three miles, and I saw the long line of the great church standing high above the roofs of the town from far away.

I approached Saint-Maximin with an agreeable sense of anticipation. The learned M. Rostan considers that its church shows the fairest page of Gothic art in the South, and to be the only religious monument of real architectural importance in Provence. This is perhaps extravagant praise, but it was at any rate the first big thing of its kind that I was to see. I had surveyed the country at large for a week, and was ready for a different sort of interest, especially as the mistral had blown steadily all day long and walking was beginning to lose the edge of its rapture.

It is not only the architectural beauties of this noble church that give it its interest. It is its connection with a tradition that has left its marks all over Provence, and in past centuries has met with such universal acceptance that it is small wonder that innumerable people firmly believe in it to this day. Saint-Maximin was the first place to which I came that had to do with it.

I read about it that evening sitting before a wood fire in a room more comfortable than is to be found in most French inns. I had come in to Saint-Maximin as dusk was beginning to fall and had gone straight to the church. But it was closed for the night. All I saw was the disappointing west front, which has never been finished. So I betook me to the hotel. Saint-Maximin is a town of small importance in the present day, but it contains a good one, something like an old English coaching inn, both in appearance and custom. It was a pleasant change to dine in a medium-sized parlour instead of a large bare café, and to find a fire in it; for the mistral had blown away all the warmth in the air and was blowing still.

Possibly it was from this inn that Lucien Bonaparte married his first wife, who was the daughter of an aubergiste of Saint-Maximin, where at the age of twenty-one he administered the military provisions of the Revolutionary army. The Revolutionists, disliking any name inclusive of Saint, called the town Marathon, but it reverted later.

So I sat very late before the fire and read about Saint-Maximin and about the legend of the three Marys. It must have been after ten o'clock when I took my candle and went up to bed. Here is the story, adapted from the learned M. Rostan, who made a life study of the antiquities of Provence and especially of Saint-Maximin, and whose memory is deservedly held in honour throughout the country.

After the death of Jesus Christ and his divine resurrection, the Jews, alarmed by the rapid progress made by the new faith in Jerusalem, began a terrible persecution, for which the martyrdom of St. Stephen was, so to speak, the signal. They threw into a boat, without sails, oars or rudder, the following saints: Mary Magdalene,[4] Lazarus and Martha with their servant Marcelle, Sidonius, the man who was born blind, Maximin, one of the seventy-two disciples, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary the wife of Zebedee, also called Salome, and several others, including Sarah the black servant of these last two Marys, Trophimus, and Joseph of Arimathea.

(The list extended itself as the legend grew, for it almost certainly began with three only, as we shall see later. But M. Rostan includes most of the above.)

The illustrious confessors were exposed to what seemed a certain and horrible death, but the sacred barque, far from being overwhelmed by the waves, floated in a calm that spread immediately around it, and protected by the mercy of Providence on its long and perilous voyage, touched at last the shores of Provence at the mouth of the Rhône, at the place now called Saintes-Maries, or Notre Dame de la Mer.

Mary the mother of James the Less, and Salome stayed in that place with their black servant Sarah. The other holy men and women spread themselves over different parts of the country and diligently preached their religion. St. Maximin went to Aix, of which he was the first bishop, St. Martha to Tarascon, which she delivered from the ravages of a horrible monster, St. Lazarus and St. Mary Magdalene to Marseilles.

Now although the church and town of Saint-Maximin bear the name of that illustrious saint their chief glory is of a still greater. St. Mary Magdalene made herself celebrated at Marseilles, then one of the chief cities of the world, by her preaching. After having made numerous converts and performed striking miracles, she went to Aix, where she was named in the charter of the Church of St. Saviour as co-founder with the bishop, St. Maximin. After some years she formed a wish to take refuge from the eyes of the world, and betook herself to the heart of the mysterious mountain forest now called Sainte-Baume, because of the cave in which she passed the last thirty years of her life in the practice of the most austere penitence. Seven times a day angels came to her in this wild retreat and exalted her to the summit of the mountain, so that her ears might be ravished by the celestial harmonies. As her last moments approached they transported her some distance from Sainte-Baume near to an obscure spot in which St. Maximin was then in retreat. She received the last sacraments at his hands, and a few days later breathed her last sigh, leaving behind her, says the Golden Legend, "an odour so sweet that the oratory was perfumed by it for seven days." Her mortal remains were reverently interred, and her tomb became thenceforward an object of remarkable devotion. Shortly afterwards the holy Prelate himself, with others of the blessed saints, was buried at her side, and above these sacred remains arose a church that became from that time a place of pilgrimage and deep veneration.

It is unfortunate that the invasions of the Saracens in the eighth century should have made it impossible to produce documentary evidence of any of this earlier than that date, for those barbarians devastated everything. Seven or eight hundred years is a big gap to cover, and when we begin to look into profane history the gap becomes much bigger; for the legend cannot be traced earlier than the translation of the relics of St. Trophimus in the twelfth century, and did not receive general acceptance until three hundred years later still. But since that time it has exercised an immense power upon the imagination of Christendom.

M. Rostan, who was an antiquarian of note, believed in it. He summons in evidence the stones of Saint-Maximin itself. In 1859, when the church was undergoing restoration, he examined a brick-built tomb which was incontestably of the date of the early Christian era, and "might well be the primitive burial-place of one of the holy personages venerated on this spot." It is true that the tomb was empty, but the sacred relics are stated to have been removed after the persecutions of the fifth century into the sarcophagi which are there to this day. The walls of the crypt also, exposed in course of further restoration thirty years ago, convinced M. Rostan, who saw them uncovered, that this was "the veritable Cubiculum, the sepulchral chamber of St. Magdalene, not only in its plan and dimensions, but in its still living reality, as it existed when the celebrated penitent was buried there, and where they placed her sarcophagus in the fourth or fifth century after the triumph of the Church. The vaulting alone is not the same."

Out of all of which the sceptic may at least accept the fact, interesting enough, that the crypt as it stands is of the date at which St. Mary Magdalene probably died.

When the Saracens were burning all the churches, and scattering all the sacred relics that they could lay hands upon, the Cassianite monks who had been in charge of these peculiarly holy ones for three hundred years, filled the crypt of their church with earth so as to hide it, and for further precaution moved the bones of St. Mary Magdalene from their tomb in the place of honour into that previously occupied by those of Sidonius, where they remained for five hundred years.

So far, then, we have in evidence the tradition of the landing of this company of saints on the shores of Provence and their subsequent missions, not from St. Maximin alone, but also from Aix, Marseilles, Tarascon and Saintes-Maries, in each of which places are monuments to their glory. We have also the evidence of a burial-place of the first century which was an object of veneration at that time and remained so thereafter.

It is true that during the epoch of the Crusades the magnificent church of Vezelay in Burgundy, in which Bernard of Clairvaux preached and Richard Cœur de Lion took the vows, attracted to itself great honour by its claim to possess the true relics of St. Mary Magdalene. But M. Rostan points out that this belief on the part of Vezelay, so far from being in flagrant contradiction to the Provençal tradition, confirms it; for the monks of the Abbey of Vezelay attributed the possession of these sacred relics to the piety of their founder, Gérard de Roussillon, who was Count and Governor of Provence under the Emperor Lothair. "But as the body of St. Magdalene had not been visible at Saint Maximin for a long time, and the precise spot in which it was hidden was not known, the statement of Vezelay was believed, and conferred great celebrity upon it as a place of pilgrimage, until the moment when it entered the designs of Providence to clear up the mystery that enveloped the tomb of the glorious saint and dispel all uncertainty upon the subject of her relics."

The instrument of this discovery was the Prince of Salerno, known later as Charles II, King of Sicily and Count of Provence, who was the son of Charles of Anjou, the belligerent brother of St. Louis.

It was in 1279. While Charles I was fighting in Italy, his son, then at Aix, moved by a great devotion towards St. Mary Magdalene and a lively desire to recover her relics, betook himself to Saint-Maximin in order to have excavations made beneath the pavement of the church. He put himself at the head of the workers, and on the ninth day of September had the singular happiness of uncovering the ancient sarcophagus which held the venerated body. Restraining the zeal of his assistants the prince put his seal on the tomb, and at once summoned a convocation of prelates to witness the exhumation of the sacred bones, which took place on the eighteenth day of the same month. In the dust of the tomb was discovered a box of cork enclosing an inscription on parchment or papyrus, which, translated from the Latin, runs thus:

"In the year of our Lord 716, in the month of December, very secretly in the night, when the most pious Odo was king of the French, at the time of the invasion of the perfidious nation of the Saracens, this body of the most dear and revered Mary Magdalene was translated from its own tomb of alabaster into this one of marble, out of fear of the said perfidious nation of the Saracens, because it is more secret here, the body of Sidonius having been removed."

Contemporary historians unanimously report the miraculous circumstances that accompanied the discovery. All make mention of the delicious odour that came from the sarcophagus when it was opened. They tell, too, how a verdant plant of fennel grew from the tongue of the blessed penitent, whose body had not yet known corruption. The noli me tangere, the spot on the forehead which the Saviour had touched, was in a perfect state of preservation. Among the eminent churchmen who vouched for the miraculous events that surrounded the disinternment was the Cardinal de Cabassoles, Petrarch's friend, whose country retreat at Vaucluse we shall visit later.

Prince Charles caused a magnificent reliquary to be made at Aix to hold the head of the saint. It was of silver gilt, in the form of a hollow bust, into which the skull was fitted. The face and the hair were of gold, and it was surmounted by a gold crown set with precious stones.

In the next year Prince Charles was taken prisoner by Peter of Aragon, and shut up in Barcelona for four years. He attributed his deliverance and the restoration of his kingdom—his father having died in the meantime—to the influence of St. Mary Magdalene, and set in hand the building of a church at Saint-Maximin which should be more worthy of the holy relics it contained. But it was not until more than two hundred years later that it was finished.

Charles carried to Rome the sacred head, to offer it for the veneration of the Pope, Boniface VIII. We are not told how it had come about, but the head had been discovered deprived of the lower maxillary. The Pope knew that a relic of this sort was honoured at the church of St. John Lateran in connection with St. Mary Magdalene. It was found to fit perfectly, and the Pope presented it to the King, who did not keep it with the greater part of the head, possibly because the magnificent reliquary would have had to be altered to receive it, but presented it in his turn to the nuns of Notre Dame de Nazareth at Aix. There it remained, until the amiable King René, who has left such a pleasant memory of himself in Provence, finally restored it to Saint-Maximin.

During all the two hundred and forty years that the great church was in the building the precious relics that it enshrined attracted pilgrims without number. Six Popes visited them, to say nothing of two anti-Popes; in one year alone five kings bowed before the shrine; royalties came from as far off as Sweden; the unfortunate Albigenses, after they had "abjured their errors," were compelled to make pilgrimage to it; and finally Louis XIV, with his mother, Anne of Austria, his brother, afterwards Duke of Orleans, and a numerous and splendid following, bent his knee at the sacred tomb, and assisted in the translation of the relics into a magnificent receptacle of porphyry. These relics would not, of course, include the head. Some vertebræ were offered to the Queen, who accepted them with gratitude. The sacred bones were examined by the King's head physician, and immediately placed in a case of lead covered with gold brocade, upon which the King placed his seal in six places. It was carried the next day in procession, and the church was filled with people, who shed tears of joy to see renewed in their own day "a devotion so holy and august in the presence of a king and queen so pious and devout."

During all these years, however, the relics had not been preserved without vicissitude or diminution. Under the Queen Jeanne, Provence was overrun by brigands, and for three years they were hidden at Sainte-Baume. King René gave part of the lower arm to the nuns who had the lower jaw. In 1505 a Neapolitan monk robbed the reliquary of its jewels, and was caught and hanged. After this mutilation a new reliquary was presented by the Queen of France, Anne of Brittany, as splendid as the old one, and a statuette of herself was added to it in enamelled gold. Louis XIII asked for some fragments of the body, and was refused. Four years later he asked again, on behalf of the Queens Mary of Medici and Anne of Austria, and was more successful, obtaining also a fragment to be presented to the Sovereign Pontiff.

In 1639 a portion of the much venerated noli me tangere was stolen from the head, and, whether it is the same or not, a minute particle of the noli me tangere is cherished in the church of Mane, in the Basses-Alps. In 1781 Louis XVI ordered a thigh bone to be detached and presented to the Duke of Parma, which was done.

We have followed the story for nearly eighteen hundred years, and now comes the Revolution, which wrought more havoc than all the successive disturbances that had taken place before it. The church was spoiled and the sacred relics profaned. The porphyry urn was violated, and the documents it contained burnt. The glorious remains of the saint were thrown pell-mell on the pavement, the head was torn from its gold case, and the other bones from their reliquaries. But the piety of the sacristan preserved the chief glory of the church, which was restored to it five years later. The head, a bone from one of the arms, some locks of hair, together with the reliquary of the Holy Ampulla, and sundry fragments of the bodies of other saints were received back when the storm had passed over, and there the bulk of them remain to this day.

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, at least, that the main facts vouching for its truth went much farther back than they seem to, and if it was difficult to accept quite that galaxy of New Testament names, or the story of the miraculous voyage, still I thought there might be some truth in the tradition as attaching to some of them.

What emerges as indisputable fact, and what moved me at the time, is that through some centuries countless people did believe in every word of it, and thronged this little town where I was resting from all parts of the then known world. And there in the church which I was to see on the morrow was—no doubt about this either—the very thing that had brought them here—princes and prelates, hard soldiers and lawyers, men and women of every degree, making journeys, some of them, of immense difficulty just for the sake of beholding what I or any other traveller coming into a dull little town could see for a few sous before passing on our way. Or would not even take the trouble to see. A man with whom I had talked at dinner came to Saint-Maximin several times in the year and had never seen it. He was 'bon Catholique,' too, and said that there was no doubt at all that it was the head of St. Mary Magdalene they had in the church there. Some day he would go and see it, but not to-morrow, for he was too busy.

You may put your finger on strange gaps in such a story; you may find the first foundations upon which it rests too weak to bear it; parts of it you may refuse altogether to believe. But make what deductions you wish, and what a lot remains.

Some poor tired body was laid to rest in the soil from which this great church has sprung at a time when there were still alive those who had walked and talked with Our Lord; and it was the body of one who was venerated. Out of the dusk of successive centuries come gleams of light that show innumerable people, who differed not so greatly from ourselves, believing that the remains they had knowledge of were those that their forbears had held in honour from the beginning. It becomes hardly more difficult to believe that they were than that they were not.

Say that there has been error, say that there has been fraud if you like, and what have you denied? Nothing in the way of strong and moving power over those who have believed. There is the church, to which men whose names stand out in history made successive gifts through two centuries and a half, until it stood the splendid monument that it is today. There is the dust that countless pilgrims' feet have trodden for two centuries past. There is the echo of prayers and hymns, sighs from burdened hearts and praise from lightened ones that have gone up through ages from this place. The Revolution, which was to sweep away all error and superstition, might despise these sanctities, and scatter the venerated human dust, but it could not destroy the least particle of the faith that had been. It did not move the iconoclasts, but it had moved the world, and its effects remain in spite of them.

The wind had blown itself out the next morning and the air was cold, but sunny and still, as I paid my early visit to the church.

Its beauty is compelling, and when I had walked round it I sat down and tried to find out for myself in what it consists.

The first impression is one of austere simplicity. There are a nave and two aisles, with chapels, no transepts, and except for the Renaissance work about the choir and the altar, and the fine pulpit, scarcely any decoration. Rows of clustered pillars carry arches between the nave and the aisles; and between the arches spring from the floor itself successive groups of three very slender pillars, like rods of stone attached to the wall, which run up uninterrupted far above the arcading, until from a simple moulding spring the delicate ribs of the vaulting, all as light as if it were a roof of leaves held up by slim tree-trunks. The sense of lightness is wonderful, gained as it is without the slightest disguise of the solid masonry, by sculpture or other suggestion; and the wonder increases when one remembers that this is not the work of one architectural genius, but the flower of many successive periods of building. It is clean and strong and beautiful, a church with a true religious significance.

The choir contains some very fine wood-carving and metal-work of the seventeenth century, and above the gilt and jasper of the high altar is a rich device of almost life-size angels and cherubs, surrounding and enclosing a little oval window on which the Holy Dove is emblazoned. The morning sun, shining through this window, made a striking effect, though it is perhaps at variance with the pure dignity of the church itself. The celestial figures are wrought with a gay and delightful luxuriance of imagination. They overflow from the main composition with its sweep and spread of angels' wings; delicious cherubic forms perch on the marble of the reredos, on the carved frames of the medallions which it encloses, on the rich screens of the choir itself; and each of them has its own attitude of devotion, or interest, or expectation, or even curiosity.[5]

The inspiration of the Gothic had begun to die away when the fabric of the church had come near to completion. We may perhaps be thankful that it was never quite finished, for it has such perfection of life as it stands: life that sprang from an impulse lasting through centuries. No such impulse exists now. It is safe to say that the most understanding and sympathetic architecture would seem like a dead thing if it were sought to complete what was left undone.

The church lovers of the Renaissance made no such mistake. Their work was alive, too, and they spent their inspiration not on the beautiful fabric of the church but on its rich furnishing. What they wrought is as far away from us as the work of the Gothic builders was from them, and it is almost as unapproachable.

The iconoclasts of the Revolution wreaked their devastating zeal upon this Gloria, and upon any symbol or figure in the rich carvings of the choir that spoke of power or privilege. The church itself they spared, though you may see a device of fleur de lys on a boss of the roof vaulting spitefully disfigured by bullets.

What was it that they hated so? The arrogance of a church that had allied itself too much with the rich and powerful and worked on superstitions of mankind to gain riches and power and glory to itself, when there was so much wretchedness all around that it made small attempts to cope with? They would have said so, and to imagine them possessed only by the spirit of wickedness would be to make the same mistake about them as they made about the Church. In that dark hour the Church reaped the reward of its virtues at the same time as it paid for its sins. To the extent that it had been faithful those who had drawn comfort and consolation from it came to its aid; and if the fury of its attackers had been ten times as great they could not have stamped out the life that persisted through all the years of destruction; and flowered again profusely when the poor substitutes that had been planted in its place had wilted away. Religion could have done everything to heal the wrongs that had been suffered by the people who were now rising up to take the redress of wrongs into their own hands; and religion had done very little. It had been chiefly on the side of the oppressors, not of the oppressed. At its best it had given consolation in trouble that it had not sought to remove, at its worst it had committed crimes unspeakable. No wonder that a blind, insensate fury against the outward tokens of such a system seized those who thought that they had a mission to remove all oppression from the world. The buildings that enshrined it they could put to other uses, and the churches themselves were spared. But sacred relics they scattered to the dust with bitter contempt, and the treasures of art which spoke of an impotent faith that they despised, they destroyed or mutilated.

One of the minor glories of Saint-Maximin is the Altar of the Crucifixion, or the Corpus Domini, at the end of the north aisle. The high reredos, with gilded columns and pilasters, frames two large paintings and a series of sixteen smaller ones on wood, which are of the utmost interest. It has only comparatively lately become known that these are the work of a Venetian painter of the early sixteenth century, Antonio Ronzen, who stayed at Saint-Maximin two years and a half to execute them, together with the reredos itself.

74a

ALTAR OF THE CRUCIFIXION, SAINT-MAXIMIN

75a

THE FIELD OF THE GREAT BATTLE, WITH MOUNT OLYMPUS IN THE BACKGROUND

Page [94]

Though Ronzen came into Provence from Venice, it seems unlikely that he was an Italian. His name is Dutch, and so is his style of painting; and a striking resemblance has been pointed out between one of these paintings and an engraving of the same subject executed by Lucas van Leyden ten years before. Wherever he came from, Ronzen was a great artist, and left behind him at Saint-Maximin a great treasure.

The sixteen panels are of different scenes in the Passion. The light was not good when I was in the church, and some of them are too high to be seen easily; but most of them are wonderfully fresh and vivid and suggestive, crowded with figures, and creating that sense of intimacy which has always been the mark of the Dutch school. Each of the scenes is set in a characteristic landscape. You can pick out the Ducal Palace at Venice, the Palace of the Popes at Avignon, the Coliseum; and the figures include all the types of the period, from the aristocrat to the peasant. Many of them, no doubt, are portraits of people very well known in their time, who came in and out of the church, or wherever the artist did his work, to see how he was getting on, and had a great deal to say about the painting and about the magnificent present that the Seigneur de Semblançay was making to the church, and what a fortunate thing it was that so clever an artist had been available to undertake the commission. Perhaps they used a little flattery, so that he should offer to "put them in."

He was an important person, this Jacques de Beaune, Seigneur de Semblançay. He was superintendent of the finances of Francis I, whose finances wanted a good deal of looking after, and lived at this time chiefly in Paris. But previously he had been Treasurer-General of Provence, and it might have been well for him if he had stayed in his own country. For he fell into disgrace, and was put to death seven years after Ronzen had finished the pictures he had ordered from him. Probably he found time, during the period from the end of 1517 to July, 1520, when Ronzen was at Saint-Maximin, to pay him a few visits and see how he was progressing. According to the custom of the time his portrait would almost certainly have been included among the figures that still appear so lifelike after five hundred years, and remains there, if we could only tell which of them all it is. Did he have any premonition or dread of the fate that was hanging over him, and did the people who were taking such a lively interest in the work he was inaugurating think of him as having attained to the pinnacle of success, and much to be envied in comparison with themselves, living humdrum lives in their beautiful Provence?

Saint-Maximin has a fine Sacristy, furnished with presses and panelling of beautifully carved walnut, of the seventeenth century. Before the Revolution it contained many rich treasures, gold cups and chalices, silver reliquaries, ornaments jewelled and enamelled. Kings and Sovereign Pontiffs had showered gifts upon it; but in 1793 everything was rifled.

"Barras and Fréron came to carry out the spoliation. Barras presented himself to the Popular Assembly to announce his mission, and a simple peasant, Jean Saurin, who died in 1842, Member of the Club, alone rose before the representative of the Convention to protest against the act of vandalism. He spoke honourably and with energy, but without success: the church was despoiled. Some rare and precious fragments, however, were saved from the wreck by the care and devotion of the sub-sacristan, Joseph Bastide, whose name deserves to be held in grateful memory by archæologists; for besides the sacred bones that the Church of Saint-Maximin can still offer, thanks to him, to public veneration, he was able to withdraw from the revolutionary spoliation a few rich ornaments, some ancient reliquaries, and a textile specimen of great value, the cope of St. Louis d'Anjou, Bishop of Toulouse. This cope, of the end of the thirteenth century, left by the holy bishop to the convent founded by his father, is one of the most beautiful and curious ornaments of the period."

Thus M. Rostan, who proceeds to describe it. But alas! it is no longer there. The sacristan, worthy descendant of the pious Joseph Bastide, told me the sad story after he had made me admire the beautiful woodwork and shown me how the long drawers in the presses that held the vestments drew in and out, as if they had been made yesterday instead of two hundred and fifty years ago.

He had taken such care of the treasures under his charge, locking up everything whenever he left the church, and seeing that all was fast when he went home for the night. And often he would look out of his window, in the little ancient house in which he lived hard by, to satisfy himself that no marauders were about.

But ten years ago—how well he remembered it—the marauders had come. He pointed to the iron-barred window through which they had made their entry. They had taken I forget what from the sacristy, but not the precious cope. I think he rather wished they had. Then they had broken into the church and into the crypt, and from there they had stolen the Holy Ampulla.

"This name is given," wrote M. Rostan, some years before the theft, "to a tube of crystal bearing the characters of the fourteenth century, and containing little fragments of glass, the remains of a phial still more ancient, which enclosed, according to tradition, some of the precious blood of the Saviour, collected by St. Mary Magdalene on Mount Calvary, brought by her to our country and discovered with the remains of this illustrious penitent."

The thieves had broken into the iron-protected case in which this relic was kept, together with the skull of the saint in its rich and heavy reliquary, and a bone from the arm. They had stolen the bone, too, but had left the chief treasure intact, possibly because it was too heavy and bulky to bear away with safety.

What was the meaning of this strange crime? As far as I understand what happened, the breaking in was difficult, and nothing of great intrinsic value was taken, though many things might have been. Much money, certainly, would be paid for such relics as were stolen, if they could have been bought openly; but if the fact that they had been stolen would have to be disclosed, as it would in order to attach even a damaged authenticity to them, of what value were they to anybody?

Protestant zeal, which sometimes indulges itself in a similar way in England, may be ruled out. In France it does not act with those impulsions, and in any case destruction or contemptuous mutilation would be its object rather than theft, and I think the people who had done the damage would be rather inclined to advertise it, and themselves. The sacred skull was not damaged.

Is it not forced upon one to believe that their value to the thief, or to those who may have encouraged the theft, was precisely that which they had always had; which was not represented by money at all?

"If our tradition is well-founded," wrote M. Rostan, "the Sainte Ampoule is evidently the most precious relic of the Church of Saint-Maximin. It has enjoyed wide celebrity throughout centuries, and frequent miracles have been attributed to it. On Good Friday, after the reading of the Passion, the traces of the divine blood were seen to liquefy, to rise and fall, bubbling, and to fill the whole phial. It was called the 'holy miracle.' A great crowd of pilgrims came each year to witness it."

Where is the relic hidden now? Does the thief who risked so much to possess it cherish it in secret, with his sin on his conscience, but hoping from its possession one knows not what in the way of preservation or blessing? Or is it hidden fearfully in some church—a priceless treasure that may never be displayed, but may be expected, by its secret presence, to sanctify its resting-place above other places? Do those who hold it still watch with strained attention on Good Fridays for the "holy miracle" to be performed? Do they perhaps persuade themselves that they see it, as many others must have done before them? For even M. Rostan, good and believing Catholic that he is, does not assert that the liquefaction has been plain to see within living memory.

I asked the sacristan whether the theft had been held to be the work of religious enthusiasts, but either he misunderstood me or his grievance overshadowed all such questions.

They had taken the wonderful cope out of his care. It was a unique specimen of thirteenth century needlework, and is now in safe keeping in Paris. After so many years they might have trusted him to look after it, he said, ignoring the fact that his care had proved unequal to the preservation of relics still more valuable, at least in the eyes of the Church. The Ministry of Fine Arts, or whatever authority had deprived Saint-Maximin of the cope, had been quite content that it should keep the sacred skull, showing some cynicism, it may be thought, as well as indulgence.

With much unlocking of iron grilles and doors, we descended into the crypt, the storied place that has seen so much during centuries past, where kings and popes have bent the knee, and before which so many princes and nobles have put off their arms.

It is almost square—a vaulted chamber about fourteen feet wide and a little longer, with an apse containing the altar, behind which is the reliquary enclosing the skull. The staircase leading down to it, and the side walls of the crypt itself, have been decorated with marble, comparatively recently, but the form of the chamber remains much as it always has been.

The sacred tombs, heavily carved with Biblical subjects, in the manner of the fourth century, are ranged on either side. They are said to be those of St. Maximin, St. Marcelle, St. Susan, St. Sidonius, and St. Mary Magdalene herself. They have been a good deal mutilated "by the piety of pilgrims," and in some degree made up, for the covers do not always belong to the sarcophagi on which they are fixed, or indeed to any other here.

The head of the Magdalen is contained in an elaborate gilt reliquary of the year 1860, of small artistic value. Under a heavy canopy four angels hold up a hollow metal bust with flowing hair, into which the head has been fitted.

What can one say of it? The sacristan pointed out to me the noli me tangere on the forehead, and I tried hard but could not distinguish it, though he said that it was quite plain to him. He was a believer, and I, frankly, was not, although the great antiquity of the relic and its stirring history aroused at least an endeavour to put myself in the mood of one who believed. But he, the believer, made it all appear so commonplace, holding up his stump of a candle here and there to exhibit a great curiosity, but showing no sign either in manner or speech of being moved to veneration or awe, or to any feeling outside those attaching to his customary occupation, that it is little wonder that I was scarcely able to produce any emotion at all.

One asks oneself many questions. Are not all the signs and wonders wrought by such relics as these a matter of self-deception, induced by crowds and movement and the atmosphere of enthusiasm? Or, in the rare instances in which they have been experienced by one alone, arising out of some state of ecstasy, hardly to be accepted as convincing testimony? If not, then how vaguely and arbitrarily these occult powers work! Faced by a known, even if half understood, power of nature, one knows the power to be there, and it will be felt beyond question if contact is made with it. Here, with a supposed spiritual power, there is only deadness of spirit, even with those who have the faith.

With one's facile modern venerations one is inclined to shudder at the iconoclasm of the Revolutionists, who laid rude hands on such objects as this. But may they not have been right after all? Long periods of deadness of spirit are a heavy price to pay for an occasional and questionable exhibition of arbitrary activity. And there are spiritual powers that do react to an exercise of faith, neither occasionally nor questionably, nor arbitrarily, which belief in tangible sanctities tends to obscure.

We locked and barred the grilles and doors and came up into the sunlight, leaving the much venerated relic to keep its watch in the dark crypt. With whatever lack of emotion it may be faced now, even by a believer, there has been no lack of it in the long past. And whatever view you may take of it, it is the seed from which sprang this strong and beautiful church.

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 changed the current of history long before the legend of which my mind had been full had had its beginning. Indeed, centuries were to elapse before the legend was to emerge out of the twilight of rumour and tradition and to rest upon documentary evidence, and yet the one story seems to go back to the dim ages of history while the other far earlier one is as plain in its main facts as if it were of yesterday. For it is of the Roman occupation of this country, and our feet are on the solid rock of history.

After two thousand years, the name of the great deliverer, Caius Marius, is still alive in Provence. Twice alive, indeed, if the very legend of the Marys which permeates the country can be traced back to the tradition of the Marii, of which there seems little doubt. But to that we shall come when we visit Les Baux and the monuments there.

In the year 102 b.c. Caius Marius gained a great victory over the Ambrons and Teutons at a spot between Saint-Maximin and Trets which I was to pass that morning. It was one of the decisive battles of the world, and to judge by the number of the slain one of the fiercest. You may read all about it in Plutarch, and here on the very spot you may follow the details of the parallel march of the Romans and the barbarians until they came to the place of the great slaughter, with recognition at every step, finding indeed here and there actual traces of the battle itself. Certain doubtful points have been cleared up and the story told by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, who went over the whole ground, Plutarch in hand, and published his results in a chapter of his interesting book, "In Troubadour Land."

In the year 113 b.c. the northern frontiers of Italy were threatened by a vast horde of barbarians, of whom the chief were the Cimbri and the Teutons. They did not, however, cross the Alps, but swept westwards into Gaul, carrying with them other tribes, among whom were the Ambrons.

They reached the Rhône three years afterwards and defeated the governor of the Roman province. Three successive consuls were sent against them from Rome, and were also defeated. Their chiefs exalted by success consulted as to whether they should march into Italy and exterminate or enslave the Romans, but although they devastated the province they could not yet make up their minds to march upon Rome.

The Cimbri divided from the rest and poured into Spain, which they ravaged. A few years later they returned, and it was now decided to invade Italy. The Cimbri were to enter it by way of the Brenner Pass, the Teutons and Ambrons by the Maritime Alps.

The menace of the barbarians had been hanging over Rome for ten years, and the utmost consternation now prevailed. Marius was despatched into Provence, as the only man who could cope with the danger there. The barbarian horde had not yet reached the Rhône on their eastward march, but were moving slowly in that direction, and Marius had a winter in which to organize the demoralized Roman troops and to choose his positions.