Book: Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3

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




The whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any
details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the
back of the scene, the space left between it and the chord of the
semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather less
than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very shallow,
and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers standing in a
line, like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent skeleton,
however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and wonder about as
by what it tells you. It has not the sweetness, the softness of
melancholy, of the theater at Arles; but it is more extraordinary, and one
can imagine only tremendous tragedies being enacted there--

"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."

At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing--immense in
height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the other
dimensions are not remarkable. The division to the right, as you face the
stage, is pointed out as the green-room; its portentous altitude and the
open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The compartment on the
left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the traces of other
chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to the theater.
Various fragments are visible which refer themselves plausibly to such an
establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome would appear to have
been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is all I saw, and all there
was to see, of Orange, which had a very rustic, bucolic aspect, and where
I was not even called upon to demand breakfast at the hotel. The entrance
of this resort might have been that of a stable of the Roman days.




Vaucluse

By Bayard Taylor


[Footnote: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's
Sons.]



This district borders on the desert of the Crau, a vast plain of stones
reaching to the mouth of the Rhone and almost entirely uninhabited. We
caught occasional glimpses of its sealike waste between the summits of the
hills. At length, after threading a high ascent, we saw the valley of the
Durance suddenly below us. The sun, breaking through the clouds, shone on
the mountain-wall which stood on the opposite side, touching with his glow
the bare and rocky precipices that frowned far above the stream.
Descending to the valley, we followed its course toward the Rhone with the
ruins of feudal "bourgs" crowning the crags above us.

It was dusk when we reached the village of Senas tired with the day's
march. A landlord standing in his door, on the lookout for customers,
invited us to enter in a manner so polite and pressing we could not choose
but do so. This is a universal custom with the country innkeepers. In a
little village which we passed toward evening there was a tavern with the
sign "The Mother of Soldiers." A portly woman whose face beamed with
kindness and cheerfulness stood in the door and invited us to stop there
for the night. "No, mother," I answered; "we must go much farther to-day."
"Go, then," said she, "with good luck, my children! A pleasant journey!"

On entering the inn at Senas two or three bronzed soldiers were sitting by
the table. My French vocabulary happening to give out in the middle of a
consultation about eggs and onion-soup, one of them came to my assistance
and addrest me in German. He was from Fulda, in Hesse-Cassel, and had
served fifteen years in Africa....

Leaving next morning at daybreak, we walked on before breakfast to Orgon,
a little village in a corner of the cliffs which border the Durance, and
crossed the muddy river by a suspension bridge a short distance below, to
Cavaillon, where the country-people were holding a great market. From this
place a road led across the meadow-land to L'Isle, six miles distant. This
little town is so named because it is situated on an island formed by the
crystal Sorgues, which flows from the fountains of Vaucluse.

It is a very picturesque and pretty place. Great mill-wheels, turning
slowly and constantly, stand at intervals in the stream, whose grassy
banks are now as green as in springtime. We walked along the Sorgues--
which is quite as beautiful and worthy to be sung as the Clitumnus--to the
end of the village to take the road to Vaucluse. Beside its banks stands
the "Hôtel de Petrarque et Laure." Alas that names of the most romantic
and impassioned lovers of all history should be desecrated to a sign-post
to allure gormandizing tourists!

The bare mountain in whose heart lies the poet's solitude now rose before
us at the foot of the lofty Mount Ventoux, whose summit of snows extended
beyond. We left the river and walked over a barren plain across which the
wind blew most drearily. The sky was rainy and dark, and completed the
desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of
the renowned glen. At length we rejoined the Sorgues and entered a little
green valley running up into the mountain. The narrowness of the entrance
entirely shut out the wind, and, except the rolling of the waters over
their pebbly bed, all was still and lonely and beautiful. The sides of the
dell were covered with olive trees, and a narrow strip of emerald meadow
lay at the bottom.

It grew more hidden and sequestered as we approached the little village of
Vaucluse. Here the mountain towers far above, and precipices of gray rock
many hundred feet high hang over the narrowing glen. On a crag over the
village are the remains of a castle; the slope below this, now rugged and
stony, was once graced by the cottage and garden of Petrarch. All traces
of them have long since vanished, but a simple column bearing the
inscription. "A Petrarque" stands beside the Sorgues.

We ascended into the defile by a path among the rocks, overshadowed by
olives and wild fig-trees, to the celebrated fountains of Vaucluse. The
glen seems as if stuck into the mountain's depths by one blow of the
enchanter's wand, and just at the end, where the rod might have rested in
its downward sweep, is the fathomless well whose over-brimming fulness
gives birth to the Sorgues. We climbed up over the mossy rocks and sat
down in the grotto beside the dark, still pool. It was the most absolute
solitude.

The rocks towered above and over us to the height of six hundred feet, and
the gray walls of the wild glen below shut out all appearance of life. I
leaned over the rock and drank of the blue crystal that grew gradually
darker toward the center till it became a mirror and gave back a perfect
reflection of the crags above it. There was no bubbling, no gushing up
from its deep bosom, but the wealth of sparkling waters continually welled
over as from a too-full goblet.

It was with actual sorrow that I turned away from the silent spot. I never
visited a place to which the fancy clung more suddenly and fondly. There
is something holy in its solitude, making one envy Petrarch the years of
calm and unsullied enjoyment which blest him there. As some persons whom
we pass as strangers strike a hidden chord in our spirits, compelling a
silent sympathy with them, so some landscapes have a character of beauty
which harmonizes thrillingly with the mood in which we look upon them,
till we forget admiration in the glow of spontaneous attachment. They seem
like abodes of the beautiful which the soul in its wanderings long ago
visited and now recognizes and loves as the home of a forgotten dream. It
was thus I felt by the fountains of Vaucluse; sadly and with weary steps I
turned away, leaving its loneliness unbroken as before.

We returned over the plain in the wind, under the gloomy sky, passed
L'Isle at dusk, and after walking an hour with a rain following close
behind us stopt at an auberge in Le Thor, where we rested our tired frames
and broke our long day's fasting. We were greeted in the morning with a
dismal rain and wet roads as we began the march. After a time, however, it
poured down in such torrents that we were obliged to take shelter in a
remise by the roadside, where a good woman who addrest us in the
unintelligible Provençal kindled up a blazing fire. On climbing a long
hill when the storm had abated, we experienced a delightful surprise.
Below us lay the broad valley of the Rhone, with its meadows looking fresh
and spring-like after the rain. The clouds were breaking away; clear blue
sky was visible over Avignon, and a belt of sunlight lay warmly along the
mountains of Languedoc. Many villages with their tall picturesque towers
dotted the landscape, and the groves of green olive enlivened the
barrenness of winter.




The Pont du Gard--Aigues-Mortes-Nîmes

By Henry James


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



It was a pleasure to feel one's self in Provence again--the land where the
silver-gray earth is impregnated with the light of the sky. To celebrate
the event, as soon as I arrived at Nîmes I engaged a calèche to convey me
to the Pont du Gard. The day was yet young, and it was perfectly fair; it
appeared well, for a longish drive, to take advantage, without delay, of
such security. After I had left the town I became more intimate with that
Provençal charm which I had already enjoyed from the window of the train,
and which glowed in the sweet sunshine and the white rocks, and lurked in
the smoke-puffs of the little olives.

The olive-trees in Provence are half the landscape. They are neither so
tall, so stout, nor so richly contorted as I have seen them beyond the
Alps; but this mild colorless bloom seems the very texture of the country.
The road from Nîmes, for a distance of fifteen miles, is superb; broad
enough for an army, and as white and firm as a dinner-table. It stretches
away over undulations which suggest a kind of harmony; and in the curves
it makes through the wide, free country, where there is never a hedge or a
wall, and the detail is always exquisite, there is something majestic,
almost processional. You are very near (the Pont du Gard) before you see
it; the ravine it spans suddenly opens and exhibits the picture. The scene
at this point grows extremely beautiful. The ravine is the valley of the
Garden, which the road from Nîmes has followed some time without taking
account of it, but which, exactly at the right distance from the aqueduct,
deepens and expands, and puts on those characteristics which are best
suited to give it effect. The gorge becomes romantic, still, and solitary,
and, with its white rocks and wild shrubbery, hangs over the clear,
colored river, in whose slow course there is here and there a deeper pool.
Over the valley, from side to side, and ever so high in the air, stretch
the three tiers of the tremendous bridge. They are unspeakably imposing,
and nothing could well be more Roman.

The hugeness, the solidity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude
of the whole thing leave you nothing to say--at the time--and make you
stand gazing. You simply feel that it is noble and perfect, that it has
the quality of greatness. A road, branching from the highway, descends to
the level of the river and passes under one of the arches. This road has a
wide margin of grass and loose stones, which slopes upward into the bank
of the ravine. You may sit here as long as you please, staring up at the
light, strong piers; the spot is extremely natural, tho two or three stone
benches have been erected on it.

I remained there an hour and got a complete impression; the place was
perfectly soundless, and for the time, at least, lonely; the splendid
afternoon had begun to fade, and there was a fascination in the object I
had come to see. It came to pass that at the same time I discovered in it
a certain stupidity, a vague brutality. That element is rarely absent from
great Roman work, which is wanting in the nice adaption of the means to
the end. The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than
attained. The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose
a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do
nothing great. Of this Roman rigidity the Pont du Gard is an admirable
example.

It would be a great injustice, however, not to insist upon its beauty--a
kind of manly beauty, that of an object constructed not to please but to
serve, and impressive simply from the scale on which it carries out this
intention. The number of arches in each tier is different; they are
smaller and more numerous as they ascend. The preservation of the thing is
extraordinary; nothing has crumbled or collapsed; every feature remains;
and the huge blocks of stone, of a brownish-yellow (as if they had been
baked by the Provençal sun for eighteen centuries), pile themselves,
without mortar or cement, as evenly as the day they were laid together.

All this to carry the water of a couple of springs to a little provincial
city! The conduit on the top has retained its shape and traces of the
cement with which it was lined. When the vague twilight began to gather,
the lonely valley seemed to fill itself with the shadow of the Roman name,
as if the mighty empire were still as erect as the support of the
aqueduct; and it was open to a solitary tourist, sitting there
sentimental, to believe that no people has ever been, or will ever be, as
great as that, measured, as we measure the greatness of an individual, by
the push they gave to what they undertook. The Pont du Gard is one of the
three or four deepest impressions they have left; it speaks of them in a
manner with which they might have been satisfied....

On my way back to the little inn where I had left my vehicle, I passed the
Pont du Gard, and took another look at it. Its great arches made windows
for the evening sky, and the rocky ravine, with its dusky cedars and
shining river, was lonelier than before. At the inn I swallowed, or tried
to swallow, a glass of horrible wine with my coachman; after which, with
my team, I drove back to Nîmes in the moonlight. It only added a more
solitary whiteness to the constant sheen of the Provençal landscape.

* * * * *

The weather the next day was equally fair, so that it seemed an imprudence
not to make sure of Aigues-Mortes. Nîmes itself could wait; at a pinch, I
could attend to Nîmes in the rain. It was my belief that Aigues-Mortes was
a little gem, and it is natural to desire that gems should have an
opportunity to sparkle. This is an excursion of but a few hours, and there
is a little friendly, familiar, dawdling train that will convey you, in
time for a noonday breakfast, to the small dead town where the blest Saint
Louis twice embarked for the crusades. You may get back to Nîmes for
dinner; the run is of about an hour.

I found the little journey charming, and looked out of the carriage
window, on my right, at the distant Cévennes, covered with tones of amber
and blue, and, all around, at vineyards red with the touch of October. The
grapes were gone, but the plants had a color of their own. Within a
certain distance of Aigues-Mortes they give place to wide salt-marshes,
traversed by two canals; and over this expanse the train rumbles slowly
upon a narrow causeway, failing for some time, tho you know you are near
the object of your curiosity, to bring you to sight of anything but the
horizon. Suddenly it appears, the towered and embattled mass, lying so low
that the crest of its defences seems to rise straight out of the ground;
and it is not till the train stops, close before them that you are able to
take the full measure of its walls.

Aigues-Mortes stands on the edge of a wide étang, or shallow inlet of the
sea, the further side of which is divided by a narrow band of coast from
the Gulf of Lyons. Next after Carcassonne, to which it forms an admirable
pendant, it is the most perfect thing of the kind in France. It has a
rival in the person of Avignon, but the ramparts of Avignon are much less
effective. Like Carcassonne, it is completely surrounded with its old
fortifications; and if they are far simpler in character (there is but one
circle), they are quite as well preserved. The moat has been filled up,
and the site of the town might be figured by a billiard-table without
pockets. On this absolute level, covered with coarse grass, Aigues-Mortes
presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a school-boy draws
upon his slate, or that we see in the background of early Flemish
pictures--a simple parallelogram, of a contour almost absurdly bare,
broken at intervals by angular towers and square holes.

Such, literally speaking, is this delightful little city, which needs to
be seen to tell its full story. It is extraordinarily pictorial, and if it
is a very small sister of Carcassonne, it has at least the essential
features of the family. Indeed, it is even more like an image and less
like a reality than Carcassonne; for by position and prospect it seems
even more detached from the life of the present day. It is true that
Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it sees certain bags of salt piled
into barges which stand in a canal beside it, and which carry their cargo
into actual places. But nothing could well be more drowsy and desultory
than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two or three
brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier who strolled on
the little quay beneath the western wall. "C'est bien plaisant, c'est bien
paisible," said this worthy man, with whom I had some conversation; and
pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed, tho the former of these
epithets may suggest an element of gayety in which Aigues-Mortes is
deficient.

The sand, the salt, the dull sea-view, surround it with a bright, quiet
melancholy. There are fifteen towers and nine gates, five of which are on
the southern side, overlooking the water. I walked all round the place
three times (it doesn't take long), but lingered most under the southern
wall, where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I
sat down on an old stone, and looked away to the desolate salt-marshes and
still, shining surface of the étang; and, as I did so, reflected that this
was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the
great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took
place, in 1538, between Francis I. and Charles V. It was also not easy to
perceive how Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the Holy
Land, set his army afloat in such very undeveloped channels.

An hour later I purchased in the town a little pamphlet by M. Marius
Topin, who undertakes to explain this latter anomaly, and to show that
there is water enough in the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have
sustained a fleet of crusaders. I was unable to trace the channel that he
points out, but was glad to believe that, as he contends, the sea has not
retreated from the town since the thirteenth century. It was comfortable
to think that things are not so changed as that. M. Topin indicates that
the other French ports of the Mediterranean were not then "disponibles,"
and that Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible spot for an embarkation.

Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not
crumbled, like the Cité of Carcassonne. It can hardly be said to be alive;
but if it is dead it has been very neatly embalmed. The hand of the
restorer rests on it constantly; but this artist has not, as at
Carcassonne, had miracles to accomplish. The interior is very still and
empty, with small stony, whitewashed streets, tenanted by a stray dog, a
stray cat, a stray old woman. In the middle is a little place, with two or
three cafés decorated by wide awnings--a little place of which the
principal feature is a very bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by Pradier.
It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that bears the name
of that pious monarch.

You may walk round the enceinte of Aigues-Mortes, both outside and in; but
you may not, as at Carcassonne, make a portion of this circuit on the
chemin de ronde, the little projecting footway attached to the inner face
of the battlements. This footway, wide enough only for a single
pedestrian, is in the best order, and near each of the gates a flight of
steps leads up to it; but a locked gate, at the top of the steps, makes
access impossible, or at least unlawful. Aigues-Mortes, however, has its
citadel, an immense tower, larger than any of the others, a little
detached, and standing at the northwest angle of the town. I called upon
the casernier--the custodian of the walls--and in his absence I was
conducted through this big Tour de Constance by his wife, a very mild,
meek woman, yellow with the traces of fever and ague--a scourge which, as
might be expected in a town whose name denotes "dead waters," enters
freely at the nine gates.

The Tour de Constance is of extraordinary girth and solidity, divided into
three superposed circular chambers, with very fine vaults, which are
lighted by embrasures of prodigious depth, converging to windows little
larger than loop-holes. The place served for years as a prison to many of
the Protestants of the south whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
had exposed to atrocious penalties, and the annals of these dreadful
chambers during the first half of the last century were written in tears
and blood. Some of the record cases of long confinement there make one
marvel afresh at what man has inflicted and endured. In a country in which
a policy of extermination was to be put into practise this horrible tower
was an obvious resource. From the battlements at the top, which is
surmounted by an old disused lighthouse, you see the little compact
rectangular town, which looks hardly bigger than a garden-patch, mapped
out beneath you, and follow the plain configuration of its defenses. You
take possession of it, and you feel that you will remember it always.

* * * * *

In general Nîmes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman remains, which
are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail in many of its
streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses are new; while
beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which had the oddest air
of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland....

What nobler ornament can there be than the Roman baths at the foot of Mont
Cavalier, and the delightful old garden that surrounds them? All that
quarter of Nîmes has every reason to be proud of itself; it has been
revealed to the world at large by copious photography. A clear, abundant
stream gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered with trees and laid
out in paths), and is distributed into basins which sufficiently refer
themselves to the period that gave them birth--the period that has left
its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we admired at Montpellier. Here are
the same terraces and steps and balustrades, and a system of water-works
less impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious and charming.

The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French eighteenth
century; for the remains of the antique baths are in a measure
incorporated in the modern fountains. In a corner of this umbrageous
precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known as a temple of Diana,
but was more apparently a nymphaeum, and appears to have had a graceful
connection with the adjacent baths. I learn from Murray that this little
temple, of the period of Augustus, "was reduced to its present state of
ruin in 1577;" the moment at which the towns-people, threatened with a
siege by the troops of the crown, partly demolished it, lest it should
serve as a cover to the enemy. The remains are very fragmentary, but they
serve to show that the place was lovely. I spent half an hour in it on a
perfect Sunday morning (it is enclosed by a high grille, carefully tended,
and has a warden of its own), and with the help of my imagination tried to
reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the Gallo-Roman days.

I do wrong, perhaps, to say that I tried; from a flight so deliberate I
should have shrunk. But there was a certain contagion of antiquity in the
air; and among the ruins of baths and temples, in the very spot where the
aqueduct that crosses the Garden in the wondrous manner I had seen
discharged itself, the picture of a splendid paganism seemed vaguely to
glow. Roman baths--Roman baths; those words alone were a scene.

Everything was changed; I was strolling in a jardin français; the bosky
slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hanging over the
place, is crowded with a shapeless tower, which is as likely to be of
medieval as of antique origin; and yet, as I leaned on the parapet of one
of the fountains, where a flight of curved steps (a hemicycle, as the
French say) descended into a basin full of dark, cool recesses, where the
slabs of the Roman foundations gleam through the clear green water--as in
this attitude I surrendered myself to contemplation and reverie, it seemed
to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world. Such moments are
illuminating, and the light of this one mingles, in my memory, with the
dusky greenness of the Jardin de la Fontaine.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.