Part 5 (1/2)

XXVI.

It was a pleasure to feel one's self in Provence again, - the land where the silver-gray earth is im- pregnated with the light of the sky. To celebrate the event, as soon as I arrived at Nimes I engaged a caleche to convey me to the Pont du Gard. The day was yet young, and it was perfectly fair; it ap- peared 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 Provencal charm which I had already enjoyed from the window of the train, and which glowed in the sweet suns.h.i.+ne 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 Nimes, 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. Some twenty minutes before I reached the little inn that marks the termination of the drive, my vehicle met with an ac- cident which just missed being serious, and which engaged the attention of a gentleman, who, followed by his groom and mounted on a strikingly handsome horse happened to ride up at the moment. This young man, who, with his good looks and charming manner, might have stepped out of a novel of Octave Feuillet, gave me some very intelligent advice in reference to one of my horses that had been injured, and was so good as to accompany me to the inn, with the re- sources of which he was acquainted, to see that his recommendations were carried out. The result of our interview was that he invited me to come and look at a small but ancient chateau in the neighborhood, which he had the happiness - not the greatest in the world, he intimated - to inhabit, and at which I en- gaged to present myself after I should have spent an hour at the Pont du Gard. For the moment, when we separated, I gave all my attention to that great structure. You are very near it 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 Gardon, which the road from Nimes has followed some time without taking account of it, but which, exactly at the right distance from the aqueduct, deepens and ex- pands, 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 soli- dity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rect.i.tude of the whole thing leave you nothing to say - at the time - and make you stand gazing. You simply feel that it is n.o.ble and perfect, that it has the quality of greatness. A road, branching from the highway, de- scends to the level of the river and pa.s.ses under one of the arches. This road has a wide margin of gra.s.s 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 ex- tremely natural, though two or three stone benches have been erected on it. I remained there an hour and got a cornplete impression; the place was per- fectly 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 pa.s.s 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 adaptation 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 dif- ferent; they are smaller and more numerous as they ascend. The preservation of the thing is extra- ordinary; 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 Provencal 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 con- duit 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 supports 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.

I feel as if it were scarcely discreet to indicate the whereabouts of the chateau of the obliging young man I had met on the way from Nimes; I must con- tent myself with saying that it nestled in an en- chanting valley, - _dans le fond_, as they say in France, - and that I took my course thither on foot, after leaving the Pont du Gard. I find it noted in my journal as ”an adorable little corner.” The princ.i.p.al feature of the place is a couple of very ancient towers, brownish-yellow in hue, and mantled in scarlet Vir- ginia-creeper. One of these towers, reputed to be of Saracenic origin, is isolated, and is only the more effective; the other is incorporated in the house, which is delightfully fragmentary and irregular. It had got to be late by this time, and the lonely _castel_ looked crepuscular and mysterious. An old house- keeper was sent for, who showed me the rambling interior; and then the young man took me into a dim old drawing-room, which had no less than four chimney-pieces, all unlighted, and gave me a refec- tion of fruit and sweet wine. When I praised the wine and asked him what it was, he said simply, ”C'est du vin de ma mere!” Throughout my little joumey I had never yet felt myself so far from Paris; and this was a sensation I enjoyed more than my host, who was an involuntary exile, consoling him- self with laying out a _manege_, which he showed me as I walked away. His civility was great, and I was greatly touched by it. On my way back to the little inn where I had left my vehicle, I pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ning river, was lonelier than before. At the inn I swallowed, or tried to swallow,a gla.s.s of horrible wine with my coach- man; after which, with my reconstructed team, I drove back to Nimes in the moonlight. It only added a more solitary whiteness to the constant sheen of the Provencal landscape.

XXVII.

The weather the next day was equally fair, so that it seemed an imprudence not to make sure of Aigues- Mortes. Nimes itself could wait; at a pinch, I could attend to Nimes 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 con- vey you, in time for a noonday breakfast, to the small dead town where the blessed Saint-Louis twice em- barked for the crusades. You may get back to Nimes for dinner; the run - or rather the walk, for the train doesn't run - is of about an hour. I found the little journey charming, and looked out of the carriage win- dow, on my right, at the distant Cevennes, 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 ca.n.a.ls; and over this expanse the train rumbles slowly upon a narrow causeway, failing for some time, though you know you are near the object of your curiosity, to bring you to sight of anything but the horizon. Sud- denly it appears, the towered and embattled ma.s.s, 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 _etang_, 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 Carca.s.sonne, 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 Carca.s.sonne, it is completely sur- rounded 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 coa.r.s.e gra.s.s, 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 speak- ing, 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 Carca.s.sonne, it has at least the essential features of the family. Indeed, it is even more like an image and less like a reality than Carca.s.sonne; 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 busi- ness; it sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a ca.n.a.l 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 conversa- tion; and pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed, though 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 the still, s.h.i.+ning surface of the _etang_, 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 _dis- ponsibles_, 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 Cite of Carcas- sonne. 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 Carca.s.sonne, 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 cafes decorated by wide awnings, - a little _place_ of which the princ.i.p.al 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 Carca.s.sonne, make a por- tion 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 im- possible, 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 north- west 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 ex- pected in a town whose name denotes ”dead waters,”

enters freely at the nine gates. The Tour de Con- stance 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 recorded 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 practice this horrible tower was an obvious resource.

From the battlements at the top, which is surmounted by an old disused light-house, you see the little com- pact rectangular town, which looks hardly bigger than a garden-patch, mapped out beneath you, and follow the plain configuration of its defences. You take possession of it, and you feel that you will remember it always.

XXVIII.

After this I was free to look about me at Nimes, and I did so with such attention as the place appeared to require. At the risk of seeming too easily and too frequently disappointed, I will say that it required rather less than I had been prepared to give. It is a town of three or four fine features, rather than a town with, as I may say, a general figure. In general, Nimes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman re- mains, which are of the first order. The new French fas.h.i.+ons 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. It is true that this church looked out on a square completely French, - a square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a cla.s.sical _palais de justice_ embellished with trees and parapets, and occupied in the centre with a group of allegorical statues, such as one encounters only in the cities of France, the chief of these being a colossal figure by Pradier, representing Nimes. An English, an American, town which should have such a monu- ment, such a square, as this, would be a place of great pretensions; but like so many little _villes de province_ in the country of which I write, Nimes is easily ornamental. What n.o.bler 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 Nimes 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 ad- mired at Montpellier. Here are the same terraces and steps and bal.u.s.trades, and a system of water-works less impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious and charm- ing. 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 con- nection 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 townspeople, 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 en- closed by a high _grille_, carefully tended, and has a warden of its own), and with the help of my imagina- tion tried to reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the Gallo-Roman days. I do wrong, perhaps, to say that 1 _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 Gardon 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. Every- thing was changed: I was strolling in a _jardin francais_; the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hanging over the place, is crowned with a shapeless tower, which is as likely to be of mediaeval 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 att.i.tude I surrendered myself to contemplation and reverie, it seemed to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world. Such mo- ments are illuminating, and the light of this one mingles, in my memory, with the dusky greenness of the Jardin de la Fontaine.

The fountain proper - the source of all these dis- tributed waters - is the prettiest thing in the world, a reduced copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up at the foot of the Mont Cavalier, at a point where that eminence rises with a certain cliff-like effect, and, like other springs in the same circ.u.mstances, appears to issue from the rock with a sort of quivering stillness. I trudged up the Mont Cavalier, - it is a matter of five minutes, - and having committed this c.o.c.kneyism en- hanced it presently by another. I ascended the stupid Tour Magne, the mysterious structure I mentioned a moment ago. The only feature of this dateless tube, except the inevitable collection of photographs to which you are introduced by the door-keeper, is the view you enjoy from its summit. This view is, of course, remarkably fine, but I am ashamed to say I have not the smallest recollection of it; for while I looked into the brilliant s.p.a.ces of the air I seemed still to see only what I saw in the depths of the Roman baths, - the image, disastrously confused and vague, of a vanished world. This world, however, has left at Nimes a far more considerable memento than a few old stones covered with water-moss. The Roman arena is the rival of those of Verona and of Arles; at a respectful distance it emulates the Colosseum. It is a small Colosseum, if I may be allowed the expression, and is in a much better preservation than the great circus at Rome. This is especially true of the external walls, with their arches, pillars, cornices. I must add that one should not speak of preservation, in regard to the arena at Nimes, without speaking also of repair.

After the great ruin ceased to be despoiled, it began to be protected, and most of its wounds have been dressed with new material. These matters concern the archaeologist; and I felt here, as I felt afterwards at Arles, that one of the profane, in the presence of such a monument, can only admire and hold his tongue. The great impression, on the whole, is an impression of wonder that so much should have sur- vived. What remains at Nimes, after all dilapidation is estimated, is astounding. I spent an hour in the Arenes on that same sweet Sunday morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that the corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are still virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the Colosseum, whose sublimity of size, however, can afford to dispense with detail. The seats at Nimes, like those at Verona, have been largely renewed; not that this mattered much, as I lounged on the cool surface of one of them, and admired the mighty concavity of the place and the elliptical sky- line, broken by uneven blocks and forming the rim of the monstrous cup, - a cup that had been filled with horrors. And yet I made my reflections; I said to myself that though a Roman arena is one of the most impressive of the works of man, it has a touch of that same stupidity which I ventured to discover in the Pont du Gard. It is brutal; it is monotonous; it is not at all exquisite. The Arenes at Nimes were ar- ranged for a bull-fight, - a form of recreation that, as I was informed, is much _dans les habitudes Nimoises_, and very common throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it is the usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nimes it has a characteristic setting, but in the villages the patrons of the game make a circle of carts and barrels, on which the spectators perch themselves. I was sur- prised at the prevalence, in mild Provence, of the Iberian vice, and hardly know whether it makes the custom more respectable that at Nimes and Arles the thing is shabbily and imperfectly done. The bulls are rarely killed, and indeed often are bulls only in the Irish sense of the term, - being domestic and motherly cows. Such an entertainment of course does not supply to the arena that element of the exquisite which I spoke of as wanting. The exquisite at Nimes is mainly represented by the famous Maison Carree.

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

If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy production, the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard that conducts to it, adorned with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops. Here, in a respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations, and with the theatre, of a cla.s.sic pretension, opposite, stands the small ”square house,” so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of a playing-card, and he ex- presses his admiration for it by the singular wish that an ”exact copy” of it should be erected in Paris.

He even goes so far as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been rendered to its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to ”have” in that city ”le Pantheon de Rome, quelques temples de Grece.” Stendhal found it amusing to write in the character of a _commis-voyageur_, and some- times it occurs to his reader that he really was one.

XXIX.

On my way from Nimes to Arles, I spent three hours at Tarascon; chiefly for the love of Alphonse Daudet, who has written nothing more genial than ”Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Taitarin,” and the story of the ”siege” of the bright, dead little town (a mythic siege by the Prussians) in the ”Conies du Lundi.” In the introduction which, for the new edition of his works, he has lately supplied to ”Tar- tarin,” the author of this extravagant but kindly satire gives some account of the displeasure with which he has been visited by the ticklish Tarascon- nais. Daudet relates that in his attempt to shed a humorous light upon some of the more erratic phases of the Provencal character, he selected Tarascon at a venture; not because the temperament of its natives is more vainglorious than that of their neighbors, or their rebellion against the ”despotism of fact” more marked, but simply because he had to name a par- ticular Provencal city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of women, a true ”_produit du midi_,” as Daudet says, who has the most fantastic and fabulous adventures. He is a minimized Don Quixote, with much less dignity, but with equal good faith; and the story of his exploits is a little masterpiece of the light comical. The Tarasconnais, however, declined to take the joke, and opened the vials of their wrath upon the mocking child of Nimes, who would have been better employed, they doubtless thought, in show- ing up the infirmities of his own family. I am bound to add that when I pa.s.sed through Tarascon they did not appear to be in the least out of humor. Nothing could have been brighter, softer, more suggestive of amiable indifference, than the picture it presented to my mind. It lies quietly beside the Rhone, looking across at Beaucaire, which seems very distant and in- dependent, and tacitly consenting to let the castle of the good King Rene of Anjou, which projects very boldly into the river, pa.s.s for its most interesting feature.

The other features are, primarily, a sort of vivid sleepi- ness in the aspect of the place, as if the September noon (it had lingered on into October) lasted longer there than elsewhere; certain low arcades, which make the streets look gray and exhibit empty vistas; and a very curious and beautiful walk beside the Rhone, denominated the Chaussee, - a long and narrow cause- way, densely shaded by two rows of magnificent old trees, planted in its embankment, and rendered doubly effective, at the moment I pa.s.sed over it, by a little train of collegians, who had been taken out for mild exercise by a pair of young priests. Lastly, one may say that a striking element of Tarascon, as of any town that lies on the Rhone, is simply the Rhone itself: the big brown flood, of uncertain temper, which has never taken time to forget that it is a child of the mountain and the glacier, and that such an origin carries with it great privileges. Later, at Avignon, I observed it in the exercise of these privileges, chief among which was that of frightening the good people of the old papal city half out of their wits.

The chateau of King Rene serves to-day as the prison of a district, and the traveller who wishes to look into it must obtain his permission at the _Mairie of Tarascon_. If he have had a certain experience of French manners, his application will be accompanied with the forms of a considerable obsequiosity, and in this case his request will be granted as civilly as it has been made. The castle has more of the air of a severely feudal fortress than I should suppose the period of its construction (the first half of the fifteenth century) would have warranted; being tremendously bare and perpendicular, and constructed for comfort only in the sense that it was arranged for defence. It is a square and simple ma.s.s, composed of small yellow stones, and perched on a pedestal of rock which easily commands the river. The building has the usual cir- cular towers at the corners, and a heavy cornice at the top, and immense stretches of sun-scorched wall, relieved at wide intervals by small windows, heavily cross-barred. It has, above all, an extreme steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle has kept its large moat, which is now a hollow filled with wild plants. To this tall fortress the good Rene retired in the middle of the fifteenth century, finding it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a dominion which had included Naples and Sicily, Lorraine and Anjou. He had been a much-tried monarch and the sport of a various fortune, fighting half his life for thrones he didn't care for, and exalted only to be quickly cast down. Provence was the country of his affection, and the memory of his troubles did not prevent him from holding a joyous court at Tarascon and at Aix. He finished the castle at Tarascon, which had been begun earlier in the century, - finished it, I suppose, for consistency's sake, in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante, addicted to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in the image that he has imprinted on the page of history. He was both clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not imbittered him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet Provence, and his sweet Provence has been grateful; it has woven a light tissue of legend around the memory of the good King Rene.

I strolled over his dusky habitation - it must have taken all his good-humor to light it up - at the heels of the custodian, who showed me the usual number of castle-properties: a deep, well-like court; a collection of winding staircases and vaulted chambers, the embra- sures of whose windows and the recesses of whose doorways reveal a tremendous thickness of wall. These things const.i.tute the general ident.i.ty of old castles; and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and remember, and contents one's self with consigning them to the honorable limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not the least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects Tarascon with Beaucaire, in order to examine the old fortress whose ruins adorn the latter city. It stands on a foundation of rock much higher than that of Tarascon, and looks over with a melancholy expression at its better-conditioned brother.

Its position is magnificent, and its outline very gallant.