As one turns north-eastward from the Pyrenees the bright abundant landscape passes gradually into a flattish grey-and-drab country that has ceased to be Aquitaine and is yet not Provence.
A dull region at best, this department of Haute Garonne grows positively forbidding when the mistral rakes it, whitening the vineyards and mulberry orchards, and bowing the shabby cypresses against a confused grey sky; nor is the landscape redeemed by the sprawling silhouette of Toulouse—a dingy wind-ridden city, stretched wide on the flat banks of the Garonne, and hiding its two precious buildings in a network of mean brick streets.
One might venture the general axiom that France has never wholly understood the use of brick, and that where stone construction ceases118 architectural beauty ceases with it. Saint Sernin, the great church of Toulouse, is noble enough in line, and full of interest as marking the culmination of French Romanesque; but compared with the brick churches of northern Italy it seems struck with aridity, parched and bleached as a skeleton in a desert: The Capitoul, with its frivolous eighteenth-century front, has indeed more warmth and relief than any other building in Toulouse; but meanly surrounded by shabby brick houses, it seems to await in vain the development of ramps and terraces that should lead up to its long bright fa?ade.
As the motor enters the hill-country to the northeast of Toulouse the land breaks away pleasantly toward the long blue line of the Cévennes; and presently a deep cleft fringed with green reveals the nearness of the Tarn—that strange river gnawing its way through cheesy perpendicular banks.
ALBI: GENERAL VIEW OF THE CATHEDRAL
Along these banks fantastic brick towns are precariously piled: L’Isle-sur-Tarn, with an octagonal brick belfry, and Rabastens, raised on a series of bold arcaded terraces, which may be viewed to advantage from a suspension-bridge119 high above the river. Aside from its exceptionally picturesque site, Rabastens is notable for a curious brick church with fortified tower and much-restored fourteenth-century frescoes clothing its interior like a dim richly woven tissue. But beyond Rabastens lies Albi, and after a mid-day halt at Gaillac, most desolate and dusty of towns, we pressed on again through the parched country.
Albi stood out at length upon the sky—a glaring mass of houses stacked high above the deep cleft of the Tarn. The surrounding landscape was all dust and dazzle; the brick streets were funnels for the swooping wind; and high up, against the blinding blue, rose the flanks of the brick cathedral, like those of some hairless pink monster that had just crawled up from the river to bask on the cliff. This first impression of animal monstrosity—of an unwieldly antediluvian mass of flesh—is not dispelled by a nearer approach. From whatever angle one views the astounding building its uncouth shape and fleshlike tint produce the effect of a living organism—high-backed, swollen-thighed, wallowing—a giant Tarasque or other anomalous offspring of the120 Bestiary; and if one rejects the animal analogy as too grotesque, to what else may one conceivably compare it?
Among the fortified churches of southwestern France this strange monument is the strangest as it is the most vast, and none of the accepted architectural categories seems to fit its huge vaulted hall buttressed with tall organ-pipe turrets, and terminating to the west in a massive dungeon-like tower flanked by pepper-pot pinnacles.
The interior of the great secular-looking salle is covered by an unbroken expanse of mural painting, and encrusted, overgrown almost, from the choir and ambulatory to the arches of the lateral chapels, with a prodigious efflorescence of late Gothic wood-carving and sculpture, half Spanish in its dusky grey-brown magnificence. But even this excess of ecclesiastical ornament does not avail to Christianise the church—there is a pagan, a Saracenic quality about it that seems to overflow from its pinnacled flushed exterior.
ALBI: INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL
To reach Carcassonne from Albi one must cross the central mass of the Cévennes. The121 way leads first, by hill and dale, through a wooded northern-looking landscape, to the town of Castres, distinguished by a charming h?tel de ville with a box-planted garden said to have been laid out by Len?tre; and soon after Castres the “wild-ridged steeps” break away in widening undulations as the road throws its loops about the sides of the Montagne Noire—black hollows deepening dizzily below, and long grey vistas unfolding between the crowded peaks. Unhappily a bourrasque enveloped us before we reached the top of the pass, so that we lost all the beauty of the long southern descent to Carcassonne, and were aware of it only as a distant tangle of lights in the plain, toward which we groped painfully through wind and rain.
The rain persisted the next day; but perhaps it is a not undesirable accompaniment to a first view of Carcassonne, since it eliminates that tout-and-tourist element which has so possessed itself of the ancient cité, restoring to it, under a grey blurred light, something of its narrow huddled medi?val life.
He who has gone there with wrath in his heart against Viollet-le-Duc may even, under these122 mitigating conditions, go so far as to think that the universal restorer has for once been justified by his results—that, granting in advance the possibility of innumerable errors of detail, his brilliant hypothesis still produces a total impression of reality. Perhaps, too, all the floating tags of literary medi?valism—the irresistible “connotations” of keep and rampart and portcullis—help out the illusion, animate the serried little burgh, and people it with such figures as Dante walked among when Bellincion Berti went girt with leather. At any rate, the impression is there—for those who have the hardihood to take it—there all the more palpably on a day of such unbroken rain, when even the official custodians hug their stove, and a beneficent mist hides the stacks of post-cards and souvenirs waylaying the traveller from every window.
N?MES: THE BATHS OF DIANA PUBLIC GARDENS
The weather, however, so beneficent at Carcassonne, proved an obstacle to the seeing of Narbonne and Béziers, and drove us relentlessly before it to N?mes, where it gave us, the next morning, one of those brilliant southern days that are born of the southern deluges. Here was Provence at last—dry, clear-edged, classic—with123 a sky like blue marble, low red hills tufted by olives, stony hollows with thin threads of stream, and a sun that picked out in gold the pure curves of the Maison Carrée.
Among the Greek towns of the Mediterranean there is none as Greek—or, to speak more precisely, as Gr?co-Roman—as N?mes. No other city of old Gaul seems to have put itself so completely in harmony with its rich nucleus of “remains”—eliminating or omitting the monuments of other periods, and content to group its later growth subserviently about the temple and the amphitheatre. It was very well for Arles to make its Romanesque venture, for Rheims to crown itself with a glory of Gothic; but with the tranquil lines of the Maison Carrée and the Nymph?um, the rhythmic spring of the arena arches, to act as centralising influences—above all with the overwhelming grandeur of the Pont du Gard as a background—how could N?mes, so far more deeply pledged to the past, do otherwise than constitute herself the guardian of great memories? The Pont du Gard alone would be enough to relegate any town to a state of ancillary subjection. Its nearness is as subduing as124 that of a great mountain, and next to the Mont Ventoux it is the sublimest object in Provence. The solitude of its site, and the austere lines of the surrounding landscape, make it appear as much on the outer edge of civilisation as when it was first planted there; and its long defile of arches seems to be forever pushing on into the wilderness with the tremendous tread of the Roman legions.
By one of the charming oppositions of French travel, one may return from this classic pilgrimage through the medi?val town of Uzès; and, as if such contrasts were not fruitful enough, may pause on the way to smile at the fantastic chateau d’Angivilliers—a half-ruined eighteenth-century “Folly” with an anachronistic medley of kiosks, arcades, pagodas, a chapel like a Roman temple, and a ruined box-garden haunted by peacocks.
CARCASSONNE: THE PORTE DE L’AUDE
Uzès itself, a steep town clustered about the ducal keep of the Crussols, has a stately terrace above the valley, and some fine eighteenth-century houses, in shabby streets insufficiently swept; but its chief feature is of course the castle which, planted protectingly in the centre of the town,125 thrusts up its central dungeon over a fine feudal jumble of subsidiary masonry.
From N?mes to the Mediterranean the impressions are packed too thick. First the Rhone, with the castles of Tarascon and Beaucaire taunting each other across its yellow flood, Beaucaire from a steep cliff, Tarascon from the very brink of the river; then, after a short flight through olive-orchards and vineyards, the pretty leafy town of Saint Remy on the skirts of the Alpilles; and a mile to the south of Saint Remy, on a chalky ledge of the low mountain-chain, the two surviving monuments of the Roman city of Glanum. They are set side by side, the tomb and the triumphal arch, in a circular grassy space enclosed with olive-orchards and backed by delicate fretted peaks: not another vestige of Roman construction left to connect them with the past. Was it, one wonders, their singular beauty that saved them, that held even the Visigoths’ hands when they wiped out every other trace of the populous city of stone-quarriers, with its aqueducts, walls and temples? Certainly, seeing the two buildings thus isolated under the radiant lonely sky, one is tempted to exclaim that they126 might well have checked even barbarian violence, and that never again did the stout Roman trunk throw out two such flowers of grace and lightness. It is as though, from that packed Proven?al soil, some dust of Greece had passed into the Latin stem, clearing a little its thick sap; yet it is just because the monuments remain so sturdily Roman that the grace and the lightness count so much.
This Alpilles country between Rhone and Durance is itself the most Grecian thing west of Greece: Provence of Provence in every line of its bare sharp-cut heights, tufted with a spare classic growth of olive, cistus and myrtle, it explains why the Greek colonist found himself at home on these ultimate shores, and why the Roman conqueror bowed here to Attic influences.
Pushing southeast from Saint Remy, one comes, through a broadening landscape, to the old town of Salon, where Nostradamus is buried, and thence, by a winding road among the hills, to the wide valley where Aix-en-Provence lies encircled in mountains.
SAINT-REMY: THE MAUSOLEUM
For a town so nobly seated it seems, at first approach, a little commonplace and insignificant;127 the eye, lighting on it from the heights, seeks a sky-line like that of Clermont or Périgueux. Aix, in this respect, remains inadequate; yet presents itself to closer inspection as a charming faded old place, tinged with legal and academic memories, with a fine double row of balconied and sculptured h?tels along its leafy cours, and a number of scattered treasures in the folds of its crooked streets.
Among these treasures the two foremost—the picture of the Buisson Ardent in the cathedral, and the Gobelin tapestries in the adjoining Archbishop’s palace—belong to such widely sundered schools that they might almost be said to represent the extreme points within which French art has vibrated. It is therefore the more interesting to note that both are intrinsically and pre?minently decorative in quality—devotional triptych and frivolous tapestry obeying the same law of rigorously balanced lines and colours. The great picture of the Burning Bush is, with the exception of the Virgin of Moulins, perhaps the finest flower of that early French school of painting which was so little known or considered that, until the recent Paris exhibition of “Primitives,”128 many of its masterpieces were complacently attributed to Italian painters. Hanging midway down the nave, where a golden light strikes it when the sacristan flings open the splendid carved doors of the west front, the triptych of Nicholas Froment unfolds itself like a great three-petalled flower, each leaf burning with a rich limpidity of colour that overflows from the Rosa Mystica of the central panel to the pale prayerful faces of the royal donators in the wings.
The cathedral has its tapestries also—a series from the Brussels looms, attributed to Quentin Matsys, and covering the choir with intricately composed scenes from the life of Christ, in which the melancholy grey-green of autumn leaves is mingled with deep jewel-like pools of colour. But these are accidental importations from another world, whereas the famous Don Quixote series in the Archbishop’s palace represents the culminating moment of French decorative art.
They strike one perhaps, first of all—these rosy chatoyantes compositions, where ladies in loosened bodices gracefully prepare to be “surprised”—as an instructive commentary on ecclesiastical manners toward the close of the129 eighteenth century; then one passes on to abstract enjoyment of their colour-scheme and balance of line, to a delighted perception of the way in which they are kept from being (as tapestries later became) mere imitations of painting, and remain imprisoned—yet so free!—in that fanciful textile world which has its own flora and fauna, its own laws of colour and perspective, and its own more-than-Shakespearian anachronisms in costume and architecture.
From Aix to the Mediterranean the south-eastern highway passes through a land of ever-increasing loveliness. East of Aix the bare-peaked mountain of Sainte Victoire dominates the fertile valley for long miles. Then the hermit-haunted range of the Sainte Baume unfolds its wooded flanks to the south, the highway skirting them as it gradually mounts to the plateau where the town of Saint Maximin in clusters about its unfinished Dominican church—a remarkable example of northern Gothic strayed into the classic confines of Provence.
Saint Maximin o............