Mona Caird

“ To the left, a magnificent plane-tree spreads golden foliage far and wide, brimming up to our bedroom windows just overhead. And a little further from the house, on this side of a sombre row of cypresses, with an ethereal view to the left of palest mountain peaks—a Provençal rose garden!
"But gather, gather, Mesdames," invites our kind host, "gather as many as you will." He smiles at our amazed delight, and waves a hospitable hand towards the masses of blossom, radiantly fresh and fair.
Roses of Provence! ”

“ Its beautiful, poplar-bordered Aliscamps, the famous avenue of tombs, was scarcely a cheering place to loiter in at the close of a winter afternoon. It brought home too clearly the Roman idea of death: sombre, cold, grim, merciless. Sometimes, not very often, the tombs revealed regret for the dead that appeared more than conventional; sometimes one seemed to discern, breathing out of the damp-stained marble, a passion of grief that was unbearably hopeless; human love beating, beating for ever, with bleeding hands, against a hateful, unyielding doorway. One had to hurry past those tombs.... ”

“ It is one of the haunted lands, the spell-weaving lands. It enslaves as no obvious technical beauty of landscape can enslave.
Provence is like one of its own enchanting ladies of the troubadour days, and strangely significant is it that this nameless quality of the country should have been thus reproduced by the crown and flower of its people. For this attribute of charm belongs to knight and baron, soldier and singer, if we may trust the old songs and the old stories. But, par excellence, it belonged to the cultivated lady of the epoch. ”

“ The traditions of chivalry are among the priceless possessions of the human race, and it is in Provence that their aroma lingers with a potency scarcely to be found in any other country. The air is alive with rich influences. The heat of the sun, the extraordinary brilliance of light and colour, the dignity of an ancient realm whose every inch is penetrated with human doings and destinies, all combine towards an enchantment that belongs to the mysterious side of nature and prompts a host of unanswerable questions. ”

“ LES BAUX
In all Provence, perhaps in all Europe, there is no more astonishing relic of mediæval life than that "crater of a feudal volcano" Les Baux, [21] a veritable eagle's nest of a city in one of the wildest and highest points of the Alpilles. It is a morning's drive from St. Remy across the little range to its steep southern side.
We plunge straight into their heart and begin to mount by gradual windings through little valleys, arid and lonely. Dwarf oak, lavender and rosemary make their only covering. ”

“ Many hours might be well spent in this forgotten little city, where in the old days the intense quiet that broods over it—as if invading it from the strange, almost ominous landscape beyond the parapet—was broken by the din of warfare more violent and more unappeasable than any other sort of strife: that of religion.
In early spring the plain of the Rhone in the neighbourhood of Avignon is all flushed with young almond blossoms. The carriage of the tourist trundles past field after field of misty pink, and for the time he might fancy himself in the landscape of a Japanese fan. ”

“ But one records and records, and yet one has not Provence. One has but her mountains and contours, her blue sky, and perhaps her wild wind—but there is always something beyond.
One sees the Rhone and the Durance on their way to 25 the sea—splendid headlong rivers; one sees the melancholy brooding wilderness of the Crau, where Hercules and the quarrelsome Titans flung those huge stones at one another in the dim old days; one sees always the strange, fantastic little limestone chain of the Alpilles which finishes to the south-east the great semicircle begun to the west by the higher ranges. ”

“ Gilles, Maguelonne, Aigues Mortes, were among these old cities or ruins, of which Narbonne alone is of much importance to-day.
When they were flourishing, the country was more or less covered with vegetation; and of a dream-like loveliness these twin-shores must have been with their fair cities dotting the green shores; towers and palaces repeating themselves in the stillness of the lagoons; gliding ships richly laden threading the waterways, passing and repassing; a fresh little wind coming in from the sea, and the vast blue of those waters stretching forth to the edge of the world! ”

“ Even while one is dreaming of other things, that wonderful Palace is impressing itself upon the sentiment with steady power. It stands there in the blaze of light, tremendous, inevitable, like a fact of nature. One can scarcely think it away. It resists even that mighty force, the human imagination.
Avignon! the Roman Avenio; a place of many events, many influences, which have helped to make our present life what it is—we are really there, absurdly improbable as it seems; we, with our modern minds, modern speech, modern preconceptions, in the bright land of the troubadours ”

“ The traveller in Provence receives a similar impression in relation not to material but to historical immensities. No sooner has one spot been explored, than another mountain-peak of tradition comes into sight, luring ever farther afield.
This is one of the pains of the ardent traveller, and it forms a curious analogy with the life-journey itself, in which renunciation after renunciation has to be made, not merely of things far distant and beautiful, but of things beautiful and near, which only need the stretch of the hand to touch, but yet are farther from reach than the Pole-star itself. ”

“ The immense block of masonry from its roots in the soil to its battlements in the sky stands clear against the 206 mysterious spaces, and presently it seems to stir and lean forward, as if it might fall or drift away in emulation of some free-born cloud that swims over its head. It is delightful to loiter in the road by the moat just below the hillock that rises to the river-bank and opposite the last of the towers, which stands at the angle of the castle between land and water. At this spot nothing can be seen of hill and river, only the tower and sky. ”

“ A good friend this fierce, cleansing sun, and the wind from Mont Ventoux must sweep away all impurities from the narrow streets, and—il y en a!
Away across the parapet a mass of roofs fills the slope to the river bank—most wonderful of rivers!—and to the south there are hills and bright distances: Provençal hills, distances of the land of "joy, young-heartedness and love." And that makes the thought that we are in Provence wake up with a cry that rings in the heart like a reveillé. ”

“ From talking of her clients, our hostess came to talking of their friends among the Félibres and of Mistral's Mireille, the modern epic of Provence. It breathes the very spirit of the country.
It is the Homeric character of the life that has inspired the poet; he saw in it a grandeur that we have been taught to imagine belongs only to the times of the ancients; probably because those times have been shown to us through the eyes of genius. But the Provence of to-day has also its seer who reveals its qualities of grandeur: the poet of Maillane. ”

“ Fields, vineyards, olive-groves, castles, cities, drift by as in a beautiful dream.
All the while the hot Provençal sun is beating on the barge, and the sorceress river is flowing and flowing: the whole scene a symbol of the country and its magic. After one has swept down and toiled up the Rhone in the Caburle, one knows a little more of what it all means, this fief of the sun and wind, this Land of the Passionate River! ”

“ Altogether Carcassonne was a place of artistic achievement.
The city, as we wended our way towards it, grew more and more dazzling to the sense of reality. That progress through the lower town, across the Aude, was like walking straight into the background of a mediæval painting—and who has not longed for that excursion? There was not a sight or a sound to mar the perfection of the place. Doubtless in the old days there would have been more stir as one approached the great double-towered gateway and crossed the bridge over what was once a moat. ”

“ We clamber up and down the ruinous higher part of the town, among those pathetic rectangles of masonry open to the sky where human life throbbed so eagerly a little while ago; we mount some perilous-looking steps on the cliff-side, in hopes of reaching the castle, but find ourselves emerging in mid-air upon the edge of the plateau overlooking from an appalling height the windy spaces of the Crau.
The mountains run sheer to the plain. It is exciting to stand on that great altitude which commands the stony desert towards Arles and the mouths of the Rhone. ”

“ They are fighting and struggling in some unknown contest which they take, poor things, so very seriously, and which really matters so very little after all! The broad, long lines of the landscape speak eloquently of the folly of that old death-struggle. It is strange to think of those stone warriors fighting on century after century as the seasons go by, always there and always fighting when the sun touches them in the morning, when the white moon peers over the jagged outline of the little mountains just behind, and finds them at it still! ”

“ Perhaps the women of to-day are making a détour out of the region of enchantment, but only in order to obtain a broader, more generous grasp of the things of life. Some day they will give back to mankind what has been taken away by the new adventures, and when the tide turns, there will surely pour over the arid world a flood of beauty and "youngheartedness" and romance such as the blinder, less conscious centuries have never so much as dreamt of! ”

“ It is impossible to wander a day in Provence without being drawn to wonder if not to speculate upon the origin of that extraordinary outbreak of new sentiment that we call chivalry. It seems like a miraculous birth. It is impossible even to imagine what would have been the destinies of mankind had the beautiful inspiration failed to descend out of the blue just at the most brutal epoch of European history. ”

“ Maguelonne is the last relic of the splendid city of that name which stood on the opposite shores of the lagoon, its towers mirrored in the blue water. The island was first the site of a Greek settlement, then of a Roman town—once attacked by Womba, King of the Visigoths; finally the Saracens built a city there which Charles Martel destroyed when he changed for good and all the fortunes of Europe by the great victories which turned back those marauding people just at the critical moment when they were on the point of becoming masters of Christendom. ”

“ Remy en Provence.
The hotel has the homely, spacious character of old-established inns in country towns. One feels a sense of comfort as one enters, and the courteous greeting of the landlord and his wife confirms one's satisfaction. The long, dark-papered salle-à-manger has a broad streak of sunshine across the polished floor from an open window which gives on to the regions at the back of the hotel. The waiter hastens to shut this, but desists with a shrug and a smile at our remonstrance. If we like to sit in draughts and endanger our lives, after all it is our own affair. ”

“ It was a glorious morning when the train puffed out of the station at Avignon and took a sharp swerve in order to give us a fine last view of that "little city of colossal aspect," as Victor Hugo calls it. Always that dominating palace on the height stretching long and massive across the hillside. The high mountains to the south-east stood entrancingly blue, Mont Ventoux looking as heavenly and innocent as if the bare thought of harbouring—much more of deliberately producing a mistral were a baseness of which she was utterly incapable. ”

“ What exactly the quality or qualities may be that bestow the power of inspiring a grande passion is one of the unfathomed mysteries of the heart. Vidal possessed every attribute that could charm—or so one would suppose—yet ladies only laughed at him affectionately, petted him, and gave their hearts elsewhere.
He is one of the most attractive and pathetic of the troubadours, and gives the impression of a sort of erratic genius. His naïveté is astonishing and charming, in spite of his outrageous habit of boasting of his successes in love and war. ”

“ But for their grey vesture one might imagine oneself in some valley of the moon, wandering dream-bound in a dead world. The limestone vales have something of the character of the lunar landscape: a look of death succeeding violent and frenzied life, which gives to the airless, riverless valleys of our satellite their unbearable desolation. It might have been fancy, but it seemed that in the Alpilles there was not a living thing; neither beast nor bird nor insect. ”

“ The man can have had no tendency to insomnia, for he fell fast asleep in the uproar, and when he woke it was to sounds of barbaric music and the clashing of cymbals. And presently La Rocca was alive with a crowd of faces, high-crowned conical hats, black satins and silks; and to 182 the great scandalisation of the watcher, grave and respected citizens of Avignon arm-in-arm with the witches. And they were all dancing as hard as they could dance, and the dust raised by the mistral whirled with them, and the windmill sails tore round scrooping and creaking. ”

“ We find her in the last canto a desolate, fragile figure crossing the Crau. She arrives at last in the island of the Camargue, and reaches, dying, the white church where the three holy women float down through the roof in answer to her prayers.
"We are Baux' guardian saints," they cry, bidding her take comfort.
And they go on to tell her that she would not fear death if she knew how small her little world appears from their high dwellings: "how ripening hopes are washed away with tears," while hatred and cruelty breed sorrow where love should shed peace over all the world. ”