Provence

“ Provence is well supplied with lofty points of vantage, from which extensive prospects are before the spectator, and enable him to understand somewhat why Provence was chosen as a home for chivalry and a garden for romance. Castles rise up on nearly every point of vantage. Great cypress-trees shelter the low-lying fields. Farmhouses nestle in the protection of rising ground, upon which they would not, like the great stern castles and watch-towers, be able to retain a foothold when the mistral sweeps the heights. For the elements are at their strongest in Provence. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE CITIES OF THE LAGOONS
The rivers of Provence are strangely fascinating; perhaps because they so dominate and ensoul the country, and because of their tumultuous flowing. The really fascinating thing for the living is life!
The river Asse is so impetuous that a proverb has grown up about it: "l'Asse; fou qui la passe."
"And fleet Durance ...
Rugged in gait as wild of appetite...."
The Rhone has a little wind all to herself; the west wind that is called lou rosau, the Provençal name for the river being la Rose. ”

“ We should leave the little room in the roof, and dwell in some bright quarter where it was all leaves and flowers; and René would be great, and go to dine with princes and drive a team of belled horses, like a famous painter who had dashed once with his splendid equipage through our narrow passage; and we should see the sky always—as much of it as ever we chose; and Lili would have a garden of her own, all grass and foliage and falling waters, in which I should live in the open air all the day long, and make believe that I was in Provence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Romans have left behind them in Provence not only a series of unalterable monuments, but the type of their race. Up country, in the little farms, a Celtic strain prevails, but in every town we find the square-built Roman frame and classic features.
We end our afternoon by a long drive through the fertile plain of Orange, all the brighter for the severeness of its setting, for the spires and hedges of cypress, for the gaunt dim blue of the distant mountains. The spring is luxuriant and ample here. ”

“ Of all the delectable regions of France, none is of more diversified interest to the dweller in northern climes than “La Provence Maritime,” that portion which includes what the world to-day recognizes as the Riviera. Here may be found the whole galaxy of charms which the present-day seeker after health, edification, and pleasure demands from the antiquarian and historical interests of old Provence and the Roman occupation to the frivolous gaieties of Nice and Monte Carlo.
Tourists, more than ever, keep to the beaten track. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We left Italy last week, and came to Provence. Marseilles, I admit, seemed to me an unattractive place after Rome—and indeed all of Provence we have seen as yet is somewhat chill and barren after Italy. No doubt the charm will grow. For one thing, Spring is very late here this year....
Arles we like much. It is a quaint and pleasant little town: and once I can get my mind free of those haunting hill-towns of the Sabines and Albans I love so much— (is there any hill range in the world to equal that swing of the Apennines stretching beyond Rome eastward, southward, and southwestward?) ”

“ We have reason to believe that many persons who have not visited the south-eastern corner of France, think of it as a "land of the cypress and myrtle;" where troubadours wander amongst orange groves, or tinkle their guitars under the shade of the vine and the fig-tree. There is something in a name, and Provence, if it were only for the sake of its roses, ought, one would think, to be a smiling and beautiful country. ”

“ The drive itself was charming, for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the grey-green landscape of Provence. It is never absolutely flat and yet is never really ambitious, and is full both of entertainment and repose. It is in constant undulation, and the bareness of the soil lends itself easily to outline and profile. ”

“ But then one remembered that this was France, and of France it was the Provence and not really a part of the sordid, scrambling world at all.
It is a garden of terraces and of waterways and of dim, lucent pools to which stairways descend, and of cypresses, graying statuary, and marble bridges and fluted balustrades; and the water is green and mysterious, and there is a background of dark, wooded hills, with deep recesses and lost paths. We climbed part way up the hillside and found a place where we could look out on the scene below. In the fading light it seemed a place of enchantment. ”

“ It was the same spirit, one would have said, that had created the treasures of ecclesiastical art and architecture of which Provence is so full, but if so, what had become of its creative force? And yet the people—the uncontaminated sons of the soil, to whom the latest doctrine would have us look for the truest appreciation of art—flocked to this pinchbeck shrine, and took its gaudy ignorance for a true revival of ancient splendours. ”

“ You in your far Provence, amid the austere hills that guard an ancient land of olive and vine, a land illumined by the blue flowing light of the Rhone, and girt by desert places where sun and wind inhabit, and scarce any other—you there and I here have this in common. Everywhere we see the life of man in subservient union with the life of Nature ”

“ If one is disposed to imagine that Provence is a land all brilliancy and gaiety, as first impressions would perhaps suggest, a sight of the Crau and the Camargue is enough to correct the error.
When any place has gathered through long centuries a certain kind of reputation, there will always be found particular potent influences that hang about the spot. ”

“ 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 [56] with such universal acceptance that it is small wonder that innumerable people firmly believe in it to this day. ”

“ The aspect of this little-known section of Provence is not wholly as soft and agreeable as, in his mind’s eye, one pictures the country adjacent to the Mediterranean to be. The hills and the shores of the “Petite Mer” are sombre and severe in outline, but not sad or ugly by any means, for there is an almost tropical glamour over all, though the olive and fig trees, umbrella-pines and gnarled, dwarf cypresses, with juts and crops of bare gray stone rising up through the thin soil, are quite in contrast with the palms and aloes of the Riviera proper. ”

“ The very best proof one could wish, that Provence is not a poor impoverished land, is that the best of everything is grown right in her own boundaries,—the olive, the vine, the apricot, the peach, and vegetables of the finest quality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And throughout Provence the custom still is general that each well-to-do family shall send a portion of its Christmas loaf—the pan calendau—to some friend or neighbour to whom Fortune has been less kind. But, happily, this gift nowadays often is a mere friendly compliment, like the gift of fougasso; for the times are past when weak-kneed and spasmodic charity dealt with real poverty in Provence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Its nearness is as subduing as 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. ”

“ At once inspiring and restful! This perfect balance is possible. Supremely good things may be in contrast but not in contradiction. So at least one believes in Provence.
The parting guest thinks wistfully of that delicious journey down stream, of the happy company in the Caburle, in Mistral's Poem of the Rhone; the old barge drifting with the current through the very heart of the country of Romance. Every city and hamlet, every bridge and ruin, the scene of a thousand stories.... ”

“ Provence, especially, with its ancient port of Marseilles to recall memories of the most cultured nation of antiquity, was in material prosperity and in arts already advancing to that stage of civilization which was to make her, in the course of the next century, the mother of the first real literature France had known and of the first extended protest against the Church of Rome. The troubadours were soon to make Provence and the Provençal tongue famous, and the Albigenses, with their heresy, were to invite the destruction of this gay, brilliant, but unsound society. ”

“ Avignon, Tarascon, Beaucaire, Arles, Nimes, Montpellier, Béziers, Carcassonne, Albi, Aigues Mortes, Carpentras, Cabestaing, Uzès, Vaucluse, L'Isle sur Sorgue, Aix-en-Provence—all printed irreverently in heartless columns, as if they were not worth mentioning except for their relation to time and tide. ”