Chapter Five

 

Roy Campbell’s Provence: The Camargue

 

“The Four Winds Dry Their Wooden Shoes”: Martigues

 

At the beginning of the 1920s the South African poet Roy Campbell (1901-57) worked on an Italian boat which operated mainly on the Marseille-Naples route. On one occasion the crew were shipping eels at Martigues—”Christmas eels” for Genoa and Rome, Campbell tells us in Broken Record (1934). The eels from the local fishing boats

 

were poured into our spherical net, bounced on to the weighing machine, shot into the hold, tallied and paid for on the spot. It is the most bewildering work. One’s eyes become utterly flummoxed by the myriad slithering, whirling, revolving, dashing and swirling mountains of lubricated and electrified macaroni.

 

He claims that the ship’s mate met a horrible fate when he slipped and fell into the hold, drowning amid eels and slime. According to Campbell’s later account in Light on a Dark Horse (1951), “Moro’s end rather put me off eels for the time being, so I went and helped with the grape-harvest.”

The poet soon took up other maritime activities. Martigues, “an amphibious, crustacean-looking town” whose canals link the Etang de Berre and the Golfe de Fos, was full of fishermen and sailors. One of their recreations, and a way of winning some extra cash, was the ferocious sport of water-jousting. Campbell was always eager to proclaim both his physical prowess—a pointed contrast with the Bloomsbury effeteness he detested—and his complete integration with the natives. He was accepted as a member of his local team, La Joyeuse Lance Martégale. Mounted on platforms at the stern of charging motor-boats (oared boats after speed restrictions came into effect in 1933) contestants armed with lances would attempt to knock each other into the water. Once he took particular delight in fighting “a verminous socialist”; socialists were among the more frequent objects of his ire, together with Jews, Calvinists, the literary establishment, tourists, psychoanalysts and the being he satirically christened MacSpaunday—MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis.

 

The Camargue: “in its natural state a vast, salt-caked and sandy desert, sparsely clothed with coarse grasses... and marsh samphire, and broken by lagoons” (Marcel Brion, Provence).

 

Roy Campbell achieved at least some of the feats he said he did. Moro the mate may or (with luck) may not have perished as described. Certainly Campbell fabricated or at least embroidered some of the stories he told in his autobiographical writings. He was inventive, he drank freely, and he wanted to live up to an image of himself; his daughter Anna, while stoutly defending him from others’ disapproval, confesses in her memoir Poetic Justice (1986) that “what irritated me most was that this very gentle man should spend so much time and energy trying to prove that he was tough.” The comment is inspired by the incident when, as a young child, she rescued him from a fight by biting his adversary in the calf.

Campbell was vulnerable as well as tough and had fled back to Martigues from England in 1928 in the wake of his wife Mary’s affair with Vita Sackville-West. This, and Sackville-West’s involvement also with Virginia Woolf, did much to fuel his Bloomsbury-hating. The affair soon ended and Mary Campbell, at first reluctantly, rejoined her husband. Gradually harmony was re-established. Anna Campbell Lyle remembers it as a mostly carefree, settled time for her and her elder sister Tess. From 1929 the family rented “a small house shaded by giant umbrella pines, at a place called Tour de Vallier, some kilometres from Martigues. In front of this house was a broad terrace with a low wall and beneath this terrace stretched two fields of olive trees that shivered into silver in the Mistral.” Her father, in Light on a Dark Horse, explains that the landlady allowed him to chop up two enormous trees, which had nearly stopped producing olives, for fuel. He again enjoys remembering his practical skills, directed this time to domestic ends:

 

The wood of the olive root has different grain from any other sort of wood. It has to be struck with great force repeatedly in the same place with wedges and it comes off suddenly in rugged chunks as big as one’s head. It burns slowly like coal, and has a rather acrid smell, but it is beautiful wood. From it I carved the figures of Our Lady and the Infant Christ with St Joseph, and the other figures of the traditional Provençal crib for my children’s Christmas.

 

From the small house or “cabanon”, Anna Campbell Lyle tells us,

 

a meandering path led down through the woods to the Etang de Berre, not a lake at all but a miniature sea... In our day, before it was polluted by factory wastes, it teemed with marine life. There were ink-blue, rust, or sage-green sea-urchins, seaweed of every colour imaginable, shoals of darting fish, and one small solitary fish with the brilliant hues of a kingfisher.

 

Martigues and the Etang have changed indeed, mainly with the growth of the oil industry. The town has been called “the Provençal Venice” but, Jean Giono caustically observes, “it has nothing in common with its glorious godmother except that it smells of petroleum, like Riva degli Schiavoni when the wind blows from Mestre.” Its earlier appearance survives in some of the paintings at the Musée Ziem, a collection of Provençal and other artists including the nineteenth- century Félix Ziem, and in some of Campbell’s poems. He and his family moved on to Spain in 1933. Here his political and religious views became more evidently extreme. His strong support for General Franco (later atoned for, in the eyes of many, by his service in the British army in the Second World War) earned him much opprobrium and resulted in some less successful poetry. Martigues, where

 

Around the quays, kicked off in twos

The Four Winds dry their wooden shoes

provided memories of a simpler time.

 

The Plaine De La Crau: “Goblins Of Light”

 

The geographer Strabo (c.64 BC-after 121 AD) considered the origins of the stony plain now called the Crau. (We now know that the stones were deposited by the River Durance during the last Ice Age.) Perhaps, thought Strabo, as translated by Horace Leonard Jones, the Mistral was involved: “the Black North, a violent and chilly wind, descends upon this plain with exceptional severity” and it is said “that by the blasts the people are dashed from their vehicles and stripped of both weapons and clothing.” Perhaps, while it is about it, the wind rolls the stones into place. Strabo cites Aristotle on the way stones vomited up by earthquakes roll together. He also cites Poseidonius, who reckons, rather, that a former lake has solidified. Either theory is plausible, Strabo thinks, but the poetical account given in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound (a play surviving only as a few fragments, including the one Strabo gives) has remained better known.

Prometheus is telling Heracles how to get from the Caucasus to the Hesperides. He explains that when he comes to “the undaunted host of the Ligurians” his weapons will fail him and it will be no use looking for stones to throw because the ground thereabouts is very soft. Zeus, however, will obligingly supply “a cloud with a snow-like shower of round stones” which will cover the soil. With these Heracles will be able to pelt the Ligurians and push them aside. The dramatist had sensibly removed “what was difficult to account for”, with regard to the “Stony Plain”, to the realm of myth.

The plain still seemed a place of mythic power to Roy Campbell who, he says in Broken Record, once crossed it in a taxi:

 

Here I saw for the first time the amazing mirage of the Crau, far more extraordinary than anything I had seen in the Kalahari or the Karroo. The huge red hangars at Istres appeared to be whirling in the air. The distant ranges of the Alpilles were expanding and contracting like a concertina. Fierce white water seemed to be streaming at us. Trees ranked themselves above the horizon. Everything was vibrating in this dance of the goblins of light.

 

The Camargue: “The Verges Of The Earth”

 

The Provençal story La Bèstio dóu Vacarés (1926), by Joseph d’Arbaud (1874-1950), is set among the marshy islands and woodland around the Etang de Vaccarès, deep in the Camargue. Here a fifteenth-century gardian or herdsman encounters what at first seems to be a “beast” but proves to be a Pan-like demigod of old, surviving precariously in these remote parts where he is still able to control thousands of animals with his music. The gardian, fascinated in spite of himself, is moved at first to fear and then to deep compassion. But, knowing that he will be branded heretic or insane, he can tell no-one but posterity what he has seen.

Necessity drives the “beast” into a land which strikes some as flat and unwelcoming: the haunt perhaps of flamingoes, white horses and otters but certainly of mosquitoes. From the safety of a château “high up on the westward slopes of the Alpilles”, the first-person narrator of Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur (1974) can see “the distant flats of the tedious Camargue with its lime-green ribbon of shallow sea”. Philippe, in Maurice Barrès’ Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891) finds the area around Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer—partly, it is true, because Bérénice has just married someone else—a windswept wasteland with no place for the life of the individual; the only objects which stand out are “a few clumps of black cypresses... in the middle of a leprous mass of moss and sticks.” (Following various drainage schemes and the introduction of large-scale rice-growing in the 1960s much of the Camargue is now much less of a wilderness.)

For many, however, the distinctive landscape and life of the Rhône delta have proved inspiriting. Even the insects can be made poetic. In “Summer Morning”, a poem by Marius Jouveau (1878-1949), a gardian rides out from his cabane at sunrise, leaving everything silent except for the sounds made by a reddish-brown horsefly. It does its flying and its buzzing with the aid of some splendidly onomatopoeic Provençal words: voulastrejant along, it vounvouno against the window. And the world Jouveau’s gardian goes into is one of creatures—bulls and white horses— whose romantic potential is more immediately apparent than the fly’s. In Provence the most famous champion of the gardians came from a rather unlikely background: the ancestors of the poet and novelist Marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon (1869-1943) had moved from Florence to Avignon in the fifteenth century and he lived there in what is now the Palais du Roure. But in 1895 he left this comfortable life for that of a Camargue manadier or rancher. Lou Marquès, as he was known, worked tirelessly to maintain and revive local traditions; he was a friend and collaborator of Frédéric Mistral. (The life of the manadier and the gardian is documented, with other local traditions, at the Musée Camarguais near Albaron and the Musée Baroncelli in Saintes-Maries.).

Joseph d’Arbaud, once a poet and law student in Aix, followed his distant kinsman Baroncelli’s example, breeding bulls in the Camargue until ill-health forced him back to the city. In d’Arbaud’s Provençal poem “Rêverie d’un gardian” the old cowboy, sitting now with his purring cat, remembers how once he would ride out in the clear light of windy morning to round up bulls, drive them into a town or village, and gallop imbrandable—invincible—into the arena, applauded by the girls on the balconies. Roy Campbell renders the more riotous side of such occasions in Taurine Provence (1932): “shots are fired into the sky; kettle-drums are beaten; whips crack; petards are let off, as the herd come thundering down the main street.”

In “Horses on the Camargue” Campbell focuses on the animals rather than the people, though he uses the horses partly as a metaphor for the kind of freedom he aspires towards. At the beginning of the poem the Camargue is a place Durrell or Barrès would recognize: “the grey wastes of dread,/The haunt of shattered gulls” and silence. But the horses replace the grey with snowy white, the deathly silence with “a sudden harmony of hooves”. Aptly in a place where there is so much land and so much water—and so much wind over both—the horses are often described as, or compared to, creatures of the sea; “white horses”, of course, can mean breaking waves. They race “spray-curled, like waves before the wind”. Their “Master’s trident” is both Neptune’s attribute and the gardian’s indispensable prod. They “only haunt the verges of the earth/And only on the sea’s salt herbage feed.”

Campbell’s poem ends with the Romantic assertion that

Still out of hardship bred,

Spirits of power and beauty and delight

Have ever on such frugal pastures fed

And loved to course with tempests through the night.

 

The “grey wastes” bring bracing hardship, no longer “dread”.

 

Les Saintes-Maries-De-La-Mer: “The Blue Whiteness Of The MilkyWay”

 

From the roof of the church at Saintes-Maries you can watch flamingoes flying overhead and look out at the Camargue, the Mediterranean, and the seaside resort which has developed in this once desolate place. The building, “less a church than a brutal fortress” felt Maurice Barrès, needed its observation-posts and needed to be like a fortress, since its position made it highly vulnerable to attack by pirates. In 869 Arab raiders made off with the visiting archbishop of Arles and demanded a large ransom for his return. Unluckily he died in captivity, but his astute kidnappers placed the body, in full episcopal regalia, on a throne, paid it polite attentions and somehow left with the ransom before the Christians noticed the deception.

The military bulk of the twelfth-century and later pilgrimage- church also became a sign of militant faith. Legend deposited a group of saints including Mary Magdalene, Martha, Lazarus, Mary Salome and Mary Clopas or Cleophas, on the coast near Saintes-Maries; they had miraculously survived a journey from Palestine in the sailless and rudderless small boat in which their enemies had cast them off. The saints fanned out in various directions to bring the Gospel to Provence; Maries Salome and Clopas remained in the place which later took their name. Their cult was promoted by King René, who ordered the church to be searched for their relics in 1448. These were duly found, encased in reliquaries and subsequently displayed in the chapel of St. Michel above the choir. (Barrès disapproved of this “chambre Louis XV” with its white and gold woodwork and wretched ex-votos, utterly inappropriate as the chapel of the “graves saintes Maries”.) They are ritually lowered from the chapel, to be touched by the pilgrims, each 25 May and again in late October. The less precious but also venerated statues of the Maries in their boat, usually kept above a side-altar in the nave, are then carried in procession back to the beach where they are supposed to have landed and then on into the sea. But it is mainly because of Sarah, the black servant who traditionally accompanied the Maries, that the pilgrimage is so well known today. Sarah became patroness of gypsies and since at least the mid-nineteenth century they have come to Saintes-Maries in great numbers and from some distance. In 1852 L’Illustration enthusiastically reported the presence of a whole “population nomade” with its covered wagons, donkeys and horses; the streets were full of “fragrant Arlésiennes” and everywhere were mendicant hermits and people selling religious images, sweets, oranges, and candles. Sarah’s highly-adorned statue processes from the crypt to the sea each 24 May.

It was the sea itself which most affected Vincent van Gogh when he came here from Arles for five days in June 1888. It was his first sight of the Mediterranean, which was, he told his brother Theo, coloured as changeably as mackerel: by turns, as the light varied, green, violet, blue, tinged with pink or grey. A walk along the deserted shore one night provoked a more visionary response to the deep blue sky and

 

clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and some others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars sparkled, turned green, yellow, white, pink... like precious stones... opal... emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires. The sea [was] very deep ultramarine—the shore of a purplish and reddish-brown colour... with bushes on the dunes... Prussian blue bushes.

 

Saint-Gilles

 

St. Aegidius, whose name managed to mutate into Gilles, was a semi- legendary hermit who lived probably in the seventh to eighth centuries. He came, claims a tenth-century Latin life, from Athens to the mouth of the Rhône. According to the later rhymed Vie de Saint Gile, it was a tough area, full of wild beasts including bears, lions, deer, boar, Olifans e bestes cornues (“elephants and horned animals”), “vipers and tigers and tortoises”, “serpents of many kinds” and centaurs. The author of the poem, Guillaume de Berneville, appears to have lived in distant Normandy or even England; he supplies the beasts appropriate to medieval hermits and heroes wherever they live.

But Gilles, who puts his trust in God, is unafraid. Like many saints, in fact, he has a good relationship with wildlife. King Flavius (or Flovent) is out hunting one day when one of his archers shoots an arrow at a doe. The hermit is pierced instead of the deer, which turns out to have been keeping him alive in the wilderness by feeding him her milk. In spite of his wounds he talks to and greatly impresses the king and accompanying bishop. Flovent wants to give the holy man presents and treasure, but instead Gilles asks him to use his money and plate and some of his land to establish a monastery and provide it with as many monks as possible. They will pray night and day for the king and the people. The king enthusiastically agrees to hand over “lands and woods, vineyards and meadows”. He will build the sort of fully-equipped monastery later monks and pilgrims will expect: church, dorter, chapterhouse, a good cellar, refectory, and other fine looking buildings. Inside will be magnificent vestments, books, hangings, carpets, censers, lamps, crosses, candlesticks. The foundation is also well endowed with lands.

 

The Camargue: “in its natural state a vast, salt-caked and

sandy desert, sparsely clothed with coarse grasses... and

marsh samphire, and broken by lagoons” (Marcel Brion,

Provence).

 

Guillaume de Berneville’s monastery is not, like his fauna, fantastical. Around the shrine of St. Gilles a rich and powerful institution had grown up by the twelfth century. Since most of the buildings were destroyed or badly damaged in either the sixteenth- century Wars of Religion or the Revolution, it is difficult to imagine the size and splendour of the medieval establishment. Gilles’ tomb was an immensely popular place of pilgrimage. Because of the injuries he sustained in place of the doe, he became patron saint of the physically impaired, and later of lepers. And because the doe fed him and he protected her he became patron of nursing mothers. Saint-Gilles was also conveniently placed on the main southern route to and from the even more popular shrine of Santiago de Compostela; this route came to be known as the “Via Aegidiana”. Numbers were swelled, too, by pilgrims, merchants and crusaders en route for the Middle East.

The abbey, which was subject to the mother-house at Cluny but allowed considerable autonomy, attracted gifts and privileges from such important patrons as Pope Clement IV (reigned 1265-8). He was originally, as Guy Foulque, from Saint-Gilles; traditionally he was born at the “Maison romane”, which now houses a local museum. The Counts of Toulouse were also, sometimes, generous patrons. Monastic wealth, however, was always a temptation to rulers less idealized than King Flavius, and rivalry between secular and ecclesiastical powers was a constant of medieval society. Raymond IV of Toulouse actually took back some of the gifts he had given and was forced to restore them only at the Council of Nîmes in 1096 when, in the presence of Pope Urban II, he set his spiritual and secular house in order before departing for the First Crusade. (It was during this visit to France that Urban dedicated the new abbey-church of St. Gilles, although most of the building seems not to have begun until 1116.) Raymond’s sons and successors, Counts Bertrand and Alphonse-Jourdain, in turn seized the abbey, were excommunicated, and eventually submitted to papal authority.

Raymond VI’s tussle with the papacy was more complicated. Like his forebears he had a tendency to persecute the monks of St. Gilles. But he was also, more worryingly for the church authorities, well disposed towards the Cathars or Albigensians; their heresies included an opposition to churches, the sacraments administered in them, and the relics (for instance St. Gilles’) venerated there. In 1207 Innocent III sent his legate, Pierre de Castelnau, to denounce the count and renew the sentence of excommunication already passed on him. “From this day forward,” went the traditional formulation Castelnau delivered, “you are the enemy of God and of men. Your subjects are released from all oaths of fealty to you. Whoever deposes you will be right to do it. Whoever kills you will be blessed.” But it was not Raymond who died; soon after leaving the court, in January 1208, the legate was murdered by one of the count’s squires—probably acting on his own initiative, although out of loyalty to his master.

There is an obvious parallel with the killing of Thomas Becket nearly forty years earlier. Like Henry II of England after that incident, Raymond VI was forced to submit to the church in very public fashion.

 

On 12 June 1209 he presented himself at the door of the abbey of St. Gilles. Naked apart from his braies (linen trousers), he had a cord round his neck and carried a lighted candle, the symbol of repentance. He kneeled before the legate Milon and swore allegiance to the pope and his legates. Milon then drew Raymond into the church by the cord; as he walked, he was whipped with rods. In the crowded church the legate sermonized the count at length; among the fairly convincing charges against him were that he had favoured heretics, was suspected of Castelnau’s murder, had imprisoned the bishop of Vaison and his clergy and destroyed his palace, and had used churches as fortresses. Finally the malefactor passed through the crypt, near Castelnau’s tomb. The Albigensian crusade would now begin in earnest, although in spite of his submission Raymond was soon fighting on the other side, against the papal crusaders.

By the time Raymond repented in front of the church it was almost certainly graced with its surviving façade. The central tympanum was replaced in the seventeenth century but otherwise the sculptures date from the twelfth century—whether early or late is disputed; some earlier scholars argued that they influenced the mid-century figures of the Royal Portal at Chartres. At St. Gilles the tympana portray, from left to right, the Virgin and Child, Christ in Majesty, and the Crucifixion. The frieze beneath narrates the Passion of Christ from the Entry into Jerusalem to his risen appearance to the Holy Women. Twelve much larger Apostles are grouped by the main portal. It has been suggested that this orthodox subject matter may have been intended as an anti- Cathar declaration. Whitney S. Stoddard argues, in Art and Architecture in Medieval France (1972), that the unusual prominence afforded the Crucifixion and Last Supper is aimed at an earlier (possibly 1120s) heretical group whose leader, Pierre de Bruys, did not believe in the efficacy of the Mass. “To emphasize his feelings, he and his colleagues stole the wooden crosses from Saint-Gilles, and on Good Friday they roasted meat in front of the abbey on a fire made of the crosses. A few days later the Church replied, and Peter and his companions were burned as heretics on the same spot.”

The St. Gilles figures were inspired chiefly by classical sculpture, perhaps mainly on sarcophagi. Sacheverell Sitwell in Monks, Nuns and Monasteries (1965) calls the style “ultra-Roman Romanesque”:

 

But, then, [St. Gilles] is in Provence , where so many classical remains are above the ground... Even the clothes worn by the figures on the fronts of both churches [St. Gilles and St. Trophime in Arles] hang down in long folds and are like fringed togas. The new emergence is in the crouching animals below the apostles’ feet. This is the beginning of another and fresh art, while the processions of small figures are of sarcophagus monotony and as dull as that.

 

That the façade, whether dull or fresh, has survived at all is extraordinary. Most of the monastic buildings were burned down by victorious Protestants in 1562. Sixty years later, amid a new outbreak of fighting, what was still standing or had been rebuilt was being used as a fortress. As Louis XIII’s army approached, the Protestant Duc de Rohan decided to blow the whole place up rather than let it fall into Catholic hands. The bell-tower and other parts of the church had been detonated when, fortunately for posterity, the royal forces arrived.

 

Aigues-Mortes: “A Bright, Quiet Melancholy”

 

“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.” Henry James, coming across the vast surrounding flats by train, registered the wholeness and compactness of Aigues-Mortes. King Louis IX of France (St. Louis) developed the town in the 1240s as the only Mediterranean port in his domains; the grid-pattern, with ramparts completed by his son Philippe III later in the century, was designed to make the remote site easier to defend. Louis set off from here on the Seventh Crusade in 1248 and, with fewer supporters, on the Eighth in 1270. (The first expedition stayed in the Middle East for six years. Early in the second, Louis died at Tunis.) But after these famous interludes the port began to decline in importance. The harbour silted up and trade was eventually lost to Sète in the seventeenth century. Closer to Aigues, Le Grau-du-Roi prospered as a fishing-port and more recently as a seaside resort. The salt- pans—a dominant feature of the wide views from the towers and ramparts—supplied the town’s surviving industry.

“The sand, the salt, the dull sea-view, surround it with a bright, quiet melancholy,” James felt. A particular subject for sadness might be the Tour de Constance. St. Louis built it both to defend his new town and as a residence which he used briefly in 1248 and 1270, but its main later role was as a prison; James notes its “extraordinary girth and solidity”. Knights Templar were held here after the sudden dissolution of their order in 1307 by Louis’ grandson Philippe Le Bel. Between 1686 and 1768 over two hundred Protestant women, mostly from the Cévennes, were consigned to the tower. (Men were more often sent to the galleys.) In the tradition of the Camisard rebels of the early eighteenth century, most of them steadfastly refused to abjure the faith. Many died here. In La Tour de Constance (1970) the novelist André Chamson (1900-83), who was married to a descendant of one of the internees, and himself descended from Camisards, tells the women’s story. They were shut up in their “high circular room, their raised tomb about twenty feet in diameter, nearly always enveloped in shade”, subject to freezing or torrid wind, streaming with damp. They were racked with coughs, attacked by fleas, bugs and scorpions, twisted with rheumatism, prone to fevers. (James, shown round by the custodian’s wife, found her “yellow with the traces of fever and ague”, as might have been expected “in a town whose name denotes dead waters”.) Usually death was the only release.

France celebrates Bastille Day on 14 July, but for Chamson the real, if unjustly forgotten Bastille was at Aigues-Mortes. In no other prison has “so much innocence and purity been kept in irons.” The tower is named after Constance, wife of Raymond V of Toulouse, who built the original structure in the twelfth century, but the name is particularly appropriate to those who showed, as Chamson says, the power of “the constancy of a woman’s heart and the firmness of a human soul”.

Such constancy is well illustrated—in fact as well as in the novel— by Marie Durand, who was incarcerated in 1730. Her father and fiancé were also arrested, the former released as an old man in 1743, the latter released and banished in 1750. Throughout her thirty-eight years in the tower she was an inspiration to the other women, and tradition has it that it was she who inscribed register—a dialectal version of resister—on the coping of the tower’s central well. Eventually the Protestants began to be less fiercely persecuted and, in April 1768, Durand was released, soon to be followed by the few other remaining prisoners. Chamson describes her disorientation on entering at last a world which seems immense, as if God has suddenly altered the units of measurement. Shereturned to her dilapidated house and was granted a pension by fellow- believers in Amsterdam; she shared it with a neighbour released from the galleys. She died in 1776, her place assured in the pantheon of Protestant south-western resisters. Chamson (born in Nîmes) was steeped in Cévenol and Camisard history from childhood; true to that past, he himself served in the Resistance as well as going on to celebrate Durand’s more passive fortitude.

 

“The constancy of a woman’s heart and the firmness of a human soul” (André Chamson): La Tour de Constance, prison of Marie Durand.