Chapter Nine
Alphonse Daudet’s Provence: Nîmes
“I was born... in a town in Languedoc where there are to be found, as in every town in the Midi, plenty of sun, not a little dust, a Carmelite convent and two or three Roman monuments.” So begins Alphonse Daudet’s partly autobiographical novel Le Petit Chose (1866-7). Nîmes, where Daudet was born at what is now 20 Boulevard Gambetta in 1840, is the southern town in question. Its two or three best known Roman monuments are its amphitheatre, Maison Carrée and Tour Magne, but it has been for centuries—not merely ancient and dusty—a centre of textile manufacture. In 1787 Thomas Jefferson noted that “this is the cheapest place in France to buy silk stockings”; the father of Daniel Eyssette, the “Petit Chose” or “weak little thing” as his schoolfellows and various later persecutors call him, owns a factory where scarves are made.
The most famous substance once made in Nîmes is denim. The word is, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “shortened from serge de Nim, French serge de Nîmes ... A name originally given to a kind of serge” and subsequently to “a coloured twilled cotton material used largely for overalls and hangings, etc.” The Musée du Vieux Nîmes, next to the cathedral, includes a display of the history of denim from practical aid to fashion icon. The city might, however, have become more strongly associated with a perhaps less useful substance: Murray’s 1843 guide notes that it was the birthplace of Nicot, “a physician who first introduced from Portugal into France tobacco (called after him Nicotiana).”
Glimpses of the life of earlier Nîmois are to be had at the Archaeological Museum: Roman and pre-Roman ex-votos, a mosaic with Bellerophon on Pegasus found in what is now Boulevard Gambetta, a fifth- or sixth-century Christian sarcophagus carved with vines and grasses. One of the best-preserved items is the funerary monument of a powerful late first-century AD couple, Licinia Flavilla, priestess of the imperial cult, and Sextus Adgenus Macrinus, variously a legionary tribune, justice, priest and “prefect of the workers”. She wears the distinctive braided imperial hairstyle of her period and a fairly dignified expression. He, with large sun flaming vigorously on his breastplate, looks calm, responsible, lined with experience as much as age. Above the pair swim dolphins, symbols of regeneration or bearers of the soul to the Isles of the Blessed.
“The proportions of the building... so happily united” (Tobias Smollett): the Maison Carrée and the Carré d’Art.
The Maison Carrée And The Carré d’Art
The Maison Carrée is all that remains above ground of the forum of ancient Nemausus. It was built at the end of the first century BC or the beginning of the first century AD and dedicated to the memory of Lucius and Gaius, Augustus’ grandsons and adoptive sons. It was a temple of the Imperial Cult.
“The proportions of the building are so happily united,” says Tobias Smollett in Travels Through France and Italy (1766), “as to give it an air of majesty and grandeur, which [even] the most indifferent spectator cannot behold without emotion.” You need not be “a connoisseur in architecture, to enjoy these beauties. They are indeed so exquisite, that you may return to them every day with a fresh appetite for seven days together.” Arthur Young, in 1787, concurs: it is absurd that modern architects who have seen such “chaste and elegant simplicity of taste” can “rear such piles of laboured foppery and heaviness as are to be met with in France.”
A rare dissenter is Prosper Mérimée, whose job as inspector of ancient monuments made him of necessity “a connoisseur in architecture”. For him the portico may be magnificent but the engaged columns have an unfortunate effect; their capitals are short and squashed-up, and the cornice is heavy and overloaded. On the other hand Stendhal, or his commercial-traveller narrator in Mémoires d’un touriste (1838), likes the building but not the familiar name: “Quel nom bourgeois pour ce charmant petit temple!” After all, it isn’t square— “carré”; “it is shaped like a playing-card, like any self-respecting ancient temple.” (Earlier generations were less geometrically precise than Stendhal’s: “carré” could mean rectangular as well as square.)
The Maison Carrée was put to various later uses. It was a town hall, a stable, a church. Joseph Spence, accompanying young Lord Middlesex on his Grand Tour in 1733, thought “the inside... spoiled by making a modern church of it, though that’s the way of making it sacred and preserving the outside.” At the Revolution that protection was lost, the Augustinians expelled, the church closed. In the youth of Stendhal’s traveller birds nested among the sculptures of the capitals and children threw pebbles at them or climbed up the columns. This was bad, but as far as he was concerned it was no more appropriate to put a museum in the place in 1823. At that time the museum displayed both archaeological finds and more recent paintings. It now houses a few statues and fragments; a mosaic found near the Maison and pre-dating it by a few years, with linked black swimmer and dolphin; and a first- or second-century AD mosaic in black and white with panthers flanking a crater or mixing-vessel.
Louis XIV’s minister Colbert had more drastic plans for the temple. He considered removing it, stone by stone, to Paris. The idea was typical of the absolutist and centralizing nature of the régime; the Nîmois had less to fear from Thomas Jefferson and the Countess of Blessington. Even before Jefferson came and admired the original in 1787, he had based the State House in Richmond, Virginia, on drawings of the Maison Carrée—probably “the most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity.” Blessington, in The Idler in France (1841), expressed the desire “to have a small model of it executed in silver, as an ornament for the centre of a table.”
Opposite the temple, echoing its name and its architecture, is the Carré d’Art (by Sir Norman Foster, 1993), which displays a permanent collection of art post-1960 and temporary exhibitions. The building is, says the architect, “a conscious exploration of Classical themes”; the pillars of the portico are the clearest classical reference. But the materials—steel, glass, concrete—and the atmosphere are modern. The walls are mostly see-through. From several levels there is a view of the street, a row of olive-trees in tubs, and the temple. People are part of the spectacle, whether using the various gallery and library facilities of the Carré d’Art, or in the street, or going in and out of the Maison Carrée. Sound-proofing helps make even the traffic aesthetically satisfying. But for some observers the juxtaposition of ancient and modern is too stark. The novelist Renaud Camus, according to his 1993 diary, could try only “méritoirement”, dutifully, to admire Foster’s “big white building”.
The Arena And Le Charroi de Nîmes: “They Will Have Bull Fights”
The Roman amphitheatre, built in the late first century AD, could seat about 20,000 spectators. Like the one at Arles, it went through long periods as a settlement and a fortress before emerging as an archaeological site and bull-fighting arena. (The Musée des Cultures Taurines is near the Arena, in Rue Alexandre Ducros. Ezra Pound, in 1912, observed that in this town where at least “the water is brought you iced in a carafe” and “the ice-cream is passable”, the people “are probably all right but they will have bull fights.”)
In 1733 Joseph Spence noted that “the bottom has a little town built in it.” John Addington Symonds in “Old Towns of Provence” looked back to less tranquil days, marvelling that “Charles Martel’s conflagration, when he burnt the Saracen hornet’s nest inside it, has only blackened the outer walls and arches venerably.” Arabs or “Saracens” had captured the city from the Visigoths in 725. Charles Martel—just as much of a “hornet” as far as they were concerned—damaged the arena during his incursion into Muslim territory in 736, sixteen years before Nîmes finally came under Frankish control.
The wars between Arabs and Franks are the setting for Le Charroi de Nîmes, a twelfth-century chanson de geste about the legendary Guillaume d’Orange, a figure based distantly on Charlemagne’s cousin, Guillaume, Count of Toulouse. The hero (also known as “Shortnose” as a result of a wound received, as he angrily reminds the insufficiently grateful King Louis, in royal service), uses a traditional and rather homely stratagem to take Nîmes from the Saracens. Having come upon a cart carrying barrels of salt, he requisitions all the carts and oxen he can find. Charroi here means a convoy of carts or waggon-train. He hides his knights and their weapons in barrels and disguises himself and some of his followers as peasants, drivers or merchants; his nephew Bertrand’s inexperience as a driver provides a comic interlude in which he gets his cart stuck in the mud. Eventually they enter the city and Guillaume advertises his wares—rich cloth, spices and (more truthfully) arms and armour—to the interested Saracens. Meanwhile barrels are being placed strategically. After a time Guillaume, having got himself into an argument and killed the king’s brother, sounds his horn and the knights emerge. They proceed to slaughter all the Saracens with that genocidal thoroughness which is casually accepted in such tales—as, often, in life.
The arena in Nîmes: “little town”, fortress scorched by Charles Martel, and setting for ancient and modern games.
(“Tote la terre est couverte de sanc,” we are told.) Their king would be spared if he converted to Christianity. He refuses and so Guillaume throws him to his death from an upper window. With equal but more commendable thoroughness, he returns the carts and oxen to the countryfolk and richly rewards them from the spoils of conquest.
Seething With Heresy”: Religion In Nîmes
The medieval town was concentrated on the narrow streets round the amphitheatre and the cathedral of Our Lady and St. Castor. The cathedral was consecrated in 1096, on the site of an earlier church, by Pope Urban II, who was in France to preach the First Crusade. Little of this Romanesque church remains, however, because it was mostly destroyed in the religious conflicts which beset the city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or by subsequent re-building.
What does survive includes part of the frieze on the upper façade showing scenes from Genesis in high relief. In the first panel, beneath a border of lions’ heads and acanthus, a large serpent with suitably diabolical eyes twists around the tree. He addresses Eve, whose missing hand probably took the missing apple, while Adam, naked like her, looks on. Further right we see the consequences of their forbidden knowledge. Each has a fig-tree. A large leaf covers Eve like a skirt and she clutches another leaf across her breasts. Adam too covers his genitals and becomes—so strong is the desire to cover and to hide—almost part of his tree. But it is no use hiding from God: in the next section the angel, holding an emphatically prominent sword (equivalent to the “flaming sword which turned every way” in Genesis) presides over their expulsion from the garden. The results of the Fall continue as, after a large divine hand has accepted Abel’s sacrifice, his brother kills him. It is this scene which is much the most noticeable from below. The figures fill almost all the available space, as unavoidable as the hatred and ferocity with which the deed is done. Whereas the angel holds his sword upright, Cain drives his long curved knife straight down through Abel’s neck. With his free hand he holds his victim by the hair. Abel’s outstretched hand, open in prayer or to beg for mercy or perhaps just reaching towards his killer’s leg, underlines his vulnerable humanity.
The rest of the frieze is less vigorous, more bunched, but often interesting, seventeenth-century work. The story continues with Noah’s ark; the building of the tower of Babel (a crane lifting blocks, masons at work) and its spectacular collapse; and Abraham prevented from sacrificing the kneeling Isaac with an almighty sword-stroke when the angel seizes the end of the sword. In view of the violent history of the church and the town the prominence of weapons and of Cain’s fratricide is unfortunately apt.
Local Protestants sacked the cathedral, and smashed the originals of these seventeenth-century replacements, in 1567. The Nîmes area was, King François I had proclaimed in 1541, “seething with heresy, error, new sects and false doctrines.” He ordered the local magistrates to extirpate “this wretched Lutheran sect”. But Nîmes was a long way from Paris, and Protestantism—mainly not Lutheran but Calvinist, with close links to Geneva—continued to grow apace, more often helped than hindered by persecution. By the late sixteenth century Protestants in Nîmes outnumbered Catholics about three or four to one. Artisans, especially the city’s many textile-workers, were mostly Protestant. With the outbreak of the Wars of Religion through much of France in the 1560s, the reformers seized their chance to take control of the city. The sacking of the cathedral was accompanied by the killing of at least a hundred Catholics, including one of the city Consuls and the bishop’s Vicar General. (This St. Michael’s Day massacre was remembered as la Michelade.) The Protestants dominated the local administration almost without break until the 1630s. A Catholic revival then followed under Bishop Cohon, who rebuilt the cathedral (sacked once more in the 1620s). His main addition was the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception at the west end, where he was buried in 1670. Restoration has successfully maintained its baroque flavour, including “barley-sugar” pillars on either side of the altar. The bishop himself, portrayed here in the customary dark clothes and skull-cap, looks more sober.
Catholic hegemony was strongly assisted by Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; Protestant places of worship were demolished and the worshippers had to pay the demolition costs. Religious troubles were far from over, however. Troops set fire to a mill and murdered a hundred Protestants just outside the city in 1703, and by that time many of their co-religionists in the Cévennes, north-west of Nîmes, were in full-blooded rebellion. The insurrection had begun in 1702 with the murder of the hated Abbé du Chayla. Since then they had waged an extraordinarily successful guerrilla campaign. (The popular name for the rebels, camisards, derives either from the fact that they fought not in uniform but in their shirts—camisa is an Occitan equivalent of chemise—or from a word meaning “ambush”.) Among their leaders was Jean Cavalier, a former baker’s boy in his early twenties but gifted with a remarkable flair for military tactics. On one occasion he had routed seven hundred soldiers with a force of sixty. But in 1704 royal troops discovered and seized his arms depots and Cavalier decided to open negotiations with the enemy. Talks took place in Nîmes, at a convent garden near the Maison Carrée. Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France (1843) gives a colourful, if fairly accurate, account:
Marshal Villars had an interview in 1704 with the celebrated chief of the Camisards Cavalier, who... at that time a mere youth, had raised himself by his talents for command, and by fanatic eloquence to be the head of the rebellion of the Cevennes. He appeared on that occasion magnificently mounted, and attired in lace coat, cocked hat, and plume of white feathers, escorted by a body-guard on horseback. The result of this memorable conference was to detach him from the insurgents by flattering promises of rank and reward... as the price of his defection, together with assurances of justice and tolerance in religion to the persecuted Protestants of the Cevennes. Neither one nor the other were destined to be kept or fulfilled. Villars, however, thus dealt a death-blow to the insurrection, by depriving it of one of its heads, and Cavalier, despised and deserted by his own party, and neglected by the court, was soon driven into exile.
Tolerance was indeed not delivered. Many camisards, accordingly, went on fighting. Many were hanged or broken on the wheel in Nîmes. Cavalier went on to serve with the British army, became Lieutenant Governor of Jersey in 1735, and died there in 1740.
Stability was achieved only after fresh sectarian violence—settling of old scores—during the Revolution and in 1815. Today the communities live in peace. Nîmes remains, however, a significant Protestant centre; for some, adherence to the reformed faith is a badge not only of belief but of regional identity.
The Tour Magne And The Temple Of Diana
On 29 December 1914 Guillaume Apollinaire, in barracks at Nîmes with the 38th artillery, addressed a poem to his beloved “Lou”—Louise de Coligny-Châtillon—whose initial rejection of him was one reason for his enlisting. (Temporarily swayed, she came to stay in Nîmes for ten days. The enthusiastic sex which occurred whenever he could leave barracks fuelled the erotic letters and love-poems of the next few months.) As he returned to barracks, thinking of Lou, “The Tour Magne was turning on its laurelled hill”, slowly dancing; “As the lovers descended the hill/The tower was dancing slowly like a Saracen woman.” Perhaps the tower does not dance for everyone; its original more practical function was probably as a watch-tower—or, as Dr. Edward Rigby persuaded his late eighteenth-century travelling companions, “an ancient gazebo”. Other theories are that it was a triumphal monument or a mausoleum. The first tower on the site was built in about the third century BC and incorporated into the surviving Roman edifice—part of the extensive city walls—in 16-15 BC. It stands 33 metres high even without its original top storey, and looks altogether more substantial than most photographs suggest.
The Tour Magne is at the top of Mont Cavalier, the hill which Apollinaire’s lovers come down. They would go first through the gardens planted in the nineteenth century with cypress, holm-oak and (as in the poem) laurel, then down to the Jardin de la Fontaine, the military engineer J.-P. Mareschal’s eighteenth-century remodelling of the area around the ancient spring. For the author of The Gentleman’s Guide, in his Tour Through France (1770) the canals, basins, cascades, the “walks form’d, trees planted, in the most uniform manner imaginable”, made this “the most complete high finished work throughout the kingdom.” The gardens also include the mainly second-century AD building known as the Temple of Diana, which was perhaps a library, certainly part of a complex associated with the imperial cult and the sacred spring of Nemausus. Here Philip Thicknesse (A Year’s Journey Through France and Spain, 1777) found anything but “high finished work”: the place was “covered with broken statues, busts, urns, vases, cornices, friezes, inscriptions... lying in the utmost disorder, one upon another, like the stripped dead in a field of battle.” It would, says Thicknesse, do admirably to illustrate the melancholy of Milton’s Il Penseroso. In 1787 Hubert Robert painted a grander, more romantic version of the scene as part of his series of ancient Provençal sites, now in the Louvre.
The contents of the Temple of Diana were removed long ago. It may still seem melancholy with its battered columns and empty plinths, open to the elements. There is free access from the park; especially at the weekend people tramp through, children cycle and climb about in spite of interdiction, balls bounce past. Nevertheless the building has something of the air of a Roman or Ptolemaic monument in Egypt as painted by David Roberts. The ground is sandy where the central paving once was, there is the odd palm-tree nearby, and there is a sense of a once mighty place abandoned, its tall arches and strong masonry still marking strength and power.
The Pont Du Gard: “The Measuring, Contriving Mind”
The aqueduct of which the Pont du Gard formed part ran from the Fontaine d’Eure, near Uzès, to the “Castellum” in Nîmes, where the delivery-tank survives. At least 30,000 cubic metres of water arrived here every day. J.G. Landels, in Engineering in the Ancient World (1978), gives some of the facts about the bridge: it
has two tiers of arches, with an additional structure of much smaller arches on top, and the total height above the river bed is 180ft. (54.8m). The highest tier is made in the same material as the rest, and carries a water channel about 4 1⁄2 ft. (1.36m.) wide and 5 1⁄2 ft. (1.66m) deep. During the many centuries when water flowed through it, a thick incrustation of calcium carbonate has been deposited on the sides and bottom. Even at this great height, stone slabs were hoisted up and placed over the channel, to shield it from the sun and from pollution.
Sober measurement is not the only reaction available. Until recently—there now seems to be more policing—a few brave or foolhardy young tourists would leap the 22 metres into the river from the first tier. (The highest tier was, until its closure to the public, a favourite and dramatic launch-pad for suicides.) Less worryingly, you can inspect the aqueduct from a number of different angles, stroll across and back, or eat and drink while looking up from the rocky white outcrops below. Having done all this, and wondered at its size, dramatic setting and completeness, visitors have frequently felt that it ought to stand for something, to make a point. For J. A. Symonds, “the human labour yet remains, the measuring, contriving mind of man, shrinking from no obstacles, spanning the air, and in one edifice combining gigantic strength and perfect beauty.” Murray’s Handbook of 1843 declares that “like Stonehenge, it is the monument of a people’s greatness, a standard by which to measure their power and intellect.” (Victorian Britons—and members of other imperially- minded nations—liked to compare their own “power and intellect” and “measuring, contriving mind” with those of the Romans.) For Stendhal, it tells us more about personal refinement or sensitivity than national greatness: it ought to operate like “sublime music”, which can be appreciated only by the chosen. Meanwhile lesser mortals wonder only at the money it must have cost. (In modern times vast sums have been spent on visitor centres, shops, cafés and car-parks, all screened discreetly from the bridge itself.)
The Pont du Gard: “the hugeness, the solidity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude of the whole thing leaves you nothing to say” (Henry James).
Henry James remains his ambivalent self when confronted by Roman grandeur: “the hugeness, the solidity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude of the whole thing leaves you nothing to say.” He “discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality”, the rigidity of a race which could do nothing small. Nevertheless, the bridge speaks of the Romans “in a manner with which they might have been satisfied.”
Tarascon: The Tarasque
Before St. Martha arrived, say several medieval accounts of her life, there was a barren wilderness between Arles and Avignon. The most ferocious of the various venomous creatures that inhabited this area was the Tarasque. Most sources say it was a dragon; or perhaps, suggests one nineteenth-century defender of the truth of the tale, it was simply a crocodile which had travelled up the Nile, across the Mediterranean and on up the Rhône. In one Latin version its breath was poisonous, its eyes shot out flames, and its teeth made a fearsome noise. Usually, like most such monsters, it ripped up people and animals. Even its odour was deadly. Jacobus de Voragine, in The Golden Legend, makes it part-fish and gives it wings. A French account (also known in Spanish translation) goes into rather more detail: “it was stouter than an ox and longer than a horse and had a mane and the mouth of a lion, and hair like a horse, and sharp teeth which cut like a sword, and legs like a horse... and lion’s feet, and bear’s nails, and a tail like a viper.” Probably it would not have been difficult to persuade such commentators that the Tarasque was very like a whale.
The dragon ate shepherds and sheep and overturned boats. Local people asked Martha to do something about it and, having rebuked them for their lack of trust in God, she obliged by going off and binding the beast with her girdle. (Her faith and her virginity, symbolized by the girdle, made her strong.) They were then able to kill it; in some later traditions, she led it away captive or ordered it to submerge itself permanently in the depths of the Rhône. The place formerly called “Blackhearth” was renamed Tarascon after the monster, and the saint made her home in the wilderness, which she transformed into a much more agreeable place. Her house was decorated not with “useless ornaments” but with virtues. She lived an ascetic life, welcomed and fed the poor, and performed such miracles as resurrecting a boy who had drowned when trying to swim the Rhône in his eagerness to hear her preach. More miracles followed after her burial in the house, which now became St. Martha’s church: the blind, the deaf, lepers and those possessed by demons were healed and Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, was cured of kidney disease when he touched the tomb.
The grateful Clovis, say the writers of Martha’s life, endowed the church with lands on either side of the river. In fact, he cannot have done this since the area was not under his rule; his donation, like the whole story of the saint’s adventures in Provence, was probably invented in order to justify St. Martha’s church’s claims for revenue against those of a rival church in Tarascon, St.-Nicolas. The church of Ste.-Marthe is first recorded in the tenth century but became considerably more prominent after the convenient discovery of her body on site in 1187. The third- or fourth-century sarcophagus is still to be seen in the small crypt. Her “recumbent effigy in white marble, not badly executed, but modern” (Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, 1897-8)—seventeenth- century—has been moved into the church. The crypt was restored in the seventeenth century and the church is mainly fourteenth-century, restored after major bomb damage in 1944. The most interesting features are the Romanesque south portal (badly vandalized during the Revolution) and, by the steps leading to the crypt, the Renaissance tomb-effigy of King René’s loyal follower Jean de Cossa, Count of Troia and Seneschal of Provence, who died in 1467.
“A procession of mummers, attended by the clergy... paraded the town escorting the figure of a dragon, made of canvas, and wielding a heavy beam of wood for a tail, to the imminent danger of the legs of all who approached” (Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould).
The Tarasque also continued to lead a vigorous legendary life in Tarascon. King René was credited with founding the jeux de la Tarasque in the 1460s but they must have had much earlier beginnings, ultimately as a fertility rite. Baring-Gould records how
a procession of mummers, attended by the clergy... paraded the town escorting the figure of a dragon, made of canvas, and wielding a heavy beam of wood for a tail, to the imminent danger of the legs of all who approached. The dragon was conducted by a girl in white and blue, who led it by her girdle of blue silk, and when the dragon was especially unruly, dashed holy water over it. The ceremony was attended by numerous practical jokes, and led to acts of violence, in consequence of which it has been suppressed. The effigy of the dragon now reposes in the lumber room of the theatre.
Sometimes legs and arms were broken, at which, according to the 1787 account of Claude-François Achard, the crowd applauded and yelled at the top of their voices in praise of the Tarasque: “Well done, ben fai! “A rather less violent version of the festival has been re-established and expanded—fireworks and bulls as well as procession and practical jokes—and the Tarasque now usually “reposes” at the information centre.
Tartarin De Tarascon: “Prodigious Adventures”
Tarascon’s other famous hunter of fierce beasts is Tartarin, the comic hero of Daudet’s Les Aventures prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon (1872) and its two sequels. But Tartarin does nothing comparable to killing or taming a Tarasque. His reputation as a big-game hunter follows on from the way he himself blurs the line between the tales of intrepid explorers and adventurers he reads and his real, timid, stay-at-home inclinations. There is also some evidence of his shooting-prowess—gained on the Sunday expeditions where, in the absence of game other than one persistently escaping hare, he and his friends throw their caps in the air and gun them down. (This is good for the hat-trade in Tarascon. Some shops even sell helpfully ready-holed and torn headgear for “les maladroits”.) Tartarin seems also to be a weapons expert, for his study walls are covered with “carbines, rifles, blunderbusses, Corsican knives, Catalan knives... Malay krises, arrows from the Caribbean, flint arrows, knuckle-dusters... Hottentot clubs… and heaven knows what else!” And he has a reputation as a traveller: the fact that there was once a possibility of his accepting a job in Shanghai has elided, for him and for others, with the idea that he actually went and was accustomed to breaking off work to blaze away with his rifle at “the Tartars”.
Tartarin further shows his firmness by standing his ground before the cage of a lion from the Atlas Mountains, part of a menagerie which visits Place du Château. “The lion of Atlas” roars at “the lion of Tarascon”, who stands firm while others rush for the doors. He is, or seems to be, prepared for anything. Absorbed in some adventure-story, he will leap up (unadventurous long johns and headcloth forgotten) to brandish an axe or a tomahawk and shout “Now let them come!” Who “they” are he does not entirely know: they are everything “which attacks, which fights, which bites, which scratches, which scalps, which shouts, which roars.” They might be Sioux or grizzlies, Malay pirates or Abruzzi bandits—”them! In other words war, expeditions, adventure, glory.” Such aggressors are unlikely to visit the sleepy Tarascon of the book, but the hero takes his precautions, especially when he visits friends in the evening. Armed only with an iron-pointed knuckle- duster, a sword-stick, a truncheon in his left pocket, a revolver in the right, and a kris across his chest, he checks his property before leaving. Slowly (“à l’anglaise, messieurs, à l’anglaise! c’est le vrai courage”) Tartarin walks round the garden and then suddenly throws open the heavy door. If they were there they would be pounded to a jelly, but “unluckily, they were not behind it.” In the silent streets he meets not a dog, not a drunk, only, annoyingly, the pharmacist and his family. Without further incident he reaches a friend’s house, where he spends the evening playing cards.
But greater undertakings are to come. Since the visit of the menagerie, rumour has had it that the famous huntsman will soon go to Africa in quest of lions that do not live in cages. Eventually the Tarasconnais begin to notice that he has not gone. His reputation is in danger. Two Tartarins struggle, one a romantic idealist, the other a plump, comfort-loving bourgeois: Don Quixote in the body of Sancho Panza. Chapter 7 includes a dialogue between them: the exalted “Tartarin-Quixote” cries “Cover yourself in glory, Tartarin” and the calm “Tartarin-Sancho” replies “Cover yourself in flannel”; the first calls for his axe, the second rings for the maid to bring his morning chocolate. Sancho has won so far; Jeannette brings such “excellent chocolate, warm, silky” and such succulent grilled meats that Tartarin-Sancho laughs for joy, stifling the cries of Tartarin-Quixote. But in the end the man who has never left Tarascon must go—after due time buying trunk-loads of equipment, and a huge send-off at the station—all the way to Marseille and from there to Algeria, whose colonization by France had begun in 1830. He insists, inevitably, on adopting Algerian dress before he even leaves Tarascon.
Abroad Tartarin’s endeavours are more often farcical than heroic. Algiers, with its customs officers, cafés, hotels and military band playing polkas by Offenbach does not correspond with his “eastern, fairy-tale, mythological” expectations. Even in the countryside lions are hard to come by—they tend, of course, to live further south. He succeeds instead in shooting a donkey, whose owner, an old woman from Alsace, belabours him with her umbrella until her husband arrives and agrees to take massive over-payment for the animal. For a while Tartarin is distracted from his quest by Baïa, a woman he accepts (mistakenly) as the exotic eastern creature of his dreams. When at last he sets off again, after a month of searching he finds and shoots what turns out to be the tame, blind and holy lion he met once before with its keepers. In order to pay the large fine which the local authorities impose on him he has to sell all his equipment. He is left with only the lion’s pelt and a loyal but melancholy and unsaleable camel which refuses to be left behind. But soon all is well again. The hero sent the lion-skin home, as promised, to his friend Bravida. As a result Tarascon and the whole of the Midi believes that he has killed not one but innumerable lions and he returns to a huge and triumphant reception. Even the camel, which he has persistently tried to shake off but which has followed him for so long, confirms his adventurous credentials. (“For a moment Tarascon thought its Tarasque had come back.”) By the time he reaches his house he is beginning to tell the story of his great hunts “in the depths of the Sahara”.
Daudet claimed that he received hate-mail from inhabitants of Tarascon who felt themselves dishonoured by this local “hero”. He also irritated some of his fellow southerners by his insistence that everything they say is interspersed with redundant cries of “autrement”— “otherwise”—which they comically pronounce “autremain”. And he endeared himself even less to many with his smiling, faux-naïf declaration, when talking about how Tartarin got his reputation, that “the man from the Midi does not lie, he is mistaken. He doesn’t always tell the truth, but he thinks he is telling it... His particular lie isn’t a lie, but a sort of mirage”—an effect of the southern sun which makes everything look bigger. But then, Daudet can say in his defence, he himself is exaggerating. In Histoire de mes livres he goes on, in part- apology, part-continued mockery, to exaggerate the reaction of the good people of Tarascon to his work: every morning, from every shop- entrance and every window, come the same angry fists, the same flashing of black eyes, the same shout of rage in the direction of Paris: “Oh, if ever that Daudet comes down this way...” But in fact, he says, the Tarasconnais should not feel singled out for unjust treatment: he chose Tarascon just because when he heard the name called at the station it rang out, more than any other, “like the cry of an Apache warrior”. The place he was really talking about in Tartarin was, he maintains, his native Nîmes.
In one respect Daudet had evidently come too close to Provençal reality. Originally, when the book was published in parts in Le Figaro, Tartarin had been called Barbarin and there were vociferous complaints from a real Barbarin family. (Daudet clearly found this name, which replaced the even earlier Chapatin, suitably comic.) But the author did not capitulate completely. In Le Figaro the unreliable Grégory, allegedly prince of Montenegro, who later robs Barbarin, misremembers him at one point as “Tartarin”. Therefore in the revised version he misremembers him as “Barbarin”, drawing the reader’s attention to the name, or the change of names, and perhaps cocking a final snook at the complainers.
Aptly for a character who thrives on his completely unjustified reputation, the fictional character has a real “Maison de Tartarin” in Tarascon. (It opened to the public in 1985.) Here are carefully realized his garden of exotic plants; his study full of weapons, with the marvellously absurd notice warning “Poisoned arrows, don’t touch!”; the scene in which Mme Bézuquet, the pharmacist’s mother, plays the “duet” from Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable where Tartarin’s stirring contribution, “with arm stretched out, clenched fist, trembling nostril”, is the repeatedly thundered word “Non!” (pronounced “Nan”). By the stairs and on the landing are “a real zebra skin”, says the label, a python-skin, an eagle, and a crocodile. The house also displays illustrations, reviews of theatrical and cinematic versions of the Tartarin books, postcards and posters.
Tarascon: The Château Du Roi René
For Henry James the outside of the castle is “severely feudal... bare and perpendicular ... It has, above all, an extreme steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as sheer and inhospitable as precipices.” As James Pope-Hennessy says, the exterior is “imposing and functional—a solid, yellow, square-built edifice with fat turrets at the four corners, castellations, machicolated galleries...; it seems a castle in some miniature illustration to the chronicles of Froissart.” It does not feature much in Tartarin de Tarascon: it is too large and dominant to fit with the quintessentially small town Daudet creates.
As befits the unwelcoming outside, this has been a place of violence and constraint. Shells have pocked and pitted the stone towards the river-bridge. In 1794 Robespierre’s local partisans were thrown from the broad high terrace at the top of the castle—where in more peaceful times can be enjoyed wide views of the Rhône, Beaucaire castle, wooded hills and more distant mountains. The castle was used as a prison from the seventeenth century to 1926 and in several rooms prisoners’ graffiti survive: both written inscriptions and detailed pictures of sailed and oared ships, a chessboard, and a lover’s heart. Some of the prisoners were English seamen, captured in war or lesser disputes in the eighteenth century. One inscription is by “John Wallters Taken in the Constantine Privateer of Bristol on the 19th Day of February. Landed on the Island of Minorca the 9th Day of March. Brought to Toulon the 28th. Brought to the Castel Tenth Day of April 1747.”
The château was built, on the site of earlier fortresses, mainly by King René’s father, Count Louis II of Provence, in the early fifteenth century. It was designed to police the Rhône, the western border of Provence. René completed it, however, as a civilized setting—behind the exterior military might—for his court. Today little is left of the décor of his palace. There are busts of René and his wife Jeanne (lacking his face and half her head) and some painted decoration on the roof-beams of the Salon du Roi: gold stars and floral patterns, horses, lions, long-snouted dragons. The written records of the festivities which took place in René’s Tarascon are much more detailed.
Over several days in June 1449 René presided over “The Joust of the Shepherdess”. Knights fought for the fantasy heroine played by a young noblewoman, Isabeau de Lénoncourt, who first appeared with her sheep on the river-island of Jarnègues (now part of Tarascon). Louis de Beauvau, one of the knights, describes her appropriately pastoral but refined costume in his verse account of the proceedings: she wore “figured damask, a very fine grey, not too dark, well lined and fringed with fur” and a scarlet hood. She carried a crook, but a crook decorated with fine silver, and a small silver keg to drink from. Her knightly “shepherds”, also bearing crooks, baskets and other shepherdly equipment when they first appeared, wore gold-embroidered grey. The king, other sources show, made his entry in a doublet of green damask with black breastplate.
After much ceremony the jousting began. Beauvau gives us some breaking of lances but, like René in his courtly treatise “on the form and the device of a tournament” (c. 1444), seems more particularly interested in the symbolic costumes and accoutrements of the jousters and their horses, for example the black, gold and blue ostrich feathers on the armoured frontlet of the charger of Tanneguy Duchastel, Grand Seneschal of Provence. After the last combats all assembled at the castle, where the Shepherdess, amid courteous speeches and trumpet fanfares, handed over the prize jewel to Ferri de Lorraine in the presence of his father-in-law, King René. The lady danced with the winner, food and wine were brought in, and eventually the lords and ladies took their elegant leave of the king and queen.
Beaucaire
Tartarin de Tarascon, brave though the Tarasconnais have long imagined him to be, is not keen on the idea of crossing the bridge to Beaucaire: that “devil of a bridge” is knocked about by the wind; “it is so long, so weak, and the Rhône at this point is so broad…Tartarin de Tarascon preferred terra ferma.”
Some people have been more intrepid. Hannibal is said to have crossed the river at this point on a bridge of boats as he proceeded from Spain to Italy. Later visitors include the lords of Provence who gathered, in 1174, for a great festival at the castle (built in the eleventh century; it would be extended in the thirteenth). They were celebrating the reconciliation of the King of Aragon and the Duke of Narbonne, which had been brought about by Henry II of England. The kings and duke were not present, but, says the Latin account of Geoffrey of Vigeois, the lords found ways to honour them and to do it inaniter—inanely, foolishly. The inanity consisted in lavish largesse to knights, ploughing land near the castle and sowing money instead of corn, and some more inventive oddities: Guillelmus Gros of Martello is supposed to have cooked all the food in the kitchen by means only of wax and pitchpine torches. Raymond of Vernoul, Geoffrey assures us, burned thirty horses causa jactantiae—”because of a boast”. The medievalist Linda Paterson points out that Geoffrey may be exaggerating—he was biased against Provence and all its ways—but if stunts like Raymond’s did occur they were regarded as examples of “the spirit of foudrat, deliberate foolishness or whimsicality”.
Beaucaire also had a less eccentric reputation as the home of a court which welcomed troubadours. Perhaps because of this association, it is one of the main settings for the early thirteenth-century French romance Aucassin et Nicolette. Aucassin, son of the Count of Beaucaire, is hopelessly in love with Nicolette, a slave who eventually turns out, unsurprisingly, to be the daughter of the king of Carthage. She returns his love and both suffer much woe. Despairing searches for each other are punctuated by frequent imprisonment and escape until at last Nicolette arrives back in Beaucaire, disguised as a minstrel, and announces a song to Aucassin, now Count, as he sits before the castle listening to the birdsong and thinking of his love. Her topic will be Nicolette’s (her own) undying love for Aucassin—effectively the tale re- told, the listener directed to savour it again—and soon they are reunited.
The castle was also famous in the same period for its involvement in the double siege of 1216, during the Albigensian Crusade in which mainly northern French armies sought not only to extirpate the Cathar heresy but to subjugate the south more generally. When the townspeople of Beaucaire declared their loyalty to the Counts of Toulouse, the “young Count” Raymond (the future Raymond VII) moved into the town. The castle garrison, however, held out in support of the crusaders, whose leader Simon de Montfort was absent in the north. For three months Raymond’s forces besieged the castle and Simon’s forces (he soon returned to take charge), outside the town, tried to prise them out. In the end Simon, until then regarded as invincible, withdrew in exchange for the garrison’s safe passage—but without their weapons and horses—out of Beaucaire. The siege is vigorously narrated, chiefly from the Toulousain point of view, in the second part (1227) of the Occitan Canso de la crotzada.
In later centuries Beaucaire castle remained a useful stronghold. In 1633 Cardinal Richelieu took the precaution of partly demolishing it following the defeat of the rebel who had seized it, the Duc de Montmorency. What was left remained a picturesque backdrop to the annual July fair which had flourished in Beaucaire since the Middle Ages. By the eighteenth century the fair was attracting possibly as many as 30,000 people and had spilled over from the fields between the castle and the river to dominate the town, increasing its population from 4,500 in 1651 to 7,400 in 1709 and hugely inflating the price of accommodation. The Chevalier Forton, whose history of the town was published in 1836, not long before the fair began at last to go into decline, points out some of the advantages of its position: “the Rhône provides easy access for merchandise from Burgundy, Switzerland and Germany” as does the Mediterranean, only seven leagues away, for goods from Italy, Spain and the Levant. The Canal du Midi brings people in from Bordeaux and down the Atlantic coast from Brittany—and sometimes Britain—and the newer canal between Beaucaire and Aigues- Mortes allows yet another approach. “The principal goods for sale,” Forton says, are “groceries, hardware, haberdashery, silk and wool fabrics, ... drapery, cotton, every sort of leatherwork” and jewelry. Other accounts add wine and foodstuffs, perfume, horses, toys.
Doubtless the fair was also, as the anonymous “galante” novella La Foire de Beaucaire (1708) observes, an excellent place for finding lovers. And there was a fairly good chance, amid the milling crowds and multiple distractions, of being robbed. The commercial traveller who narrates Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste (1838) has been trying hard to understand what a fellow visitor is saying to him in Catalan when he discovers that the contents of his pocket have vanished. But with so much to see or, in a “street” whose walls are made up entirely of strong- smelling onions and garlic, to flee, he does not let the loss unduly distress him. Porters stagger under enormous burdens borne on their heads; there are people selling figs, plums, rosaries; singers “gesticulate and bawl” to the accompaniment of a horn and a double bass.
There is silence only where the waxwork figure of Napoleon on his death-bed at St. Helena is displayed, silence in the moments before the proprietor’s assistant announces to his respectful (and gullible) audience that he can show them the very handkerchief which the emperor used to bind around his head. The living and as yet unvenerated Napoleon himself was in Beaucaire in 1793. The forceful young artillery officer’s pamphlet, Le Souper de Beaucaire (1794), is set at the fair, where a transparently Napoleonic character, “Le Militaire”, lays down the law to a Marseillais whom he meets there. Bonaparte was serving with the army which had just occupied Beaucaire and Tarascon, having driven the Marseillais forces, who were in rebellion against the Republic, out of Avignon. The unfortunate Marseille man in Le Souper is lectured by the soldier and two Languedociens; but any ill-feeling is dissipated when, after the “debate”, they consume several bottles of champagne. The Marseillais, of course, pays.
Fontvieille And Daudet’s Lettres De Mon Moulin
“A windmill for flour, situated in the Rhône Valley, in the very heart of Provence, on a hill wooded with pines and ilex; the said mill having been abandoned for over twenty years” and no longer able to function, overgrown as it is with wild vines, moss, rosemary, and other parasitical verdure which extend right to the end of the sails. “This notwithstanding,” goes on the deed of sale which opens Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin (1869), Monsieur Daudet “declares that he finds the said mill suitable for him” and for his “poetic labours”.
Near Fontvieille the “Moulin de Daudet” can be visited. Daudet manuscripts, illustrations and mementoes are shown on the lower floor. But he composed the Lettres mainly in Paris and visited “his” mill—the deed of sale is of course fictional—while staying with his wife’s cousins at the nearby Château de Montauban. And the mill he had in mind was the Moulin de Tissot, not the similar one his admirers later purchased, the Moulin de St.-Pierre. Some people, perhaps because they have taken the naïve tone of some of the tales at face value, find these facts disappointing. But the Lettres are not an account of life in a windmill. It, and various Provençal traditions and stereotypes, function more often as points of departure, motifs, ways of linking a series of largely unconnected stories. Frost around the mill makes Provence briefly a northern land where the pines are fringed with rime, and so the story- teller writes two “prose ballads” of appropriately “Germanic fancy”. Unable to sleep as the mistral noisily shakes the damaged sails, he is reminded of the time when he lived in a lighthouse in Corsica.
The windmill does feature more directly in the introductory sections. In the “Installation” the narrator takes possession, meets his “silent lodger” (the owl that lives on the upper floor), enjoys the quiet of the pine-wood, and watches sheep being brought down from the mountains for the winter—all part of a world to be contrasted with a Paris of “newspapers, cabs and fog”. “Master Cornille’s Secret” is also set at the mill, back in its working days. Old Cornille has been a miller all his life, but when a Parisian company builds a large steam-mill on the road to Tarascon people desert him and the other traditional millers. For a week he rushes round madly, warning anyone he meets that “steam is an invention of the devil”, whereas he, Cornille, works only with the winds—”the tramontane and the mistral, which are the breath of the good Lord.” Then he locks himself up in his mill. Nobody brings him their corn. But soon everyone is surprised to see the sails turning and, in the evenings, the miller going along with his donkey loaded with what appear to be bulging sacks of flour. Eventually it is discovered that there is no corn or flour in the mill: nothing but a few bags of plaster and rubble. Cornille has proudly tried to keep up appearances. Discovered, he is in despair. But the local people take pity on him, abandon the steam-mill, and bring him their corn once more. Only at his death does the windmill stop production and decline gradually into its state in the Lettres.
Daudet includes a great variety of other stories, and narrative voices, in the rest of the volume. Frequently human follies are exposed, but it is lightly, genially done. As Zola noted, the jokes are good-humoured, there is no real bitterness, nothing too “crudely sarcastic”. There are tales of simple human observation, almost like Maupassant if a little more sentimental. “L’Arlésienne” economically and movingly explores unhappy love. A young man cannot marry the woman of the title once he learns that she is involved with another man. After a time he seems cured of his love, happily joining in the celebrations for the feast of St. Eloi, to his parents’ relief. But next morning at dawn he throws himself to his death from an upper window. We are left with a terrible, realistic pietà, where it is the mother, who ran after him from her bed, who is naked: “in front of the stone table covered with dew and with blood... the mother, completely naked, wailed with her dead child in her arms.” “L’Arlésienne” is based quite closely on the events leading up to the suicide of Daudet’s friend Mistral’s nephew in 1862, as described to him by Mistral. (As Roger Ripoll points out in the authoritative Pléiade edition of Daudet’s works, there is no truth in the tradition that Mistral objected to the material being used.) Daudet later turned this unusually intense piece into a play, for which Georges Bizet provided a now better known overture and incidental music.
There are Provençal landscapes—the powdery hot white road in “Les Deux auberges”, the windmills in action in Cornille’s time—and animals including the resident owl and rabbits, cranes and bittern in the Camargue, the Pope’s mule (see pp.13-15) and the anthropomorphized but obstinately goatish goat in “La Chèvre de M. Seguin”. There is a visit to Mistral, fast becoming a symbol of Provence. The diversity of the book reflects its origins as a sporadic series of newspaper pieces. Possibly the links would be even looser without the presumed editorial contribution of Paul Arène to some of the stories. Daudet first mentioned his involvement in 1883, and this gave rise to accusations of dishonesty, but Arène himself said that he provided only a few details of colour and style. Daudet’s wife Julia was also involved in the editorial process.
It is difficult to typify such a various collection, but one tale which illustrates a fair number of its qualities is “Les Trois messes basses”. A seventeenth-century chaplain is so gluttonously anxious to enjoy the grand Christmas meal to be served at the château that, with encouragement from a devil in the form of his young clerk, he rushes at extreme and irreverent speed through all of the three low masses he must say. He eats so much at the feast that he dies. He had no chance to repent of his ways. When he arrives at the gate of heaven God tells him that his punishment is that he must return to say his masses each Christmas for three hundred years. His flock, whom he led astray, must also attend. A local wine-grower witnesses the ghostly gathering in the ruined chapel, all that is left of the château. In the first part of the story especially, bright surfaces, rich tastes, succulent dishes, evidently point in the direction of excess but are not made disgusting. They are unspoilt by the coming moral. The morality, too, is palatable—tempered by the folkloric elements and atmosphere. Geniality is maintained; there is nothing very frightening about the ghostly masses, which are as much “a singular spectacle” for the wine-grower as a dire warning. The costumes of the congregation are old and faded but picturesque and even amusingly old- fashioned. The witness is particularly delighted to see one of the dignitaries in difficulty because one of the birds who usually lives in the ruins has become entangled in his high black wig.
St.-Michel-De-Frigolet
Monks first came here from Montmajour in the tenth century. The church and cloister of St.-Michel survive from the twelfth century, as does the domed chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Remède. Anne of Austria, Louis XIII’s queen, was one of many pilgrims who sought the Marian remedy on offer. In her case the problem was her failure to provide a desperately needed male heir to the throne. When at last the future Louis XIV was born in 1638 (to be king only five years later) the grateful mother had the chapel embellished with gilded wooden panelling and pictures.
After the Revolution the abbey fulfilled various functions, including a hideout for smugglers and an illicit gambling-den. It housed the rather ramshackle boarding-school attended by Frédéric Mistral in 1839-41; the pupils spent much of the time, according to Mistral’s memoirs, running wild among the rocks and thyme, stunted almond-trees and asphodels. They would roll in the thyme, pick mushrooms, set traps for small birds, search for the mythical treasure of the Golden Goat, and wear out their clothes sliding and climbing and tumbling about. In bad weather they charged about the cloisters, played hide-and-seek in the abandoned church of St.-Michel and even went into the open vaults full of monkish skulls and bones. This semi-scholastic interlude came to a rapid end when the only young woman in the establishment, a servant from Tarascon, became pregnant. The cook left when he was, rightly or wrongly, accused of responsibility. The woman left too and so did the underpaid teachers. The proprietor, M. Donnat, was, as usual, away looking for pupils or money; his old parents held the fort until the food ran out and then told the pupils they would have to go. The better- organized Premonstratensians or White Fathers moved in in 1858. But the fathers were expelled in 1880, provoking the comical siege in Daudet’s Port-Tarascon (1890), where Tartarin and the Tarasconnais occupy the abbey of “Pampérigouste” in defence of the monks but are starved out by the army after a fortnight. Tartarin’s longing for his morning cup of chocolate is a factor in their defeat.
The nineteenth-century monks incorporated Notre-Dame-du-Bon- Remède in the larger and more controversially decorated abbey church. This is not unfairly characterized, by the authors of Provence: Art, Architecture, Landscape (1999), as “a gothic fantasmagoria, overflowing with crenellations and turrets”. The church is, for the more excitable Paul Mariéton (La Terre provençale, 1890), painted, illuminated, Byzantine, multicoloured, garish; inevitably contrasts with the simpler medieval survivals have continued to be made.
The smooth functioning of divine office in the fictional equivalent of the great abbey church is interrupted in Daudet’s story “L’Elixir du Révérend Père Gaucher”, in Lettres de mon moulin. Father Gaucher arrives late and is observed, to his colleagues’ consternation, plunging his arms and sleeves deep into the holy water, bowing to the organ instead of the high altar, and wandering about for five minutes as he tries to locate his stall. He is, increasingly obviously and outrageously, drunk. He caps his performance by breaking, in the midst of the Ave Maria, into a rather different song beginning “In Paris there is a White Father,/Patatin, patatan, tarabin, taraban.” But this is no neglectful sot of a monk, no whisky-priest, for what has made him drunk is the liqueur he distils, sales of which have redeemed the abbey from ruin; before the surprise brainwave of the then Brother Gaucher, the burly, seemingly slow-witted monastery cowman and figure of fun, the buildings were crumbling, the monks lived on water-melon, and the abbot’s woollen mitre was embarrassingly moth-eaten.
The liqueur, wonderful stuff, “green, golden, warm, sparkling, exquisite”, is the occasion for Daudet’s story: the curé of Graveson begins by carefully, lovingly pouring the narrator a sample. It is so wonderful, of course, because it includes, following the recipe of mad old “aunt Bégon” who brought Gaucher up, fine local Provençal herbs, perfumed, sunned, and probably not rolled in by young Mistral and his friends. This is particularly apt in a place whose very name derives from ferigoulo, a Provençal word for thyme. (About thirty herbs, among other ingredients, go into the real liqueur now produced at Châteaurenard.) Herbs have long been used here for palliative as well as palate-pleasing ends. But Gaucher’s problem with his “elixir” is that he needs to taste it in order to check that the finish is velvety enough, and cannot resist taking more. When he is inebriated he remembers, and cannot stop singing, Bégon’s ribald songs. Worse, he thinks he will be damned for such irreligious behaviour. All this is seen as the punishment for the pride he takes in his potion, but the senior monks are very keen that he should go on distilling nonetheless. The Prior has an ingenious solution, but the dangers are still there, as the curé of Graveson becomes ruefully aware: bursting, in effect, out of the frame of the tale, he contemplates the awful prospect of his parishioners hearing the vigorous rendering of Gaucher’s song he has just given—perhaps under the effects of the elixir as much as the requirements of the story. “Patatin, patatan”: it is the sort of song which has little intention of ending.
Maillane: “Happy lizard, Drink Your Sun”
Frédéric Mistral was born at the Mas du Juge, just outside Maillane, in 1830. The farm and the village remained central to his identity and imagination for the rest of his life. In 1851 Mistral came home to the Mas after completing his studies in Aix. His father told him that he was free to choose his course in life and, bolstered by that assurance, “there and then”, he says in his memoirs,
with my foot on the threshold of the paternal Mas, with my eyes turned towards the Alpilles, in myself and for myself, I made this resolution: first, to raise up and revive the sense of race which I saw being reduced to nothing at the hands of the false, unnatural education practised in every school; second, to instigate this revival by restoring the natural and traditional language of the land, against which all the schools were waging war unto the death; third, to make Provençal popular once again by the influx and the flame of divine poetry.
Mistral admits that he did not really formulate these idealistic sentiments so clearly at the time, but certainly he felt confident enough to begin his own metaphorical “war unto the death”.
Full of love for his homeland, “one evening during sowing-time, as I watched the ploughmen following the ploughs along the furrows and singing as they went, I started, God’s be the glory, the first canto of Mireille.” The tone may strike readers now as immodest, but Mistral was looking back after more than forty years at the genesis of a work widely regarded as the first great victory of, as emblematic of, the whole Provençal movement. He worked gradually at the long poem (Mirèio in Provençal), a story of doomed love set in the Crau, Les Baux and the Camargue and making extensive use of local customs and legends. At the same time he took over the running of the farm under the direction of his eighty-year-old father, who was now blind. The two activities went well together. “This poem of Provence” was all around him at the Mas du Juge; he saw Mireille go past every day, “not only in my young man’s dreams, but also in person” in the girls who came to gather mulberry- leaves for the silkworms, hoed, made hay, picked grapes or olives. “From dawn to dusk the actors of my drama, my ploughmen, my reapers, my cowmen and my shepherds... were moving about.”
In 1855, when Mistral’s father died, an elder half-brother inherited the Mas and the poet and his mother moved into a smaller but substantial house in Maillane itself. It was known as the Maison du Lézard in honour of the lizard he had had carved on the front of the house, above a sundial and a verse inscription encouraging readers—and himself—to seize the day: “Happy lizard, drink your sun:/Time passes only too quickly/And perhaps tomorrow it will rain.” Here he profited from this advice by finishing Mirèio (1859). At the time of the visit described by Daudet in “Le Poète Mistral” (in Lettres de mon moulin) he had nearly completed his next Provençal epic, Calendau (1867). Daudet’s experience of the Maison du Lézard probably fuses several such visits in the early and mid-1860s and aims to promote Calendau and— furthering the same aim—to show the Parisian reader the newly famous poet at home. For the man who had come “to show Paris to his Mireille”—a man in a tight collar and inconvenient high hat—was not really Mistral. Here, in his “little one-storey house with garden in front”, he is to be found in his felt hat, afire with inspiration, as he paces about composing. Describing the poet’s study, Daudet strikes the balance between the homely and the intellectual so often sought in accounts of the félibres: the yellow check sofa and straw chairs, casts of the Venus of Arles, a painting and a photograph of the poet, a small desk overflowing with old books and dictionaries. His old mother, who speaks only Provençal, works away in the kitchen and produces a fine traditional meal including roast goat, mountain cheese, muscatel grapes, and Châteauneuf du Pape. Daudet has the opportunity not only to hear and read and marvel at the new poem but to go to the Maillane fête with its processions, banners, wooden saints, bells, bulls, games of strength, and joyously danced farandole.
In 1876, when Mistral married a woman twenty-seven years younger than himself, the couple moved into a newly built house just across the road. This would become his monument, the Museon Mistral. The rooms remain as they were at his death in 1914. His tomb in the village cemetery, built several years before his death, is a copy of the small, highly decorated sixteenth-century structure near Les Baux known as the Pavillon de la reine Jeanne. The tomb is crowned by a cross but the Provençal associations of the pavilion were more interesting to Mistral than the religious: he believed that there “the princesses of Les Baux held their courts of love.”
Uzès
Soon after his arrival in Uzès in the autumn of 1661 Jean Racine had his first encounter with olives on the tree. He picked some splendid looking specimens, put them in his mouth and, he told his friend the fabulist La Fontaine, could not rid himself of the bitter after-taste for four hours. It was a painful way to discover that only after much cleansing and processing do olives become edible. He was also, more pleasantly, surprised by the taste of olive oil; in northern France everything was cooked in butter. At first he liked much else about Uzès. Fine nights in January 1662 had him sending verses to his friend Vitart concluding “Et nous avons des nuits plus belles que vos jours.” (“And we have nights more beautiful than your days.”) He found the people courteous. He found the women attractive, but felt he must not dwell too much on such matters since he was living with his uncle, Antoine Sconin, Vicar- General of the diocese, who hoped to obtain a benefice for him.
For a time it seemed likely that Sconin would succeed, and although with hindsight it seems clear that Racine was much better qualified to write tragedy than he would have been to participate in the politics of southern churchmanship, he would have accepted a suitable position. (This would not, of course, have ruled out some kinds of literary career; his royal marriage ode “La Nymphe et la Seine” was well received in Uzès.) Sconin, however, had his enemies and turned out not to be as influential as he had imagined. The job did not materialize and the small town soon began to taste as bitter as the olives. The letter which praises winter nights in verse also, in prose, complains about “accursed” Uzès, a place full of faction where if you make one friend you make a hundred enemies. Here malice and self-interest are everywhere, declares Racine in a rather hyperbolical letter to his friend the Abbé Le Vasseur. (To some extent, all his remarks about Uzès, favourable or unfavourable, are epistolary or literary jeux d’esprit rather than considered opinions.)
In May 1662 Racine told Vitart about the case of a girl who had poisoned herself with arsenic after a quarrel with her father. Everyone assumed she must have been pregnant, but the autopsy revealed otherwise. In Racine’s opinion, this suicide for some more trivial cause was typical of “the disposition of the people in this region”, how they “portent les passions au dernier excès.” But clearly his own nature was as much of a problem as that of the fiery Uzétiens: he told Le Vasseur in July that he would like to write a play but was in no spirits to do so with such cause to be melancholy in Uzès. Throughout his year there he remained eager to hear as much news as possible from the literary world of Paris—to which he returned, with relief, in the autumn of 1662.
In André Gide’s childhood, in the 1870s and 1880s, Uzès seemed scarcely less remote than in Racine’s day. “The progress of the century seemed to have forgotten the little town,” says Gide in his autobiography Si le grain ne meurt. When he came on family visits from Paris the railway took them only as far as Nîmes; they completed the journey, he remembered, in some old boneshaker of a carriage, crossing the river Gardon into a different world, “Palestine, Judaea”, where purple and white cistus and lavender grew in the “rough garrigue” and “enormous grasshoppers suddenly unfolded their blue, red or grey membranes— light butterflies for an instant” before blending, drab once more, back into the undergrowth and stones. Racine may have been happy to get back to Paris, but for Gide it is only unfamiliarity which keeps the northerners away: “if only you were in Umbria,” he tells Uzès, “tourists would come running from Paris to see you.” In modern times they have come running, mainly to see the Duché, the ducal residence with its partly-eleventh century keep and elegant 1550s facade designed by Philibert Delorme. And the chic Place aux Herbes, with its vaulted archways, became well known as one of the settings in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s 1990 film of Cyrano de Bergerac.
The Tour Fenestrelle. In Uzès Jean Racine encountered faction, passions taken to excess, and nights more beautiful than northern days.
Gide mentions the “shaded gardens of the Duché” on the steep slope of the rock of Uzès, but his particular passion was for the surrounding garrigue. He wandered there whenever he could, turning stones to wonder at “hideous scorpions, millipedes and centipedes”. But in Uzès too, early forms of life were still flourishing. Strict Protestants, linked with Gide’s forebears, lived on, “formes... quasi paléontologiques de l’humanité” which still seemed normal in a place where the memory of past persecution remained fresh. Another sort of ancient survivor was his grandmother, unchangingly old, it seemed to him, from year to year, always knitting stockings but never finishing them. “She knitted all through the day, the way an insect would” and tucked her needles behind one ear. Although she herself hardly ate, she continually feared that her visitors were not getting enough food. She was not convinced that four courses were enough at a sitting and her daughter-in-law, Gide’s mother, was for ever intervening to prevent the equally ancient servant from buying too much.
Grandmother would surely have been pleased, while hoping also for some stouter comestibles, at what Elizabeth David found in the market at Uzès, even on a cold February day, in 1984: “good creamy firm- fleshed potatoes”, goat’s cheeses and ewe’s milk cheeses, “little round, crisp, bronze-flecked, frilly lettuces, baskets of mesclun or mixed salad greens, great floppy bunches of chard, leaf artichokes, trombone-shaped pumpkins... fat, fleshy red peppers, new laid eggs, eight or nine varieties of olives in basins and barrels, thick honey and clear honey.”