To the south-west of Fréjus lies the Chaine des Maures, the outline of which is by no means so bold as that of the porphyry Esterel, but the mountains rise in sweeping lines from a broad and fertile plain covered and silvered with olives, growing out of rich red soil, like the old red sandstone of Devonshire. The red sandstone rocks through which the line passes are ploughed with rains. On the right appears the wonderfully picturesque little town of La Pauline, with an extensive ruined castle, and the walls and towers of the town in tolerable condition. Above it rises a stately peak capped with the white limestone that forms the mountains about Toulon and Marseilles, and having all the appearance of a flake of snow.
When we reach the basin between Aubaine and Camp-Major we are surrounded by these barren white ranges, so white that they look as if a miller had shaken his flour-bag over them.
But I have not quite done with Fréjus yet. I fear the reader will think I have given him a dull chapter of antiquarian and historical detail, so I will here add an anecdote, to spice it, concerning a worthy of Fréjus, Désaugiers, one of the liveliest of French poets. He was born at Fréjus in 1772. One day he was invited to preside at the annual banquet of the pork-butchers. At dessert everyone present was expected to pronounce an epigram or sing a song; and when the turn came to Désaugiers, he rose, cleared his throat, looked around with a twinkle in his eye, and thundered forth "Des Cochons, des Cochons."
The pork-butchers bridled up, grew red about the cheeks and temples, believing that an insult was intended, when Désaugiers proceeded with his song:—
"Décochons les traits de la satire."
Siéyès was another native of Fréjus, that renegade priest, to whom is attributed the ferocious saying, when called on to give his vote on the condemnation of Louis XVI., "La mort—sans phrases." Some few years after the Directory sent Siéyès as ambassador to Berlin. He invited a prince of the blood royal of Prussia to dine at the embassy with him; but the prince took the invitation and scored across it his answer:—
"Non—sans phrases."
Napoleon as national recompense to Siéyès for the services he had rendered to France, and to himself personally, gave him the estate of Crosne. This gave rise to the epigram—
"Bonaparte à Siéyès a fait présent de Crosne,
Siéyès à Bonaparte a fait présent du trône."
But after all, it is chiefly as the birthplace of Agricola, that true model of a Roman soldier of the best description, that Fréjus interests us most. His father, Julius Græcinus, had fallen a victim to Caligula, because he refused to undertake the prosecution of a man the Emperor was determined to destroy, and there is some reason to suspect that Agricola himself was sacrificed to the suspicions and envy of Domitian. Like most good and honourable men, he had a good mother, whose virtues Tacitus records.
When Agricola was proconsul of Britain, his rule was mild, and he took pains to win the confidence of the provincials. He it was who drew a chain of forts from sea to sea between the Tyne and Solway, to protect the reclaimed subjects of the southern valleys from the untamed barbarians who roved the Cheviots and the Pentlands. He was not merely a conqueror, but an explorer and discoverer, in Scotland. In A.D. 83 he passed beyond the Frith and fought a great battle with the Caledonians near Stirling. The Roman entrenchments still remaining in Fife and Angus were thrown up by him. In 84 he fought another battle on the Grampians, and sent his fleet to circumnavigate Britain. The Roman vessels at all events for the first time entered the Pentland Frith; examined the Orkney islands, and perhaps gained a glimpse of the Shetlands.
It was interesting to tread the soil where the childhood was passed of a man who left such permanent marks in Britain, and to whom we are indebted for our first knowledge of Scotland.
CHAPTER IV.
MARSEILLES.
The three islands Phoenice, Phila, Iturium—Marseilles first a Phoenician colony—The tariff of fees exacted by the priests of Baal—The arrival of the Ionians—The legend of Protis and Gyptis—Second colony of Ionians—The voyages of Pytheas and Euthymenes—Capture of Marseilles by Trebonius—Position of the Greek city—The Acropolis—Greek inscriptions—The lady who never "jawed" her husband—The tomb of the sailor-boy—Hôtel des Négociants—Ménu—Entry of the President of the Republic—Entry of Francis I.—The church of S. Vincent—The Cathedral—Notre Dame de la Garde—The abbey of S. Victor—Catacombs—The fable of S. Lazarus.
The traveller approaching Marseilles from the sea observes three islets of bare limestone rock that are apparently a prolongation of that rocky promontory now crowned by the fortress of S. Nicolas, and that act as a natural breakwater against wave and storm from the S.E. They go by the names of Pomègue, Ratonneau, and Château d'If. But the classic geographers called the group the Little Stoechades, and named these islets Phoenice, Phila, and Iturium; and these three appellations give us in a compact form the story of ancient Marseilles, founded by the Phoenicians, refounded by the Greeks, and then made a dependency under the Roman empire.
That Marseilles was a Phoenician colony before the Phoceans settled there is shown by the monuments that have been exhumed from the foundations of the modern houses, and are now collected in the museum. There are some curious images of Melkarth and Melita, the Hercules and Venus of these Asiatic traders, known also to us through the Bible as Baal and Ashtaroth. But most curious of all is a long Phoenician table of charges made by the priests of Baal for the various sacrifices and oblations offered by the people. This tariff of charges was found in 1845. It consists of twenty-one lines, and begins:—
"The Temple of Baal.—This is the regulation relative to the dues legally established by Italis-Baal, the suffete, son of Bod-tanith, son of Bod-Milcarth, and by Italis-Baal.
"For an entire ox, the ordinary sacrifice, the priests are to receive ten shekels. At the sacrifice, in addition, three hundred mishekels of flesh.
"Item. For the ordinary sacrifice, of cereals and flour of wheat, also the hide, the entrails, and the feet of the victim. All the rest of the flesh goes to the master of the sacrifice."
So it continues to regulate the fees for a calf, a ram, a bird; also for cakes, and for offerings made by lepers and by common people. The table of fees is extremely curious and is, I believe, unique.
The Phoenician colony at Marseilles was probably in decline when, in B.C. 599, a Greek fleet left the port of Phocæa, one of the twelve Ionian cities of Asia Minor, seeking new homes in the West. The colony was under the command of an adventurer named Protis. Attracted by the Bay of Marseilles, and the basin surrounded by hills that lay in its lap, the Greek colony disembarked.
And now for a legend.
The first measure taken by the new arrivals was to send a deputation to the King of the Segobrigæ, a Keltic race occupying what is now called Provence. The king was at Arles, which was his capital; his name was Nannos. By a happy coincidence the embassy arrived on the day upon which Nannos had assembled the warriors of his tribe, for his daughter, Gyptis, to choose a husband among them.
The arrival of the young Greek, Protis, in the midst of this banquet was a veritable coup-de-théâtre; he took his place at the board. His natural grace, his easy and polished manners, the nobleness and elegance of his person and features, contrasted strangely with the savagery and coarseness of the Gaulish warriors.
Free to choose whom she would, Gyptis rose from the table, filled a cup, and made the circuit of the board. Every eye was fixed on her; he was to be her choice to whom she offered the bowl. She did not hesitate for a moment, she went to the Greek stranger and extended it to him. Protis put the goblet to his lips, and the alliance was concluded.
The example of Gyptis was followed by some of her maidens. The Gauls agreed to receive the Greeks, and suffer them to colonise the basin of Marseilles.
But the chiefs who had been set aside by the fair Gyptis bore a grudge against the new-comers. The growing prosperity and rapid development of the new settlement aroused their jealousy, which was probably augmented by the defection of some of their wives and daughters. Profiting by the Feast of Flora in May, they presented themselves at the gates of Marseilles in attendance on some waggons laden with green boughs, under which were their arms concealed. But love, that had founded the Ionian colony, was destined to save it. A young Gaulish woman revealed the plot to her Hellenic lover, and the Greeks laid their hands on the arms that were to have been employed against them, turned them against the intrusive Gauls, and massacred them to a man.
But having thus saved themselves from one danger they felt that they had incurred another. They had provoked the deadly animosity of the whole tribe of the Segobrigæ. They therefore appealed to their countrymen in Ionia to come to their aid. The appeal met with a ready response, a second fleet of colonists arrived. Marseilles was encompassed with walls on the land side, and thus made secure against the assaults of undisciplined barbarians.
Such is the graceful legend of the origin of Marseilles. It is only so far historical that it gives us in poetic and romantic form the main facts, that the first colony settled at Marseilles without opposition, that after a while it got embroiled with the Gaulish tribes of the neighbourhood, and that a second Ionian colony came to strengthen the first. But this second colony arrived B.C. 542, fifty-seven years after the first, and was due to the taking of Phocæa by the Medes and Persians.
As a Greek mercantile colony Marseilles flourished, and sent forth other colonies, that formed settlements along the Ligurian coast, as a Literal crown from Ampurias and Rhodé in Catalonia to the confines of Etruria. Free, rich, protected by the Roman legions, these Greek settlements cultivated the arts and sciences with ardour, as well as carrying on the trade of the Mediterranean.
In the year B.C. 350 two of her most illustrious citizens, Pytheas and Euthymenes, explored the northern and southern Atlantic. Pytheas was charged to make a voyage of discovery towards the north. He coasted Spain, Portugal, Aquitania, Brittany, discovered Great Britain, coasted it, and reached Thule, which some have supposed to be Iceland, but others the Orkney Isles. In a second voyage he penetrated the Baltic by the Cattegat and Sound, and reached the mouths of the Dwina or the Vistula. On his return he composed two works, records of his discoveries, of which precious fragments have been preserved by Pliny and Strabo. Thanks to his labours, Marseilles was the first town whose latitude was determined with some precision.
About the same time, Euthymenes was commissioned to make explorations in the opposite direction. He sailed south-west, traced the western coast of Africa, and penetrated the mouths of the Senegal, whence he brought back gold dust.
Marseilles was taken, B.C. 49, by Trebonius, the lieutenant of Julius Cæsar. Two naval battles ruined her fleet; and, but for the clemency of Cæsar, the doom of the city would have been sealed. She had enthusiastically taken the part of Pompey, and had resisted Cæsar with unusual determination. But he appreciated the importance of the colony and the mercantile energy of her inhabitants, and he did not lay his hand in retribution too severely upon her.
[Illustration: Ancient Massilia.]
The old Greek city of Massilia occupied the promontory which is still old Marseilles, clustered on the Butte St. Laurent and Butte des Moulins, where was the Acropolis, with the temples of Apollo and Diana, and the Butte des Cannes. The harbour was the natural fiord, which is now the Vieux port; and the modern splendid street Canebière runs along the site of the old shipbuilding-docks of the Greeks. Here was found a few years ago an ancient galley with keel and ribs of cedar, and coins in her of the date of Julius Cæsar. She is now in the museum. To the south of the old port was a marsh; the rectangular canal and the Bassin du Carénage mark the position of this marsh, now built over—a marsh that reached to the base of the limestone hills that rise to the peak now occupied by Notre Dame de la Garde.
The old Greek walls of Massilia ran in a sweep along where is now the
Boulevard des Dames, Rue d'Aix, and reached the Vieux port at the Bourse.
Considering the importance of the Greek city, its wealth and splendour, it is surprising to find nowhere in Marseilles any ruins of its ancient founders. But Marseilles has traversed every historic period, in the midst of storm; and after a voyage of three thousand years through history, she has been plundered of every fragment of her ancient treasures. In Rome the Colosseum and the tomb of Augustus were robbed of their materials for the construction of houses; and in Marseilles every stone of her ancient temples and acropolis have been appropriated for baser purposes. She has passed through twenty fires, and as many sieges. Taken, sacked, decimated, she has been rebuilt over and over again, always hurriedly, consequently always with material taken where nearest at hand, without respect for her monuments and historic recollections. The disturbed soil of Marseilles is not even a heap of ruins, for every stone found in the soil has been utilised as material for construction. Nevertheless some traces of the Greek founders remain in the beautiful coins of the colony, and in inscriptions that have been picked out of the walls or foundations of mediæval houses. The coins, stamped with classic beauty, are well-known to numismatists.
We have space to notice only one or two inscriptions. One is the sign of Athenades, son of Dioscorides, professor of Latin grammar, probably set up two thousand years ago over his door; another is a notice of a young lad, Cleudemos, son of Dionysius, having gained a prize. A curious Greek inscription is found at Carpentras, a colony from Marseilles, that illustrates the manner in which foreign religions got mixed up with those that were proper to the Greeks.
"Blessed be Thebe, daughter of Thelhui, laden with oblations for the God
Osiris—she never jawed her husband—she was blameless in the eyes of
Osiris, and receives his benediction."
Truly such a wife deserved that her conduct towards her husband should be commemorated through ages upon ages, and we may thank good fortune that it has preserved to us the name of this incomparable lady.
As I am on the subject of Greek inscriptions, I may quote the following touching one, that has been found built into the wall of a house at Aix.
"On the banks, beaten by the waves, a youth appeals to thee, voyager! I, beloved by God, am no more subject to the domination of Death. I passed my life sailing on the sea, myself a sailor, like to the youthful gods, the Amyclæans, saviours of sailors, free from the yoke of matrimony. Here in my tomb, which I owe to the piety of my masters, I rest sheltered from all maladies, free from toil, from cares, from pains; whereas in life, all these woes fall on our gross envelopes of matter. The dead, on the other hand, are divided into two classes, of which one returns to the earth, whereas the other rises to join the dance with the celestial choirs; and it is to this latter class that I belong, having had the good fortune to range myself under the banners of the Divinity."
Clearly this was the tomb of a young sailor-boy, a native of Aix, who had served in a merchant vessel of Marseilles. There is something graceful and pathetic in the monument.
But enough of the past. Now for the present, and in considering the present let us attend to that which feeds and builds up that gross envelope of matter the young Greek sailor had laid aside.
At Marseilles I put up at the Hôtel des Négociants, in the Cours Belzunce. Let me observe that I do not see the fun of going to hotels of the first class. Not only is one's expense doubled, but one is thrown among English and American travellers, and sees nothing whatever of the people in whose country one is travelling. Now, here in this commercial inn, I had for dinner the following dishes, which I am quite sure I should not have had in the Grand Hôtel de Noailles, where a dinner is six francs, whereas at my inn I paid just half. I must also observe that the dinners were abundant and excellent, but among the dishes were some that were peculiar to the Provençal cuisine, for instance:—
Bread slices sopped in saffron, with fish, garnished with small crabs, to be chewed up, shell and all.
Artichokes, raw, with oil and vinegar.
Oranges with pepper and salt.
On the table were glass jugs with tar-water, and I observed that over half those present drank their wine diluted with this tar-water.
One day in summer I was at table-d'hôte in France when I saw a very fine melon on the table. Said I, in my heart of hearts, "I'll have some of you by-and-by!" But, to my consternation, the melon was taken round with stewed conger eel, and eaten with salt and pepper. I could not summon up courage to try the mixture, and the whole melon was consumed before the next course came on.
I was at Marseilles when M. Carnot, the President of the Republic visited it, April 16th. Great efforts were made to give him a splendid reception. Venetian masts were set up, strings of fairy lamps were suspended between them, and tricolours were hung as banners to the masts, or grouped together in trophies. But alas! No sooner were all preparations made, than a furious gale broke over the coast, the venetian masts swayed in the wind and were upset or thrown out of the perpendicular, the little lamps jingled against each other and were broken, such as were not shivered were filled with rain, the banners were lashed with the broken wires and torn to shreds, and when M. Carnot arrived, in a pouring rain, it was amidst a very wreckage of festival preparations, and he was received by a crowd of umbrellas. Under such circumstances enthusiasm was damped and ejaculations of welcome were muffled. The President occupied an open landau, and drove along the boulevards without umbrella or waterproof, bowing to right and left in a slashing rain. A deputation of flower women presented him with a sodden bouquet, by the hand of a dripping little girl in white that clung to her as a bathing gown. The President insisted on the maid being lifted to him into the carriage, where he hugged and kissed her, whilst the moisture ran out of her garments like a squeezed sponge, and this demonstration provoked some damp cheers.
I bought Henri Rochefort's paper next day, to see what his correspondent had to say about the visit. Some passages from it are too racy not to be quoted.
"Il faisait un temps à ne pas mettre un ministre dehors, lorsque le train présidentiel est arrivé en gare, et le défilé à la détrempe était pitieux à voir dans le gargouillement et la transsudation de ce dégorgement cataractal. Sadi Carnot avait donné l'ordre de laisser son landau découvert, afin de recevoir les ovations enthousiastes des parapluies.
"Bref, la Présidence est arrivée à la préfecture trempée comme une soupe à l'oignon et fortement dessalée."
Verily there is no tongue like the French for saying nasty things in a nasty way.
I do not know whether it is fair for one to pass an opinion on a man from a sight of his face overrun with rain-water, and with his nose acting like a shoot from a roof; but certainly the impression produced on me by M. Sadi Carnot was that his features were wooden, and that he was but a very ordinary man—intellectually. I pass this opinion with hesitation. When dried possibly the sparks of genius may be discovered and may flare up; they were all but extinguished in the downpour when I saw him.
That cheerful king, Réné of Anjou and Provence, paid a visit to Marseilles in 1437, and made his royal entry on Sunday, December 15th. He was delighted with the reception accorded him, and in a gush of kindly feeling promised to make Marseilles his headquarters. But he forgot his promise, or circumstances were against his keeping it. He never revisited Marseilles. On January 22, 1516, Francis I. entered the town and was received by children carrying banners and garlands, and troupes of young girls in white, then followed archers, arquebusiers, the consuls, and the clergy bearing the relics of S. Lazarus and S. Victor. A theatre was erected at every street corner, on which were presented to his sight incidents from the life of S. Louis. The procession ended with a battle of oranges and lemons, in which the king gave and received a good many blows on the head with the golden fruit.
At the head of the Allées des Capucins, a fine street planted with trees and with a handsome fountain in the place where the Allées de Meilhan unites with it, is a really fine modern Gothic church with twin west spires of open tracery. They are perhaps too thin, a usual fault with modern work, but otherwise the church is very good and stately. It is as fine within as without, but sorely disfigured by the coloured glass, which is garish. French painted glass is very bad. It is precisely the sort of stuff that was turned out by English glass-painters about thirty years ago, the colours crude and distressing to the eye—windows that our more cultured taste cannot now endure. But the French artists have not advanced, the windows put in to-day are as detestable as those they put in at the beginning of the revival. Unfortunately, every cathedral is crowded through the length and breadth of France with this abominable stuff, that is only tolerable in a modern tasteless church, vulgar in its architecture and insipid in its sculpture, but is painfully out of place in a venerable minster.
The city of Marseilles has been lucky in securing a good architect for the Church of S. Vincent de Paul, but in another architectural venture Marseilles has been unfortunate. She was resolved to have a cathedral, and she gave the designing of it to a man void of taste, who has built a hideous erection on the quay in what he is pleased to call Byzantine style. I am quite sure any Byzantine architect would cheerfully have jumped into the Bosphorus rather than disfigure a city with such a structure as Notre Dame.
The Germans have a saying that the higher a monkey climbs the more he exposes his monkeyishness; and unfortunately this architect has been allowed to climb very high. He was given the peak of Notre Dame de la Garde, that towers over Marseilles, on which to erect a church. The site is exceptionally good, one on which a man of ordinary genius would have done something, could hardly have failed to have done something, that would have been picturesque. But such is the perversity of this unfortunate man's talent that he has erected a structure on the limestone crag, of almost miraculous hideousness. It is also in so-called Byzantine architecture. There is a dish-cover which serves as a dome, and a tower which would be comical if it were not irritating. It resembles the handle of a renaissance knife or fork stuck into a sheath and standing upright with a figure at top. We have made a blunder at South Kensington in setting side by side a depressed dome—the Albert Hall, and the acute pinnacle of the Albert Memorial; but a road runs between them, and it is possible to shut one eye and see one of these two structures apart from the other. But in Notre Dame de la Garde the two are combined in one building, and tease the eye from every point in Marseilles.
[Illustration: Abbey of S. Victor, Marseilles]
I ascended the steep crag to the church and found it full of a devout congregation. The service was the "Salut," and the Host was being elevated to the strains of "The Last Rose of Summer," on the hautbois stop of the organ.
The view from the platform of the church, of Marseilles, the coast, the blue Mediterranean and the islands is beautiful. Below Notre Dame de la Garde, and above the old port, stands the ancient Abbey of S. Victor; this abbey, of which the church alone remains, occupies a site where the successive generations of Massaliots buried their dead from the earliest pagan times, and here the first Christians formed catacombs of which some traces remain under the church, subterranean passages bearing some resemblance to those in the outskirts of Rome. The abbey itself was founded by Cassian, in the fourth century, over these galleries containing the bones of the first Christians, but his monastery was wrecked by the Saracens four hundred years later, and it was rebuilt in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. What remains of this famous Abbey of S. Victor has rather the appearance of a fortress than a church; the walls and ramparts date from 1350, and were the work of William de Grimoard, who was prior of the monastery before he was elevated to be pope under the title of Urban V. The heavy, clumsy pile is a type of the architecture, at once military and ecclesiastical, that characterises most of the churches along the coast.
Externally the venerable church is devoid of beauty. No attempt at decoration has been made. It seems a shapeless pile of towers and machicolated and battlemented curtains, falling into almost complete ruin. But on passing through the single entrance, one finds oneself in a well-proportioned church of nave and side aisles, a south chapel, and an apse. Each buttress of the apse is battlemented outside and forms a turret, and two strong towers are adapted internally to serve as a transept and a porch.
Marseilles claims to have had as its first apostle Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead. The foundation of this myth is that in the fourth century it perhaps had a prelate of the name of Lazarus, though the earliest known bishop was Orestius, A.D. 314. The fact is that the existence of S. Lazarus at Marseilles was unsuspected till the eleventh century. When Cassian founded his abbey he dedicated it to S. Victor. If he had known anything about Lazarus, almost certainly he would have dedicated the church to him; he erected moreover, two other chapels, one to SS. Peter and Paul, the other to the Blessed Virgin and S. John the Baptist. When, in 1010, Benedict IX. enumerates the glories of the abbey restored after the destruction by the Saracens, he does not make the most transient allusion to S. Lazarus. However, Benedict IX., in 1040, does mention the passion of this Lazarus raised from the dead by Christ, as one of the causes why the abbey was venerable. His relics were said to have been transported thence to Athens, to preserve them from the Saracens. We shall learn more about this fable when we come to the Camargue.
CHAPTER V.
THE CRAU.
The Basin of Berre—A neglected harbour—The diluvium—Formation of the
Crau—The two Craus—Canal of Craponne—Climate of the Crau—The Bise and
Mistral—Force of the wind—Cypresses—A vision of kobolds.
On leaving Marseilles by train for Arles, the line cuts through the limestone ridge of the Estaque, and the traveller passes from the basin of Marseilles into the much more extensive basin of Berre, surrounded by hills on all sides, a wide bowl like a volcanic crater, with the great inland salt lake of the Etang de Berre occupying its depths. This is a great natural harbour, seven times the size of the port of Toulon, and varying in depth from 28 to 32 feet; it is perfectly sheltered from every wind, and entire fleets might anchor there in security, not only out of reach, but out of sight of an enemy, for the chain of l'Estaque intervenes between it and the sea. It would seem as though Nature herself had designed Berre as a safe harbour for the merchant vessels that visit the south coast of France. It is almost inconceivable how this sheet of water, communicating with the sea by the channel of Martignes, can have been neglected; how it is that its still blue waters are not crowded with ships, and its smiling shores not studded with a chain of industrial and populous towns. "The neglect of this little inland sea as a port of refuge," says M. Elisée Reclus, "is an economic scandal. Whilst on dangerous coasts harbours are constructed at vast expense, here we have one that is perfect, and which has been neglected for fifteen centuries." But though the Romans or Greeks had a station here, they did not utilise the lagoon. At S. Chamas are remains of the masters of the ancient world, but no evidence that they had there a naval station.
The line cuts again through the lip of the basin, and we are in the Crau.
At a remote period, but, nevertheless, in one geologically modern, the vast floods of the diluvial age that flowed from the Alps brought down incredible quantities of rolled stones, the detritus of the Alps. This filled up a great bay now occupied by the mouths of the Rhone, and spread in a triangle from Avignon as the apex, to Cette in the west, and Fos in the east. This rubble, washed down from the Alps, forms the substratum of the immense plain that inclines at a very slight angle into the Mediterranean, and extends for a considerable distance below the sea. Not only did the Rhone bring down these boulders, but also the Durance, which enters the Rhone above Arles, and formed between the chain of Les Alpines and the Luberon another triangular plain of rolled stones, with the apex at Cavaillon and the base between Tarascon and Avignon. But the Durance did more. There is a break in the chain on the south, between the limestone Alpines and the sandstone Trévaresse; and the brimming Durance, unable to discharge all her water, choked with rubble, into the Rhone, burst through the open door or natural waste-pipe, by Salon, and carried a portion of her pebbles into the sea directly, without asking her sister the Rhone to help her. Now the two great plains formed by the delta of the Rhone, and that of the Durance into the Rhone, are called the great and little Craus. They were known to the ancients, and puzzled them not a little. Strabo says of the Great Crau: "Between Marseilles and the mouth of the Rhone, at about a hundred stadia from the sea, is a plain, circular in form, and a hundred stadia in diameter, to which a singular event obtained for it the name of the Field of Pebbles. It is, in fact, covered with pebbles, as big as the fist, among which grows some grass in sufficient abundance to pasture herds of oxen."
Then we are given the legend that accounts for it. Here Hercules fought against the Ligurians, when the son of Jove, having exhausted his arrows, was supplied with artillery by a discharge of stones from the sky, showered on his enemies by Jupiter.
This desert, a little Sahara in Europe, occupies 30,000 acres. "It is composed entirely of shingle," says Arthur Young, "being so uniform a mass of round stones, some to the size of a man's head, but of all sizes less, that the newly thrown up shingle of a seashore is hardly less free from soil; beneath these surface-stones is not so much a sand as a cemented rubble, with a small admixture of loam. Vegetation is rare and miserable, some of the absinthium and lavender so low and poor as scarcely to be recognised, and two or three miserable grasses, with Centaurea calycitropes and solstitialis, were the principal plants I could find." A mineralogical examination of the rolled stones presents peculiar interest. In the Little Crau, the mouth of the Durance, are found prodigious numbers of green and crystalline rocks, granite and variolite brought down from the Alps of Briançon, but nine-tenths of the pebbles of the Great Crau are white quartz brought from the great chain of the Alps, together with mica-slate and calcareous stones, and only a few of the variolites of Mont Genèvre. One may say that the Great Crau is a complete mineralogical collection of all the rocks that form the chain of the Alps, whence flow the Rhone and its tributaries.
The aspect of the Crau is infinitely desolate, but it is no longer as barren as it was formerly. It is in fact, undergoing gradual but sure transformation. This is due to a gentleman of Provence, named Adam de Craponne, born in 1525 at Salon, who conceived the idea of bringing some of the waters of the Durance through the gap where some of its overspill had flowed in the diluvial epoch, by a canal, into the Great Crau, so that it might deposit its rich alluvium over this desert of stones. He spent his life and his entire fortune in carrying out his scheme, and it is due to this that year by year the barren desert shrinks, and cultivation advances. There are to-day other canals, those of Les Alpines, of Langlade, and d'Istres, besides that of Craponne that assist in fertilising the waste. Wherever the water reaches, the soil is covered with trees, with pasture-land, with fields of corn; and in another century probably the sterility of the Crau will have been completely conquered.
In its present condition, the Crau may be divided into two parts, that which is watered, and which has been converted into a garden, and that which is not as yet reached by the rich loamy waters of the Durance, and is therefore parched and desolate, overrun by herds of sheep and cattle, driven down in winter from the Alps, when a certain amount of herbage is found on the desert, which in summer is utterly dry and barren. These migrations date back to a remote epoch, for they are mentioned by Pliny.
Previous to the construction of the canal by Craponne, who began it in 1554, the desert reached to Arles; the whole of the plain south of the chain of the Alpines was either marsh lagoon, or a waste of stones, where now grow and luxuriate mulberries, olives, almond trees and vines. The canal of Craponne was carried by the originator for thirty-three miles, sending out branches at Salon, Eyguières, and elsewhere. In winter the meadows are green as those of Devon in spring, and the fields yield heavy crops. Indeed, the Durance acts to this region in the same way as does the Nile to Egypt. "The meadows I viewed," says Young, "are among the most extraordinary spectacles the world can afford in respect to the amazing contrast between the soil in its natural and in its watered state, covered richly and luxuriantly with clover, chicory, rib-grass, and Avena elatior."
The climate of the Crau presents contrasts most extreme. In winter the thermometer falls and remains below zero for many nights in succession, and the glacial bise sweeps over the face of the desert, curdling the blood; the flocks and herds seek shelter from this blast behind the long walls of dry stones, which sometimes the violence of the wind throws down upon them.
During the summer the phenomenon of the mirage is almost continuous. The bed of air in contact with the surface of stones scorched by the blazing sun becomes rarified and dilated, so that the horizon appears to be fringed on all sides with lakes of rippling water, most deceptive and tantalising to the eye of the traveller.
The troops of wandering bulls and wild horses, flights of rose-coloured flamingoes, of partridges and wild ducks give this region a pronounced oriental physiognomy, and however painful it may be at such a time to traverse this burning plain, it affords a curious picture of the Sahara in miniature nowhere else to be seen in Europe.
The great scourge of the Crau is the north-west wind, the bise, the black boreas of the ancients, so violent as to roll over the pebbles, and to blow away the roofs of houses, and tear up trees by the roots. In fact, the Crau may be regarded as the Home of the Winds.
It is easy to explain the origin of these furious gales, bise and mistral. The low sandy regions at the mouth of the Rhone, denuded of all vegetation, and the great stony plain of the Crau, heated by the direct rays of the sun, rarify the air over the surface of the soil, and this rises, to be at once replaced by the cold air from the Alps and Cevennes; the air off the snow pours down with headlong violence to occupy the vacuum formed by the heated ascending column of air off the plain, sweeping the valley of the Rhone, and reaching its maximum of intensity between Avignon and the sea, where it meets, and is blunted in its force by the equable atmosphere that covers the surface of the Mediterranean.
The violence of the wind is consequently due to the difference of temperature between the hot air of the plain and the cold air of the mountain.
An old saying was to this effect:—
"Parlement, Mistral et Durance
Sont les trois fléaux de Provence."
Parlement exists no longer, or rather is expanded into a National Assembly that is a discredit to all France, and not Provence alone; the Durance has become, thanks to Adam de Craponne, an agent of fertilisation and wealth. But the mistral (magistral, the master-wind) remains, and still scourges the delta of the Rhone. In 1845 it carried away the suspension bridge between Beaucaire and Tarascon; the passage of the Rhone is often rendered impossible for days, through its violence. It has been found necessary to plant rows of cypress on each side of the line that crosses the Crau, to break the force of the wind upon the trains. Indeed, throughout the district, the fields will, in many places, be found walled up on all sides by plantations of cypresses from thirty to fifty feet high, as screens against this terrible blast, to protect the crops from being literally blown out of the ground.
When I was a child of five years my father's carriage with post horses was crossing the Crau. It was in summer. I sat on the box with my father and looked at the postilions. Presently I saw a number of little figures of men with peaked caps running about the horses and making attempts to scramble up them. I said something about what I saw, whereupon my father stopped the carriage and put me inside with my mother. The heat of the sun on my head, he concluded, had produced these illusions. For some time I continued to see these dwarfs running among the pebbles of the Crau, jumping over tufts of grass, or careering along the road by the carriage side, making faces at me. But gradually their number decreased, and I failed finally to see any more.
One June day in the year 1884, one of my boys, then aged eight, was picking gooseberries in the fruit garden at home, when, standing between the bushes, he saw a little man of his own height, with a brown peaked cap, a red jacket, and green breeches. He had black hair and whiskers and beard. He looked angrily at the boy and said something. The child was frightened, ran indoors and told his elder brother and sister. They brought him to me, and his elder brother repeated the story, but purposely varied the description of the apparition, so as to see whether the lad held to the same account, but the child at once corrected him, and told me his story, which his brother informed me agreed exactly with what in his alarm, he had first told. The little boy was looking white, and frightened. Again a case of sun on the head.
Now for another. A lady whom I know very well indeed, and who never deviated from the truth in her life—save when she swore at the altar to honour and obey me—was walking one day, when a girl of thirteen, beside a quickset hedge; her brother was on the other side. I believe they were looking for birds' nests. All at once she saw a little man dressed entirely in green, with jacket, breeches, and high peaked hat, seated in the hedge, staring at her. She was paralysed with terror for a moment, then recovering herself, she called to her brother to come round and see the little green man. When he arrived the dwarf had disappeared.
Now these are funny stories, and are to be explained by the fact that the sun was hot on the head. But it does not strike me that the explanation is wholly satisfactory. Why should the sun on the head superinduce visions of kobolds? Is it because other people have suffered from a hot sun, and that the hot sun reproduces year after year the same phenomenon, that the fable of little men, pixies, gnomes, brownies, fairies, leprechauns is to be found everywhere? Or—is it possible that there is such a little creation only visible to man when he is subject to certain influences?
Sir Charles Isham, of Lamport, has collected a good deal of evidence of a similar nature. I do not venture to express an opinion one way or another. I can remember still, with vividness, the impression produced on me by what I saw that hot day on the Crau, when but a child of five years; but I cannot for the life of me explain it satisfactorily to myself.
CHAPTER VI.
LES ALYSCAMPS.
Difficulty of finding one's way about in Arles—The two inns—The mistral—The charm of Arles is in the past—A dead city—Situation of Arles on a nodule of limestone—The Elysian Fields—A burial-place for the submerged neighbourhood—The Alyscamp now in process of destruction—Expropriation of ancient tombs—Avenue of tombs—Old church of S. Honoré—S. Trophimus—S. Virgilius—Augustine, apostle of the English, consecrated by him—The Flying Dutchman—Tomb of Ælia—Of Julia Tyranna—Her musical instruments—Monument of Calpurnia—Her probable story—Mathematical versus classic studies—Tombs of utriculares—Christian sarcophagi—Probably older than the date usually attributed to them—A French author on the wreckage of the Elysian Fields.
I do not know a more perplexing place anywhere to find one's way in and out of than Arles. During a fortnight spent there I never could hit my inn aright once on coming from the railway station. The place is like a labyrinth; but one of those labyrinths that our forefathers delighted to construct of pleached alleys of box or lime were always to be traversed when you possessed the key. There is no key, no principle whatever upon which Arles has been built. Every public edifice seems to be dodging round the corner, like Chevy Slyme, hiding from some other public edifice with which it is on dubious terms, or not quite on social equality, and wishes to avoid the difficulties of an encounter.
Arles streets are about the worst paved in Europe. They are floored with the cobble-stones rolled down by the diluvium, and torture the feet that walk over them and rick the ankles. There are two melancholy inns in the Place du Forum, and it is hard to choose between them, probably it does not much matter. I was given a bed-chamber in one where neither the door nor the window would shut, and where there were besides two locked doors that did not fit, and as the mistral was blowing, my hours in that room were spent in a swirl of draughts. Moreover, an old party with bronchitis was in the adjoining room, also suffering from the draughts, and in despair of recovering his health in such a situation. I complained, and was given another room where the draughts were the same, but I was without my coughing and hawking neighbour. No wonder that I was charged half a franc per night for my candle. It guttered itself in no time into the tray of the candlestick, as it was blown upon from four distinct directions simultaneously.
Arles—when not in a mistral—is charming, but the charm is in the past. There one must be a laudator temporis acti, for the present is wholly wretched and bad. The fact is, Arles had a glorious past, from which it has been falling throughout the Middle Ages till it reached a point approaching extinction, and it has not as yet realised that better days are shining before it, and that there is a future to which it may look up.
So depressed did Arles become some time ago, that its only lively trade was in old coffins. It had a vast cemetery outside its walls, crammed with memorials of the dead of all ages; and as the curators of the museums of Paris, Marseilles, Avignon, Aix, &c., thirsted after sarcophagi, the mournful Arelois went to their necropolis, dug up as many as were wanted, and forwarded coffins to those who had made requisition for them.
Arles is planted upon a nodule of limestone rock that rises out of the diluvium of rolled stones. In former times it was almost the sole dry spot to be found for miles round, and as the dead of Pagan and Christian times alike seem to have objected to wet beds, their bodies were transported from all the country round to the plateau east of Arles and there entombed. This plateau was called the Elysian Fields, now Alyscamp, and is so thick with tombs that you walk over them as you follow the road that runs along the plateau. You see the grass at the side dead in one place, there is a tomb there; you see a bit of white marble cropping up in another, that is a tomb. You see a great stack of stones heaped up by the side of a railway cutting, they are all tombs. You look at the cutting itself, and see that to a certain depth it is honeycombed with tombs, some cut through, some sticking out. In every farmyard the pigs eat out of old sarcophagi. The fountains squirt into them, the bacon is cured in them. The farrier dips his hot iron into a sarcophagus. In the churches the altars are made of them. The foundations of the houses are laid in them. The very air seems to be pervaded with the dust of the dead, and this dust lies heavy on the spirits and energies of the inhabitants.
But what an age we live in! Utilitarian and disrespectful of the past! The other day a cargo of mummied cat-deities arrived at Liverpool and was sold for manure. At Arles, the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean Railway Company has bought up the Elysian Fields to convert them into a factory for their engines. The company are excavating Les Alyscamp for this purpose, throwing about the sarcophagi, Pagan or Christian, or using them for building materials—and sawn in half they make decent quoins for a brickshed—and strewing the dust of the dead of ages under the wheels of the locomotives.
One undesecrated, unrifled headland remains above the factories, on which is a venerable but abandoned church. The company would grub that up too, but the proprietor will not sell, as he believes the tradition that an incalculable treasure is hidden somewhere among these tombs.
But the Arelois not only expropriate the tombs of their forefathers, they have given away or sold other things as well. On the Alyscamp is the venerable church of S. Honoré, half ruinous, in which, underground in the crypt is the ancient baptistery that had served the first Christians when the church was young. It was furnished with a large porphyry circular vessel for immersing adults. Louis XIV. saw it, coveted it for some water-works, and got the Arelois to give it him. Among the ruins of the theatre was found a Venus of Greek workmanship and of Parian marble. They sent it away also; it is in Paris.
The old church of S. Honoré is now reached by a long avenue of poplars lined with Pagan Roman tombs. The nave of the church is in ruins, but the choir is in tolerable condition, and is the most interesting portion. It consists in fact of an early Romanesque basilica with three aisles ending in three apses. The pillars separating nave from aisles, three on each side, are great drums ten feet in diameter. The later, ruinous nave contains the reputed chapel of S. Trophimus, apostle of Arles. When the fourteenth century church was added, this little chapel was left standing within, and though now crumbling, it is comparatively watertight. It has, however, undergone recasing in Renaissance times, and to understand its structure the chapel must be entered. It is then seen to have been an open porch of four semicircular arches, and may possibly have been erected over the tomb of S. Trophimus. The only ornament about it is a moulding, which may give its date.
S. Trophimus, reputed apostle of Aix, is now said to have been that Asiatic who was a companion of S. Paul mentioned in Acts xx. 4, xxi. 27-29, and 2 Tim. iv. 12, 20. But the very early diptychs of the church of Arles mention S. Dionysius as the first prelate, and the cathedral was built in 625 by S. Virgilius, and dedicated to S. Stephen. It did not take the title of S. Trophimus till the twelfth century, when the relics of this saint were brought to it from the little chapel just described. The exact date was 1152; the tradition of S. Trophimus having been one of the disciples of Christ and companion of S. Paul arose about this time. Not a trace of such a tradition appears in the Provençal poem composed by an eye-witness of the translation of the relics.
There was, no doubt, a bishop of this name at Arles, and probably early, but the first whose name is authenticated is Martianus, who followed the Novatian heresy in 254. Gregory of Tours—and his testimony is confirmed by a MS. of the fifth century—says that S. Trophimus was sent into Gaul in the consulship of Decius and Gratus, i.e., 250, and that he was the first bishop of Arles, and Gregory of Tours is the earliest and most reliable authority that we have on the beginnings of the Christian church in Gaul.
The church of S. Honoré was built by S. Virgilius, Archbishop of Arles A.D. 588-618, and the baptistery dates from his time. According to the legend, whilst he was erecting the basilica, the people toiled ineffectually to move the pillars to their destined place. At last they sent word to S. Virgil that the truck was fast, and the pillars could neither be taken on nor carried back. Then Virgil hurried to the spot, and saw a little devil, like a negro boy, sitting under the truck, obstructing its progress. Virgil drove him away, whereupon the columns were easily moved. He was buried in this church, but I do not fancy his tomb is known. A strange story is told of him, how one night, as he was pacing the walls of Arles, or possibly walking in the Alyscamp, he saw a mysterious ship come sailing over the meres. In the starlight he discerned forms of sailors. The ship drew up near where he stood, and a voice called to him: "Reverend father, we know who thou art. Now we are bound for Jerusalem, and are here to ask thee to come on board with us." "No, thank you," answered Virgilius, "not till you have shown me who you are." Then he made the sign of the cross, and suddenly the ship resolved itself into a drift of fog that rolled away before the wind along the surface of the mere. This is the second version of the world-wide-known myth of the Flying Dutchman. The earliest form comes to us in the legend of S. Adrian, a martyr in Asia Minor. As his widow Basilissa was sailing over the Black Sea with his body, to bury it at Byzantium, a phantom ship passed by, which also vanished when adjured in the sacred name.
What is, to us English, of interest in connection with S. Virgil of Arles is, that it was he who consecrated Augustine for his mission to Kent, at the command of Gregory the Great. So here, probably, in this ruinous, silent old church, our apostle of the English knelt and received his commission to go and preach the Gospel to us Angles. This same Virgil also built the cathedral, and dedicated it to S. Stephen. But of his work there not a trace remains. Another bishop of Arles of some note was Regulus, who when preaching one day was so troubled by the noise made by the frogs, that he interrupted his sermon to order them to be silent, and—they obeyed.
In a side chapel of the old church of S. Honoratus is a sarcophagus that contains the skull and bones and dust of a young girl. The coffin is of lead, and this perhaps accounts for the preservation. Along with it were found the gold ear-rings and other trinkets. On the ear-rings a cross, but the inscription on the tomb hardly leads one to believe the girl was a Christian. She was aged seventeen years, eight months, and eighteen days, when she died. Her name was Ælia. Here is the inscription in the lead, translated:—
ÆLIA, DAUGHTER OF ÆLIA.
Thou who can'st read these lines, read a sad mishap, and learn our
plaintive lay.
Many call that a sarcophagus which contains bones,
But this has become the home of unhallowed bees. [1]
Shame it should be so! Here lies a damsel of exceeding beauty.
There's more than grief in this: a dearly loved wife has been snatched
away.
She lived a virgin so long as Nature willed.
When she became a bride, the marriage vows were a joy to her parents.
She lived seventeen years, eight months, and eighteen days.
Happy the father who lived not to see such sorrow.
The wound rankles in the bosom of her mother, her precious jewel,
And her father, taken away in old age, still holds her clasped to his
heart.
[Footnote 1: The ancients thought that bees were bred of dead bodies. See
Virgil, Georgics. iv. 281-5.]
Here is the original with conjectural restorations. Would not old Dr.
Keates have whipped the Eton boy who wrote such barbarous Latin verses! But
it must be remembered the Arles folk were Græeco-Gallic, and not masters of
Latin. Some of the words are run together. It runs thus—
ÆLIA ÆLIÆ
Littera.quinosti.lege.casum.et.d(ice querelam.)
Multi.sarcophagum.dicunt.quod.con(tinet ossa:)
Set.conclusa.decens.apibus.domus.ist(a profanis:)
Onefas.indignum.jacet.hic.præclara(puella.)
Hoc.plusquam.dolor.est.rapta.est.s(uavissima conjux.)
Pervixit.virgo.vbi.jam.natura.placebat.
Vixit.enim.ann.xvii.et.menses viii.diesque xviii.
O.felice.patrem.qui.non.vidit.tale.dolorem.
Hoeret.et.in fixo.pectore.volnus.dionysyadi matri.
Et junctam.secum.geron.pater.tenet.ipse.puellam.
This is an exact copy. I am not responsible for the grammatical blunders, they were made clearly by the sculptor of the inscription, who did not understand what he cut.
Among the tombs extracted from the Alyscamp and now in the Museum of Arles, is another of a girl, and a very accomplished young lady she must have been; her name was Julia, and she was the daughter of Lucius Tyrannus. She died at the age of twenty; the inscription on her tomb records that in her morals and in her schooling she was a pattern to all other girls.
[Illustration: Musical instruments from the tomb of Julia.]
What is particularly interesting about this monument is that it gives illustrations of all the musical instruments she was able to play, and it affords us I believe, the earliest known example of the organ. [1] But what is even more curious is that on it is represented a guitar, very much the same as is now manufactured.
[Footnote 1: Nero on the night when he died was going to try a water-organ, when the news of the revolt of Galba and the defection of the troops reached him. I am puzzled about this organ on the tomb of Julia Tyranna. Sir George Grove, in his 'Dictionary of Music,' gives an illustration of this same organ copied from Dom. Bedos' 'L'Art du Facteur d'Orgues,' Paris, 1766. This represents two slaves crouched and blowing into the organ bellows. I could not see these figures. I made my sketch carefully, and can hardly suppose the figures have been chipped away since the monument was placed in the museum.]
The instruments she could play were the organ, the guitar, the syrinx or panpipe, and the lyre, which she struck not with her fingers, but a plectrum represented beside it. Observe, between the lyre and the banjo her little satchel of music-books, and below the syrinx a lamb and palm. This is the only sign on the monument that could in the least lead to a supposition that Julia Tyranna was Christian. The inscription bears no trace of Christianity.
[Illustration: Calpurnia's monument.]
Another interesting monument found there is that to Calpurnia, daughter of Caius Marius. Probably she died from the exposure and roughness of life camping out, when the barbarian hordes rolled west, and all the inhabitants of the towns were obliged to fly before them to the hills. I shall in a future chapter tell the story of Caius Marius and his great victory at Pourrières over the Teutons, having first thrashed the Ambrons near Aix. Suffice it now to note that here is the tombstone of his poor little daughter. I must, however, state that the genuineness of this inscription has been called in question. It is also worthy of notice how that the victory of Marius and delivery from the barbarians impressed the people of the neighbourhood. In the museum the name of Marius occurs on other monuments. The name of Marius is even now a popular Christian name in Provence.
But to return to Calpurnia. The place where the Arles inhabitants fled from the Teutons was the limestone range of Les Alpines, almost an island, so surrounded was it by lagoons and marshes.
Looking at Calpurnia's monument I fell into a dream, and saw her whole story unfolded before me. Caius Marius was a rough-mannered man, of peasant origin, but he had a wife Julia, of patrician rank, and who, I have not a shadow of doubt, flourished her noble origin before him, and talked very big of her grand relations. When little missie was born: "I'll have none of your plebeian names, if you please, for my baby," said Julia; "you will please note that my family derives from the immortal gods. I shall call the child Calpurnia." [1] Madame Julia was a good wife, and she followed her rough husband everywhere. At the beginning of windy March, tidings came that the Teutons and Ambrons were on the move. In April all the women and children of Arles, Glanum, Ernaginum, and Cabelio were clustered on the heights of Les Alpines, in extemporised cabins or in some of the prehistoric habitations they found scooped out of the limestone. Down came the rains. A gale and driving out-pour then as to-day, when M. Carnot comes into Provence. The roofs of the cabins let in water, the sides of the caves ran down with moisture. Then the wind changed, the sun shone out hot, but the mistral tore over the country cold and sharp as a double-edged sword. Poor Calpurnia could not stand it. She shivered and coughed, lost appetite and spirits. Next came the tidings of the battle at Les Milles, and a couple of days later of the extermination of the enemy at Pourrières. Now the refugees might in safety descend from their rocky refuges, and return to their homes.
[Footnote 1: See Appendix A, on this monument and the question of its genuineness; as well as for some other inscriptions in the Arles Museum.]
Then Julia went with the sick girl to Arles. Meantime Marius on the battlefield had received the ovation of his officers and soldiers, and the salutations of the delegates from the senate proclaiming him consul. But at the same time there appeared—I doubt not, though Plutarch does not say so—a slave with a note from Julia:—
"I am sorry to tell you that Calpurnia is very unwell. That horrible mistral froze her, and she has done little else than cough night and day since. I have given her snail broth, but it has not relieved her much, and she is now spitting blood. Bother these Teutons, it is all their work. I always told you that you made a mistake in letting them come into Provence, and cross the Rhone. However, you were ever pigheaded, and now it serves you right. You will lose Calpurnia, who is the apple of your eye. Now if you had listened to me, etc., etc.
"Salve."
But there was something further to complicate matters, and superinduce sickness in a delicate girl. To escape to the hills the good people of Arles could not follow a road, for the whole district between them and the range of Les Alpines was covered with one vast lagoon. They could not travel in boats, for the lagoon was shallow, so they went on rafts supported on inflated skins, about which I shall have something to say presently. So Calpurnia, creeping close to her mother, wrapped in her pallium, was exposed for hours on a raft at the beginning of April to the cold winds, and to the water oozing up between the joints of the raft.
The whole story works out like an equation. I fancy—but am not sure—a quadratic equation, somehow thus:—
As I, in a 19th cent. hotel, and in Jäger underclothing:
Calpurnia, on a raft and in a pre-historic cave:: a cold in the head
I got: x
x X self in hotel and Jäger costume = Calpurnia on a raft and in a cave X cold in the head.
x = pthysis.
I think this is right. I cannot be sure; and I cannot be sure, though I was educated to be a mathematician by a senior wrangler.
The facts were these. My dear father thought, and thought perhaps justly, that a classical education was but a throwing back of the current of the mind into the past, whereas a mathematical education directed it to the future, and was the sole course which would prove Pactolean. So I was cut down in my classical studies, and drawn out in those which were mathematical. Likewise I was sent the year before entering the university to a senior wrangler to ripen me. I then learned that what as a boy I was wont to call the Rule of Three was more properly termed equations, and that equations might be complicated to the highest limits of muddledom, and when so complicated were termed quadratics. After a course of equations that flattened out my head like the Camargue, I was thrust into what are called surds, a sort of wood of errors, in which one spends hours in hewing one's way to get at nothing of the slightest profit to man or beast; finally, I believe my good tutor, now a bishop, got tired of me. I was stupefied by surds; and I entered the university. Now, after thirty-seven years, I find that every ode of Horace, every chapter of Cæsar, every line of Virgil I learned at school lies as a sprig of lavender in the folds of my memory—but I cannot even set and work out a common equation, or add up a sum in compound addition correctly.
I beg the pardon of the reader for this digression. I have made it because I think, should my reader be a father, this experience of mine may be of profit to him.
To return to the monuments of the Elysian Fields. A considerable number have been found here, also at Nimes, S. Gabriel, and Cavaillon, which are the memorials of utriculares. [1] There were guilds of these men. They appointed noble Romans as their patrons, and these patrons on their tombstones made mention of the fact. But what were these utriculares? They were raftsmen who carried on trade over the lagoons, sustaining their flat vessels upon distended skins. The lagoons were so shallow that no vessel of deep draught could travel over them, and all the merchandise of central Gaul for the Mediterranean—the tin from Britain for instance—and all the goods of the Mediterranean for Gaul, had to be transhipped at Arles from the river boats, unable to cross the bar, on to these barges sustained on inflated skins that conveyed them to Fos, at the mouth of the lagoons, where they were again shipped for the sea voyage. After Marius had cut a canal, matters were better. Ships could come up through the lagoons to Arles, but none at any time of deep draught, and the raftsmen, the utriculares, carried on their trade till the Middle Ages, when the mouths of the lagoons became choked, and the lagoons themselves turned into noxious morasses. Here is one of their monuments, in the museum of Arles:—
"To the manes. To Marcus Junius Messianus, of the guild of the utriculares of Arles, four times president of this corpora Junia Valeria raised this monument to him, her son, who died aged twenty-eight years, five months, and ten days."
Here is another, found near Lyons:—
"To the manes and eternal repose of Caius Victorinus … urix, also called Quiguro, citizen of Lyons, one of the corporation of utriculares there, who lived twenty-eight years,… months and five days, without giving offence to anyone. His mother, Castorina, raised this to the memory of her sole and very dear boy."
The navigation on distended skins is now everywhere extinct except on the Euphrates. On some of the Nineveh sculptures may be seen men swimming across rivers sustained on these primitive air-vessels.
[Footnote 1: See Appendix C.]
In the museum at Arles are numerous sculptured Christian sarcophagi, with groups of the Raising of Lazarus, the Multiplication of Loaves, the Striking of the Rock by Moses, the Opening of the Eyes of the Blind, &c. These are attributed to the fourth and fifth centuries. For myself I am by no means satisfied that the Christian sarcophagi of rich and beautiful sculpture are as late as the dates generally given to them. I judge by the fashion of the hair worn by the ladies. Now there is a sarcophagus at Arles with the twelve apostles on it, six on each side of Christ, and a portrait of the deceased. This is set down to be a tomb of the fifth century, and yet the lady wears her hair in precisely the fashion, and it was a peculiar one, of the Faustinas, the wives of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, A.D. 138-177. It must not be forgotten that the protection of the laws was extended to Christian sepulchres as well as Pagan till the edict of Valerian in A.D. 257, and although this was withdrawn by Gallienus in A.D. 260, yet after that edict, the cemeteries, the catacombs, were never quite secure; before that, the Christians made no concealment of their places of burial, they used the richest available decorations for them, in sculpture and in painting. Only after A.D. 257 do the ornamentations cease, or become hastily sketched and rude, and the inscriptions degenerate into scrawls. All the finest, costliest work in the Roman catacombs belongs to the first two centuries and the beginning of the third. When peace returned to the Church, art had fallen into decay, and there were not sculptors capable of performing such work as had been done before. No more convincing proof of this can be found than the two porphyry tombs of Constantia and Helena, daughter and mother of Constantine, now in the Vatican.
To what a depth of degeneracy sculpture fell may be judged by the lid of the sarcophagus of S. Hilary, Bishop of Arles, d. 449, now in the Arles museum. Beside the rude lettering, there are but a leaf and two birds on it, but they might have been scribbled by a child. It is to me inconceivable that some of the beautiful white marble sarcophagi both at Arles and at Rome, sculptured with Scriptural scenes, can belong to the period when art was as degraded as it certainly was in the time of Constantine, and I think that antiquarians have been misled in dating them.
Before taking leave of the Elysian Fields, I must quote the words of a French author upon them:—"It has been a rich quarry only too easily worked, and we will not here enter on the painful story of its spoliation. All the museums of the south of France possess tombs stolen from the Alyscamp. As to the monolithic tombs, they were abandoned to any one who cared to have them, and for many centuries have been regarded as stones quarried ready for use. The city of Arles has on several occasions had the culpable condescension of giving up the tombs of its ancestors to the princes and great men of the world. Charles IX. laded several ships with them, which sank in the Rhone at Pont S. Esprit. The Duke of Savoy, the Prince of Lorraine, the Cardinal Richelieu, and a hundred others have taken away just what they liked, and Arles to-day has hardly more to show of this vast cemetery than an avenue—but a noble one—of sarcophagi and some fragments of fine Gothic or Romanesque chapels lost in the midst of a desert." [1]
[Footnote 1: Lenthéric, 'La Grèce et l'Orient en Provence,' 1878.]