The Motor Routes of France / To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone Valley

PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE ROUTE

Carcassonne was for a long period a dual town, and even to-day, when the original city is mainly an historical monument, it contains a considerable

number of people within its ancient walls. A glance at the plan will reveal the position and relative sizes of the two towns, and it need scarcely be stated that the original city is the one standing on a raised site east of the river. Because of the great antiquity of the “Cité,” the large town beneath it is too often regarded as a mushroom growth. It was, however, founded in the thirteenth century by the people of the original Carcassonne,

who, according to some writers, were condemned to leave the town by St. Louis (IX.) for having supported Raymond Trencavel, the last Vicomte of Carcassonne, in his unsuccessful efforts to regain the city which his father had lost. The new town was called the Ville Basse, and its position being more suited for commercial expansion than the feudal one, it took a comparatively short time to outgrow the ancient Cité. Being entirely separated from each other by the River Aude, the growth of the new town did not mean the disappearance of the old, as at Tours and Périgueux, and thus in the twentieth century it is possible to see a practically perfect medieval city, completely encompassed by massive tower-studded walls. Within them the beautiful Church of St. Nazaire, the former cathedral, still stands; the castle also remains in complete preservation, and probably a resurrected townsman of the thirteenth century would find his way through the streets and along the defensive walls without the smallest difficulty.

The story of the Cité is told in its walls, for the lower portion belongs to the Roman occupation in the fourth century. Immediately above comes the different work of the Visigoths, into whose sinewy hands the place fell when the Gallo-Roman power had weakened. In 713 the conquering Saracens took the place of the Visigoths, but Pepin-le-Bref, the founder of the vast Frankish Empire over which his son Charlemagne was to reign, drove out the Mohammedans in 759.

Great building activity took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries under the powerful dynasty of the Vicomtes Trencavel, which was only terminated by Simon de Montfort (father of the leader of the English barons), who, by treachery, was enabled to seize the young Vicomte, Raymond Roger, during the fierce fighting in the Albigensian War.[I]

As already mentioned, the efforts of Raymond Roger’s son to recover Carcassonne led to the founding of the new town, which outgrew the ancient city, which has now become a source of revenue as an attraction to visitors from all parts of the world.

The restoration of the Cité was carried out by Viollet-le-Duc with that thoroughness which characterizes the archæological undertakings of the French, and in the buildings-up and pullings-down

one feels that more regard for the marks of time and less speculative roof-making would have preserved the spirit of antiquity, which, it must in candour be admitted, has been destroyed in the enthusiasm for reconstruction. When this fact has been recognized and the first disappointment has gone, the Cité becomes, as it cannot fail to do, one of the most thrilling of medieval survivals. There is a continuous double line of walls from 50 to 60 feet in height, made strikingly picturesque with no less than forty-eight towers. Several of these are the work of the Visigoth successors of Alaric, and merely to gaze upon them for a few moments in making the circuit of the walls with the guide gives one a more real and true impression of what the invasion of Gaul really meant than one gets from reading the sketchy account of those times which is all the smaller histories supply. Six more towers make the three inner sides of the castle formidable. The Porte Narbonnaise, on the east side of the Cité, was built by Philippe le Hardi, who continued to strengthen the defences of Carcassonne until his death at Perpignan in 1285.

The Church of St. Nazaire is a building of exceptional charm and beauty, the choir and transepts being regarded as the most perfect example of thirteenth-century work in the South of France. They were added during the reign of St. Louis, to whose generosity the church was deeply indebted. The Romanesque nave dates from about 1100, when an earlier one was rebuilt. In the south aisle a most remarkable bas-relief is let into the wall. The subject is the Siege of Toulouse in 1218, when Simon de Montfort was killed. There are some exceedingly interesting effigies and tombs of early bishops, and that of Simon Vigorce, Archbishop of Narbonne, who died in 1575. The glass ranges from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and some of it is very beautiful.

Good plans of the Cité are sold in the souvenir shop in the main street leading from the Porte d’Aude, which faces the modern town. The old bridge across the Aude is an interesting medieval survival, and makes a good foreground to the first near view of the old city, with its many towers and conical roofs cutting into the sky-line.

The streets of the later town are all narrow, and as they run at right angles to one another, the American visitor must almost feel at home. There are two churches which should not be overlooked. They are St. Michael’s, now the cathedral, a thirteenth-century building, with a painted nave, and St. Vincent’s, belonging to the fourteenth century, with a west portal enriched with statuary.

THE ROAD TO NARBONNE

goes straight out of Carcassonne towards the east, crossing the Pont Neuf. In fine weather this road is white and dusty, like all the roads in the South of France, and motor-cars appear as clouds by day and fire by night.

Looking back on the ancient Carcassonne, the medievalism of the place is quite fantastic, and exactly what the early school of Italian artists depicted as backgrounds to their pictures.

For many miles a ridge of arid hills runs parallel to the road on the south, and the Cevennes appear in the distance to the north.

Barbaira has a ruined castle bearing the Visigoth name of Alaric.

Some of the hamlets have a strong resemblance to the rock villages of Italy, and it is here that the silvery green foliage of the olive is first noticed on the journey eastward. Soon after passing Moux the low hills come close to the road, exposing layers of soft sand between harder strata, and the soil changes in colour from a light buff to the deepest orange.

Lézignan has a fourteenth-century church, but is not an interesting town.

Passing through more arid hills, one reaches the historic cathedral city of

NARBONNE

The continual silting-up of the Aude has converted the Narbo of the Phœnicians from one of the busiest ports of the Mediterranean into an inland town, connected with the sea by a canal. The Romans, foreseeing this danger, deflected part of the River Aude, and thus kept the seaway to Narbonne open until 1320, when a dyke gave way, and the river reverted to its earlier course, with the consequent rapid decline of the town as a port.

It stands at the southern end of a plain which is a vast vineyard, and produces great quantities of wine.

The martyr St. Sebastian, whose death took place in 288, was born at Narbonne, and also the Roman Emperors Carus, Carinus, and Numerian. Carved stones of the Roman period have been discovered in great quantities in the city.

The Cathedral of St. Just was begun in 1272 on a most ambitious scale, but the choir alone

came into being. Had the great undertaking been completed, Narbonne would have possessed one of the vastest cathedrals in France. As it stands to-day, the choir, with its two towers of the fifteenth

century, rises up above the roofs of the city, after the fashion of Chartres. In the eighteenth century an effort was made to complete the nave, but the unfinished masonry in front of the west end of the choir is all that was accomplished. The swing-doors lead into what might be called a ‘narthex,’ which is without windows, and the darkness is profound until one has stumbled cautiously into one of the aisles. There are fourteenth-century windows in the apse, and round the sanctuary are some interesting tombs, including those of Cardinal Briçonnet, Prime Minister under Charles VIII., and La Borde, President and General Treasurer of France (1607).

Over the door to the sacristy there are magnificent tapestries of the early Renaissance, and one should see the beautifully vaulted roof of the fifteenth-century chapter-house.

The Archbishop’s Palace is a huge fortified building, joined to the cathedral by a mutilated cloister. A portion of the palace has been adapted as the Hôtel de Ville, the new work by Viollet-le-Duc being in the style of the thirteenth century. The large turreted tower was built in 1318, and the central one in 1375.

The museum is in the buildings of what was formerly the Benedictine Convent of Lamourguier (thirteenth, fourteenth, and eighteenth centuries). On the same side of the canal—that is, on the opposite side to the cathedral—is the interesting Church of St. Paul-Serge, with a Romanesque nave, and a choir in the ogee style of Gothic, built early in the thirteenth century.

North of the cathedral is St. Sébastien, a church with fine fifteenth-century vaulting.

From Narbonne to Béziers the road crosses the flat alluvial ground to the little wine town of Coursan, on the Aude, which has a fifteenth-century bridge. The rest of the way is through a slightly undulating country, with scarcely more than a village on the road.

BÉZIERS

is one of the busiest centres of the great wine industry of the Midi, and has been famous for its wines from Roman times until now. It was the scene of considerable excitement and rioting during

the crisis in the trade depression of two or three years ago. The site is a raised plateau, with steep ascents from the River Orb, and during the feudal period it was a place of great strength, first under its own lords, and then under the Viscounts of Carcassonne. In the latter period the town was besieged by Simon de Montfort, and was taken in July, 1209, a large proportion of the inhabitants being massacred, the lowest figures of those who perished being given as 20,000. Although Béziers has a healthy site and a wide, tree-shaded promenade named after Pierre-Paul Riquet, who was born in the town in 1604, and was the creator of the Canal du Midi, between Toulouse and Cette, yet the streets as a whole are narrow, and the atmosphere one breathes in passing through them is generally very unwholesome.

There is a thirteenth-century bridge of seventeen arches, which should be seen, and four churches, of which St. Nazaire, formerly the cathedral, is the most important. It was burnt in the siege of 1209, so that there are only slight remains of the early building. The transepts belong to the thirteenth century, and the choir, apse, and nave to the next. The façade has a fine rose-window, and in the choir the fourteenth-century windows are protected externally by wrought-iron grilles. The cloister, also of the fourteenth century, is a beautiful piece of work.

The other churches are—(1) St. Jacques, with a beautiful twelfth-century apse: (2) La Madelaine, where many of the townsfolk were killed in 1209, is a Romanesque building, altered and restored in the eighteenth century; (3) St. Aphrodise belongs to the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and has a Romanesque crypt. The font at the west end is an early sarcophagus of marble, with a bas-relief, showing two infuriated beasts in combat.

The Canal du Midi crosses the Orb at Béziers on a big aqueduct, and considering that it was built as long ago as 1668, it should be looked upon with the deepest respect. Arthur Young, who was inclined to run down most of the things he saw in the South of France, grew enthusiastic over the Canal du Midi. ‘The Canal of Languedoc,’ he says, ‘is the capital feature of all this country.... Nine sluice-gates let the water down the hill to join the river at the town—a noble work! The port is broad enough for four large vessels to lie abreast.... This is the best sight I have seen in France.’

A fairly hilly country is passed through between Béziers and Pézenas, but there are no bad gradients on the road.

PÉZENAS

stands in a narrow plain, of such great fertility, owing to the volcanic properties of the soil, that it is called the Garden of Hérault. It was a Roman colony, and Pliny mentions the excellence of its woollen stuffs.

A bust of Molière reminds the passer-by that the famous playwright represented his first works in the town during the winter of 1656, and that it was here that he wrote ‘Les Précieuses Ridicules.’

A fifteenth-century gateway survives in the town, and there are some interesting houses of the same and the following centuries.

Leaving Pézenas, one crosses the railway twice, and then goes to the right for Montagnac, crossing the River Hérault.

Montagnac is a sad-looking town, with gloomy and dirty stuccoed houses; and one is glad to leave it behind, as one goes through the sunny hills towards Mèze, having, as one approaches that town, a great panoramic view over the land-locked Etang-de-Thau, with the Mediterranean showing beyond Cette. It is in this neighbourhood that one begins to notice the swords of the cactus, and the olive is seldom absent from the views. Aleppo pines grow picturesquely here and there, and a solitary cypress appears now and then.

It is hardly worth while to linger at Mèze, as there is little to see, and there are many places farther east where the time would be valuable. There is a pleasant run by the side of the sparkling blue waters of the Etang, followed by a rather uninteresting stretch of country to Montpellier, which is entered through a fine avenue of sycamores.

SECTION XVI

MONTPELLIER TO AIX-EN-PROVENCE,
98½ MILES
(158 KILOMETRES)

PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE ROUTE

Montpellier does not boast many antiquities, but it has some spacious promenades and boulevards which give a dignity and charm to the city. Hare, writing before some of the more modern streets had assumed their present appearance, says:

The place became prosperous in the thirteenth century with the founding of the School of Medicine, which is famous to this day. It is housed in the buildings of the Episcopal Palace, and its frontage is still machicolated.

The Musée Fabre in the Esplanade contains the best provincial collection of pictures in France next to Lille. It is open on week-days—except Mondays—from 9 to 12, and 1.30 to 4 or 5; Sundays, 11 to 4 or 5.

The Cathedral, with a very odd-looking porch, is the church of a Benedictine abbey founded in 1364. Three of the original towers at the angles of the nave survive; the fourth and the Gothic choir were rebuilt about 1857.

The Tour des Pins is a survival of the early fortifications of the town, now restored. The inscription is to the memory of Jayme, the conqueror of Arragon.

The Jardin des Plantes, founded in 1593 by Henry IV., is the earliest in France.

A triumphal arch, called the Porte du Peyrou, was put up at the end of the seventeenth century to the glory of Louis XIV. The Promenade de Peyrou, begun about the same time and completed in 1785, has a statue of the same Louis, and a great prospect towards the sea and the Cevennes across the level country bordering the mouth of the Rhone.

The impression one gets of Montpellier in a short visit is that of a city mainly composed of buildings that are all of a uniformly creamy-white colour, and that the only other colour besides the dusty green of the foliage is the bright red of the soldiers’ uniforms and the gaudy colour of advertisements.

THE ROAD TO NÎMES

Keeping to the edge of the plain, the road goes eastwards to Lunel, which stands in the great vine-growing plain. In the Place de la Liberté one may see a small facsimile of the New York statue of Liberty by Bartholdi. The church is Romanesque in part.

From Lunel a détour of a most profitable character may be made to Aigues-Mortes (meaning ‘stagnant waters’), one of the dead ports of that blighted land called the Carmargue. The road passes through Marsillargues and St. Laurent-l’Aigouze, and for the last three kilometres runs parallel with the Beaucaire Canal, which has to some extent reanimated the ancient walled town from which St. Louis embarked for the Holy Land in 1248 and 1270. The lofty walls and square towers, without any machicolation to relieve their grim strength, were built by Philippe-le-Hardi, and are said to have been copied from Ascalon, in Syria, even as the Château Gaillard was based on the experience Richard I. gained in the Holy Land. It was the Crusades that seem to have brought the town into being, and, like everything connected with those unsuccessful efforts to roll back the Mohammedan power, Aigues-Mortes, being surrounded by fever-producing swamps, was doomed to failure from the first day St. Louis founded it. But the constant depletion of the population in the past—at the rate, it is said, of five or six a day in the spring out of a population of 1,500—has given the modern antiquary a walled medieval town only comparable to Carcassonne and Avignon, and in some respects of greater interest than either.

From Lunel to Nîmes the country is a vast vineyard, with here and there an Aleppo or an umbrella pine or a few olives.

NÎMES

To the tourist who has never seen Roman remains outside a museum, or has only looked dully at a few foundations of Roman walls in situ, Nîmes brings the reality of Rome’s power before his eyes with such overwhelming vividness that he begins to forget the remoteness of the civilization which raised these enduring monuments. That the vast amphitheatre, the perfect temple to Caius and Lucius Cæsar, the gateway called the Porte d’Auguste, the complete aqueduct known as the Pont-du-Gard, and the Roman tower, 90 feet high, called the Tour Magne, date from the early years of the Christian era, or even before the birth of Christ, seems at first easy to grasp. But these structures stand so imposingly among the buildings of 2,000 years later which have grown up around them that there comes in time a feeling almost of incredulity. Perhaps some clever French architects have done most of the building, one thinks; but a glance at the stonework of any of these great works shows that the restoration that has taken place has been of a trifling character, the main work in the case of the arena having been the clearing away of the later accretions which were hiding the Roman fabric.

It was in 121 B.C. that the capital of a Gaulish tribe became the Nemausus of the Romans. For over five centuries it remained a Roman city of the greatest importance, a period equal to England’s history from the crude times of Richard II. to the present year. So much did the Romans appreciate their new colonies in Provincia (now Provence) that they even considered the transference of the capital of the Empire to the banks of the Rhone. One need not wonder, therefore, at the magnificence and the permanent character of the buildings they erected. At Orange, at St. Rémy, and at Arles the survivals are equally forceful, and the most ill-informed who gaze upon them go away with an impression of Roman power so vivid that they cannot ever again regard archæology as a musty science.

In its modern aspect Nîmes is a thriving city with a busy trade in wine and silk. The main streets are wide and cheerful, with trees which are a boon during the hot time of the year.

The chief features of the town are:

THE ROAD TO ARLES

From Nîmes the road is practically level all the way to Arles, whether one goes by St. Gilles or direct through Bellegarde.

ST. GILLES

The St. Gilles route is only seven kilometres longer, and the slightly increased distance will not be regretted when the remarkable church has been seen. It was planned on a vast scale, and, if carried out, would have been one of the finest Byzantine churches in France; but for some reasons, perhaps connected with the decline of St. Gilles as a port owing to the constant silting up of the Rhone delta, or possibly owing to war or pestilence or a weakening of religious enthusiasm, the great structure was never finished, and a smaller church in the Gothic style is all that came to completion. It embodies, however, the splendid western façade of the earlier scheme, and the details of its columns, its mutilated statues and carved enrichments, are finer even than those of St. Trophime at Arles. The abbot of the monastery, which had been founded by St. Egidius in the sixth century, administered justice seated between the grotesque lions of the portal, and the charters often began with, ‘Sedente inter leones.’ The crypt, the tomb of St. Gilles and his altar, the twelfth-century sacristy, and the Vis de S. Gilles, a remarkably fine newel staircase, should all be seen. There is also a restored Romanesque house in the town of St. Gilles. [J]

It should be remembered that historical and geological evidence prove that the flat marshy country called the Carmargue was in Roman times a beautiful district of rivers, tree-grown islands, and extensive seaways. No doubt there were marshes at the mouth of the Rhone then, but that mouth was a long way north of the present outlet, and the area must have been comparatively small before some of the large inlets were silted up and became fever-breeding swamps. Everywhere one goes in the Carmargue, from Arles to Aigues-Mortes, St. Gilles or Les Saintes-Maries, the same tale is told of prosperous ports becoming land-locked and fever-stricken. To-day the flat treeless land is cultivated where the swamps have dried up, but it is a sad desert even under a cloudless sky. In the summer there is dust everywhere, and in the winter the ground has a tendency to become a morass.

ARLES

is entered from the west side through the old suburb of Trinquetaille, the business quarter of the Roman city, and the Rhone is then crossed on a semi-suspension bridge of lattice girders, on which, when the mistral blows, it is scarcely possible to keep one’s feet. It is on the east side of the river—the official and patrician quarter—that the thrilling relics of Greek and Roman Arles survive.

In the importance of these ancient monuments Arles is a close rival to Nîmes, and in some ways Arles is pre-eminent.

The origin of the name is generally considered

to be the Celtic ‘Ar-lath,’ meaning a wet place, and its position at the mouth of the Rhone, with the island which is now the corner of the Carmargue opposite, was so advantageous to traders that, long before the Romans conquered Provence, earlier even than the founding of Marseilles by the Greeks from Phocæa, there was a busy commercial town at Arles, well known to the Phœnician traders of the Mediterranean. When the Romans found it necessary to conquer Provence they found a Greek city at Arles, and the ruins of the beautiful theatre, built before the Roman occupation was a reality, impress on the mind the change which took place, for within a few paces of the theatre there stands the amphitheatre—the time-defying evidence of the power of Rome. The amphitheatres and most of the other Roman remains in Provence are due to the Imperial policy of ‘panem et circenses,’ and what the huge arenas really meant is vividly brought to mind by Mr. Theodore Cook.

The beauty of the women of Arles astonishes the stranger even when he is prepared by the statement of the fact in all guide-books. The classic features of their Greek ancestry are constantly reproduced to-day, although in the men the intermingling of Roman, Saracen, and Frank has destroyed all resemblance to the Hellenic type. In a book of this character one is compelled to summarize where expansion is so inviting, and the reader is advised to study Mr. Cook’s two volumes entitled ‘Old Provence’ if he wishes to know more of the story of the region which teems with evidence of the Roman occupation.

The historic monuments of Arles are therefore briefly tabulated below:

THE ROAD TO AIX-EN-PROVENCE

leaves Arles from the Avenue Victor Hugo, and after winding a little for about twelve kilometres, with trees interfering with the view, goes due east in a straight line across the open plain called La Crau (pronounced ‘Crow’). It is a strange level waste of round stones, very uniform in size, which the torrents of innumerable ages have brought down from the Alps. The early peoples of Provence were mightily impressed with these monstrous pebbles, and Strabo has preserved the legend that Zeus rained them down on the earth to scatter the Ligurian tribesmen who often attacked the adventurous Phœnician traders and colonizers. The heat of the sun on the mass of stones, which has a depth averaging from 30 to 45 feet, produces the phenomenon of the mirage, and the conditions of wind and temperature are always inclined to be different to less exposed places. A clear sunrise over the mountains north-east of the Crau is a memorable sight. The desert of stones, broken here and there with lines of cypresses, is full of a strange shadowiness under the crimson-streaked sky as the eastern light grows in intensity, and one half expects to see a caravan of camels and the burnous of Arabia in place of the country cart of the French peasant.

The curiously isolated ridge called Les Alpines is prominent to the north wherever one goes between Nîmes and Salon.

Salon is a cheerful town at the very edge of the Crau. The main street has a bright and almost Parisian touch, with its numerous cafés having their tables under the shade of old plane-trees. There is a fourteenth-century château, and in the Church of St. Laurent, a Gothic building of the same period, is the tomb of Michel de Notre Dame, Catherine de Medici’s favourite astrologer. Another church is dedicated to St. Michael, and is a century earlier.

At the fork just beyond Salon the turning to the right is taken to Pélissanne, a village with tall cream-washed houses. In the centre one goes to the right and immediately afterwards to the left. Beyond this the road runs through pine-covered hills to St. Cannat, and finally through open country down a long descent into Aix-en-Provence.

SECTION XVII

AIX-EN-PROVENCE TO CANNES, 100 MILES
(160 KILOMETRES)