While the mistress of the hotel was preparing what we later pronounced a most excellent meal, mine host was telling me surprising things in the dining-room, to which one gained access through a fine old-fashioned kitchen. With one of Taride's large scale maps before me, whereon was shown a "national road" right through the gorges of the Tarn to Millau, I asked for some particulars of the route, and was smilingly informed that it did not yet exist.

"But it is here, shown by a thick red line, on this map."

"Quite so, m'sieu; many cyclists come here with a map like that and think they can cycle all the way. But there is no road as yet, though in five years or six there will be one. The only way to descend the Tarn from here to Le Rozier is in a barque."

Now, experience has made me doubtful of anything a hotel-keeper in a tourist resort will tell you about boats and coaches, for you never know to what extent he is financially interested in the matter, and he of the Hôtel de Paris was avowedly the agent of the company to whom belong the boats used for the descent of the river. Although his hotel had a modern and well-appointed annexe—token of the growing popularity of the place where hotels are rapidly increasing—in person he resembled a brigand grown stout with easeful days, and one naturally grew more suspicious when he protested that it would not make the difference of a sou to him whether we went by boat or toiled ourselves to death across the mountains. A good friend at Florac—none other than the Free Church minister—had also assured us there was no road beyond Ste. Enimie, but that the boat charges were not dear. "Nor are they," said the hotel-keeper; "it is only thirty-six francs (thirty shillings) all the way, which is very cheap." We were unable to see eye to eye with him then, but subsequently came round to his opinion when we knew how much labour and skill could be purchased for this modest outlay.

IV.

You must know that the Tarn and its ways are not to be measured by the ordinary experiences of holiday travel. At seven o'clock in the morning you wake and breakfast without loss of time, in order to set out without delay and reach Le Rozier, thirty miles to the south, in time for six o'clock dinner. On the beach, close by the hotel, lie a number of flat-bottomed barques, rudely constructed affairs, exactly similar to fishing-punts used in shallow English waters. A plank of wood with a back to it, and covered with a loose cushion, is laid athwart the primitive craft, and here you take your seat. It is possible, I believe, for six passengers to be carried, but personally I should be loath to trust myself in such a boat with more than four, for two boatmen are necessary to each punt. The charge is for the boat irrespective of numbers, so that we might have had two more in ours without adding to the cost, but our bicycles helped us to square matters. Our boatmen were rough, half-shaven fellows, and he who took his place at the stern seemed to have been drinking unnecessarily early in the morning. But both knew their business thoroughly, and were alive to every current and whirlpool in the river.

Their system of navigation is at once simple and effective, the only possible method of using the water-way. Armed with a strong pole, they stand, the one in front and the other behind, and allow the barque to glide down the swift current of the river, which runs, as I should judge, at six or eight miles an hour. Its course is broken up by innumerable gravel beds and rocky snags, and while we seem to be on the very instant of dashing into a seething whirlpool one of the boatmen will, with admirable precision, jab his pole into a hidden gravel bank and thrust the boat once more into the main current. Beautiful was it to watch how skilfully the men made use of this current, and that, guiding the frail craft straight into what seemed a perilous swirl of breakers, only that they might avail themselves of a different current resulting therefrom, and pilot us into a quiet pool by the beach on the very lip of a thundering weir.

It is indeed difficult to convey any adequate idea of the sensation of such a journey, where the water itself is at once the element and the cause of the progress. One sits as in a cockle shell on the enchanted sea, gliding along magically amid scenes of unequalled splendour; but, alas! the bronzed youth at the prow and the hairy wine-bibber at the stern are no creatures of fairyland, but the very serviceable mortals without whose aid the wonders of the Tarn would have remained to this day as distant as the realms of faëry.

The panorama, which seems to pass us slowly on both sides of the river—for the absence of mechanical propulsion gives one the illusion of sitting still while the cliffs on each hand move past the boat—is of ceaseless change. For a time the hills reach up, green and carefully cultivated, to the higher basaltic cliffs, that rise perpendicular to the edge of the plateau, a thousand feet or more above our level, and then as they suddenly narrow, with never a foothold for the tiniest of creatures, the river roars between precipices that soar sheer and stupendous from its water, or in some cases lean forward so that at a little distance both sides seem to meet and form an arch across the stream. And the whole is rich in colour, the prevailing grey of the rocks being varied by great masses in which warm reds and browns occur, while every crevice is picked out with greenery, and wherever the foot of venturesome man can scramble there have been those bold enough to terrace patches of the slopes where vines and even tiny crops of wheat contrive to grow. One of the most beautiful and romantic pictures is supplied by the ancient castle of La Caze, which occupies a sheltered corner in a bend of the river, where above it the cliffs uprear with great hollows and rotundities, illustrating how in the unknown ages the water has eaten its way down from the upper level to its present bed.

The Château de La Caze is set about by many tall and leafy trees, and one could imagine no holiday more enjoyable than a few days passed here, for—Oh, ye romantic and practical Frenchmen!—the castle has been transformed into an hotel, where all the appointments and even the costumes of the servants recall the Middle Ages in which it was built. As we approached, one of our boatmen took up a large conch and, blowing into it, set the gorge echoing as from a foghorn; but we had decided not to visit the château, as it was our purpose to lunch farther down at La Malene, and the sounding of the conch was meant only to attract the attention of some of the servants, to whom our boatmen shouted that we had thrown on the river-bank about a quarter of a mile above the castle a sack of loaves for its inmates.

V.

Between Ste. Enimie and La Malène there are four or five points at which we have to change our barque, where the river leaps over dangerous weirs, and several changes are necessary on the lower beach. It is due to this manœuvring and to a wait of nearly two hours at La Malène, while the bateliers lunch and gossip boisterously at one of the hotels—the voyageurs also being not unmindful of refreshment—that Le Rozier is not reached until six o'clock, despite the rapid course of the river.

La Malène is one of the three places south of Ste. Enimie, and still in the real cañon of the Tarn, where the river is crossed by bridges; all splendid structures, designed to withstand the spring floods when the current carries with it many a mighty block of ice and all sorts of debris from the hills. The first and newest of the bridges is passed at St. Chely, a small and dirty, but extremely picturesque, hamlet half-way between Ste. Enimie and La Malène, where we explored a wonderful series of ancient cave dwellings, and where, by the way, an enterprising photographer has joined the modern to the prehistoric by painting an advertisement of his wares on the face of the cliff overlooking the former haunts of the Troglodites.

La Malène is, to my thinking, one of the most beautiful points on the route. The little town sits in the mouth of a great ravine that reaches far into the Causse de Sauveterre, and on the opposite side the majestic mass of the Causse Méjan climbs to well-nigh 1,800 feet above the river, the mountain road wriggling upward from the bridge in a series of wonderful twists and turns, "exactly like an apple paring thrown over the shoulder of the engineer," as Mr. Crockett has said of another highway in the farther south. It takes a man, walking at his best, more than an hour to climb that same road, as I can testify, and never for a moment during the ascent is the little town at the foot out of view. This will convey some idea of the barrenness of the mountain-side, where cattle and sheep crop a scanty herbage on fields that slope like the roof of a house and are thickly strewn with stones and boulders. At La Malène also there is a mediæval castle, which, like La Caze, is the property of that great tourist agency, "La France Pittoresque," and now serves as a hotel; but we were more interested in the old church of Romanesque design, where we saw the common grave of the thirty-nine villagers who were slain by the Republican troops during the Terror, and are remembered throughout the Cevennes as "the Martyrs of La Malène." It is striking proof of the terrible thoroughness of that bloody regime that even to this remote and sequestered nook the gory hand of the Terror stretched out.

The French are the best of all road-makers; more than any of the Latin peoples they have retained and fostered this gift of their Roman forebears. The highway they are now constructing along the Tarn was almost completed between St. Enimie and La Malène, at the time of our passing, and a splendid road it promised to be, here running like a gallery along the face of a cliff and there tunnelling some mighty bluff that juts out into the cañon. But the river will always remain the real highway, as the scenery can only be viewed to full advantage from a seat in a barque, and the bateliers need not fear the competition of the road that is in the making.

VI.

If one were innocent enough to believe the boatmen who live by the tourist traffic, it would be difficult to know which part of the Tarn is the most beautiful. At St. Enimie you would be assured, in the event of your being undecided as to the whole trip, that the stretch between that town and La Malène was by far the best; while at La Malène you would find the local boatmen emphatic as to the unrivalled beauty of the cañon between that point and Les Vignes, where the third bridge stands; and as surely when you arrived there you would be told the Tarn was only beginning to be worth seeing from there to Le Rozier! Naturally, it is impossible for two boatmen to take you a voyage which, occupying twelve hours, requires more than double that time and many times more energy, to bring the empty boats back to the starting-places. Thus the bateliers are prejudiced in favour of their own particular part of the journey, and the only way is to make the entire trip; but indeed that is for all who do not cycle imperative, as the expense of reaching a railway station from any of the places mentioned before Le Rozier would be prohibitive, and one must continue the journey from the last-named place to Millau by coach and train, for which only a small charge is made.

My own impression, if one can distinguish among scenes so differently beautiful, is that the cañon between La Malène and Les Vignes presents its most surprising aspect. At Les Detroits the giant walls lean forward in a bold and menacing way, and further on, at the Cirque des Baumes and Les Baumes Basses, we see some of Nature's most picturesque effects, while the Pas de Soucy is a wild and thrilling part of the journey, where the great basaltic masses are scattered about as if an awful earthquake had but recently shaken them into their fantastic positions.

But really there seems to be no end to the beauty of the Tarn, and when one has arrived at Le Rozier fresh wonders await the eye, and scenes rivalling anything we have witnessed are still to behold, if we will make a short detour into the valley of the Jonte, where the ancient town of Peyreleau sits like a queen enthroned among enfolding hills. If one can go a little farther along this tributary of the Tarn and visit the famous grotto of Dargilan, discovered by M. Martel in 1884, a strange and beautiful underworld, before which the most extravagant fantasies of the Arabian Nights pale into insignificance, will be revealed. There, by the light of torches, we can wander through gigantic caverns of stalactite greater and more awe-inspiring than any cathedral, and journey by canoe on underground rivers, in what—those practical Frenchmen once again!—is "the property of the Society 'La France Pittoresque.'"

Even that part of the Tarn between Le Rozier and Millau, no longer a gorge, but broadening into a smiling and fruitful valley, with the great impregnable wall of the Causse Noir frowning along its eastern length, is full of beautiful vistas; but the wild and rugged grandeur of the cañon has given place to scenes of pleasant pastoral life, and we cycle along a highway fringed with cherry trees in fruit, passing many a populous little town before we enter the leafy boulevards of the historic and prosperous city of Millau.

The custom observed by English authors of giving fictitious names to places described in works of romance—as for example, Mr. Hardy's "Casterbridge" (Dorchester) and Mr. Barrie's "Thrums" (Kirriemuir)—has so brought their readers to accept the most faithful realism for romance, that when they take up a French novel they are apt to think the places mentioned therein are treated in the same way. But those who have any acquaintance with French fiction will know that the novelists across the Channel follow a method entirely opposed to ours. An English reader who may have enjoyed to the full the famous trilogy of "Tartarin" books may well be excused if he supposes that the town of Tarascon is largely a creation of their author, Alphonse Daudet. It is true that if he has ever travelled from Paris to Marseilles by way of Lyons and Avignon he will have passed through Tarascon, with its wide and open station perched high on a viaduct, and the porter bawling in his rich, southern tongue, "Tarascon, stop five minutes. Change for Nîmes, Montpellier, Cette." And if he has—as he cannot fail to have—delightful memories of the incomparable Tartarin, his feet will itch to be out and wander the dusty streets in the hope of looking upon the scenes of the hero's happy days; to peep perchance at his tiny white-washed villa on the Avignon Road with its green Venetian shutters, where the little bootblacks used to play about the door and hail the great man as his portly figure stepped forth, bound for the Alpine Club "down town." There would certainly be small other reasons for tarrying at this ancient town of France; it owes such interest as it possesses chiefly to the genius of Daudet, whose inimitable humour has vivified and touched it with immortality.

I had been wandering a-wheel over many a league of these fair southern roads one summer before I found myself at the ancient Roman city of Nîmes, the rarest treasure of France, and it was a visit to Daudet's birthplace there that suggested the idea of going on to Tarascon a desire intensified by the ardour of a gentleman from that town whom I met at a hotel, and who perspired with indignation as he denounced "that Daudet" for libelling the good folk of Tarascon. "Tartarin! The whole thing's a farce. There never was such a man!" But he asserted that the town was well worth seeing, if I could only forget Daudet's ribald nonsense.

It went well with my plans for reaching the main route back to Paris to make a little journey through the fragrant olive groves along the high road to Remoulins in order to visit the world-famous Roman aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard, near to which a gipsy told Tartarin he would one day be a king, and thence by the banks of the river Gardon to Beaucaire and Tarascon. Not often have I made a literary pilgrimage of so pleasant or profitable a nature.

II.

You must know, of course, what a rare fellow this Tartarin was—Coquin de bon sort! I am not sure that I should speak of him in the past tense; although his creator eventually gathered him to his fathers, Tartarin was built for immortality, and at most his passing was a translation; he is for all time the archetype of southern character, and Tarascon is alive with him to-day. Of medium height, stout of body, scant of hair on his head, but bushy-whiskered and jovial-faced, you will see his like sipping absinth at any café on the promenade of the sleepy old town, or playing a game of billiards with the grand manner of a Napoleon figuring out a campaign.

Tartarin, blessed with all the imagination of the generous south, was indeed an ineffectual Bonaparte, in the body of a good-natured provincial. "We are both of the south," he observed to his devoted admirer Pascalon, when that faithful henchman, at a crisis in his hero's career, pointed out the similarity between him of Corsica and him of Tarascon. Daudet makes him, in a bright flash of self-knowledge, describe himself as "Don Quixote in the skin of Sancho Panza," and Mr. Henry James has in this wise elaborated the point with his usual deftness:

"There are two men in Tartarin, and there are two men in all of us; only, of course, to make a fine case, M. Daudet has zigzagged the line of their respective oddities. As he says so amusingly in Tartarin of Tarascon, in his comparison of the very different promptings of these inner voices, when the Don Quixote sounds the appeal, 'Cover yourself with glory!' the Sancho Panza murmurs the qualification, 'Cover yourself with flannel!' The glory is everything the imagination regales itself with as a luxury of reputation—the regardelle so prettily described in the last pages of Port Tarascon; the flannel is everything that life demands as a tribute to reality—a gage of self-preservation. The glory reduced to a tangible texture too often turns out to be mere prudent underclothing."

Since I visited the town the Tarasconians have proved worthy of their reputation, as a picture post card has been put in circulation bearing a photograph of "La Maison de Tartarin." It shows a square and comfortable white house, flat-roofed, with a series of loop-hole windows that give it a murderous look. In front is a large garden, where an old baobab stretches forth its branches and innumerable exotics mingle their strange leaves in the beautiful disorder of the primeval forest. So, at least, I gather from a French journal. Yet, while pointing out the mendacity of the picture post card, the journal in question publishes with every evidence of sincerity an equally apocryphal account of the real Tartarin, who we are told, was a person named originally Jean Pittalouga, a native of the south of Sardinia, not a Frenchman at all. He was bought out of slavery by the Brotherhood of the Trinity, and came to Tarascon to manage the property of the fraternity in that town. As Sidi-Mouley-Abdallah was the superior of Morocco and that country was part of Barbary, Pittalouga became known in Tarascon, because of his romantic experience among the Moors, first as Sidi-Barbari, and then as Barbarin. The time came when the Trinity fraternity had to clear out, and with them Barbarin, who now rented a neighbouring farm on the outskirts of the town—the veritable "Maison de Tartarin" of the post card. But he did not die there. He went away with the Trinity fathers into Africa, and is believed to have been devoured entirely by some terrible wild beast, with whom he had disputed the sovereignty of the desert. To all of which, as Daudet remarks of the member of the Jockey Club travelling avec sa nièce, "Hum! hum!"

One may note here that the author did first write of his comic hero as Barbarin; but as the French law affords the fullest measure of protection to living people whose names may be introduced in works of fiction, and as there lived in Tarascon a certain M. Barbarin, who wrote to Daudet a letter worthy of his hero, wherein he threatened the utmost rigour of the law unless the novelist ceased to make sport of "what was dearer to him than life itself, the unspotted name of his ancestors," Daudet altered the name to Tartarin, and was inclined to think in after years, when the fame of his creation had travelled around the globe, that his hero would never have been so popular under his original name. It may have been a case of "apt alliteration's artful aid"; but one may suppose that Tartarin would have been equally popular by any other name. He embodies the extravagant, and not the least lovable, side of French character, as truly as Uriah Heep and Mr. Pecksniff represent English humbug and hypocrisy; he has many points of similarity with Mr. Pickwick, but the last-mentioned can hardly be compared with him as reality seen through the eye of kindly caricature.

IV.

Tartarin was, in a word, an epitomy of innocent vanities; large-hearted, generous, he had the Cæsarian ambition to be the first man in his town; he was imbued with the national hunger for "la Gloire," and many were the amusing ways in which he sought to demonstrate his prowess. To impress his townsmen, the dear old humbug surrounded himself with all sorts of foreign curiosities. His garden was stuffed with exotics from every clime, most notable of all the wonderful baobab, which he grew in a flower-pot, although that is the unmatched giant of the tree kingdom! His study was decked with the weapons of many strange and savage people, and, like a miniature museum, his possessions were ticketed thus: "Poisoned arrows! Do not touch!" "Weapons loaded! Have a care!"

His earliest exploits were as chief of the "cap-hunters," for, you see, in those days the good folk of Tarascon were great sports, and the whole country-side having been denuded of game, they were reduced to the device of going forth in hunting-parties, and after a jolly picnic they would throw up their caps in the air and shoot at them as they fell! "The man whose hat bears the greatest number of shot marks is hailed as champion of the chase, and in the evening, with his riddled cap stuck on the end of his rifle, he makes a triumphal entry into Tarascon, midst the barking of dogs and fanfares of trumpets."

Tartarin, however, determined to cover himself with glory—as well as flannel—by making an expedition into Algeria and Morocco, there to try his prowess on the lions of the Atlas. His ludicrous adventures on this great enterprise—how he shot a donkey and a blind lion, and returned to Tarascon pursued by his devoted camel—form the theme of the first of Daudet's three charming stories. The years pass with Tartarin lording it at Baobab House, and at the club every evening spinning his untruthful yarns, beginning: "Picture to yourself a certain evening in the open Sahara." Then comes the further adventures of "Tartarin in the Alps," and I confess that when, a good many years ago, I first clambered up a portion of Mont Blanc it was of Tartarin's famous ascent I thought rather than of Jacques Balmat's; the fiction was more vivid in my mind than the fact; and again at the Castle of Chillon—I say it fairly—the comic figure of Tartarin imprisoned there was more engaging to the imagination than that of Bonnivard; and, by the bye, in the famous dungeon one can see scratched on the wall the signatures of both Lord Byron and Alphonse Daudet.

The last, and in some respects the best, of all the Tartarin books—like Mulvaney, the mighty Tarasconian has his fame "dishpersed most notoriously in sev'ril volumes"—is Port Tarascon, wherein are detailed the mirthful misadventures of the great man, and many of his townsmen who, under his direction, set sail to found a colony in Polynesia, an undertaking that proved fatal to his fame, and ended eventually in his self-exile across the river to Beaucaire, where he died soon after; of sheer melancholy we may suppose.

V.

It was into the busy little town of Beaucaire, which lies around its ancient castle of Bellicardo, on the west bank of the broad Rhone, glaring across at Tarascon, that I wheeled one bright day in June. Beaucaire, for all its canal, wharves, and signs of prosperous industry, is as tidy a town as I have seen, and the fine old castle, ruined by Richelieu, where in the golden age of Languedoc's poesy the troubadors sang their ballads at the Court of Love, is beautifully situated on a little hill by the river-side, quite near to the magnificent suspension bridge which figures so humorously in Port Tarascon. The rivalry between the two towns, their mutual jealousies, furnished Daudet with many an opportunity to poke fun at them. "Separated by the whole breadth of the Rhone, the two cities regard each other across the river as irreconcilable enemies. The bridge that has been thrown between them has not brought them any nearer. This bridge is never crossed—in the first place, because it's very dangerous. The people of Beaucaire no more go to Tarascon than those of Tarascon go to Beaucaire." As the gentleman I met at Nîmes would have said, "Zut! It is not true." But that is neither here nor there.

Tartarin, up to his forty-ninth year, had never spent a night away from his own home. "The very limit of his travels was Beaucaire, and yet Beaucaire is not far from Tarascon, as there is only the bridge to cross. Unhappily that beastly bridge had been so often swept away by the storms; it is so long, so rickety, and the Rhone so broad there that—zounds, you understand!... Tartarin preferred to have a firm grip of the ground." But this must have referred to the old bridge that made way for the present magnificent structure, which crosses the river in four spans and is 1,456 feet in length. However, it was this suspension bridge, and no other, across which the hero's cronie Bompard came with such bravery to witness for his friend, when Tartarin, fallen from his high estate, was on trial at the court of Tarascon for having been party to a gigantic swindle in the great colonising fraud of Port Tarascon, a charge from which, as we know, he was rightly acquitted. Bompard at the time of the trial was in hiding at Beaucaire, where he had become conservator of the Castle and warden of the Fair Grounds—Beaucaire's annual fair is famed all over France—"but when I saw that Tartarin was really dragged into the dock between the myrmidons of the law, then I could hold out no longer; I let myself go—I crossed the bridge! I crossed it this morning in a terrible tempest. I was obliged to go down on all fours the same way as when I went up Mont Blanc.... When I tell you that the bridge was swinging like a pendulum, you'll believe I had to be brave. I was, in fact, heroic."

VI.

The view from the bridge as one crosses to Tarascon is as pleasant a picture as may be seen in any part of old France. The noble stream, broken by sedgy inlands, sweeps on between its low banks, and rising sheer from the water's edge on a firm rock-base, almost opposite the picturesque mass of Bellicardo, are the massive walls of the ancient castle of Tarascon, founded by Count Louis II. in the fourteenth century and finished by King Réné of Anjou in the fifteenth, and at one time tenanted by Pope Urbain II., but now, like many another palace of kings, fallen to the condition of a common prison. Within these grim walls Tartarin passed some of his inglorious days, but days not lacking romance, for was not Bompard from the opposite height signalling o' nights to him by means of mysterious lights?

Proceeding straight into the town, we arrive in a minute or so at the Promenade, with its long rows of plane trees, as in most French towns, only in Tarascon the trees seem to grow higher and leafier than anywhere else. It opens out a short distance from the riverside, and although it cannot be strictly called the "Walk Round" for the reason which the author gives—that it encircles the town—it certainly traverses a goodly portion of Tarascon, and takes in en route that "bit of a square" to which he makes so many sly allusions.

Almost the first thing one notices after crossing the bridge is the "Hotel of the Emperors," close by the Hospice at the opening of the Promenade. This title is worthy of Daudet himself! Along the south side of the Promenade stand the chief cafés and shops; as one sits by a table at a door watching the passers-by, the scene is entirely agreeable. Everybody seems to have walked out of Daudet's page. The men are of two types chiefly—those of the stout and bearded figure, such as Tartarin himself possessed, and the thin and sharp-featured fellows of Italian caste, like Bezuquet and Costecalde, with their bright, black eyes and fierce moustachios. Most of them, this sunny day, are abroad in their shirt sleeves, and almost to a man they wear the soft black felt hats such as our English curates affect.

VII.

There is a musical jingle of spurs, as some baggy-trousered soldiers pass on their way to the fine cavalry barracks which the town possesses. There go a pair of comfortable-looking priests in their long black gowns, their good fat fingers twined behind them; but nowhere do we see the white habit of the friars, whose monastery of Pampérigouste the gallant Tartarin and his crusaders defended from the Government troops so long ago! The women-folk whom one sees about are nearly all hatless, but they wear a dainty substitute in the shape of a little cap of white muslin and lace, and a pelerine of the same material over their shoulders and breast. Small, plump, swarthy, they are true daughters of the south, and by that token better to look upon than their sisters of the north. Here and there one may see a woman touched with something of the Paris fashion, members of that local aristocracy to which belonged the charming Clorinda of Pascalon's hopeless passion.

There is a constant toot-toot or tinkle of bells as cyclists go by, for the wheel has come into great popularity here as elsewhere since Tartarin made his tragic exit across the bridge. Perhaps the most unmistakable evidences of provincialism are supplied by the antiquated types of vehicles with their fat-faced drivers and their unshorn horses, many of the latter being harnessed with the most extravagant kinds of collars and saddles that project a couple of feet or more above the level of the animals' backs.

The whole scene is one of peaceful and happy life, and it is good to look upon people who are in no hurry to do business and seem to take things easily. Across the way, there, the chemist is standing at his door, with those great glasses of coloured water, that seem to have gone out of fashion in England, shining in his window, while he rolls a cigarette for the white-legged postman who has stopped to give him a letter, and chats with him in the passing. He might be Bezuquet himself, did we not know of the misfortune that befell the latter, when he was tatooed out of recognition by the South Sea Islanders, and had to wear a mask when he came home!

Going down a street that leads northward from the Promenade, we pass the Mairie, a quaint old building from whose balcony floats, not the Tarasque, but the tricolor, and by whose doorway are posted notices of coming bull-fights, for Tarascon is still keen on its ancient sport despite the restrictive legislation. Near by is the public market, and the whole district swarms with dogs of every breed. We peep into the church of St. Martha, which is no bad example of the Pointed Gothic and occupies the site of an old Roman Temple. One of the kings of Provence is buried here, but more interesting is the tomb of the saint to whom the church is dedicated.

VIII.

St. Martha and the Tarasque are the peculiar glories of the Tarasconians, who, you must know, would almost strike you if you breathed the word "Tartarin" to them, and have never forgotten Daudet for his satires on the town. We cannot do better than go to Daudet for the legend of St. Martha and the beast.

"This Tarasque, in very ancient days, was nothing less than a terrible monster, a most alarming dragon, which laid waste the country at the mouth of the Rhone. St. Martha, who had come into Provence after the death of our Lord, went forth and caught the beast in the deep marshes, and binding its neck with a sky-blue ribbon, brought it into the city captive, tamed by the innocence and piety of the saint. Ever since then, in remembrance of the service rendered by the holy Martha, the Tarasconians have kept a holiday, which they celebrate every ten years by a procession through the city. This procession forms the escort of a sort of ferocious, bloody monster, made of wood and painted pasteboard, who is a cross between the serpent and the crocodile, and represents, in gross and ridiculous effigy, the dragon of ancient days. The thing is not a mere masquerade, for the Tarasque is really held in veneration; she is a regular idol, inspiring a sort of superstitious, affectionate fear. She is called in the country the Old Grannie. The creature has herself stalled in a shed especially hired for her by the town council."

Daudet's light sketch of the Tarasque may be supplemented by a more circumstantial account of the strange ceremony from a writer on old customs (William S. Walsh), who informs us that "the famous Miracle Play of 'Sainte Marthe et la Tarasque,' instituted, it was said, by King Réné in 1400, was one of the last Provençal coronlas to disappear, as in its day it was one of the most popular. Even after the Mystery Play was itself abandoned, a remnant of it lingered on until the middle of the nineteenth century in the annual procession of La Tarasque, celebrated on July 29th, not only at Tarascon, but also at Beaucaire. The main feature was the huge figure of a dragon, made of wood and canvas, eight feet long, three feet high, and four feet broad in the middle. The head was small, there was no neck, the body, which was covered with scales, was shaped like an enormous egg, and at the nether extremity was a heavy beam of wood for a tail. Sixteen mummers, gaily caparisoned and known as the Knights of la Tarasque were among its attendants. Eight of the knights concealed themselves within the body to represent those who had been devoured, and furnished the motive power, besides lashing the tail to right and left, at imminent risk to the legs of the spectators. The other eight formed the escort, and were followed by drummers and fifers and a long procession of clergy and laity. The dragon was conducted by a girl in white and blue, the leading string being her girdle of blue silk. When the dragon was especially unruly and frolicsome she dashed holy water over it. A continuous rattle of torpedoes and musketry was kept up by those who followed in the dragon's train."

The celebration of the Tarasque has taken place several times, I believe, since the prohibition, while the procession of St. Martha is held annually; but as my visit did not synchronise with either, I had to be content with securing photographs from a local photographer, who was more inclined to discuss the weather and smoke his cigarette than sell his wares, and left his wife—at the time of my call, in a state of partial undress between changing her visiting costume for an indoor dress—to do the business of hunting up prints for me. It will be remembered by those who have read Port Tarascon that Tartarin foresaw his own downfall from the day on which, under the impression that he was shooting at a whale, he planted a bullet in the gross carcase of the Tarasque, which had been taken with the emigrants to the South Seas and was swept overboard to become a waif of the waves.

IX.

One of the peculiarities of Tarascon is its railway station on the outskirts of the town. It is situated some thirty feet above the level of the street, and you gain the platform by climbing several long flights of stairs, up which it is no light task to carry a heavily-burdened bicycle. During most of the day there is little evidence of life in or around the station, and a clerk will cheerfully devote a quarter of an hour to explain to you the absurdities of the railway time table; but five or six times a day the place wakes up on the arrival of a train from or to the capital, for all the trains in France seem to have a connection, however tardy and remote, with the octopus of Paris. Then there is much ringing of bells and blowing of trumpets, and you almost expect to see the quaint and portly form of Tartarin himself returning from his great adventure in the Sahara or his ascent of Mont Blanc. But you reflect that these and many other of his doings were much too good to be true, and take your place in the corner of the carriage, making yourself comfortable for the long and dreary journey to Paris.

The last thing you see as the train steams away is the white stretch of the Avignon Road lying between the railway and the river, its little white houses and modern villas close-shuttered and growing indistinct in the soft southern twilight.

"La Fête Dieu"

I.

For centuries the 19th of June has been to the people of France a day of high festival. No one who has happened to be travelling in Normandy or Brittany—or indeed in almost any of the French provinces—about this time of the year can have failed to notice the celebration of the Fête Dieu, and many may have wondered what it was all about. It has existed so long as one of the national customs, varying in its observance in different parts of the country, and having passed through many periods of change, that a few years ago he would have been accounted a rash and uninspired prophet who would have foretold that the Republican Government might have the temerity to lay its embargo on this sacred institution. But, behold the day when the secular hand of M. Combes had stretched out into the remotest parts of fair France, and following hard upon the upsetting of monastic peace, came the prohibition of religious processions in public. The effect of this order was to limit the fête in many places to a mere perambulation of the exterior of the church, and in others the procession was confined entirely to the interior, though here and there, it would seem, the function took place just as it did generations before M. Combes and the anti-clericals arose into power.

The festival is clearly of pagan origin, like so many of the ceremonies of the Christian church; it corresponds with the Corpus Feast in Spain, the exhibition of the holy sacrament having been grafted on to the heathenish rights very early in the Christian era. There seems to be evidences of the ceremony having been observed in some form or other centuries before 673, as in that year an ecclesiastical council, held at Braga in Spain, spoke of "the ancient and traditional custom of solemnly carrying the Host on the shoulders." It was Pope Urbain IV., who vainly endeavoured to stir up a new crusade on behalf of his former diocese of Jerusalem, that officially recognised and instituted as regular offices of the church in 1264 the ceremonies connected with the Fête Dieu. But, despite this papal ordinance, the festival did not become one of general observance until, some generations later, there had grown around the purely religious part of it a mass of painfully secular tomfoolery, which turned the fête into a great saturnalia. In the days of that merry monarch, King Réné, it had assumed such proportions that an entire week was devoted to the celebration, "courts of love," tournaments, jousts, mystery plays, and many other amusements being associated with the solemn procession of the sacred sacrament. Flourishing more or less, the fête continued annually, without interruption until the great Revolution, which gave short shrift to the old taste for processions; but under Louis XVIII. it was re-established, and the State even furnished troops as escorts for those taking part in the processions. Times are changed indeed when we find Le Pèlerin, an illustrated weekly newspaper devoted entirely to the interests of pilgrimages, publishing cartoons which show the police dispersing the pious participants in the procession of the Fête Dieu, while rowdy socialists are permitted to wave their red rags in the highway.