I met at Paris with a brother architect of the name of Sharp, who was going to Rome by the South of France; he left Paris a little after me, and joined me at Lyon. On the 12th we got into the packet-boat, to descend the Rhone; it was loaded with goods and passengers going to the fair at Beaucaire; and such a steam rose from the only room below deck, that I did not choose to venture into it; although a thick drizzling rain which obscured the prospect, and permitted us to see only the ghosts of beautiful scenery, would have made the shelter very acceptable. The packet-boat, or barge, is suffered nearly to drift down the stream, but the boatmen are provided with oars, to direct, rather than to accelerate the motion, as the rudder, though made very large, has of course little power. Our voyage begins upon the Saone, but we entered the Rhone a little below Lyon, and reached Vienne, a distance of nearly eighteen miles, in two hours and a half. Here we left the boat, and although the weather incommoded us all day, yet it was sufficiently fine at intervals to shew us that we were in a beautiful country, and to permit us to see some of the antiquities of the place. A magnificent quay extends along the bank of the river, but the current of the Rhone is so strong, that every thing connected with it must be of the most solid construction. One pier of a bridge is still standing; and a tower, which probably defended the end of it, remains on the opposite shore: a rocky hill rises behind the town, crowned by what appears the fragment of an old castle, but this we did not visit. Vienne is the first town I have seen, where the Roman antiquities remain in sufficient perfection to claim the study of an architect. I ran into the first church which occurred in our ramble through the city, (that of St. André le Bas) and found it a very curious old building, with many fragments of Roman antiquity, particularly two shafts of columns, and capitals upon them, but as the capitals had originally belonged to columns half as large again, the composition was not very happy. It is an edifice of great antiquity, being simply a parallelogram, with a semicircular niche at the end, which forms the choir; the vaulting is pointed, but the openings are round-headed, except three little windows in the choir. It was founded by Ancemond, Duke of Burgundy, and restored by Conrad, King of Burgundy. The latter reigned from 1033 to 1037. A little further we stumbled on an ancient temple, a good deal ruined. The spaces between the columns have been walled up, and the walls of the cell removed, in order to convert the building, first into a christian church, and afterwards into a court of justice. The edifice is not in very good taste, nor very well executed; yet the union of simplicity of form with richness of decoration, produces a pleasing effect under so many disadvantages: and the coming thus by chance upon an object with which one has so many associations, excited an emotion more easily imagined than described. Just out of the town is a slender pyramid on a square basement, perforated in each direction by an arched opening, and with a column at each angle. It is called by the vulgar the tomb of Pontius Pilate, who, according to them, put an end to his own life at this place. Its real date and destination are very uncertain. It is undoubtedly Roman, and probably a sepulchral monument, but there is no inscription. It stands in the middle of a corn-field, and cannot boast much beauty either in itself or in its situation. The finest relic, in point of taste and execution, is what is called the Arch of Triumph. Enough remains to shew with certainty, that it does not merit this appellation, but not sufficient to enable me to determine what it has been: some heads of satyrs have given rise to a conjecture that it formed part of a theatre.

Numerous fragments of Roman ornaments and inscriptions are scattered about Vienne. Some of the most interesting antiquities, discovered in and about the city, have been collected, and placed in an old church, where they form a museum; there are amongst them a few beautiful fragments of sculpture; and many mosaics, some of which may be considered as very fine ones, but a considerable portion of the objects appears to belong to the decadence. Besides these monuments of Roman times, Vienne boasts a very fine cathedral. The front rises from an elevated platform, or parvis, about twelve feet above the street, the ascent to which is by a magnificent flight of steps. This platform terminates at each end against private houses; the front is defended by a Gothic balustrade, which returns down the steps. The façade has never been completed, and perhaps in its present state the form is too square, yet it is truly a magnificent object, and has proved to me not only the possibility, but the great advantage of thus elevating a Gothic church. It is generally very difficult, when one contemplates a noble building, to determine precisely from what particulars our pleasure is derived, and to judge what might be omitted without injury, or what added with advantage. On considering the religious edifices of our own country, we observe that they are almost all, either on a level with the ground, or somewhat below it; and I had consequently began to doubt whether part of their beauty might not be owing to this circumstance. In France such a peculiarity is not observable, for we find here that the cathedrals are, with hardly any exception, placed on a platform more or less elevated. This at Vienne is the highest I have seen, and from that very circumstance, it is the finest, and the one which most contributes to the dignity of the building. The whole of this part, and the western front itself, together with the four first arches of the nave, were added by Pierre Palmier in 1527, and present nothing very remarkable in the style of architecture, unless perhaps, that in some cases there is an appearance of the artist having endeavoured to imitate the character of the ancient work.

On entering, the building seems at first glance to present a considerable uniformity of style; but a closer examination betrays very important differences. As to its whole effect, the want of coloured glass is a deficiency hardly to be forgiven; and it seemed to me, who have been lately so much accustomed to the very lofty churches of the north of France, rather too low in proportion to its extent, but in this my companion did not agree with me. We estimated its height at between eighty and ninety feet; and certainly if it had but painted glass, it would not be disgraced in a comparison with the proudest Gothic churches in Europe, but in its present state, it is less impressive than that at Lyon. The first four arches are of the same date and style as the front, but beyond these are seven other arches on each side, which form the most curious part of the building. From the pavement to the under side of the gallery, the architecture is of a manner which I have not seen before, and one might imagine it for a moment to be formed at the restoration of the Italian architecture, but it is only for a moment: the mouldings, the ornaments, and above all, the capitals, clearly attest the antiquity of the work. Driven from that supposition, the observer is almost led to attribute it to the decline of Roman architecture, (I wish we had good words corresponding with the French decadence and renaissance,) for it approaches even more nearly than the Saxon style, to the productions of the ancients; nevertheless the arches are pointed, and if we imagine this to have been in consequence of some restorations, or repairs, which may possibly have been the case, since the points are very obtuse, and there is a central key-stone; yet the general disposition is too much like that of a Gothic church, to allow us to push so far back the era of its construction. The arches of the side aisles in this part have no mouldings on the groins, the lower windows are rose-headed, and probably of the thirteenth century; those of the clerestory are by threes, and without tracery, they may therefore be attributed to the twelfth; but in both parts some of a later style have been introduced. There is no transept, but there are four steps at the eighth pier from the entrance, and three more at the eleventh. The latter mark the present choir, the straight part of which, consisting of two arches only, is of the earliest French pointed style, while the chevet is polygonal, and has a quatrefoil in the window heads. Externally the flanks of the side aisles are finished with a gallery of small arches, upon little columns, some of which are semicircular, and others pointed, and above these rise Gothic pinnacles. Some fragments of more ancient work have been built up in the walls, and in the oldest part there are also monumental tablets as early as 1200, which seem to be posterior to the erection of the wall. Reasoning from appearance, I should consider it as a building begun in the eleventh, and continued through the whole of the twelfth century, but the history of the cathedral mentions no considerable works in that period. It is said to have been begun by St. Esalde, archbishop in 718. The works were afterwards suspended till the time of another archbishop, St. Theobald, who completed the choir in 952. It seems certain that something was erected by him at that time, and equally certain that it was not the present choir. Yet the foundation may have been of that date, and semicircular, though the work above is slightly polygonal, and the want of a transept to so considerable a building creates a suspicion that the plan is of great antiquity. After this period I have found no accounts of any important works till those already mentioned, in 1527.

Besides the cathedral, there is at Vienne a very curious Saxon church, dedicated to St. Michel;^[18] it has a stone ornament, running along the ridge of the roof, which seems not to be uncommon in these parts; the ornamental arches of the tower include nearly two-thirds of a circle; a circumstance which unites it with the Moresque architecture. The interior of the church is not beautiful, but a little cloister is very pretty, composed of arches, resting on little coupled columns.^[19]

The churches of the villages down the Rhone are almost all of that style which we call in England, Saxon or Norman, very ancient and very rude. One at Bourg St. Andiole has an octagonal central tower, with semicircular arches, and is crowned with a spire of rather low proportions, rising immediately from the sides of the octagon, without cornice, or balustrade, or any thing to mark the line of separation.^[20]

I have been so used in France to hear the pieces of twenty francs called louis, that I thought of nothing else when I made the agreement with a boatman at Vienne, to take us to Pont St. Esprit, full one hundred miles, for three louis; he used his oars very little, just enough to preserve a direction to the boat. When we were about to pay our waterman, he demanded seventy-two francs, instead of sixty; as we could not settle the matter, we all went to a magistrate, who acknowledged the ambiguity of the term, and decided that we should pay sixty-six francs, as a mean between the two methods of understanding the bargain. I do not know whether the man had any intention of cheating us. He had assured us on setting out that he must sell his boat at Pont St. Esprit to great disadvantage, since from the rapidity of the stream, it was impossible to bring it up the Rhone, and yet we found the boat on entering quite an old one. This had excited some suspicion of his honesty, because, if they could not be moved against the stream, we did not understand how they were to wear out at Vienne: but perhaps in this we were unjust. These boats cannot last long, as they are very slightly and poorly made, and the man only estimated the value at thirty-six francs.

The voyage down the Rhone is delightful; and I doubt if all the boasted beauties of the Rhine deserve to be compared with it. The scene is continually varying, but always beautiful; the river sometimes runs between lofty banks, always steep, generally rocky, sometimes precipitous. The hills are ornamented with villages, and with ruined castles without number, occupying the most picturesque situations; some are covered with sloping vineyards; in others little terraces are made for the vines among the rocks; some are crowned with forests, and everywhere the mixture of scattered trees and bushes gives richness to the landscape. In some places the bank of hill recedes from the river, or diminishes in height; at others it is entirely lost, and the eye wanders to more distant hills, to rugged mountains, or to the snow-covered summits of the Alps. Sometimes one of these styles of landscape is presented on one side, and another on the opposite shore; at others all appear to be united; add to which, the Rhone itself is a noble river, from a quarter to half a mile wide, rushing impetuously along, and giving life and spirit to the scene.

The rapidity of the current has given rise to a method of crossing which we do not see in England: a rope is stretched across the river, generally at the narrowest parts, and the ferry-boat is attached to this rope by a pulley, which passes along with it; and thus, when merely committed to the stream, with a little help from the rudder, which is made very large, the boat is impelled to the opposite shore. The rope is elevated sufficiently for boats descending the river to pass underneath it, either by attaching it to a rock, or to a piece of rough masonry erected for that purpose. The rapid current of the Rhone is continually shifting the gravelly bottom on which it runs, and this produces a continual noise, like the frying of fish, but louder.

We slept at Ancone, a little village on the banks of the river. I counted twenty beds at the inn, and every thing about them seemed very clean; indeed the sheets in France are always clean, and I never had occasion to doubt whether they had not been already used, which has sometimes been the case in England.

Although the exertion of the rower is trifling, the progress made by the help of the current is very considerable. We were little more than ten hours from Vienne to Ancone, a distance of seventy-six miles; from Ancone to Pont St. Esprit, six leagues of the country, or about twenty-four miles, very little more than three; so that we travelled nearly seven miles and a half per hour. Allowing two for the effect of the oars, we shall have five and a half for the rapidity of the stream, which is about the same as from Lyon to Vienne. The course of the Rhone from the Lake of Geneva to the sea, measured along all its windings, is nearly three hundred miles, according to the best maps, and the elevation of that lake is 1,200 feet above the Mediterranean Sea. This would give an average descent of four feet per mile. The descent from Geneva to Lyon is probably much greater than this, especially as it includes the loss of the Rhone, and a considerable space, where the river runs with great velocity in a deep bed, and the channel is but a few yards wide; and although, on the other hand, it is probable, that the descent from Beaucaire to the sea is trifling, since there the valley opens, and a wide spread of alluvial soil begins, yet perhaps we cannot calculate the descent of the Rhone from Lyon to Avignon at more than three feet per English mile, or one foot in 1,760.

At Pont St. Esprit we find the first bridge over the Rhone, in descending from Lyon. It was begun on the 4th of September, 1265, and finished in February, 1309: the water-way is contracted to about 1,800 feet, passing through nineteen large arches, and seven small ones, with great rapidity. As well as I could judge by the eye, the water is about fifteen inches higher, above, than below the bridge. The edifice is very well built, with semicircular arches, but it is very narrow, and in order to oppose more resistance to the action of floods, is not built in a straight line. In walking upon it we perceived how much we lost in this part of the Rhone, where the banks are comparatively low, by the depressed position of the eye in a boat; a rich and fertile plain shaded by mulberry trees, appeared between us and the hills, of which we had seen nothing from the water.

There are some whimsical particularities in the churches at Pont St. Esprit; but perhaps depending rather on the fancy of the architect than on the style of the time, and therefore not very interesting. The date is probably the fifteenth century. In one of these is a vault, said to have the property of preserving the human body, but like so many other things, most of the objects thus preserved were destroyed in the fury of the revolution, when the French populace gave full play to the desire to injure and destroy, which seems so natural in an ignorant multitude. One, the body of a female, was, as I was informed, still entire, and I went to see it; arms, legs, and mutilated trunks, were pulled out from a hole, one after another, to gratify my curiosity, and at last the desired object. It was exceedingly light, of a dingy buff colour, somewhat shrivelled, but in other respects very perfect.

We engaged a voiture from Pont St. Esprit to Orange, and travelled the whole way in a mizzling rain, which continued all the evening and the next morning. My companion finds the climate of the south of France much like that of Ireland, and I cannot contradict him; but I suppose that such summers are very rare.

Orange is a little city of about 8,000 inhabitants, but it is said to have had 15,000 under the government of its own princes. It was added in 1713, by the treaty of Utrecht, to the crown of France. The situation is at the foot of an insulated hill, round which a fine plain extends to a considerable distance; beyond are hills, mountains, rocks, and valleys, all of which are seen to great advantage from the summit of this eminence. The inns are in the suburbs, the high road passing on the outside of the town; and this is absolutely necessary, as the widest part of the widest street does not exceed twelve or thirteen feet, and few are more than nine or ten. Here we first saw an order which we have since met with in several other places, that no carts are permitted to enter the city. The inhabitants tell us, that the situation of the town is cold, and subject to violent blasts of wind from the Alps; but we observed pomegranates in full bloom in the hedges. The general aspect of the vegetation is very different from that of England and the north of France.

There are few places, even in Italy, which can vie with this part of France, in the number and beauty of Roman antiquities. At Orange, our first object was the celebrated Arch of Triumph, one of the most interesting in existence for the beauty of its proportions, as well as for the singularity of its disposition, which differs widely from those remaining at Rome; but it has never been even tolerably well published. There are holes in the architrave on the north side, by means of which the metal letters have been fixed, but the inscription itself is wanting, and the monument has baffled all attempts of the French antiquaries to determine its date, or the object of its erection. At Orange it is attributed to Marius, or rather to Domitius Ahenobarbus, under whom they suppose Marius to have served a campaign in Gaul: but the chief evidence of this is the name ‘Mario,’ sculptured on one of the shields among the trophies. There are many other names, similarly placed, which seem to be in the nominative case, as Udillus, Sacrovir, and it therefore seems probable, that those, whose case is not determined by the termination, should be in the nominative also, as Beve, Ratui, Varene, and this Mario, which has given rise to the opinion of the occasion of the building. The letters S. R. E. occur in several places. We have no good reason to believe that stone triumphal arches were in use before the time of the emperors, and the profusion of ornament on the mouldings announces a style of art posterior to the Augustan age. Another hypothesis gives it to Marius and Catulus, on their defeat of the Cimbri, somewhere in this neighbourhood; a third to Julius Cæsar, on his conquest of Marseille. The Baron de Bastie contends that it is of the time of Augustus; and Maffei, that it was constructed in the reign of Hadrian. The result is, that we know nothing at all about it.

In the Corinthian capitals, as executed by the Romans, the angles of the abacus are always cut off. Among the Greeks the acute point was, sometimes at least, preserved. The capitals of this arch are too much damaged to admit of absolute certainty, but I am pretty confident that the Greek manner was adopted. Again, the Attic base, among the Romans, has a deep scotia, and the fillet above it is nearly under the fillet of the apophysis; the Greeks used a wide and shallow scotia, and made the projection of the fillet nearly as great as that of the torus above.

The bases here are decidedly Greek, and the foliage of the capitals is also somewhat Greek in character. These circumstances have not before been noticed, and indeed it is only lately that we have become sufficiently acquainted with the remains of architecture in Greece, to be aware of the differences which distinguished the two styles; the finding them here is curious, and seems to point out some connexion between the building and the Greek colony of Marseille. The composition of this edifice is very good, and the architect has contrived to give it something of a pyramidal form, which suits admirably with its character, as a monumental building. The French architects complain of it as top-heavy, and compared with the Roman triumphal arches, the opening is small in proportion to the whole edifice; but the character is different. In the Roman, the arch itself is the principal object, and the architecture and sculpture merely adorn a chosen point in the course of a triumphal procession. Here it is a fine pyramidal mass, erected to commemorate some important event, in which the openings must be such as not to destroy the apparent firmness and solidity. Nothing could be taken away without injuring the effect, and if any thing could be added, it could only be some additional sculpture at the top, which probably once existed. The mouldings are overloaded with ornaments, and the corona is small and channelled, as if to indicate dentils; an abuse which I should not have supposed to exist prior to the time of Hadrian. The best external evidence we have, would perhaps, assign this arch, and two others at Carpentras and Cavaillon, to Domitius Ahenobarbus; but the proofs are very slight, and the internal evidence is strongly against so early a period.

This building was converted into a fortress in the thirteenth century, by Raymond de Baux, Prince of Orange, and he appears to have damaged it considerably, but he probably preserved it from total destruction. At present it is quite out of the town, and perfectly insulated.

Besides the arch, here is a large theatre, of which the scene wall, now standing, is about 300 feet long, and 100 feet high; or, more exactly, according to M. de Gasparin, ‘Histoire de la ville d’Orange,’ 336 feet in length, and 114 in height; the seats were in the slope of a hill, as in the Greek theatres. Nothing is known as to its date, and the workmanship is rude and gives no help; the lower part is occupied with shops, and part of the ruin is the town prison, but the building well deserves an accurate examination. The outside presents a range of arches, now mostly occupied by little shops, and ornamented with a sort of Doric pilaster and an entablature. Over this is a plain face of wall with holes in it, and some projecting stones, which suggest the idea of an advancing roof and colonnade in front of the present arches. Higher up is another range of arches, low and without pilasters: nevertheless a small capital is shown over each pier, and there is a second continued entablature about the same size as that below. In the wall above these, we have, first a row of blocks to receive the base of the posts of the velum, then a very simple cornice, of considerable projection, in which there are no perforations over the three blocks nearest to the angles of the building; over the six following blocks this cornice is perforated, but in the remainder there are no holes till we arrive at the same distance from the opposite end; higher up is a second range of blocks, all of which are perforated. The upper cornice has no perforations or channels, and it is probable that the posts escaped it by a slight inclination outwards, as it has but a small projection.

The inside has been ornamented with columns and entablatures of white marble, of which very few vestiges remain. The whole back wall of the stage is clearly shown. It has one large doorway, corresponding with the central opening on the outside, and a very small one on each side of the larger, and no other opening; but there are two very whimsical recesses, of which the drawing will give you a better idea than any description; above, is a large niche in the centre, and on the sides, and on the return are recesses, supposed to have received mosaics, but I think, without sufficient reason. These return walls have no openings at any height. There are, in the back wall, some grooves issuing immediately above the second cornice, and below there are irregular recesses, which one may suppose made to receive beams, either of wood or stone, and it has thence been concluded that there was a roof over the stage. It is however, difficult to imagine a roof extending above 200 feet, and having a projection of 38 feet without any supports in front. The Sedili are very much injured, and greatly incumbered with houses, which were to have been removed had the reign of Napoleon continued.

They pretend at Orange to show the remains of a circus, and to point out the site of an amphitheatre, but the vestiges are somewhat obscure. The inhabitants must have been much devoted to amusements. No remains of any temple are visible, and hardly any fragments are scattered about, which could have belonged to other public buildings. We find, indeed, two or three pieces of mosaic pavement, but much inferior in number, size, and beauty, to those at Vienne.

I shall leave my Gothic till another opportunity, when I hope to be able to give you some idea of a very peculiar style of early architecture which prevailed in this country. After the rainy weather at Orange we had some very fine days. The wet gave me cold, and during the fine weather I made myself ill by exposing myself too much to the sun, while making my notes upon the theatre. By way of relaxation, I determined to go and see the great fair at Beaucaire, but on examining some voitures, which were proceeding in that direction, I found them so small that I could not sit upright. What a misfortune to be tall in a country where every body else is short! My head was too dizzy to write or draw, I therefore walked to Avignon, and found the heat much less oppressive when using moderate exercise, than when standing still. The road is shaded in some parts, but others are quite exposed to the sun. The near landscape consists of gentle hills, with meadows and cornlands, mixed with mulberry trees and vineyards, and, in the latter part of the way, with olive grounds. There is, generally, plenty of water, and one or two beautiful clear streams descend from the mountains, to join a little river which enters the Rhone above Avignon. The mulberry is of the white sort; the fruit small, sweet, and mawkish; something in taste like the yew-berry, but without its viscidity. In the back-ground, on the left, are rugged mountains, and one very high one (Mont Ventou), on the top of which was a little patch of snow. Avignon makes a fine appearance at a distance, exhibiting a great extent of walls and towers, but intending to return thither and survey it more at leisure, I hastened forward to the fair. I was told that the packet-boat would set off for Beaucaire between five and six in the morning. An old fellow came to call me at twenty minutes before five, but though I was on the quay by five, the barge was gone; I hired a little boat and followed. The Rhone is still beautiful, though a wider valley and lower hills render the scenery less striking than it is higher up. The language here is considerably different from the French, and is designated by the word patois, which seems a general term for all provincial dialects differing considerably from the language of the capital. My boatman told me that the canaille (query, who or where is this canaille) had killed his pèro, his mèra, and his frèro, meaning all the while to speak French, and not his own provincial tongue. In the verbs they usually pronounce all the letters, and mostly omit the pronouns; ‘avez du mao?’ said a little girl to me, when I accidentally had a handkerchief round my hand: and Beaucaire is with them a word of three syllables, all the vowels of the latter part of the word being distinctly pronounced. Even at Lyon, the e mute is often heard as a syllable, and they assure me here that the Parisians speak very bad French, and are hardly intelligible any where but in Paris.

Beaucaire is a small town seated at the foot of a rock, which is crowned by the ruins of an old castle. This is a very picturesque object, both in itself and in its situation. A small plain, shaded with avenues of trees, extends from the town and the rock to the Rhone. The streets seem to contain nothing but shops and warehouses, except a few inns and coffee-houses. Cloths were extended over them to keep out the sun, and as they are very narrow, not much wider than those of Orange, this object is easily accomplished. Square pieces of cloth, with the names and occupations of the traders, are hung upon ropes extended across the streets, but so close together, that in some parts, it is difficult to read any of them. The plain, from the foot of the castle rock to the Rhone, was filled with booths of all sorts and sizes. In one of these I found one of my old travelling companions from Dijon to Lyon, and his shop was so much cooler than my room in the town, under the covering of the streets, that I usually made it my resting place. The bad weather has injured the vines, and this has been extremely unfavourable to the fair, as the people of the country have no means of making purchases. Towards evening the amusements commence, and one of the earliest, which was an amusement to me, though a trade to him, was the exhibition of a quack named Charini. He assured us that he did not exercise his profession from any desire of obtaining money, for he had a clear rental of 25,000 livres, which put him quite above any wish of that sort, but for the love he bore to the good people of France, and the hope of future renown. He makes no profit of his medicines, but merely seeks to repay his expenses; a request, not only reasonable, but absolutely necessary; for he had already distributed in the course of this year, sixty thousand bottles at Montpellier, and ninety thousand at Marseille, each of which cost him thirty sous, and it would consume the fortune of a prince to support such an extended scale of beneficence. He rode about in a sort of sociable, drawn by four horses, with his preparations disposed before him, and was attended by eight musicians on horseback, a degree of style which I think you can hardly boast of in England.

This fair is esteemed one of the three greatest on the Mediterranean, and perhaps, the chief of the three, but in the present year it has fallen short. It is said to have been established by Raymond VI., count of Toulouse, but the most ancient act, still existing, is of Louis XI. in 1463. The master of the first bark which arrives, salutes the town of Beaucaire with a musket or pistol, and receives a sheep, offered with much solemnity, as a premium for his expedition.

The castle at Beaucaire was destroyed in 1632, but I cannot tell you when it was built. Raymond V., Count of Thoulouse, held here a splendid court in 1172, rendered remarkable by the whimsical contest of extravagance and profusion maintained there. Raymond himself set the example by giving 100,000 sous to Raymond d’Agoust, who immediately distributed them among ten thousand knights, then present at the court. Bertrand Rambault ploughed the court, and neighbourhood of the castle, with twelve pair of oxen, and sowed 100,000 sous in the furrows. Guillaume Grosmantel had the food for his own table, and for three hundred knights’ followers, dressed by the flame of wax candles. Raymond de Venou, adding brutality to extravagance, burnt thirty of his most beautiful horses. The struggle of ostentation was clumsily maintained, and the parvenus of modern times cannot be reproached with any absurdities which will bear a comparison with these.

A bridge of boats across the Rhone connects the little town of Tarrascon with the opposite one of Beaucaire, and two sous are paid for crossing it; when I reached the other end, it was with the greatest difficulty that I could get permission to go on shore to see the church, as a special pass was necessary on visiting, or returning from the fair. The church at Tarrascon offers some curious parts, but is by no means beautiful: the entrance is by a large, semicircularly headed arch, with abundance of mouldings, a few of which have Norman ornaments; and one is enriched with an inverted ovolo: above the entrance is a range of alternate columns and pilasters supporting an architrave. There are also some remains of a castle, where in 1449 a tournament was held by Louis III. almost as singular as the former court at Beaucaire.

The following English card, stuck up in the salle-à-manger at Orange, had directed us to the ‘hotel of Luxembourg, in the Esplanade,’ at Nismes:

“Mr. David Londes acquaints the gentlemen travels that he has remplaced Mrs. Londes widow, his sister-in-law, in the said hotel. He has the honour to acquaint the gentlemen travelling, that they might find chambers elegantly fitted, and that nothing has been omitted for the comfort of travellers. The hotel being moreover placed in the finest situation in the town. The chambers are newly suited, the stables and the coach-house are vast and commodious.

“Mr. David Londes entertains the hope, that he will fill entirely the desires of the gentlemen travellers, and that he will augment the renown which this hotel has always enjoyed. It is proach bath houses and flying coach office. The travellers will find there a magazine of silk stockings, and all sorts of cloths.” Do you think the French advertisements we sometimes meet with in England appear as ridiculous to a Frenchman? After indulging a laugh at the notice, we went to the inn, and were very well contented. The antiquities of Nismes are the most celebrated of all those in the south of France, and of these, to an architect, the Maison Carrée is the most interesting. It is a temple, with six columns in front, and eleven on the sides, which is according to the rules of Vitruvius, but the side spaces are walled up. Technically speaking then, it is a hexastyle pseudoperipteral temple of the Corinthian order. It is in very good preservation, and the spacing and proportions of the columns are singularly pleasing. The bases are Greek Attic, but with some additional mouldings, which diminish its beauty; they are very incorrectly given in Clerisseau’s Antiquités de France. Nothing else is in the Greek taste, and it is evident that no very minute attention has been given to attain a perfect agreement of form and dimension in the corresponding parts. The cornice is heavier, and more loaded with ornaments than that of the arch at Orange, and I imagine the building to be posterior. The date of the Maison Carrée, is supposed to be determined by an inscription restored by M. Seguier, by means of the remaining holes in the frieze. C. Cæsari Augusti F. Cos. L. Cæsari Augusti F. Cos. designatis principibus juventutis. It is therefore of the time of Augustus, and we must consequently push back the date of the arch to an earlier period, from internal evidence.

Two projecting stones, moulded, and perforated with a square opening, on the sides of the doorway, have been supposed to be intended to support an external temporary door; but one does not understand the object of such a door inclosing the inner one and all its ornaments; and as no similar instance can be produced, we must, I believe, be content to leave their purpose unexplained.

The fragment by the fountain, usually called the temple of Diana, must be of still later erection. The order is composite; the earliest ascertained example of which is, I believe, the arch of Titus, at Rome. A number of fragments are collected in it, which mostly announce the period of the decline of the art; but there is one which is completely Greek, and which probably belonged to some more ancient edifice. The principal part of this ruin is what once was a large vaulted room, perhaps a covered court; but most of the vaulting has disappeared, and its present beauty depends, not so much on its architecture, as on the beautiful colour of the stone, on the morsels of antiquity collected there, and which form a sort of museum, and on the dark green of the fig-trees which hang loosely about the walls, and give an air of freshness and coolness even in a hot summer’s day. There are three recesses at the farther end, and a dark covered passage on each side, of which I do not comprehend the object, but I know no reason to suppose it to have been a temple.

The situation of this ruin is very pleasant, in the midst of a public garden, close by a copious spring of delightful water, which supplies the town. This garden is the finest thing of the sort I have ever seen. The columns and balustrades which adorn the fountain, and the basins made for the reception of its waters, extend all through it, and there are abundance of stone seats, vases, and statues. The character of art is no where lost, but it is a beautiful character of art, and the more so, because all the parts are consistent, and there is no appearance of pretence or affectation. Every thing is part of one design; whereas, in England, where we have such ornaments, they are too detached, and seem to have dropt from the clouds, rather than to belong to the scene. Even at the Tuilleries the distribution is by no means sufficiently apparent, they want more architecture to support them. The trees here are of a good size, and uncut, principally the linden.

Comfort is said to be a winter idea. On leaving the gardens I had a good elucidation of what it means in a warm climate. A boy was seated on the stone bank which confines the water in these basons, under the shade of the thick trees, and smoking a cigar, while the stream was gushing out over his feet: he seemed most perfectly contented with his situation.

The amphitheatre is a great building, completely cleared out, so that it is seen to the utmost perfection, and the degree of ruin is such as to disclose the internal structure, and yet to exhibit all the external forms. The parts, as is generally the case in buildings of this sort, are but rudely finished. It was built, according to Menard (Histoire des Antiquités de la ville de Nismes) by the liberalities of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, consequently between the years 138 and 161.

One of the Roman gateways of the city is still standing, but it is not an antiquity of much consequence. A ruin called the Tour Magne stands on a hill just out of Nismes; its destination is unknown, but it probably was a magnificent sepulchre; the base appears to have been a polygon, perhaps an octagon,^[21] but with unequal sides: the upper part was clearly octagonal, but smaller, and ornamented with pilasters; within, it is an irregular oval. At present there is little to be seen but a towering mass of rubble. I found the people at Nismes unwilling to speak about their late sufferings, and still in a state of extreme apprehension.