The fields of France

by A. Mary F. Robinson

“Les félibres de la Loi.”

No one knew precisely what the word designed—so much the greater its charm, its suggestiveness! The name was adopted by acclamation; and henceforth, at any rate, the meaning of Félibre is clear.

VI

We went the next day, in company with Mistral and his charming, intelligent wife, to see the races at St. Remy. “Regardez nos fillettes!” said the poet. “On dirait des statues Grecques.” A Greek statue is severer in its beauty; but certainly the girls of St. Remy might be the sisters of the statuettes of Tanagra: so dignified, so graceful, do they appear in the beautiful costumes of Arles. They were the great adornment of these mild provincial sports, as we watched them come in troops from Maillane and Tarascon, from Avignon, from Arles, all dressed in the plain-falling skirt, the fichu of pure fresh tulle, and the long pointed shawl, or “Provençale,” which recalls the graceful garb of the Venetian women. Sometimes the skirt is pale pink or apricot, with a dove-coloured shawl, or green with a lilac shawl; but, as a rule, the skirt and shawl alike are black, relieved only by the narrow muslin apron, which reaches to the hem of the skirt before, and by the abundant fulness of the white fichu across the breast. Every one who has been to a fancy ball recalls the charming coiffure which surmounts this costume—the thick wavy black tresses, parted in the middle of the brow, taken down either side of the face loosely, then suddenly raised from the nape of the neck high at the back of the head, coiled round there and fixed under a tiny band of white lace, and a large bow or sash of black ribbon. Few head-dresses are at once so irresistible and so dignified, and none could be better suited to the regular features, ample beauty, and melting eyes of the daughters of Provence.

We fell in love with St. Remy: we stayed there for a week, in the Hotel du Cheval Blanc, where the long dark convent-like corridors and the cypress-screens behind the house give one already, as it were, a waft of Italy. St. Remy is a delightful little place. All its streets are avenues of great zebra-trunked century-old plane-trees, garlanded in April with quaint little hanging balls, or else of wychelms, gay with pinkish-buff blossoms, and yet so gnarled and hollow that they might almost be those famous elms which Sully planted about the towns of France. “La Ville Verte” the people call it, and never was name better chosen. Even as at Orange, the town has shrunk within its ancient girdle, and has filled out its space with gardens, with

orchards, with hay-meadows. The gardens of St. Remy are the fortune of the place, and owe to their happy situation behind the range of the Alpines an earlier harvest of flowers and fruit than elsewhere, even in the sunny South. An acre of carnations of St. Remy is a fortune to a man, as profitable as an acre of asparagus at Monteuil or early peas at Plougastel. If the mountains behind us, so lovely in their lilac bareness, were duly forested and covered to the crown with pine and ilex, we could imagine no happier situation. But the hills of Provence are as unthrifty as they are beautiful. They absorb and retain no salutary moisture from the rare torrential rains of autumn, which dash down their ravined sides, ruining and tearing the friable soil, with not a kindly root to stay and store them. This reforesting of mountains is a great question, nothing being more important to a climate than its supply of woods and the distribution of its rains; the future of agriculture depends on it, especially in Provence, where, even more than elsewhere, the struggle for water is the struggle for life. In 1860, and for some years after, much planting was done; but then, alas! there came a slackening of zeal. Farmers everywhere think of the present rather than the future, and a plantation remains unproductive for a score of years; whereas these barren mountains serve as winter quarters to endless herds of sheep, who browse their rocky perfumed sides. In the year 1902 more than three hundred thousand sheep were pastured on the territory of Arles. Flocks of three thousand and four thousand beasts are common. In summer, when the native sheep are sent to feed upon the high fields of the Alps, the shepherds of Algeria bring their flocks across the sea to Arles; the patient Africans find sufficient pasturage in the rare but succulent plants that defy the ardours of the summer sun among the pebbles of Camargue and Crau, or on those rocky heights which, arid though they be, prove not unprofitable to the farmer who lets them out for hire. Talk to him of replanting! He fears to trouble a certain source of gain, and, knowing the span of life, prefers a small profit to-day to riches for to-morrow. But he sacrifices all the countryside. A forest has no enemy so deadly as the shepherd. It is he who burns the young wood, in order to have more grass; it is he who leads the sheep among the tender saplings, whose juicy shoots are dear to all the tribe of ovines, as the bird and the mouse to the cat, or the poultry-yard to the fox. The sheep must disappear if woods are to grow.

And unless the woods are planted, the climate of Provence will year by year turn harsher, dryer, more subject to the mistral. The delicate Alpilles will be worn by the force of torrents to a range of hillocks; the rivers will ruin the plains. From this, and more, the woods may deliver us. When men think of their children rather than of themselves—but when will that be?—the woods will be planted, and a generation will grow up to call these sheltered and sunny fields a Paradise. Even as it is, they are fertile and precocious in a rare degree. In the roomy inn-garden we wondered at the luxuriance of the spring, as we sat in the shadow of the blossoming guelder-rose bush, or picked great trails of rose and syringa. We gathered our first dish of strawberries on the 23rd of April. There are but two openings at St. Remy—miller or market-gardener: the two prettiest trades, suitable to this greenest, most pastoral of cities.

St. Remy is but gently raised above the plains; still low enough to nestle among the white-flowered hawthorn hedges by the runnels bordered with flowers. But, scarce two miles beyond, there rise the scarred, fantastic, sun-baked crags of the Alpille range—the Alpines, in modern guide-book parlance—a furthest prolongation of the Alps. These are true southern hills, barren and elegant, grey, lilac, blue, pink even, or purple against the sky; but never green. Walk thither along the upward road till, at the mountain’s feet, you come to a round knoll of fine turf, fringed with stone-pines, with, under every tree, a marble sarcophagus for a seat. Hence the view is beautiful across the wide blue valley to the snow-streaked pyramid of Mont Ventoux. But you will turn your back upon the view, for placed on the middle of this grassy mound is the pride of St. Remy: the Antiquities, sole relic of the prosperous town of Glanum Livii. Nowhere in Provence have we seen so beautiful a setting to monuments so perfect in their small proportions as the Triumphal Arch and the Mausoleum. Time has much ruined, it is true, the decorations of the Arch: the winged Victories are bruised and battered; only the feet of one warrior remain, the head and fighting arm of another; the chains of the slaves have fallen into pieces. But nothing has marred the style, the grace, the purity of the exquisite outline, Greek rather than Roman in its simple elegance. The Mausoleum is less correct in style, but more picturesque, more suggestive. A flight of steps leads to a sculptured pediment, from which there arises a crossed double arch, itself supporting a small round temple, roofed, but enclosed merely by a ring of columns, in the style of the Temple of Fortune at Rome. Within these columns stand two tall figures, robed in the ample toga of the Consul; they seem to lean forward as though they gazed across the valley to some ancient battlefield. Standing so high, and screened behind their wall of columns, the statues do not show the trace of the modern restorer. The opinion of archæologists is still, I believe, divided as to their identity, but the peasants have views of their own on the matter. Some of them aver the figures to be the portraits of those twin emperors, Julius and Cæsar; but most of them, with some show of reason, consider that they commemorate the victories of Caius Marius, the hero of all this countryside. The figures are twain, so the peasants have doubled the General; Caius and Marius look out towards the Fosses Mariennes. Others, aware of the individuality of their hero, have solved the difficulty by giving him his wife as a companion! One shepherd, however, offered me the best explanations.