Standing in a small courtyard surrounded by the walls of a seventeenth-century bishop’s palace, now the Hôtel de Ville, is a small triumphal arch which has been battered by wind and rain for twenty centuries. It is only a single arch, and considerable doubt exists as to its exact age. On the two sides there are sculptured in high relief figures of captive Gauls. The columns that form each angle of the arch are little more than fragments, but the engaged columns on the inside have suffered less. This arch was supposed by some archæologists to have some connection with the great arch at Orange, but nothing can be proved with any certainty. It remains one of those puzzling relics of the past that will continue to provoke differences of opinion until the fabric crumbles out of human sight and mingles with the dust of ages.
A little local train runs from Tarascon through vineyards, ploughed fields, and pasture lands, stopping at tiny
wayside shelters too insignificant to warrant a name. Its destination is Orgon, but about midway between the limits of its journey it stops at St. Remy, a little town of about five thousand inhabitants. This is a typical Provençal village, full of traditions, customs, and leisured existence, like hundreds of others in the Rhone valley, and but for its close proximity to the ancient Roman town of Glanum Livii, few strangers would ever walk its streets. It still retains traces of a former prosperity, and many of the houses in its quaint streets are embellished with fine portals of the Renaissance architecture.
It has had famous and illustrious citizens too, whom it honours with statues that ornament the public places. The astrologer, Nostradamus, who was patronised by the great and believed in by all, lived for some years in retirement in the little town. It was he who was indirectly responsible for the ruin of the poor imaginative man who spent his time and fortune in excavating the ground floor of the Tour Magne in the vain search for a “golden fowl.” History does not relate if the astrologer’s prediction “that a farmer would make his fortune by the discovery of a golden cock” ever did come true, or if the disappointed treasure-seeker of the Tour Magne ever sought an interview with the prophet.
The oldest inhabitants of St. Remy may tell of the gradual decline in the splendour of its fate, in the merriment of its song and dance; but the youngest glory in the Sunday visits of the Cinema. Occasionally a strolling troupe of players invade the town, and in the open air, with a sad semblance of gaiety, emulate the “Jongleurs” of old in their efforts to amuse. But the men in these little villages make their own amusements, and in the summer evenings they congregate in the public squares, and under the shelter of the great plane-trees play at their game of bowls, the same game that is popular in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and even across the Mediterranean in Tunis and Algiers. Any piece of ground, even the highway, will serve for their purpose, and casual passersby or spectators run no little risks from the balls, which are not trundled or rolled along the ground, but are thrown high through the air.
The four cafés which St. Remy boasts are large enough for its wants, and their clients, dressed in fustian, indulge with temperance in absinthe, cards, and tobacco, most of them retiring early in the evening, for St. Remy does not keep late hours like Nîmes or Arles. The Church at St. Remy is a most imposing building for so small a town; it is classic in design and modern in construction, but it is built beneath an ancient belfry with a tapering spire, Gothic and beautiful, a relic of the fourteenth century.
