CHAPTER XX
The Last Walk. St. Michel de Frigolet
I walked on from Montmajour through the most delightful country. The road dipped up and down, crossed thymy, brambly, rocky heaths, and gave promise of pleasant villages to come. One begins here to get out of the plain, and on the low heights the comfortable land, dotted with nestling farms and towers and steeples, can be seen stretching away to the white Alpilles, upon which Les Baux perches and makes its romantic presence felt, though it cannot be seen.
This little corner is full of curiosities, but I had a long walk before me and a fair one behind, and turned aside to see none of them. There are the remains of the Roman aqueduct, built to carry the waters of Vaucluse into the Arena at Arles. It is still called Ouide de Sarrasin (stonework of the Saracens) by the country people, because the Spanish Moors marched along it to attack Arles. At the foot of the Montagne de Cordes are the remains of fortifications, contemporary and perhaps built by the invading Saracens. On the top of the same hill is the Grotto of the Fairies, with its curious pavement and stones which were cut in prehistoric times. And there are other megalithic remains in the little hill of Castellet, and a cavern in which were found a hundred skeletons, and among other objects ornaments of a stone only to be found in the Indies and the Caucasus. The French call it calaïs; I do not know its English name. All these things are to be seen within a mile or two of Montmajour.
But two of the sights I did see, because they lay right on my road, and the second of them I would have gone out of it a reasonable distance to see in any case.
The first was the "allées couvertes," of which signposts obligingly give notice, at so many metres from the road. They are subterranean passages, running at a short distance beneath the surface, on either side of the road and parallel to it, broken into here and there, and their entrances covered with brambles. When they were constructed, or what for, I have not the slightest idea, and no book that I have been able to get hold of tells me. My impression is that they extend for some miles, but I don't know where I got it from, and perhaps I am wrong. The "allées couvertes" are a mystery of which I am content to be without the key.
But nearly halfway between Arles and Tarascon is the charming little village of Fontvieille, and there is something to see there that I would not willingly have missed. It is the disused mill which Alphonse Daudet bought to retire to as a young man, and from which he wrote that delightful collection of tales and essays about his beloved native country to which he gave the title "Lettres de Mon Moulin." They breathe Provence, as nothing modern does, except the works of Mistral and his brother Félibres, and some of the tales of Jean Aicard, and if one wanted to make a pilgrimage to the heart of it, one would come either to the "Mas" at Maillane in which Mistral was born, or to Daudet's mill at Fontvieille.
Nevertheless when I came within sight of it I was a trifle disappointed. There it stood on its thymy hill overlooking the village, familiar enough in its aspect from the photograph in my edition of this book. But there were two other mills exactly like it on the little hill, and all three quite close together; and it was in full view of the village, and not very far from it. I had imagined a place of more reflective solitude. I was glad to have seen it, but did not trouble to go up and examine it more closely.
