SAINT-MICHEL DE FRIGOLET
THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN, VILLENEUVE-SUR-AVIGNON
Page [303]
In the evening I came to the roadside chapel of St. Gabriel, which was marked on my map with a cross, showing it to be something worth looking at, but was left without mention alike by the German Baedeker and the French Joanne. It is just a single, heavily buttressed nave with a richly carved porch, within the arch of which is a curious relief representing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It stands in an olive garden by the side of the road and there are no other buildings quite near to it, so that it comes as something of a surprise. It is important, as I have learnt since from Mr. T. A. Cook, as a link in the progression of early Provençal architecture, and is certainly worth seeing on its own account.
A little farther on was an auberge, before which some great wagons were standing while their drivers refreshed themselves within. It was in a quiet and pleasant corner, where four roads met, all overshadowed by trees now in their full leafage. I should have liked to get a bed and a dinner there, as by this time I had walked quite far enough, and it was the sort of peaceful countrified place that it is pleasant to wake up in. But they did not want me, and after sitting there for a time I tramped the three or four miles into Tarascon.
It was dark by the time I got there, and I saw very little of the immortal Tartarin's town. I went up under an old gateway, and wandered about the streets on the lookout for an inn. I would have taken the first that came, for I was very tired by this time. But I could not find one at all. At last I was directed to a large hotel, where they gave me a bad dinner and charged me preposterously.
But I got a good deal of fun out of it. Tarascon is a military town, and the big dining-room in a corner of which I sat was providing entertainment for many of the soldiers of the regiments quartered there, and their friends among the townspeople. There were cavalry officers in natty little Cambridge-blue tunics, and troopers with tunics of a deeper shade of blue. They did not mix, but their friends were all of the same class, and of course a trooper of a French cavalry regiment may be just as well bred as his officers. It seemed to me, remembering the character that Daudet fixed upon the Tarasconnais, that he had done them no injustice. There was a sort of theatrical swagger about those that came within my view that marked them off from their companions of the military even more than their civilian garb. I remember Sir Henry Irving in "The Lyons Mail" taking a meal with his back to the audience. He seemed to be eating chiefly with his shoulders, and that was exactly the way in which these gentlemen of Tarascon ate, as if they were in the limelight, and everything must be done for effect. When they talked, they did so with terrific emphasis and gesticulation, and when somebody else was talking they would suddenly withdraw themselves from the conversation and reflectively twirl their moustaches. And when my waiter, who was tremendously overworked, did bring my long pauses of reflection to an end, he served me with a flourishing air that would have made it almost indecent to complain of being kept waiting, since my reward was to be attended to with an amount of pomp and circumstance that must warm the coldest of victuals.