It is impossible to regard Roquebrune seriously or to think of it as an old frontier stronghold that has had a place in history. Roquebrune, as a town, belongs to the country of the story book. It is a town for boys and girls to play in. It is just the town they love to read about and dream about and to make the scene of the doings of their heroes and heroines and their other queer people. From a modern point of view this happy little town is quite ridiculous. It is full of funny places, of whimsical streets and of those odd houses that children draw on slates when one of them has made the rapturous suggestion—“let us draw a street.” It has an odd well too—a real well with real water—but it is bewitched and haunted by real witches. At least the people about are so convinced they are real that they are afraid to come to the well for water. Now a well of this kind is never met with in an ordinary town.
There are walled places in Roquebrune where oranges and lemons are growing side by side and where both lavender and rosemary are blooming. The garden of the church is a child’s garden, for the paths are narrow and roundabout and the flowers are children’s flowers such as are found on nursery tables, while the whole place bears that pleasant form of untidiness which is only to be found where children are the gardeners. There is in the town—as everybody knows—a Place des Frères and with little doubt there is also, somewhere on the rock, a Place des Sœurs which is prettier and which only a favoured few would know about or could find their way to.
Nothing that happens in any story book would seem out of place in Roquebrune. Indeed one is surprised in wandering through its curious ways to find it occupied by ordinary people, men with bowler hats and women who are obviously not princesses. One expects to come upon blind pedlars, old women in scarlet capes and pointed hats, mendicants who are really of royal blood, hags—especially hags with sticks—ladies wrapped in cloaks which just fail to conceal their golden hair, servants carrying heavy boxes with great secrecy and mariners from excessively foreign parts.
There is a steep, cobble-paved lane in Roquebrune up which Jack and Jill must assuredly have climbed when they went to fetch the pail of water which led to the regrettable accident. Indeed it is hardly possible for a child, burdened with a bucket, not to tumble down in Roquebrune. By the parapet in the Place des Frères there is a stone upon which Little Boy Blue must have stood when he blew his horn; for no place could be conceived more appropriate for that exercise. There are walls too without number, walls both high and low, some bare, some green with ferns, which would satisfy the passion for sitting upon walls of a hundred Humpty Dumpties.
The town itself is—I feel assured—the kind of town that Jack reached when he climbed to the top of the Beanstalk, for the entrance to Roquebrune is precisely the sort of entrance one would expect a beanstalk to lead to. In one kitchen full of brown shadows, in a side street near the Rue Pié, is an ancient cupboard in which, almost without question, Old Mother Hubbard kept that hypothetical bone which caused the poor dog such unnecessary distress of mind; while in a wicker cage in the window of a child’s bedroom was the Blue Bird, singing as only that bird can sing.
As there are still wolves in the woods about Roquebrune and as red hoods are still fashionable in the Place des Frères it is practically certain that Little Red Riding Hood lived here since it is difficult to imagine a town that would have suited her better. As for Jack the Giant Killer it is beyond dispute that he came to Roquebrune, for the very castle he approached is still standing, the very gate is there from which he hurled defiance to the giant as well as the very stair he ascended. Moreover there is a room or hall in the castle—or at least the remains of it—which obviously no one but a giant could have occupied.
As time goes on archæologists will certainly prove, after due research, that Roquebrune is the City of Peter Pan. There is no town he would love so well; none so adapted to his particular tastes and habits, nor so convenient for the display of those domestic virtues which Wendy possessed. No one should grow up in this queer city, just as no place in a nursery tale should grow old.
ROQUEBRUNE: THE EAST GATE.