"Laura, illustrious for her own virtues, and long celebrated by my verses, first appeared to my eyes, in the time of my early youth, on the morning of the sixth day of April, in the year of our Lord 1327, in the church of St. Clare at Avignon; and in the same month of April, on the same first hour of the morning, in the year of our Lord 1348, that light was removed from this light of day, while I by chance was at Verona, unconscious, alas! of my fate. The unhappy news, however, reached me at Parma, in a letter from my friend Ludovico, on the morning of the 19th of May.
"Her most chaste and fair body was buried in the evening of the day of her death, in the convent of the Fratres Minores; but her soul, as Seneca saith of the soul of Africanus, hath returned, I am persuaded, to the heaven from whence it came.
"I have felt a kind of bitter pleasure in writing the memorial of this mournful event, the rather in this place, which so often meets my eyes, to the end that I may consider there is nothing left which ought to delight me in this world; and that I may be reminded by the frequent sight of these words, and the due appreciation of this fleeting life, that my principal tie to the world being broken, it is time for me to fly from this Babylon; which, through the preventing grace of God, will be an easy task, when I reflect deeply and manfully on the superfluous cares, the vain hopes, and the unlooked for events of the time past."
This simple and affecting tribute, written, as it evidently seems, under such solemn impressions, clears the memory of Laura from the imputation of any thing trifling or criminal, while it sufficiently establishes the identity of "a nymph," according to Gibbon, "so shadowy, that her existence has been questioned."
May 14.—We left Avignon this morning, with a more favourable impression of its cleanliness and comfort than any other town had as yet left on our minds. The road to Nismes, winding up a hill on the opposite side of the river, above Fort Villeneuve, is remarkably adapted also to display its numerous spires, and the grand Gothic mass of the legate's palace, to the utmost advantage: and we watched with something like regret the disappearance of these objects over the brow of the hill which we had ascended, more especially as on this spot the eye takes leave, for some time, of every thing agreeable. The view here consists of a high dull flat, with hardly a tree, and the road of rolling stones and dust; and a high wind prevailed, which seemed a combination of the Bise and Mistral, aided by all the bottled stores of a Lapland witch, and very nearly blew poor Durand off his box. After passing Fouzay and Demazan, two Little villages, adorned each à la Provençale, with a ruined castle, we turned out of the road to Nismes at Remoulin, where the features of the country somewhat improve. Another mile and a half brought us to an indifferent inn within a ten minutes' walk of the Pont du Gard. It is adapted for nothing more than a baiting-place for a few hours, and not at all of that description which so well-known a ruin would be in most cases capable of maintaining. The landlord, however, "a sallow, sublime sort of Werter-faced man," was civil, and inclined to do his best, and gathered us some double yellow roses, of a sort we had never seen before, to season his bad fare.
The Pont du Gard, which we were not long in visiting, is seen to the greatest advantage on the side on which we approached it from the inn. The deep mountain glen, inhabited only by goats, whose entrance it crosses from cliff to cliff, forms a striking back-ground, and serves as a measure to the height of the colossal arches which appear to grow naturally, as it were, out of the gray rocks on which they rest.[38] There is certainly something more poetical in the stern and simple style of architecture of which this noble aqueduct is a specimen, than in the more florid and graceful school of art. The latter speaks more to the eye, but the former to the mind, possessing a superiority analogous to that which the great style of painting (as it is termed) boasts over the florid and ornamental Venetian school. Our own Stonehenge is too much, perhaps, in the rude extreme of this branch of architecture to be quoted as a favourable instance of it; but few persons can come suddenly in sight of Stonehenge on a misty day without being struck by its peculiar effect; and the Pont du Gard, placed in as lonely a situation, exhibits materials almost as gigantic in detail, and knit into a towering mass which seems to require no less force than an earthquake, or a battery of cannon, to change the position of a single stone. A large and solid bridge which has been built against it by the states of Languedoc, appears by comparison to shrink into insignificance, and shelter itself behind the old Roman arches, the lower tier of which, eleven in number, overtop it in height by about three-fifths. The span of the largest arch is about 78 feet; of the other ten, 66 each: and they are surmounted by a row of thirty-five smaller arches. With the exception of two or three of these last, the whole fabric is complete, and, if unmolested, appears likely to witness more changes of language and dynasty than it has already done. I do not know that the mind is ever more impressed with the idea of Roman power and greatness, than by contemplating such structures as these, erected for subordinate purposes at a distance from the main seat of empire. It is like discovering a broken hand or foot of the Colossus of Rhodes, and estimating in imagination the height and bulk of the whole statue from the size of its enormous extremities.
From the Pont du Gard the road to Nismes has little to recommend it excepting the high state of cultivation of the country, and this is not of a nature to gratify an eye accustomed to English verdure. Olive-groves, it is true, have been naturalized in poetry as conveying an image of beauty and freshness; but in reality nothing can be more opposed to the oaks and elms of an English hedge-row, than the pale shining gray of this stunted tree, which has more of a metallic than a vegetable appearance. Nor does a perpetual succession of corn-fields, however rich in reality, present the same appearance of luxuriant vegetation as an English pasture. There is, besides, nothing in the nearer approach to Nismes, which reminds one of the environs of an opulent commercial town, and its precincts would cut a poor figure when compared with those of Leeds or Bristol. The transition is immediate, from a dull range of corn-fields, without a gentleman's house, to a long dirty suburb. On emerging, however, from the latter into the better and more central part of the town, one is surprised to find wide and elegant streets well watered and planted, and public buildings, whose beauty and good taste show that the citizens of Nismes have made a good use of the fine architectural models afforded by the ancient Nemausis. The Palais de Justice deserves to be particularly remarked for its classical elegance, and contrasts well with the black solid arches of the Arenes, near which it is placed.
"Monsieour! les antiquités!—Heou! Monsieour! les Arenes!—Commissionaire pour voir la Maison Carrée!—Heou—ou! Monsieour! decrotteur, s'il vous plait!—Le Temple de Diane, Monsieour!" are the cries with which every third or fourth ragamuffin at Nismes salutes you, enforcing his application by a peculiar yell, of which no combination of letters can give an idea uncouth enough. As it is hardly possible to walk in the central part of Nismes without seeing its antiquities before you, it is best to avoid a troublesome live appendage of this sort, by appearing totally deaf. The Arenes are nearly in front of the Hôtel du Louvre, and the Maison Carrée is within two or three minutes' walk of it: the Temple of Diana and the Baths are situated in the most conspicuous spot in the public gardens, whither a perpetual concourse of people may be seen thronging; and the Pharos overlooks them from the summit of a small precipitous hill, which may be ascended in five minutes by a good walker. Every thing therefore lies within the compass of an evening's stroll.
The Maison Carrée is a beautiful bijou, better known than any other of the curiosities of Nismes. I believe the opinion of Mons. Seguier (formed from a laborious examination of the nail-holes belonging to its last bronze inscription) is generally adopted; viz. that it was a temple dedicated to Caius and Lucius Cæsar, grandsons of Augustus. A perfect copy of it, built from actual measurement, may be found in the Temple of Victory and Concord, in the Duke of Buckingham's gardens at Stowe. So admirable is the preservation of the original in every part, owing to the dry and pure air of Languedoc, as almost to operate as a disadvantage. Its freshness and compactness suggest rather too much the idea of a modern pavilion of twenty or thirty years standing, instead of that of a temple; and if I may venture to say so, the same want of the ærugo of age, which renders it more valuable as an architectural relic, produces an incongruous and unpoetical effect on the imagination. Age, in fact, has its own characteristic branch of beauty. An old man with curly hair and a fresh smooth complexion, like Godwin's Struldbrugg, St. Leon, would be an unpleasant and unnatural object. There is a masculine and imposing medium between youthful vigour and decay, in which the leading features of the former man may be distinctly traced; as in Wordsworth's beautiful description of the old knight of Rylstone, and Sir Walter Scott's fine portraiture of Archibald Bell-the-Cat: and I think the analogy holds good in classical remains. Somewhat should be decayed for effect's sake; and those parts only left which are strikingly beautiful, or of a leading and important nature. The Arena, which we next visited, is perhaps more consonant to this standard than the Maison Carrée. Its structure is similar to that of the Colosseum at Rome, of which, however, it falls infinitely short in size and grandeur, while at the same time it so far exceeds it in perfectness, as to give a complete idea to an inexperienced eye of its original figure and arrangement, and of the admirable system of accommodation which such places possessed. It has just enough of the graceful decay of age to render it picturesque, and enough of freshness to answer the questions of the antiquarian: and neither too much nor too little is left to the imagination. Mr. Albanis Beaumont, in his work on the Maritime Alps, calculates the number of persons which this building must have held at 16,599, and the spectators in the Colosseum at 34,000. He also states the widest interior circumference of the Arena, as 1110½ feet. The plate engraved in his work, dated 1795, represents two square towers over the principal entrance, erected perhaps by Charles Martel, when he converted the building into a citadel; they have however been since destroyed, and the work of clearing away the houses which defaced both its inside and outside, commenced originally by Louis XVI., has been completed. It now stands in a broad open space, adapted to set off its full height and proportions.
The public garden also presents a well-arranged group of interesting objects; but to behold them to any advantage, it is necessary to turn your back upon a pert little café, roofed with party-coloured tiles like the scales of a fancy fish, which glares from under the shade of the trees. From hence you look over a handsome balustrade into a large excavated space adorned with stone steps, which collects the waters of a fine fountain, and in which the foundations of the ancient Baths are still visible. On the summit of the opposite cliff, from whence these waters issue, the ruined Pharos, which forms the principal landmark of Nismes, rises with great majesty, and at its foot, immediately to the left of the fountain, the ruined temple of Diana, though not individually striking, combines admirably with the general group. From the fountain arises a beautifully clear stream, which is distributed in wide and deep stone channels through some of the principal streets at Nismes, and greatly contributes to the ornament and cleanliness of the town. The Pharos, or Tour Magne, to which I scrambled from the Baths, fully answers to its distant appearance. There is a peculiar dignity and solidity in a figure approaching to the pyramidical, when placed on the top of a rock; and independent of its height, which is between eighty and ninety feet, the Pharos has this recommendation also. Its interior appears a curious work of masonry. A high wide conical vault, without pillar or buttress, constitutes almost the whole internal space, admitting just light sufficient to render "the darkness visible," and give additional solemnity to a mere shell of brickwork.