Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Every one has read, and supposedly has at his finger-tips, the pages of this thrilling romance, but if he is journeying through Provence, let him read it all again, and he will find passages of a directness and truthfulness that have often been denied this author—by critics who have taken only an arbitrary and prejudiced view-point.

Marseilles, the scene of the early career of Dantes and the lovely Mercédès, stands out perhaps most clearly, but there is a wonderful chapter which deals with the Pays d’Arles, and is as good topographical portraiture to-day as when it was written.

Here are some lines of Dumas which no traveller down the Rhône valley should neglect to take as his guide and mentor if he “stops off”—as he most certainly should—at Tarascon, and makes the round of Tarascon, Beaucaire, Bellegarde, and the Pont du Gard.

“Such of my readers as may have made a pedestrian journey to the south of France may perhaps have noticed, midway between the town of Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde, a small roadside inn, from the front of which hung, creaking and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a rude representation of the ancient Pont du Gard.”

There is nothing which corresponds to this ancient inn sign to be seen to-day, but any one of a dozen humble houses by the side of the canal which runs from Beaucaire to Aigues Mortes might have been the inn in question, kept by the unworthy Caderousse, with whom Dantes, disguised as the abbé, had the long parley which ultimately resulted in his getting on the track of his former defamers.

Dumas’s further descriptions were astonishingly good, as witness the following:

“The place boasted of what, in these parts, was called a garden, scorched beneath the ardent sun of this latitude, with its soil giving nourishment to a few stunted olive and dingy fig trees, around which grew a scanty supply of tomatoes, garlic, and eschalots, with a sort of a lone sentinel in the shape of a scrubby pine.”

If this were all that there was of Provence, the picture might be thought an unlovely one, but there is a good deal more, though often enough one does see—just as Dumas pictured it—this sort of habitation, all but scorched to death by the dazzling southern sun.

At the time of which Dumas wrote, the canal between Beaucaire and Aigues Mortes had just been opened and the traffic which once went on by road between this vast trading-place (for the annual fair of Beaucaire, like that of Guibray in Normandy, and to some extent like that of Nijni Novgorod, was one of the most considerable of its kind in the known world) and the cities and towns of the southwest came to be conducted by barge and boat, and so Caderousse’s inn had languished from a sheer lack of patronage.

Dumas does not forget his tribute to the women of the Pays d’Arles, either; and here again he had a wonderfully facile pen. Of Caderousse and his wife he says: