Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

St. Rémy

St. Rémy itself is a historic shrine, sitting jauntily beneath the jagged profile of the Alpines, from whose crest one gets one of those wonderful vistas of a rocky gorge which is, in a small way, only comparable to the cañon of the Colorado. It is indeed a splendid view that one gets just as he rises over the crest of this not very ample or very lofty mountain range, and it has all the elements of grandeur and brilliancy which are possessed by its more famous prototypes. It is quite indescribable, hence the illustration herewith must be left to tell its own story.

Below, in the ample plain in which St. Rémy sits, is a wonderful garden of fruits and flowers. St. Rémy is a great centre for commerce in olives, olive-oil, vegetables, and fruit which is put up into tins and exported to the ends of the earth.

Not every one likes olive-trees as a picturesque note in a landscape any more than every one likes olives to eat. But for all that the grayish-green tones of the flat-topped oliviers of these parts are just the sort of things that artists love, and a plantation of them, viewed from a hill above, has as much variety of tone, and shade, and colour as a field of heather or a poppy-strewn prairie.

The inhabitants of most of the old-time provinces of France have generally some special heirloom of which they are exceedingly fond; but not so fond but that they will part with it for a price. The Breton has his great closed-in bed, the Norman his armoire, and the Provençal his “grandfather’s clock,” or, at least, a great, tall, curiously wrought affair, which we outsiders have come to designate as such.

Not all of these great timepieces which are found in the peasant homes round about St. Rémy are ancient; indeed, few of them are, but all have a certain impressiveness about them which a household god ought to have, whether it is a real antique or a gaudily painted thing with much brasswork and, above all, a gong that strikes at painfully frequent intervals with a vociferousness which would wake the Seven Sleepers if they hadn’t been asleep so long.

The traffic in these tall, coffin-like clocks—though they are not by any means sombre in hue—is considerable at St. Rémy. The local clock-maker (he doesn’t really make them) buys the cases ready-made from St. Claude, or some other wood-carving town in the Jura or Switzerland, and the works in Germany, and assembles them in his shop, and stencils his name in bold letters on the face of the thing as maker. This is deception, if you like, but there is no great wrong in it, and, since the clock and watch trade the world over does the same thing, it is one of the immoralities which custom has made moral.

They are not dear, these great clocks of Provence, which more than one tourist has carried away with him before now as a genuine “antique.” Forty or fifty francs will buy one, the price depending on the amount of chasing on the brasswork of its great pendulum.

Six feet tall they stand, in rows, all painted as gaudily as a circus wagon, waiting for some peasant to come along and make his selection. When it does arrive at some humble cottage in the Alpines, or in the marshy vineyard plain beside the Rhône, there is a sort of house-warming and much feasting, which costs the peasant another fifty francs as a christening fee.