I find that I am not alone in my opinion of these Roman remains. James in his Little Tour in France speaks of them as monotonous and brutal, and not at all exquisite. He referred especially to the amphitheatres at Nîmes and Arles. They are cold and cheerless even under a brilliant sunlight; perhaps the memory of their wild beasts and all the blood and slaughter have much to do with this. Certainly here at Nîmes, while one must admire the splendid arches and sweeping lines of the whole, one does not linger with any such pleasure as, for instance, in Heidelberg or among the ruined abbeys of England. The Maison Carrée is beautiful to look upon and you feel glad that there is such a gem, yet it is cold and you soon leave it with no regret. It stands on the busy street of a too large town, and trams rattle and rush by its door. You cannot picture men in togas and sandals on those steps to-day.
The rest of Nîmes, while probably a comfortable city in which to live, will not hold your interest for a moment and I roll off and away with no desire ever to return. How different our feelings at Avignon!
Leaving Nîmes we roll southward for some hours until Montpellier is reached at half past five. The roads have been fine but the ride not so pleasant as that of yesterday. Montpellier is simply a place to spend the night with nothing to see, a busy place of some sixty thousand people. The streets and sidewalks bubble and sparkle until a late hour with the life that is so dear to these people,—open cafés and tables all over the sidewalks, much wine but never a case of intoxication. No matter in what part of the world you find this nation, they will arrange some portion of their abiding place to resemble their beloved Paris. It is so here, it is so in Saigon, and would be so on a desert island.
This afternoon, during an enforced stoppage of fifteen minutes, I saw Jean smile, and looking round beheld a group for a picture. In the middle of the long dusty highway stood my little Jap servant gazing up into the face of an old French woman perched high on a pile of rubbish which loaded a small cart almost to the breaking point, the whole being drawn by the most diminutive donkey I have ever seen. Surely there was a strange juxtaposition; she who might have been a descendant of the Vixen in Dickens' Two Cities gazing down upon a representative of the far-off rising Empire. Yama is greatly amused by the carts drawn by small dogs, and in many ways he finds France different from the Land of the Morning.
GENERAL VIEW OF THE CHÂTEAU OF KING RENÉ AT TARASCON
From a photograph
This is our third day and we are leaving Montpellier, having passed from Aix to Arles, Tarascon, and Nîmes, and thence here, and have had but one mishap, not at all our fault. In a long, straight stretch of the Corniche, between Nice and Cannes, two men were walking away from us and we fortunately were not moving at high speed. Our horn was blown constantly and there were no other machines in sight. One of the men, knowing we should follow the law of the land and pass him on his left, kept his side of the road, but the other completely lost his head, and dodging from one side to the other like a chicken, forced us either to run over him or into the ditch. Of course we did the latter. Jean managed the auto so well that no injury was done, as the ditch was but a few inches deep, but then came the problem, how to get out. The soft mud rendered our own power useless, we simply churned holes. Finally a van came along, drawn by two stately Normandy horses, the driver, after a moment's inspection of our plight, calmly hitched on to our springs and drew us on to the high-road, after which the horses stood nodding their great heads at us as though to say, "After all you have to come to us when in trouble, as you are most of the time." A few francs called down a benediction upon us from the old driver and we skimmed away, the horses still holding converse concerning us as we vanished in a cloud of dust.
Jean takes as much interest in this auto as one does in a horse. He knows all its good points and one discovers its bad ones only by noting his watching of certain parts. The tire of the right hand rear wheel seems to bother him and late in the day that tire collapses. He claims that that wheel, being mostly off the crown of the road, or rather being forced off when we meet or pass anything is subject to a greater strain than the others, and we have some trouble until at Montpellier he buys some new ones, and to-day towards Carcassonne there has been no trouble—but I anticipate.