He described the coming of hundreds of ships, carrying each a whole stable full of horses for towing up the river on the return journey; and how the great canal brought boats from Aigues Mortes and Albi, and the sea brought Turks, Algerians, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, with silk, pearls, figs, and a thousand objects of merchandise. Then the good people of Beaucaire were inundated with heretics and pagans. When there were disputes between the merchants, a tribunal on the spot settled the matter. All was arranged in departments: silks, wools, cottons, whole streets of booths devoted to jewellery, spices, coffee, and so forth. In the evening the company cooked their dinners between stones on the shores of the river; "and one shouted and one laughed, and the physicians and the acrobats and the bear-tamers called to the crowd with loud cries amid the noise of cymbals and tambourines. Fine ladies and gentlemen came from long distances to see all that!"
We heave a sigh of regret at the passing away of so many bright and cheering things, such as fairs and picturesque shipping, and turn to wander, as the fancy takes us, about the pleasant streets of Tarascon, visiting the tomb of St. Martha, but, through misdirection, missing the Tarasque. However, we knew all about his very singular personal appearance from descriptions and drawings. Tarascon is now probably more associated with Tartarin in our minds than with St. Martha, but it is a beautiful legend of the gentle saint who by sheer force of lovingness was able to change the ravaging Tarasque—a creature certainly born with no hereditary turn for polite usages—into a pleasant, regenerate animal of gentlemanly manners. Along the bright ways of the city, as the legend goes, the procession moved: a crowd of excited people, a beautiful woman with a light playing round her head, leading by a silken cord the reformed monster who ambles after her as quietly as if he were a pet-lamb: this huge hybrid of a creature, with the body of an alligator, the legs of a grand-piano, the head of a dragon, and a "floreat tail" of heraldic design which he flourishes affably in response to the plaudits of the multitude.
And never again did he ravage the country round Tarascon or carry off so much as a single babe, after St. Martha had pointed out to him, with her usual sweet reasonableness, how wrong-headed and how essentially immoral such conduct had been.
It is disappointing to be told by an innovating savant that this sweet lady was not St. Martha at all, but merely the Christianised form of the ancient Phœnician goddess Martis, the patroness of sailors, who had for her symbols a ship and a dragon. What is one to be allowed to believe?
The Phœnicians, one has to admit, plied a busy trade along these coasts. Their language has left traces in the Provençal dialects, and images have been found at Marseilles of Melkarth and Melita, or Hercules and Venus, known in the Bible as Baal and Ashtaroth. There has even been discovered a tariff for sacrifices in the temple of Baal, giving a list of dues legally established for the payments of the priests.
(Barbara was utterly confounded to find these distinctly Biblical deities figuring so far from home.)
The tariff is a long affair, and goes into all possible details. But the following extract maybe worth quoting:—
"For an entire ox, the ordinary sacrifice, the priests are to receive 10 shekels. At the sacrifice, in addition, 300 shekels of flesh," and so on.
But it does not follow, from all this, that St. Martha did not subdue the Tarasque. Moreover, Tarasques are being subdued every day by Marthas not by any means arrived at saintship. The old legend, be its origin Christian, Phœnician, Celtic or classic, reads almost like a parable by which to convey the old truth that love and kindness have power to subdue evil which force has failed to overcome.
St. Martha's tomb and shrine are in the church dedicated to her at Tarascon, and, until lately, there were yearly processions through the city, in which the gigantic creature was paraded in triumph, the legs of the man inside being ingeniously "dissimulated by a band of stuff."