One sees the Rhone and the Durance on their way to the sea—splendid headlong rivers; one sees the melancholy brooding wilderness of the Crau, where Hercules and the quarrelsome Titans flung those huge stones at one another in the dim old days; one sees always the strange, fantastic little limestone chain of the Alpilles which finishes to the south-east the great semicircle begun to the west by the higher ranges. The eye follows everywhere, fascinated, the battalions of cypresses, while over all is the flooding light, vibrating, living. And yet after all is said, Provence is still an unknown land.
It is one of the haunted lands, the spell-weaving lands. It enslaves as no obvious technical beauty of landscape can enslave.
Provence is like one of its own enchanting ladies of the troubadour days, and strangely significant is it that this nameless quality of the country should have been thus reproduced by the crown and flower of its people. For this attribute of charm belongs to knight and baron, soldier and singer, if we may trust the old songs and the old stories. But, par excellence, it belonged to the cultivated lady of the epoch. Take, for instance, the mysterious Countess of Die or Dia, of whose identity nothing is certainly known. She was a writer of songs and the heroine of one of the poetical love-stories of the age: a lady capable of deep and faithful love, unhappily for her peace of mind. Of the subtlety of her attractions one may judge by the power which the mere dead records wield to this day over the imagination. This is how a modern author writes of her—
"Her voice had the colour of Alban wine, with overtones like the gleams of light in the still, velvety depths of the goblet, and when she smiled, it seemed as if she drew from a harp a slow, deep chord in the mode of Æolia. Though not at all diffident, and not at all prudish, she wore usually an air of shyness, the shyness of one whose thoughts dread intrusion."
How our author managed to gather such intimate detail from ancient volumes is perhaps difficult to understand; and doubtless he has reconstructed a voice and a smile from hints of the personality given by musty documents written demurely in the quaint, beautiful old langue d'oc. Still, there must have been some potent suggestion in the chronicles to set the fancy working in this glowing way, and it is a fact that all that one reads of the women of that time has a curious elusive element, producing an impression of some attraction subtler and more holding than can be expressed in direct words.
And Provence has a charm like that of her mysteriously endowed women; unaccountable, but endless to those who are once drawn within the magnetic circle. Have their sisters of to-day none of this quality? One here and there, no doubt, but it is to be feared that modern conditions do not favour the production of the type. Perhaps the women of to-day are making a détour out of the region of enchantment, but only in order to obtain a broader, more generous grasp of the things of life. Some day they will give back to mankind what has been taken away by the new adventures, and when the tide turns, there will surely pour over the arid world a flood of beauty and "youngheartedness" and romance such as the blinder, less conscious centuries have never so much as dreamt of!
Meanwhile the troubadours had the privilege of dedicating their songs and their hearts to the most fascinating women which civilisation had as yet produced. Perhaps one associates such subtle attraction with the powers of darkness, but there is nothing to show that such powers had aught to do with the charm of the heroines of troubadour song. On the contrary, they seem as a rule to have been of extremely fine calibre; and if one consults one's memories of magnetic personalities—after all there are not a very large array of them—it almost always proves to be the powers of good in its broadest sense, and not of evil, that give birth to the fascination that never dies.
And the fascination of this gay, sad, brilliant, sympathetic country is not dreadful and diabolic. It is compounded of wholesome sunshine and merriment, swift ardour of thought and emotion, of beautiful manners; of the poetry of ancient industries: of sowing and reaping and tillage; of wine-culture and olive-growing; of legends and quaint proverbs, and a language full of the flavour of the soil and the sun that reveals itself to the quick of ear and of heart long before it can be fully understood. For it appeals to the heart, this sweet language of the troubadours, and hard must have often been the task of those poor ladies, wooed in this too winning tongue!
The traditions of chivalry are among the priceless possessions of the human race, and it is in Provence that their aroma lingers with a potency scarcely to be found in any other country. The air is alive with rich influences. The heat of the sun, the extraordinary brilliance of light and colour, the dignity of an ancient realm whose every inch is penetrated with human doings and destinies, all combine towards an enchantment that belongs to the mysterious side of nature and prompts a host of unanswerable questions. The eye wanders bewildered across the country, wistfully struggling to realise the wonder and the beauty. It sweeps the peaked line of mountains with only an added sense of bafflement, and rests at last, sadly, on some lonely castle with shattered ramparts and roofless banqueting-hall, where now only the birds sing troubadour songs, and ivy and wild vines are the swaying tapestries.