Romantic Cities of Provence

by Mona Caird

Not but that it is a very real and solid world, this sun-created realm of rambling terraces and upward-trending pathways. Rich stone-pines follow the slant of the road, as it mounts the famous Rocher du Dom in easy zig-zags till it reaches the plateau at the summit, where once upon a time, tradition says, all the witches and wizards of the country-side used to celebrate their unholy rites. And thereby hangs a tale—perhaps to be told later in the day.

Half-way up the rock, on a little platform of its own, stands a small Romanesque Cathedral, singularly fine in style, and characteristic of the architecture of the South of France. Creepers are hanging recklessly, alluringly over the walls and parapets of the hill above. On the top there is a little garden, with seats and shrubs and a pond inhabited by ornate, self-conscious kinds of birds. We learn this in later explorations. Just now the instinctive human desire to reach the highest point achievable is half quieted by the warm comfort of this placid spot below, and we turn our backs on the aspiring Mount.

There are sun-warmed stone benches under the young, sparsely-covered plane-trees (no town in Provence ever dreamt of trying to exist without plane-trees), and here we establish ourselves and watch the little events of the square: the soldiers coming and going up the steps of the Papal Palace (now a barracks); the three recruits being frantically drilled (there is always an element of frenzy in French military exercises); the slow moving of the shadows which rudely caricature the huge stone garland on the Papal Mint, a design in Michael Angelo's most opulent manner; the stray cats on the prowl from neighbouring kitchens; the cheerful dog trotting across the square, tail in air, ready to answer to a friendly word with which we detain him from more important affairs.

Ancient as is this city of the Popes, there are no weather-stains, as we northerners understand them, only marks of the sun and wind. A good friend this fierce, cleansing sun, and the wind from Mont Ventoux must sweep away all impurities from the narrow streets, and—il y en a!

Away across the parapet a mass of roofs fills the slope to the river bank—most wonderful of rivers!—and to the south there are hills and bright distances: Provençal hills, distances of the land of "joy, young-heartedness and love." And that makes the thought that we are in Provence wake up with a cry that rings in the heart like a reveillé. And on its heels comes a strange, secret rebound of sadness, keen as the cut of a knife. As for the cause? Who can say exactly what home-sickness, what vast longing it is that wakens thus when the beauty and greatness of the world and the narrowness of individual possibilities point too clearly their eternal contrast?

PALACE OF THE POPES AND CATHEDRAL.
By E. M. Synge.

"I can't get over that light," Barbara exclaims, in renewed astonishment. "I don't feel as if I ever wanted to move from this bench."

And we let the sun make a considerable portion of his daily journey across the palace walls before we move. Already the influence of the South is in our veins. It makes one better understand the genius of this "Rome transportée dans les Gaules." It must have been, in some sort, the capital of Europe, when for sixty years or so the Papal Court drew the great and the famous from the ends of the earth to the gay, corrupt little city.