If one may not regard the ordinary man and woman of the towns of Provence as the direct representatives of this primitive people, they have surely left living records in the peasants of the remoter nooks and corners of Southern France.
In Languedoc, Provence, indeed everywhere in the great regions of the Ligurians, notably on the hills of the Riviera, one comes upon a curious brown-skinned, flat-featured type, not "plain," as a modern face may be plain from failure in harmonious development, but merely roughly fashioned. It is a type not without a harsh comeliness, a wholesome success in its own archaic fashion.
The faces seem scarcely European. There is in them a singular look of antiquity; something unfinished, half animal (in the sense of unreflecting), with steady, open gaze, not intent but unswerving, revealing very little that we understand by "human nature." One seems to be looking at human nature in the making.
These people live in little vales by a mountain stream, in nooks in the hills; fauns or satyrs one might fancy them in the twilight—cultivating a few olives and keeping a few cocks and hens and perhaps a cow, and so living as their ancestors must have lived for centuries while the great tides of life and history were flowing and flowing past them.
Perhaps this was the dusky race that the Greeks and Romans actually took for satyrs, or divinities of the woods, for the term "work like a satyr" is the Provençal equivalent for "work like a nigger," and it is thought likely, by some authorities, that the term thus became embedded in the popular traditions.
There is a strange corroboration of the idea that in this rough-hewn type we may really see the ancient inhabitants of Gaul, the predecessors of the Gauls themselves, for near Aix was discovered among the remains of a prehistoric village some primitive stone carving attributed to Ligurian workmanship, and the features there so crudely wrought are practically identical in type with those of the true gens du pays.
Any one who visits the little grey towns that cap so many mountain peaks of the Maritime Alps, will encounter examples of this prehistoric face.
Without any reasonable doubt such people fought for their lives and homes—probably caves and huts of mud and reeds in the fastnesses of the hills—many and many a time, and the tradition of their combat with Hercules is probably the echo of some monster battle between Greeks and Ligurians on the plain of the Crau.
Why any one should desire to visit the Crau puzzles the gaiety-loving Provençal not a little, and that a traveller should for that purpose deliberately make a railway journey to a little, windy, solitary station beyond Arles, where but few trains stop—that argued a form of madness probably considered as peculiar to Britons.
At Arles unhesitating informants had insisted that from St. Martin-en-Crau one could easily reach the Field of Pebbles, and on arrival there I asked the porter in which direction it lay. He stared, and referred me to the stationmaster, a majestic creature in blue and buttons.