It must be beautiful here in May when the vines are yellow-green to the tips of their young fingers. But greater beauty than now, at this late time, is scarcely possible to believe in.
The plain is gold and brown, with splashes of crimson where the sun shines through some eccentric spray of vine-leaves passionately red beyond its fellows.
St. Remy is the ancient Glanum of the Romans, and has memories not scholastic of Cæsar's Gallic Wars. Along the passes of the Alpilles, Marius moved with his army at that stirring moment which was to decide whether the hordes of the Cimbri and the Teutons were to overrun all Italy and take possession of the Eternal City itself. So near a thing it was that the barbarians insolently asked the Roman soldiers if they had any messages for their wives and sweethearts in Rome, as they would soon be there.
Everything hung on the strategy of the Roman general, and it is only on the scene of that great contest that one realises what a desperate and universal moment it was.
Had the campaign of Marius ended otherwise than it did—had he yielded an hour too soon to the impatience of his soldiers to begin the fight—the whole course of history would have been different in all probability, and perhaps not one of us would have been born!
The railway from Tarascon to our little City of Gardens brings one into the very heart of the country. The carriages are so small—two-storied though they are—that one feels as if one were taking a drive in a donkey-cart or station fly, and more than once we were almost impelled to call out to our driver to stop and let us gather wild-flowers by the wayside. And the wayside is so absurdly near. There is none of the dignified aloofness of the ordinary train journey.
ROMAN ARCH, ST. REMY.
By Joseph Pennell.
The same general features of the country are, of course, as before, but now we are intimately among its details: the vines, the low olive-bushes, the farmsteads, the cypresses, the patches of cultivation, the plantations of yellow canes rustling and swaying. And ever we are nearing the Alpilles. The train stops dutifully at a dozen little stations, where no one gets in or out. They are scarcely more than sentry-boxes; sometimes a mere frame filled in with the stalks of the reeds. Were it not that the mistral can blow through them, it seems impossible that these trivialities could withstand his lightest breath.