Romantic Cities of Provence

by Mona Caird

A proverb, he points out, says that "one does not die of love: perhaps not; but what we know with absolute certainty, what stares us everywhere in the face in letters of fire and blood, is that one dies of the absence of love."

And it is always to women he looks for the founding of the gentler dispensation. He really does seem to appreciate us! He declares that we are one and all, without exception, "artists in happiness!"

"Oh! then he has never met Aunt Rebecca," said Barbara conclusively.

Only a few more days in Provence were now before us, and we had worked our way across country to the main line at Arles for the homeward journey.

It was a pleasure to find ourselves again in that strange flat country of the Crau and the Camargue, with the grey city on its hill above the Rhone.

We were wearied with the mad, sad doings of men and turned to the natural features of the surrounding country for rest and relief. And they did not fail us as far as interest was concerned. Only they, too, had their dramas and their tragedies. Those strange solitudes had a wild and stirring past; while the vast lagoons at the Rhone's mouth have a long story all to themselves.

Whole volumes have been written about their formation and the geological romance of this brilliant coast. Once, as we have seen, the Mediterranean washed the cliffs at Beaucaire and Nimes, and swept up to the base of the Alpilles. The country, in truth, seems to have retained something of the sea-song in its wide reminiscent spaces.

There were deluges and avalanches, and all sorts of exciting events of mountain and river; the Rhone and the Durance playing the principal parts in this melodrama of the elements. Those impulsive heroes carried off vast masses of stone and rubble from the mountains and covered the low-lying land with the "wreckage of the Alps."

Then the secondary characters trooped along: the Herault, the Ley, and other streams, and they helped to heap up great bars at the river's mouth, so that the monster could not find his way to the sea without much uneasy wandering; and always as he wandered, murmuring angrily, more and more mud and stones were deposited to heighten the bars. And so with the passing of the centuries the great lagoons were formed so big and blue that the unwary traveller nearing Arles may almost mistake them for the Mediterranean. When at last the sea is found, there is another flinging down of Alpine spoils, for the difference in the weight and in the temperature of the salt and the river waters at their meeting, causes the river to drop what it carries rapidly—perhaps in joy at this final home-coming to the brightest of all seas.

Louis XIV., it appears, built miles and miles of dykes, and Adam de Craponne accomplished wonders of engineering work, and has become one of the heroes of Provençal history; but still the waters now and again come down in floods and do terrible damage. Indeed engineers are beginning to think that the system of dykes is a mistaken one, for by confining the river within narrow limits, the force is enormously concentrated and presses on the dykes, while there is always a tendency to raise the bed by the deposits.