"No, but every woman in Marseilles would have bought a new kerchief or a trinket to make herself smart, just because it was a fête. As it was, money circulated."
"How so?"
"One thousand and ninety-seven umbrellas were sold that day at prices ranging from five to fifteen francs, which on other occasions sell for two francs twenty-five centimes, and ten francs."
I do not know whether I have been peculiarly unfortunate in lighting on only one class of men under the present régime, but whether it be in France, Switzerland, Belgium, or Italy, that I have come across Frenchmen and had a talk with them of late years, I have noticed a prevailing discouragement, a pessimism, that certainly was absent in former days. The very character of a French table d'hôte is changed. Instead of Gallic vivacity, merriment, and general conversation, such as one was wont to find there, one encounters silence, reserve, and a marked absence of self-assertion. It is the Germans who are now boisterous and self-assertive at table. The French are quiet and subdued. As I have already said, I may be mistaken; I may have hit on exceptional cases, but it is a fact that those Frenchmen I have conversed with during the last two or three years have been oppressed with a conviction that France has lost caste among the nations, that her future is menaced, and they say that they see no way out of their present condition.
As one said to me last winter in Rome: "The idea of France is an abstraction. We range ourselves now under parties, our devotion is no longer to our country but to our party. Have you ever been at a stag hunt? When the noble beast is down the huntsman slices it open and throws the heart and liver and entrails to the hounds. Then ensues a battle. Every dog snatches at what he desires, and envies the other the piece of offal he has secured. All are filled with hatred of each other, and selfish greed as to who can eat most and the best morsels of the fallen beast. And that is a picture of France. If war came upon us, we must infallibly be overthrown, for each general would be seeking out of the accidents of warfare to steal an advantage for himself or the party he favours."
The town of Beaucaire, on the farther side of the Rhone, is fuller of picturesque points than is Tarascon. Seated at the head of the Beaucaire Canal, that communicates with the sea, it has that commercial prosperity which is lacking at Tarascon. The old church is an exact reproduction of that of S. Martha, but has in addition a most remarkable font, a structure rising in stages like a tower, and with a spire to cap it, resembling somewhat the sacramental tabernacles in the German churches. The Hôtel de Ville is a picturesque Renaissance building with bold open staircase on pillars. The castle of Beaucaire crowns the ridge of limestone that extends across the country from Nimes and is cut through by the Rhone, again emerging, in a low eminence, at Tarascon. This noble castle was taken by Simon de Montfort in the Albigensian War from the Count of Toulouse, but the youthful Raymond VII., though only nineteen years old, laid siege to it in 1216, and succeeded in recovering it. In this siege, the inhabitants of the town, under the young count, assailed the castle. Simon de Montfort collected an army and attacked Raymond in the rear. There is a very curious account of this siege in a Provençal poem on the Albigensian War, from which I will quote a few lines, only premising that in the original the castle is called the Capitol:—
"The townsmen set up their engines against the Crusaders in the castle, and so battered it that castle and watch-tower were broken, beams and lead and stone. At Holy Easter the battering-ram was made ready, long, iron-headed, sharp, which so struck and cut that the wall was injured, and the stones began to fall out. But the besieged were not discouraged; they made a loop of cords attached to a wooden beam, and with that they caught the head of the ram and held it fast. This troubled those of Beaucaire sore; till the master engineer came, and he set the ram in motion once more. Then several of the assailants got up the rock, and began to detach portions of the wall with their picks. This the besieged were ware of, and they let down upon them sulphur and pitch and fire in sackcloth by a chain along the wall, and when it blazed it broke forth and was spilt over the workmen, and suffocated them so that not one could there continue. Then they went to their machines for casting stones, and they threw them with such effect into the castle as to break all the beams thereof."
Beaucaire castle is now in ruins, but the Romanesque chapel remains in tolerable condition. In it Louis IX. is said to have heard Mass before he embarked for the crusade to Egypt. The pretty old Provençal poem of Aucassin and Nicolette, which has been recently translated into English by Mr. Andrew Lang and daintily published, has its scene laid at Beaucaire. Tieck gave a version of it in his "Phantasus."
[Illustration: The chapel of Beaucaire Castle.]
As we are on the very scene of this graceful little tale, I must give the essence of it. The romance, which dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, is in prose, mingled with scraps of rhyme, destined to be sung, and with their musical notation given. At the head of each scrap of verse comes the rubric "Now is to be sung," and the prose passages are headed, "Now is to be said."