"Her voice had the colour of Alban wine, with overtones like the gleams of light in the still, velvety depths of the goblet, and when she smiled, it seemed as if she drew from a harp a slow, deep chord in the mode of Æolia. Though not at all diffident, and not at all prudish, she wore usually an air of shyness, the shyness of one whose thoughts dread intrusion."
How our author managed to gather such intimate detail from ancient volumes is perhaps difficult to understand; and doubtless he has reconstructed a voice and a smile from hints of the personality given by musty documents written demurely in the quaint, beautiful old langue d'oc. Still, there must have been some potent suggestion in the chronicles to set the fancy working in this glowing way, and it is a fact that all that one reads of the women of that time has a curious elusive element, producing an impression of some attraction subtler and more holding than can be expressed in direct words.
And Provence has a charm like that of her mysteriously endowed women; unaccountable, but endless to those who are once drawn within the magnetic circle. Have their sisters of to-day none of this quality? One here and there, no doubt, but it is to be feared that modern conditions do not favour the production of the type. Perhaps the women of to-day are making a détour out of the region of enchantment, but only in order to obtain a broader, more generous grasp of the things of life. Some day they will give back to mankind what has been taken away by the new adventures, and when the tide turns, there will surely pour over the arid world a flood of beauty and "youngheartedness" and romance such as the blinder, less conscious centuries have never so much as dreamt of!
Meanwhile the troubadours had the privilege of dedicating their songs and their hearts to the most fascinating women which civilisation had as yet produced. Perhaps one associates such subtle attraction with the powers of darkness, but there is nothing to show that such powers had aught to do with the charm of the heroines of troubadour song. On the contrary, they seem as a rule to have been of extremely fine calibre; and if one consults one's memories of magnetic personalities-after all there are not a very large array of them-it almost always proves to be the powers of good in its broadest sense, and not of evil, that give birth to the fascination that never dies.
And the fascination of this gay, sad, brilliant, sympathetic country is not dreadful and diabolic. It is compounded of wholesome sunshine and merriment, swift ardour of thought and emotion, of beautiful manners; of the poetry of ancient industries: of sowing and reaping and tillage; of wine-culture and olive-growing; of legends and quaint proverbs, and a language full of the flavour of the soil and the sun that reveals itself to the quick of ear and of heart long before it can be fully understood. For it appeals to the heart, this sweet language of the troubadours, and hard must have often been the task of those poor ladies, wooed in this too winning tongue!
The traditions of chivalry are among the priceless possessions of the human race, and it is in Provence that their aroma lingers with a potency scarcely to be found in any other country. The air is alive with rich influences. The heat of the sun, the extraordinary brilliance of light and colour, the dignity of an ancient realm whose every inch is penetrated with human doings and destinies, all combine towards an enchantment that belongs to the mysterious side of nature and prompts a host of unanswerable questions. The eye wanders bewildered across the country, wistfully struggling to realise the wonder and the beauty. It sweeps the peaked line of mountains with only an added sense of bafflement, and rests at last, sadly, on some lonely castle with shattered ramparts and roofless banqueting-hall, where now only the birds sing troubadour songs, and ivy and wild vines are the swaying tapestries.
CHAPTER II
AVIGNON
Table of Contents "Sur le pont d'Avignon,
On y danse, on y danse!"
"Avenio ventosa, sine vento
Venenosa, cum vento fastidiosa."
Latin Proverb.
"Parlement mistral et Durance
Sont les trois fleaux de Provence."
Old Saying.
CHAPTER II
AVIGNON
How the sun does pour down on to the great esplanade before the Palace of the Popes! It is as warm as a June day in England and twice as light. That astounding building towers into the blue, bare and creamy white, every stern, simple line of it ascending swift and clear, in repeated strokes, rhythmically grand, like some fine piece of blank verse.
The parapet alone shows broken surfaces. Neither cornice nor corbel nor window pediment; scarcely a window to interrupt the mass of splendid masonry, only recurrent shafts of stone (continuing from the machicolations above) which shoot straight and slim from base to summit of the fortress, to meet there at intervals, as if a line of tall poplars, two by two, had bent their heads together to form this succession of sharply-pointed arches.
The arrangement of massive wall and slender arch gives to the building a singular effect of strength and eternity combined with a severe sort of grace.
PONT DE ST. BENÉZET, AVIGNON.
By E. M. Synge.
It stands there enormous, calm, yet with a delicacy of bearing belonging surely to no other edifice of that impregnable strength and vast bulk. The genius of the architect has expressed in these sixteen-feet walls some of the spirit of the palace as well as the rudeness of the stronghold, and has given a subtle hint of the painted halls and galleries wherein half the potentates of Europe were magnificently entertained, where Petrarch dreamed and Rabelais jested.... And that hint seems to lie in the general relations of mass to mass, and especially in the shallow projection and towering height of that endless line of delicate arches. Burke, in his sublime way, assures us that sublimity is the result of monotonous repetition, and this surprising achievement of Papal magnificence certainly bears out the theory.
The palace shows no more signs of age upon it than the glowing tint of the walls through the beating of the sun upon them for hundreds of brilliant years. How brilliant they must have been! What warmth, what light! That is what astonishes Barbara: the light. She cannot get over it. We seem to have awakened into a world woven out of radiance.
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...
