The Christmas Kalends of Provence Part 7

I am sorry to say that we "scamped" our last monument. To be sure, it was merely a tablet in a house-front setting forth the fact that emile Augier had been born there; and already Augier had had one of the best speeches of the day. But that was no excuse for us. Actually, we scarcely waited to see the veil of pink paper torn away by a man on a step-ladder before we broke for the boat--and not a speech of any sort was made! Yet they bore us no malice, those brave Valencois. All the way down to the river, under the blaze of the sun, they crowded closely around us--with a well-meant but misapplied friendliness--and breathed what little air was stirring thrice over before it had a chance to get to our lungs. They covered again in a black swarm the bank and the bridge in our honour. Their band, through that last twenty minutes, blared steadfastly the "Ma.r.s.eillaise." From his post upon the landing-stage the cherubic Mayor beamed to us across his n.o.bly tri-coloured stomach a series of parting smiles. The bra.s.s-helmeted firemen surrounded him--a little unsteadily, I fancied--smiling too. And as we slipped away from them all, into the rush of the river, they sent after us volley upon volley of cheers. Our b.r.e.a.s.t.s thrilled and expanded--it is not always that we poets thus are mounted upon high horses in the sight of all the world--and we cheered back to those discriminating and warm-hearted towns-folk until we fairly were under way down-stream. To the very last the cherubic Mayor, his hat raised, regarded us smilingly. To the very last--rivalling the golden glory of the helmet of Mambrino--the slightly-wavering head-gear of his attendant firemen shot after us golden gleams.

VIII

We drew away into calmer lat.i.tudes after leaving that whirlwind of a town. For the time being, our duties as public poets were ended; and there was a sense of restful comfort in knowing that for the moment we were rid of our fame and celebrity, and were free--as the lightest hearted of simple travellers--to enjoy the beauties of the river as it carried us, always at a full gallop, downward toward the sea.

In that tranquil spirit we came, presently, to the leaning Tour-Maudite: and found farther restfulness, after our own varied and too-energetic doings, in looking upon a quiet ruin that had remained soberly in the same place, and under the same sedative curse, for more than three hundred years. It is an architectural curiosity, this Cursed Tower--almost as far out from the perpendicular as is its better-known rival of Pisa; but more impressive in its unnatural crookedness because it stands upon an isolated crag which drops below it sheer to the river in a vast precipice. Anciently, before it went wrong and its curse came upon it, the tower was the keep of the Benedictine nunnery of Soyons.

Most ungallantly, in the year 1569, the Huguenots captured the Abbey by a.s.sault; and thereupon the Abbess, Louise d'Amauze (poor frightened soul!) hurriedly embraced the Reformed religion--in dread lest, without that concession to the prejudices of the conquerors, still worse might come. Several of her nuns followed her hastily heterodox example; but the ma.s.s of them stood stoutly by their faith, and ended by making off with it intact to Valence. I admit that an appearance of improbability is cast upon this tradition by the unhindered departure from the Abbey of the stiff-necked nuns: who thus manifested an open scorn equally of the victorious Huguenots and of the Reformed faith. But, on the other hand, there are the ruins of the Abbey to prove conclusively that it truly was conquered; and there, slanting with a conspicuously unholy slant high up above the ruins, bearing steadfast witness to the wrath of heaven against that heretical Abbess and her heretical followers, is the Cursed Tower!

While the Abbess of Soyons, being still untried by the stress of battle, went sinless upon her still orthodox way, there lived just across the river on the Manor of l'etoile a sinner of a gayer sort--Diane de Poitiers. The Castle of the Star dates from the fifteenth century; when Louis XI. dwelt there as Governor of Dauphiny and was given lessons in how to be a king. Diane the beautiful--"the most beautiful," as Francis I. gallantly called her--transformed the fortress into a bower, and gave to it (or accepted for it) the appropriately airy name of the Chateau de Papillon. There she lived long after her b.u.t.terfly days were over; and in a way--although the Castle of the b.u.t.terfly is a silk-factory now--she lives there still: just as another light lady beautiful, Queen Jeanne of Naples, lives on in Provence. To this day her legend is vital in the country-side; and the old people still talk about her as though she were alive among them; and call her always not by her formal t.i.tle of the d.u.c.h.esse de Valentinois, but by her love t.i.tle of "la belle dame de l'etoile." Of this joyous person's family there is found a ghastly memento at the little town of Lene--a dozen miles down the river, beyond the great iron-works of Le Pouzin. It is the Tour de la Lepreuse: wherein a leper lady of the house of Poitiers was shut up for many years in awful solitude--until at last G.o.d in his goodness permitted her to die. I suppose that this story would have pointed something of a moral--instead of presenting only another case of a good moral gone wrong--had Diane herself been that prisoner of loathsome death in life.

But aboard the _Gladiateur_ our disposition was to take the world easily and as we found it--since we found it so well disposed toward us--and not to bother our heads a bit about how moral lessons came off. With cities effervescing in our honour, with Mayors attendant upon us hat in hand, with brazen-helmeted firemen playing champagne upon us to stimulate our poetic fires, with _boites_ and bands exploding in our praise--and all under that soul-expanding sun of the Midi--'tis no wonder that we wore our own bays jauntily and nodded to each other as though to say: "Ah, you see now what it is to be a poet in these latter days!" And we were graciously pleased to accept as a part of the tribute that all the world just then was rendering to us the panorama of mountains and towns and castles that continuously opened before us for the delectation of our souls.

Off to the right, hidden behind the factory-smoke of La Voulte, was the sometime home of Bernard de Ventadour, a troubadour whom the world still loves to honour--quite one of ourselves; off to the left, commanding the valley of the Drome, were Livron and Loriol, tough little Huguenot nuts cracked all to pieces (as their fallen ramparts showed) in the religious wars; and a little lower down we came to Cruas: a famous fortified Abbey, surmounted by a superb donjon and set in the midst of a triple-walled town, whereof the Byzantine-Romanesque church is one of the marvels of Southern France. Cruas was founded more than a thousand years ago, in the time of Charlemagne, by the pious Hermengarde, wife of Count Eribert de Vivarais; being a thank-offering to heaven erected on the very spot where that estimable woman and her husband were set upon in the forest by a she-wolf of monstrous size. But the fortified Abbey was a later growth; and was not completed, probably, until the sixteenth century. It was toward the end of that century, certainly, that the Huguenots attacked it--and were beaten off finally by Abbot etienne Deodel and his monks, who clapped on armour over their habits and did some very sprightly fighting on its walls.

Below Cruas, around the bend in the river, Rochemaure the Black came into sight: a withered stronghold topping an isolated rock of black basalt six hundred feet above the stream. It is a grewsome place: the ruin of a black nightmare of a basalt-built castle, having below and around it a little black nightmare of a basalt-built town--whereof the desperately steep and crooked streets are paved with black basalt, and are so narrowed by over-hanging houses as to show above them only the merest strip of sky. It is a town to which, by preference, one would go to commit a murder; but 'tis said that its inhabitants are kindly disposed. Only a step beyond it lies Le Teil: a briskly busy little place tucked in at the foot of a lime-stone cliff--town and cliff and the inevitable castle on the cliff-top all shrouded in a murky white cloud, half dust, half vapour, rising from the great buildings in which a famous hydraulic cement is made. Not a desirable abiding place, seemingly; but in cheerful contrast with its lowering neighbour up the stream.

And then, pa.s.sing beyond a maze of islands--amidst which the river wandered so tortuously that our pilot had behind him a strong tiller-crew in order to carry us through safely--we came to the n.o.ble town of Viviers. From afar we saw its tall bell-tower, its beautiful cathedral, its episcopal palace; and as we drew nearer the whole environment of ancient houses and fortifications spread out around those governing points in a great amphitheatre. But what held us most was the gay dash of tri-colour on its bridge, and the crowd there evidently waiting for our coming to manifest toward us their good will. They cheered us and waved their hats and handkerchiefs at us, those poet-lovers, as we neared them; and as we pa.s.sed beneath the bridge a huge wreath of laurel was swung downward to our deck, and a shower of laurel branches fluttered down upon us through the sunlit air. In all the fourteen centuries since Viviers was founded I am confident that nothing more gracious than this tribute to pa.s.sing Poetry is recorded in the history of the town.

Naturally, being capable of such an act of nicely discriminating courtesy, Viviers has sound traditions of learning and of gentle blood.

In its day it was a great episcopal city: whose bishops maintained an army, struck money, counted princes among their va.s.sals, in set terms defied the power of the King of France--and recognized not the existence of any temporal sovereign until the Third Conrad of Germany enlarged their knowledge of political geography by taking their city by storm.

Yet while finely lording it over outsiders, the bishops were brought curiously to their bearings within their own walls. Each of them, in turn, on his way to his installation, found closed against him, as he descended from his mule before it, the door of the cathedral; and the door was not opened until he had sworn there publicly that he would maintain inviolate as he found them the rights and privileges of the chapter and of the town. Moreover, once in each year the men and women of rank of Viviers a.s.serted their right to a part enjoyment of the ecclesiastical benefices by putting on copes and mitres and occupying with the canons the cathedral stalls.

The line of one hundred and thirty bishops who in succession reigned here ended--a century back, in the time of the Revolution--in a veritable lurid flame; yet with, I think, a touch of agonized human nature too. The church historian can see only the diabolical side of the situation; and in a horror-struck way tells how that last Bishop, "being overcome by the devil, abjured the episcopacy; with his own hands destroyed the insignia of his sacred office; and thereafter gave himself up to a blasphemous attack upon the holy religion of which he had been for a long while one of the most worthy ministers."

It certainly is true that the devil had things largely his own way about that time here in France; but it does not necessarily follow that in this particular matter the devil directly had a hand. To my mind a simpler and more natural explanation presents itself: That the iconoclastic Bishop was a weak brother who had suffered himself to be forced into a calling for which he had no vocation, and into an apparent champions.h.i.+p of a faith with which his inmost convictions were at war; that for years and years the struggle between the inward man and the outward Bishop had gone on unceasingly and hopelessly, until--as well enough might happen to one strong enough to resent yet not strong enough to overcome restraint--the galling irksomeness of such a double life had brought madness near; and that madness did actually come when the chains of a life and of a faith alike intolerable suddenly were fused in the fierce heat of the Revolution and fell away.

IX

Below Viviers the Rhone breaks out from its broad upper valley into its broader lower valley through the Defile of Donzere. Here the foothills of the Alps and the foothills of the Cevennes come together, and behind this natural dam there must have been anciently a great lake which extended to the northward of where now is Valence. The Defile is a veritable canon that would be quite in place in the Sierra Madre. On each side of the sharply-narrowed river the walls of rock rise sheer to a height of two hundred feet. The rush of the water is tumultuous. In mid-stream, surrounded by eddies and whirling waves, is the Roche-des-Anglais--against which the boat of a luckless party of English travellers struck and was shattered a hundred years ago. Indeed, so dangerous was this pa.s.sage held to be of old--when faith was stronger and boats were weaker than in our day of skepticism and compound-engines--that it was customary to tie-up at the head of the Defile and pray for grace to come through it safely; and sincerely faithful travellers tied-up again when the pa.s.sage was ended to offer a service of grateful praise. But nowadays they clap five men on the tiller and put on more steam--and the practical result is the same.

The cliffs bordering the canon, being of a crumbling nature, are known as the Maraniousques; but usually are called by the Rhone boatmen the Monkey Rocks--because of the monkeys who dwelt in them in legendary times and stoned from their heights the pa.s.sing travellers. It was a long while ago that the monkeys were in possession--in the time immediately succeeding the Deluge. During the subsidence of the waters it seems that the Ark made fast there for the night, just before laying a course for Ararat; and the monkey and his wife--desperately bored by their long cooping-up among so many uncongenial animals--took advantage of their opportunity to pry a couple of tiles off the roof and get away.

The tradition hints that Noah had been drinking; at any rate, their absence was not noticed, and the Ark went on without them the next day.

By the time that the Deluge fairly was ended, and the Rhone reopened to normal navigation, a large monkey family was established on the Maraniousques; and the monkeys thenceforward illogically revenged themselves upon Noah's descendants by stoning everybody who came along.

Later, the ill-tempered monkeys were succeeded by more ill-tempered men.

In the fighting times the Defile of Donzere was a famous place in which to bring armies to a stand. Fortifications upon the cliffs entirely commanded the river; and at the lower end of the Defile the castle and the walled town of Donzere, capping a defiant little hill-top, commanded both the river and the plain. Even the most fire-eating of captains were apt to stop and think a little before venturing into the Defile in those days.

All of those perils are ended now. The dangers of the river are so shorn by steam that the shooting of the canon rapids yields only a pleasurable excitement, that is increased by the extraordinary wild beauty of that savage bit of nature in the midst of a long-tamed land; and the ramparts and the castle of Donzere, having become invitingly picturesque ruins, are as placable remnants of belligerency as are to be found anywhere in the world. Indeed, as we saw them--with the afternoon sunlight slanting down in a way to bring out delectably the warm greys and yellows of the stone-work and to produce the most entrancing effects of light-and-shade--it was not easy to believe that people had been killing each other all over them not so very long ago.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEFILE OF DONZeRE]

Having escaped from the Defile of Donzere, the river wanders away restfully into a wilderness of islands--a maze so unexplored and so unexplorable that otters still make their home in it, and through the thick foliage poke out their snub noses at pa.s.sing boatmen now and then.

Thence onward for a long way islands are plentiful--past Pierrelatte, and Bourg-Saint-Andeol, (a very ancient and highly Roman flavoured town), and the confluence of the Rhone and the Ardeche--to the still larger archipelago across which the Bridge Building Brothers, with G.o.d himself helping them, built the Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Modern engineers--possibly exalting their own craft at the expense of that of the architects--declare that this bridge was the greatest piece of structural work of the Middle Ages; certainly it was the greatest work of the Freres Pontifes: that most practical of brotherhoods which, curiously antic.i.p.ating one phase of modern doctrine, paid less attention to faith than to works and gave itself simply to ministering to the material welfare of mankind. In the making of it they spent near half a century. From the year 1265 steadily onward until the year 1307 the Brothers labored: and then the bridge was finished--a half-mile miracle in stone. In view of the extraordinary difficulties which the engineer in charge of the work overcame--founding piers in bad holding-ground and in the thick of that tremendous current, with the work broken off short by the frequent floods and during the long season of high water in the spring--it is not surprising that the miracle theory was adopted to explain his eventual victory. Nor is it surprising that the popular conviction presently began to sustain itself by crystalizing into a definite legend--based upon the recorded fact that the Brothers worked under the vocation of the Holy Spirit--to the effect that the Spirit of G.o.d, taking human form, was the designer of the fabric and the actual director under whose guidance the work went on. And so the genesis of the bridge was accounted for satisfactorily; and so it came by its holy name.

Personally, I like miracles; and this miracle is all the more patent, I think, now that the bridge has been in commission for almost six hundred years and still is entirely serviceable. Yet while its piers and arches, its essential parts, remain nearly as the Brothers built them, the bridge has undergone such modifications in the course of the past century--in order to fit it to the needs of modern traffic--that its picturesqueness has been destroyed. The chapel of St. Nicholas upon one of its piers, and the tower at its centre, were razed about the end of the last century; a little later the fortified approaches were removed; in the year 1854, to provide for the increasing river navigation, the first two arches from the right bank were replaced by a single iron arch of two hundred feet span over the main channel; and in the year 1860 the entire superstructure on the north side, with a part of the superstructure on the south side, was torn down--and in place of the old narrow roadway, with turn-outs on each pier, there was built a roadway uniformly twenty-two feet wide. In a sentimental way, of course, these radical changes are to be regretted; but I am sure that the good Brothers, could they have been consulted in the premises, would have been the first to sanction them. For they were not sentimentalists, the Brothers; they were practical to the last degree. What they wanted was that their bridge, living up to their own concept of duty, should do the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of men.

Almost as we came out from beneath that monument to practical Christianity, we saw over on the left bank two monuments to the theoretical Christianity of three hundred years ago: the grisly ruins of Mornas and Montdragon--each on a hill dark green with a thick growth of _chene vert_, and each having about it (not wholly because of its dark setting, I fancied) a darkly sinister air. In truth, the story of Mornas is sombre enough to blacken not merely a brace of hill-tops but a whole neighbourhood. In the early summer of the year 1565, a day or two before the Fete-Dieu, the Papists surprised and seized the town and castle and put the entire Huguenot garrison to the sword. Then, as now, it was the custom in honour of the Fete-Dieu to adorn the house-fronts with garlands and draperies; and by way of variant upon this pretty custom "certain of the conquerors, more fanatical than the rest, flayed the dead Huguenots and draped their houses bravely with Protestant skins."

Thereupon the Baron des Adrets, the Huguenot commander in that region, sent one of his lieutenants, Dupuy-Montbrun, to avenge that deviltry. At the end of a three-days' siege Mornas was conquered again, and then came the vengeance: "for which the castle of Mornas, whereof the battlements overhung a precipice falling sheer two hundred feet to broken rocks below, offered great advantages." In a grave and orderly fas.h.i.+on, the survivors of the conquered garrison were a.s.sembled in the castle court-yard; were taken in orderly squads of ten up to the battlements; and thence were thrust over into that awful depth. And so the account was squared.

It is instructive to note that des Adrets, who ordered the vengeance on Mornas, a little later abjured the Reformed religion and became a Papist; and that Dupuy-Montbrun, who carried out his orders and who succeeded him upon his recantation in the command of the Protestant army, but a little while before had renounced Papacy to become a Huguenot. So the leaders, the worst of them, s.h.i.+fted from side to side as they happened to be swayed by pay or policy; and to such creatures of no real faith were due the direst of the atrocities of those hideous times. But the Huguenots of the rank and file were of another sort.

Their singleness and sincerity in their fight for their faith were beyond question. They died for it willingly. Failing the happiness of death, yet being conquered, they still held fast to it. In the end, rather than relinquish it, they unhesitatingly elected--at a stroke giving up country, rank, fortune--to be outcast from France.

For me the history of those desperate wars has a very vital interest: for my own ancestors took the share in them that was becoming to faithful gentlemen vowed to the Reform, and I owe my American birthright to the honourable fact that they fought on the losing side. As I myself am endowed with a fair allowance of stubbornness, and with a strong distaste to taking my opinions at second hand, I certainly should have been with my kinsfolk in that fight had I lived in their day; and since my destiny was theirs to determine I am strongly grateful to them for having shaped it so well.

X

But I was glad when Mornas, vivid with such bitter memories, dropped out of sight astern. Sleeping dogs of so evil a sort very well may lie; though it is difficult not to waken a few of them when they lie so thickly as here in the Rhone Valley, where almost every town and castle has a chapter of nightmare horrors all its own.

Even Chateauneuf-du-Pape--which we saw a half hour later off to the eastward, rising from a little hill-top and thence overlooking the wide vineyard-covered valley--came to its present ruin at the hands of des Adrets; who, having captured and fired it, left standing only its tall square tower and some fragments of its walls. This was an unfairly lurid ending for a castle which actually came into existence for gentle purposes and was not steeped to its very battlements in crime; for Chateauneuf was built purely as a pleasure-place, to which the Popes--when weary with ruling the world and bored by their strait-laced duties as Saint Peter's earthly representatives--might come from Avignon with a few choice kindred spirits and refres.h.i.+ngly kick up their heels.

As even in Avignon, in those days, the Popes and cardinals did not keep their heels any too fast to the ground, it is an inferential certainty that the kicking up at Chateauneuf must have been rather prodigiously high; but the people of the Middle Ages were too stout of stomach to be easily scandalized, and the Pope's responsibilities in the premises were all the lighter because the doctrine of his personal infallibility had not then been formulated officially. And so things went along comfortably in a cheerfully reprehensible way.

It was in those easy-going days that the vineyards were planted, on the slopes below the castle, which were destined to make the name of Chateauneuf-du-Pape famous the toping world over long after the New Castle should be an old ruin and the Avignon Popes a legend of the past.

Only within the present generation did those precious vines perish, when the phylloxera began among them its deadly work in France; and even yet may be found, tucked away here and there in the favoured cellars of Provence and Languedoc, a few dust-covered bottles of their rich vintage: which has for its distinguis.h.i.+ng taste a sublimated spiciness due to the alternate dalliance of the bees with the grape-blossoms and with the blossoms of the wild thyme. It is a wine of poets, this bee-kissed Chateauneuf, and its n.o.blest a.s.sociation is not with the Popes who gave their name to it but with the seven poets--Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Matthieu, Brunet, Giera, Tavan--whose chosen drink it was in those glorious days when they all were young together and were founding the Felibrige: the society that was to restore the golden age of the Troubadours and, incidentally, to decentralize France. One of the sweetest and gentlest of the seven, Anselme Matthieu, was born here at Chateauneuf; and here, with a tender love-song upon his lips, only the other day he died. The vineyards have been replanted, and in the fulness of time may come to their glory again; but the greater glories of Chateauneuf--which belonged to it once because of its Popes, and again because of its sweet-souled Poet--must be only memories forevermore.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ROUMANILLE MONUMENT]

The castles over on the right bank, Montfaucon and Roquemaure, are of the normal painful sort again. Roquemaure is a crooked, narrow, up-and-down old dirty town, where old customs and old costumes and old forms of speech still live on; and, also, its people have a very pretty taste in the twisting and perverting of historic fact into picturesque tradition--as is shown by the way in which they have rearranged the unpleasant details of the death of Pope Clement V. into a bit of melodramatic moral decoration for their own town. Their ingeniously compiled legend runs in this wise: Clement's death in the castle of Roquemaure occurred while he was on his way homeward from the Council of Vienne; where--keeping with the King the bargain which had won for him the Papal throne--he had abolished the Order of the Templars and had condemned their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, to be burned alive. When that sentence was pa.s.sed, the Grand Master, in turn, had pa.s.sed sentence of death upon the Pope: declaring that within forty days they should appear together, in the spirit, to try again that cause misjudged on earth before the Throne of G.o.d. And the forty days were near ended when Pope Clement came to Roquemaure--with the death-grip already so strong upon him that even the little farther journey to Avignon was impossible, and he could but lay him down there and die. While yet the breath scarce was out of his body, his servants fell to fighting over his belongings with a brutal fierceness: in the midst of which fray a lighted torch fell among and fired the hangings of the bed whereon lay the dead Pope--and before any of the pillagers would give the rest an advantage by stopping in their foul work to extinguish the flames his body was half-consumed. And so was Clement burned in death even as the Grand Master had been burned in life; and so was executed upon him the Grand Master's summons to appear before the Judgment Seat on high!

It is interesting to note that this tradition does very little violence to the individual facts of the case, and yet rearranges them in such a fas.h.i.+on that they are at sixes and sevens with the truth as a whole.

When, in my lighter youth, I entered upon what I fancied was antiquarian research I was hot for the alluring theory that oral tradition is a surer preserver of historic fact than is written record; and as I was not concerned with antiquities of a sort upon which my pretty borrowed theory could be tested I got along with it very well. But I am glad now to cite this capital instance in controversion of my youthful second-hand belief--because it entirely accords with my more mature conviction that oral tradition, save as a tenacious preserver of place-names, is not to be trusted at all. And as unsupported written record rarely is to be trusted either, it would seem that a certain amount of reason was at the root of King David's hasty generalization as to the untruthfulness of mankind.

The day was nearly ended as we pa.s.sed that town with a stolen moral history: and so swept onward, in and out among the islands, toward Avignon. Already the sun had fallen below the crest of the Cevennes; leaving behind him in the sky a liquid glory, and still sending far above us long level beams which gilded radiantly--far off to the eastward--the heights of Mont-Ventour. But we, deep in the deep valley, threaded our swift way among the islands in a soft twilight which gently ebbed to night.

And then, as the dusk deepened to the westward, there came slowly into the eastern heavens a pale l.u.s.tre that grew brighter and yet brighter until, all in a moment, up over the Alpilles flashed the full moon--and there before us, almost above us, the Rocher-des-Doms and the Pope's Palace and the ramparts of Avignon stood out blackly against the moon-bright sky. So sudden was this ending to our journey that there was a wonder among us that the end had come!

All the Felibres of Avignon were at the water-side to cheer us welcome as the _Gladiateur_, with reversed engines, hung against the current above the bridge of Saint-Benezet and slowly drew in to the bank. Our answering cheers went forth to them through the darkness, and a stave or two of "La Coupe" was sung, and there was a mighty clapping of hands.

And then the gang-plank was set ash.o.r.e, and instantly beside it--standing in the glare of a great lantern--we saw our Capoulie, the head of all the Felibrige, Felix Gras, waiting for us, his subjects and his brethren, with outstretched hands. From him came also, a little later, our official welcome: when we all were a.s.sembled for a _ponch d'honneur_ at the Hotel du Louvre--in the great vaulted chamber that once served the Templars as a refectory, and that has been the banquet-hall of the Felibrige ever since this later and not less honorable Order was founded, almost forty years ago.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AVIGNON]

Not until those formalities were ended could we of America get away to receive the personal welcome to which through all that day we had been looking forward with a warm eagerness--yet also sorrowing: because we knew that among the welcoming voices there would be a silence, and that a face would be missing from among those we loved. Roumanille was dead; and in meeting again in Avignon those who had been closest and dearest to him, and who to us were close and dear, there was heartache with our joy.

SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE, _August, 1894._

The Comedie Francaise at Orange

I