Chapter 7

The walls, on which some gilding still remained, the stone window-frames, and the chimney-pieces, were still entire. From the door, we looked out into the long gallery[20] built by the Count de Grignan, and communicating with different suites of handsome rooms, or at least their remains. We explored them as far as was consistent with safety, and descended to the "belle terrasse," now over-run with weeds and lizards, in order to take[21] another survey of the castle, and form a general idea of the parts which we had separately visited. Though built at different periods of time, each part is in itself regular and handsome. The two grand fronts are the north and west, the former of which is represented in Mr. Cooke's first engraving of Grignan. The eastern part, facing Mont Ventou, is in a more ornamental style of architecture, somewhat resembling that of the inside square of the Louvre.[22] The southern part, affording a view of Mad. de Sevigne's window, and of the collegiate church founded by the family, is represented in the second engraving, the subject of which was sketched on the road to La Palud, whither we were bound for the night. In our way thither, we made a short detour, accompanied by our host, to the Roche Courbiere, a natural excavation on the rock, within sight of the terrace, and to the left of the road. This cool retreat, it may be recollected, was discovered and chosen by Mad. de Sevigne, as a sort of summer pavilion; and was embellished by the Count de Grignan with a marble table, benches of stone, and a stone bason, which collected the filterings of a spring that took its source from this cavern. I have since seen a drawing made previous to the Revolution, which confirms Peyrol's account. Even this modest hermitage, however, was not spared by the systematic spite of the brigands who destroyed the castle. Only one stone bench remains; the table and bason are demolished, and the spring now oozes over the damp floor as it did in a state of nature. On returning from this spot to the road, we crossed an open common field on the south side of the castle, planted with corn, and apparently of a better quality than the land in its vicinity. "Voila le jardin," said our guide; "c'etoit la ou il y avoit de ces belles figues, ces beaux melons, ce delicieux. Muscat dont Madame parle." The fine trees, which marked the limits of the garden, have all been cut down and burnt, with the exception of a row of old elms on the western side, forming part of the avenue which flanked the mail, or ball-alley, a constant appendage in days of old to the seats of French noblemen. The turf of the mail is even and soft still, and the wall on both sides tolerably perfect--"And now, Messieurs," said mine host, "you may tell your countrymen, that you have walked in the actual steps of the Marquise. C'est ici qu'elle jouoit au mail avec cette parfaite grace--et M. le Comte aussi--ah! c'etoit un plaisir de les voir." We hardly knew whether to laugh at, or be interested by the comical Quixotism of this man, who I verily believe had, by dint of residence on the spot, and thumbing constantly a dirty old edition of Madame's letters, worked himself up to the notion that he had witnessed the scenes which he described. We were induced, in the course of our walk, to inquire somewhat into his own history, which appeared rather a melancholy one, though common enough in the times through which he had lived. About a week after the pillage and destruction of Chateau Grignan, he was denounced as a royalist, and immured in the prison of Orange, in company with several gentlemen of the neighbourhood, acquaintances of his master. By means of a friend in the town, (for they were not all devils at Orange, as he emphatically assured us), he was enabled to procure a few common necessaries, to improve the scanty prison allowance of some of the more infirm; but his charitable labour soon ceased, for all were successively dispatched by the guillotine in a short space of time. In the course of three months, 378 persons perished by decree of the miscreants composing the Revolutionary tribunal at Orange, whose names were Fauvette, Fonrosac, Meilleraye, Boisjavelle, Viotte, and Benoit Carat, the greffier. One of their first victims was an aged nun of the Simiane family, canoness of the convent of Bollene, accused of being a counter-revolutionist; so lame and infirm, that her executioners were forced to carry her to the scaffold. Madame d'Ozanne, Marquise de Torignan, aged ninety-one, and her grand-daughter, a lovely young woman of twenty-two, perished in the same massacre. The personal beauty of the latter, which was much celebrated in the neighbourhood, had interested one of the brigands of Orange in her fate, who promised to exert his influence with the council of five, to save the life of the grandmother, on condition of receiving the hand of Mademoiselle d'Ozanne. The poor girl overcame her horror and reluctance for the sake of her aged relative, and promised to marry this man on condition of his success in the promised application. The life, however, of so formidable a conspirator as a superannuated and dying woman, was too great a favour to be granted even to a friend; and the only boon which he could obtain was the promise of Mademoiselle d'Ozanne's life, in consideration of her becoming his wife. "Eh bien! il faut mourir ensemble;" was her answer without a moment's deliberation, and next day, accordingly, both the relatives perished on the same scaffold. Poor Peyrol himself, after expecting the fatal _Allons_ for many a morning, was at length relieved from his apprehensions by the fall of Robespierre, and obtained his release, on condition of serving in the army. After fighting for four years, with a cordial detestation of the cause in which he was engaged, he was disabled for the time by a severe wound, and obtained leave to return to Grignan, where he settled in the little inn; but the most severe blow of all was yet in store for him; for his wife died not long after, leaving him with five children. "Ainsi vous voyez, Monsieur, que j'ai connu le malheur. Au reste, Mons. de Muy m'a donne la clef de ce chateau, et cela me vaut quelque chose; car il y a du monde qui viennent quelquefois le voir." Then, relapsing into his habitual strain of complaint, he ended with, "Oh mon pauvre cher maitre! ce beau, ce grand chateau! ah, j'ai tout perdu!" One bright moment, however, as he exultingly remarked, occurred during his compulsory service in the army; for it so chanced that he was one of the guard on duty during the execution of his former oppressor, Fauvette. "Moi a mon tour je l'accompagnois a cet echafaud ou il m'auroit envoye; il avoit la mine triste, un fleur de jasmin a la bouche; ma foi, ca ne sentoit pas bon pour lui."

Such is an exact transcript of our communicative host's conversation, which, notwithstanding the suspicion with which I regard the prattle of foreign guides, seemed to me not so much a well-conned lesson, as the genuine overflowing of such a disposition as honest Thady M'Quirk's. His interest in the persons and events of which he spoke, appeared as warm and genuine as his _naivete_ was amusing and we took leave of him with a strong feeling of good will towards himself and his little clean inn.

[Footnote 20: Eighty feet by twenty-four, according to a measurement made previous to the burning of the castle.]

[Footnote 21: Pour entrer au vestibule (says the same letter which I quoted before, written before the Revolution) on monte par un escalier, car les appartemens sont tous au premier. Il y a quatre beaux salons, qui s'appellent la salle du roi, la salle de la reine, la salle des eveques, et la galerie: le reste de la maison, qui est vaste, est distribuee en divers appartemens, dont chacun est compose d'une chambre a coucher, un grand cabinet, et un cabinet a toilette.]

[Footnote 22: Vide Cooke's Views.]

It is as needless to apologize for devoting a whole chapter to local circumstances connected with Madame de Sevigne's life, as it would be to detail the well-known social virtues which have erected this amiable and unpretending woman into a sort of household deity in the eyes of so large a class of persons, while the Lauzuns, the Montespans, and other gay and brilliant favourites of that period, are only recollected with disgust.

CHAP. VI.

ORANGE--AVIGNON.

OUR road to La Palud lay along the rocky vale first discovered from the heights above Chateau Grignan, which in fact is not so much a vale as a high plateau of ground enclosed between hills, like many parts of Castille. To the latter country, indeed, the Comtat Grignan bears a striking resemblance in the characteristic features which prevail through the greater part of it. The insulated grey rocks have forced themselves through the starved soil, like projecting bones; the parched fields are more full of pebbles than corn; and the stunted evergreen oaks, with their diminutive tough leaves of a dingy grey, though well enough adapted to the inhospitable ground in which they grow, present an appearance quite repugnant to our English ideas of verdure and vegetation. The immediate neighbourhood of Chateau Grignan, indeed, seems tolerably fertile, but it is difficult nevertheless to conceive from whence the adequate supplies for the Count's immense table were procured, or how the feudal contributions of such a country could have supported in earlier days the number of castles and towers, whose ruins we saw on the summits of every detached rock. These, from their resemblance to the "antiguas obras de Moros," which the muleteers used to point out, presented another feature strongly reviving my Spanish recollections. In the days of romance, this country must have been the Utopia of Troubadours, where each might in the compass of a short walk have taken morning draught, breakfast, nooning, dinner, and supper, at the strong holds of different barons. The first of these fortalices, called Chamaret le Maigre, presents a striking landmark from the town of Grignan; but, on a nearer approach, consists of little more than a tall slender tower upon an insulated rock; the rest is in ruins. At a short distance beyond this spot stands Montsegur, a little old fortified town upon a hill, which, from its name and appearance, may have been one of those cradles of civil liberty, where the "bon homme Jacques" first found refuge from his haughty feudal oppressors. A ruin of a more lordly description close to it, is called, as we understood, the Chateau Beaume: but the number of less important ruins, which occurred in this day's journey, is too great to admit of a particular description. A turn to the right between a couple of commanding heights, brought us out of this barren country into the wide and fertile plain of the Rhone, and under the walls of St. Paul de Trois Chateaux, the ancient Augusta Tricastinorum. From the respectable appearance of this town, we conceived ourselves in the high road to La Palud, and likely to be soon indemnified by dinner and rest, for the joltings of the day; but our driver, instead of taking the proper direction, lost himself in a series of inextricable cross roads, which terminated in a quagmire. In this slough of despond the unfortunate patache, from which we had descended, might have stuck for ever, but for the assistance of two shepherds, as wild in their attire, and as civil, as Don Quixote's friendly goatherds. By dint of their exertions and those of the floundering and groaning horse, the vehicle, which was too deeply imbedded in the muddy ruts to dread an overturn, was dragged out by main force; the driver sometimes wringing his hands in King Cambysses' vein, and sometimes strenuously applying his shoulder to the wheel. A franc or two dismissed our bare-legged friends grinning to their very earrings, and we pursued our road without further interruption, quite satisfied with this specimen of the loamy fatness of the soil. From the experience of this day, I certainly should recommend no one to make the detour to Grignan in a wheeled carriage of any sort. An active person might accomplish on foot, before breakfast, the whole distance from Montelimart to Grignan, and might reach St. Paul de Trois Chateaux, or perhaps La Palud, by night; but even lady travellers would find less fatigue in hiring saddle-horses and mules from Montelimart, than in being bumped at the rate of two miles and a half per hour, over roads which frequently seem a jumble of unhewn paving-stones. We afterwards understood that there was a direct road from Grignan to Orange, which would have saved us some distance, and could not have been worse than that which we travelled this evening.

At La Palud we found the servants and voiture established in the second inn, the name of which I forget. The accommodations, however, were decent and comfortable, and the charges moderate: and, on the whole, the appearance of this inn was nearly, or quite as good as that of the Hotel d'Angouleme. The people of the latter house, to which the servants were originally directed, concluding that they had positive orders to await us there, persisted in demanding a price for every thing which more than doubled any charge yet attempted; an instance of pertinacious rascality which it is not amiss to mention, and which would have diverted us by its very absurdity, had we not been too tired to find amusement in any thing but supper and beds. In the course of this day and the next, we heard, for the first time, the Provencal patois, which seems a bad compound of French, Spanish, and Italian, with an original gibberish of their own. As far, indeed, as a slight and partial observation enables me to judge, I have been much struck by a similarity which the inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast bear to each other in language and character, a similarity so great, as to lead one to suppose them descended from the same original stock. The same savage originality of manner, (accompanied frequently by much good-humour and civility), the same extravagance of gesture, which seems the overflow of bodily vigour and animal spirits, the same red cap, and lastly, the same villainous compound of languages, mixed up in discordant cadences and terminations, appear to distinguish the inhabitants of Provence, Languedoc, Naples, and Genoa, and last and noblest of all, the Catalans.

May 11.--To Orange eighteen miles, through the same rich and extensive plain, from which the barrier of hills that accompanied us before, receded to a considerable distance; but which is still interrupted and broken occasionally by rocks of the wildest and most abrupt shape possible, with the addition in general of a frowning castle in ruins. The little towns of Montdragon[23] and Mornas, which we passed this morning, are each situated under heights of this description. The castle of the former, of which a plate is given in Mr. Cooke's work, I think even superior to that of Caerphilly, in South Wales, in the "awsome eyriness," as a Scotsman would express it, with which its detached masses are grouped. The castle of Mornas is not so remarkable, but the rocks on which it stands are very striking; for if they have any inclination out of the perpendicular, it is rather towards than from the road. It is indeed impossible, when you stand under the shade of this lofty barrier, and look up to the clouds drifting over it, to fancy that it is not in the act of toppling down upon your head. We had not as yet emerged from the land of castles, for, as in yesterday's route, almost every little town possessed some vestige of ancient fortification, a silent testimony to the peaceful virtues of "the good old days." The heat of the weather at this comparatively early season of the year, induced us to congratulate ourselves that we had not chosen a month, or even a fortnight later, for our excursion, particularly as the mulberry-trees, which in this thrifty country form almost the only shade, were beginning to lose their covering of leaves. Every where we met women and children carrying ladders, shaped exactly like those used by cocks and hens in roosting, or perched high in trees, stripping them for the food of the silk-worms. The natural gracefulness of the mulberry foliage is entirely destroyed by the unmerciful pruning and pollarding which it undergoes in this country, in order to concentrate it for gathering. Very little fruit, and that small and tasteless, is produced from these cabbage-cut trees; a circumstance which I mention to prevent disappointment, since, no doubt, many a gentle traveller may indulge, as I confess to have done, the luxurious hope of feasting on this fruit in perfection under every hedge-row in Provence. Another month would have rendered the heat of the country insufferable, and stript it of much of its beauty, by reducing to bunches of bare poles those trees which still continued to afford verdure and finish to the prospect.

[Footnote 23: Vide Cooke's Views.]

Within a few miles of Orange we crossed the river Aigues by a handsome stone bridge, commanding a magnificent view of Mont Ventou. This mountain seems the most conspicuous landmark in the part of France which we were traversing, continuing visible as it does for two or three days journey with very little alteration of outline. To judge from its situation on the map, it could not be less than twenty-five or thirty miles from the place where we stood, though from the deception caused by its enormous length and height, and not uncommon in mountain scenery, it appeared accessible in a walk of two or three hours. I well remember, as an instance illustrative of this deception, the surprise of a Berkshire servant at Capel Curig, when informed that he really could not take an evening's walk to the top of Snowdon after littering up his horses, and return to supper. The effect in question is increased, and rather to the detriment of picturesque beauty, by the less hazy atmosphere of southern countries; but I never recollect so strong an instance of it, as in the view of Mont Ventou of which I am speaking. I was struck also by its great similarity to drawings which I had seen of AEtna from the Catanian coast, as well its outline, as the manner in which it rises from a cluster of satellite hills into the borders of the snowy region. Several scattered snow-ridges were visible near its top, contrasting curiously with the effect of the sun's rays reflected from its sides, which, instead of Campbell's picturesque "cliffs of shadowy tint" appeared a red-hot stony mass, and might be fancied by a slight effort of imagination, into AEtna covered with an eruption of burning cinders.

The approach to the celebrated arch of Orange, commemorating Marius's victory over the Cimbri, is marked by an avenue of Lombardy poplars which line the high road. The classical and sombre stone pine, which gives so striking an effect to the tomb of the Scipios (as it is styled) near Tarragona, would have been more in character as an accompaniment to this proud monument also; but since the days of [24] Alpheus and his red silk stockings, the taste for _quelque chose de gentil_ has constantly poisoned those classical associations of which the French are so fond. The grave Patavinian is still designated by the tom-tit appellation of Tite Live; and the majestic arch, whose history would have been so well illustrated by his lost annals, is tricked out with a poplar avenue, like a summer-house on Clapham-common.

[Footnote 24: See the Spectator.]

The townsmen of Orange, however, deserve credit for the substantial style in which they have repaired one end of it, to prevent farther dilapidation, and for the manner in which the road is diverted from it on both sides in a handsome sweep, leaving a green space in the middle, in which the arch stands. We returned to it immediately after breakfast, and our second impressions were fully equal to the first. As[25] a work of art, it is certainly worthy of one of the proudest places in the Campo Vaccino, though of course its effect is more striking in the neighbourhood[26] of the victory which it commemorates. The bas relief on the side facing Orange, would not be unworthy of a place between the well-known statues of Dacian captives, which ornament the arch of Constantine. Different as were their respective aeras, the stern thoughtful dignity of the barbarian chiefs, and the spirit which animates

"The fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe,"

as represented in the battle of Marius, appear to have been conceived by the same powerful mind, and embodied by the same master hand. The same chastened energy and unaffected greatness of design which characterizes the poetry of Milton, the painting of Michael Angelo, and the music of Handel, is conspicuous in both. The bas relief which I have mentioned forms the principal ornament of the arch; but the trophies, the rostra, &c. which appear in other parts, are in a style of simple and soldier-like grandeur corresponding with its character and the achievement which it commemorates. I do not pretend to consider this monument as comparable on the whole to the arch of Constantine; but still it is of a very different school of art from that which produced the arch of Severus. On the bas relief representing Marius's victory, one might fancy the most high born and athletic of Achilles's Myrmidons in the full "tug of war;" whereas the swarms of crawling pigmies which burlesque the triumph of Severus might be supposed the original Myrmidon rabble, just hatched, as the fable reports, from their native ant-hills, and basking in the sun like so many tadpoles.

[Footnote 25: Vide Cooke's Views.]

[Footnote 26: Marius's victory is said to have been gained near Aix (Aquae Seaetiae).]

The Roman colony of Orange, to judge from the relative positions of the arch and circus, must have been very considerable, and have occupied a far larger space than the present town. The arch stands detached from its entrance, as I mentioned, on the Lyons' side, and the circus at the extreme end, in the direction of Avignon; yet the former we may suppose to have joined on to the ancient town, and the latter to have stood in the same central position which the Colosseum occupied in Rome. Of the circus nothing now remains but the chord of the semicircle, or, to express it more familiarly, the straight line of the D figure, in which it was built. As far as I could guess, from pacing the length of this enormous wall, encumbered and buttressed as it was by dirty shops, it is in length nearly or quite a hundred yards, and of a height proportionate. The point of view from which it appears to the most advantage, is on the road to Avignon, about two or three furlongs out of the town. When viewed in this direction, it stands with a commanding air of a grim old Roman ghost among a group of men of the present day; forming, by its blackness and colossal scale of proportions, a striking contrast to every thing around it, and overtopping houses, church-tower, and every thing near, excepting a circular hill at the foot of which it stands. The latter is marked as the position of the ancient Roman citadel by the remains of tower and wall, half imbedded in turf, which surround it: and one veteran bastion still stands firm and unbroken, in a position facing the Circus, its companion through the silent and ruinous lapse of so many centuries. Without the affectation of decrying well-known and celebrated monuments of antiquity, or the wish to put any thing really in comparison with the ruins of ancient Rome, I must still own, that the unexpected view which I caught of the citadel and Circus from this position, realized more strongly to my mind the august conceptions so well expressed in Childe Harold, than any view in Rome itself, hardly excepting the Colosseum.