CHAPTER III.

ST. RÉMY DE PROVENCE

St. Rémy de Provence is delightful and indescribable in its quiet charm. It’s not so very quiet either--at times--and its great Fête de St. Rémy in October is anything but quiet. On almost any summer Sunday, too, its cafés and terraces, and the numerous tree-bordered squares and places, and its Cours--the inevitable adjunct of all Provençal towns--are as gay with the life of the town and the country round about as any local metropolis in France.

The local merchants call St. Rémy “_toujours un pays mort_,” but in spite of this they all eke out considerably more than what a full-blooded Burgundian would call a good living. As a matter of fact the population of St. Rémy live on something approaching the abundance of good things of the Côte d’Or itself. There is perhaps nothing remarkable about this, in the midst of a mild and pleasant land like Provence; but it seems wise to state it here, for we know of an Englishman who stayed three days at St. Rémy’s most excellent Grand Hôtel de Provence and complained because he did not get beefsteaks or ham and eggs for a single meal! He got carp from Vaucluse, _langouste_ from St. Louis-de-Rhône, the finest sort of lamb (but not plain boiled, with cauliflower as a side dish), chickens of the real spring variety, or a brace of little wild birds which look like sparrows and taste like quail, but which are neither--with, as like as not, a bottle of Châteauneuf des Papes, grapes, figs, olives, and goat’s milk cheese. Either this, or a variation of it, was his daily menu for breakfast or dinner, and still he pined for beefsteaks! Had our traveller been an American he would perhaps have cried aloud for boiled codfish or pumpkin pie!

The hotel of St. Rémy is to be highly commended in spite of all this, though the writer has only partaken of an occasional meal there. He got nearer the soil, living the greater part of one long bright autumn in the household of an estimable tradesman,--a baker by trade, though considering that he made a great accomplishment of it, it may well be reckoned a profession.

Up at three in the morning, he, with the assistance of a small boy,--some day destined to be his successor,--puts in his artistic touches on the patting and shaping of the various loaves, ultimately sliding them into the great low-ceiled brick oven with a sort of elongated snow-shovel such as bakers use the world over.

It was in his manipulating of things that the art of it all came in. Frenchmen will not all eat bread fashioned in the same form, and the cottage loaf is unknown in France. One may have a preference for a “_pain mouffle_,” a long sort of a roll; or, if he likes a crusty morsel, nothing but a “_pistolet_” or a “_baton_” will do him. Others will eat nothing but a great circular washer of bread--“_comme un rond de cuir_”--or a “_tresse_,” which is three plaited strands, also crusty. A favourite with toothless old veterans of the Crimea or beldames who have seen seventy or eighty summers is the “_chapeau de gendarme_,” a three-cornered sort of an affair with no crust to speak of.

By midday the baker-host had become the merchant of the town and had dressed himself in a garb more or less approaching city fashions, and seated himself in a sort of back parlour to the shop in front, which, however, served as a kitchen and a dining-room as well.

Many and bountiful and excellent were the meals eaten _en famille_ in the room back of the shop, often enough in company with a _beau-frère_, who came frequently from Cavaillon, and a niece and her husband, who was an attorney, and who lived in a great Renaissance stone house opposite the fountain of Nostradamus, St. Rémy’s chief titular deity.

These were the occasions when eating and drinking was as superlative an expression of the joy of life as one is likely to have experienced in these degenerate days when we are mostly nourished by means of patent foods and automatic buffets.

“My brother has a pretty taste in wine,” says the _beau-frère_ from Cavaillon, as he opens another bottle of the wine of St. Rémy, grown on the hillside just overlooking “_les antiquités_.” Those relics of the Roman occupation are the pride of the citizen, who never tires of strolling up the road with a stranger, and pointing out the beauties of these really charming historical monuments. Truly M. Farges did have a pretty taste in wine, and he had a cellar as well stocked in quantity and variety as that of a Riviera hotel-keeper.

Not the least of the attractions of M. Farges’s board was the grace with which his Arlesienne wife presided over the good things of the casserole and the spit, that long skewer which, when loaded with a chicken, or a duck, or a dozen small birds, turned slowly by clockwork before a fire of olive-tree roots on the open hearth, or rather, on top of the _fourneau_, which was only used itself for certain operations. Baked meats and _rôti_ are two vastly different things in France.

“Marcel, he bakes the bread, and I cook for him,” says the jauntily coiffed, buxom little lady, whose partner Marcel had been for some thirty years. In spite of the passing of time, both were still young, or looked it, though they were of that ample girth which betokens good living, and, what is quite as important, good cooking; and madame’s taste in cookery was as “pretty” as her husband’s for bread-making and wine.

Given a casserole half-full of boiling oil (also a product of St. Rémy’s; real olive-oil, with no dilution of cottonseed to flatten out the taste) and anything whatever eatable to drop in it, and Madame Farges will work wonders with her deftness and skill, and, like all good cooks, do it, apparently, by guesswork.

It is a marvel to the writer that some one has not written a book devoted to the little every-day happenings of the French middle classes. Manifestly the trades of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker have the same ends in view in France as elsewhere, but their procedure is so different, so very different.

It strikes the foreigner as strange that your baker here gives you a tally-stick, even to-day, when pass-books and all sorts of automatic calculators are everywhere to be found. It is a fact, however, that your baker does this at St. Rémy; and regulates the length of your credit by the length of the stick, a plan which has many advantages for all concerned over other methods.

You arrange as to what your daily loaf shall be, and for every one delivered a notch is cut in the stick, which you guard as you would your purse; that is, you guard your half of it, for it has been split down the middle, and the worthy baker has a whole battery of these split sticks strung along the dashboard of his cart. The two separate halves are put together when the notch is cut across the joint, and there you have undisputable evidence of delivery. It’s very much simpler than the old backwoods system of keeping accounts on a slate, and wiping off the slate when they were paid, and it’s safer for all concerned. When you pay your baker at St. Rémy, he steps inside your kitchen and puts the two sticks on the fire, and together you see them go up in smoke.

St. Rémy itself is a historic shrine, sitting jauntily beneath the jagged profile of the Alpines, from whose crest one gets one of those wonderful vistas of a rocky gorge which is, in a small way, only comparable to the cañon of the Colorado. It is indeed a splendid view that one gets just as he rises over the crest of this not very ample or very lofty mountain range, and it has all the elements of grandeur and brilliancy which are possessed by its more famous prototypes. It is quite indescribable, hence the illustration herewith must be left to tell its own story.

Below, in the ample plain in which St. Rémy sits, is a wonderful garden of fruits and flowers. St. Rémy is a great centre for commerce in olives, olive-oil, vegetables, and fruit which is put up into tins and exported to the ends of the earth.

Not every one likes olive-trees as a picturesque note in a landscape any more than every one likes olives to eat. But for all that the grayish-green tones of the flat-topped _oliviers_ of these parts are just the sort of things that artists love, and a plantation of them, viewed from a hill above, has as much variety of tone, and shade, and colour as a field of heather or a poppy-strewn prairie.

The inhabitants of most of the old-time provinces of France have generally some special heirloom of which they are exceedingly fond; but not so fond but that they will part with it for a price. The Breton has his great closed-in bed, the Norman his _armoire_, and the Provençal his “grandfather’s clock,” or, at least, a great, tall, curiously wrought affair, which we outsiders have come to designate as such.

Not all of these great timepieces which are found in the peasant homes round about St. Rémy are ancient; indeed, few of them are, but all have a certain impressiveness about them which a household god ought to have, whether it is a real antique or a gaudily painted thing with much brasswork and, above all, a gong that strikes at painfully frequent intervals with a vociferousness which would wake the Seven Sleepers if they hadn’t been asleep so long.

The traffic in these tall, coffin-like clocks--though they are not by any means sombre in hue--is considerable at St. Rémy. The local clock-maker (he doesn’t really make them) buys the cases ready-made from St. Claude, or some other wood-carving town in the Jura or Switzerland, and the works in Germany, and assembles them in his shop, and stencils his name in bold letters on the face of the thing as maker. This is deception, if you like, but there is no great wrong in it, and, since the clock and watch trade the world over does the same thing, it is one of the immoralities which custom has made moral.

They are not dear, these great clocks of Provence, which more than one tourist has carried away with him before now as a genuine “antique.” Forty or fifty francs will buy one, the price depending on the amount of chasing on the brasswork of its great pendulum.

Six feet tall they stand, in rows, all painted as gaudily as a circus wagon, waiting for some peasant to come along and make his selection. When it does arrive at some humble cottage in the Alpines, or in the marshy vineyard plain beside the Rhône, there is a sort of house-warming and much feasting, which costs the peasant another fifty francs as a christening fee.

The clocks of St. Rémy and the _panetières_ which hang on the wall and hold the household supply of bread open to the drying influences of the air, and yet away from rats and mice, are the chief and most distinctive house-furnishings of the homes of the countryside. For the rest the Provençal peasant is as likely to buy himself a wickerwork chair, or a German or American sewing-machine, with which to decorate his home, as anything else. One thing he will not have foreign to his environment, and that is his cooking utensils. His “_batterie de cuisine_” may not be as ample as that of the great hotels, but every one knows that the casseroles of commerce, whether one sees them in San Francisco, Buenos Ayres, or Soho, are a Provençal production, and that there is a certain little town, not many hundred miles from St. Rémy, which is devoted almost exclusively to the making of this all-useful cooking utensil.

The _panetières_, like the clocks, have a great fascination for the tourist, and the desire to possess one has been known to have been so great as to warrant an offer of two hundred and fifty francs for an article which the present proprietor probably bought for twenty not many months before.

St. Rémy’s next-door neighbour, just across the ridge of the Alpines, is Les Baux.

Every traveller in Provence who may have heard of Les Baux has had a desire to know more of it based on a personal acquaintance.

To-day it is nothing but a scrappy, tumble-down ruin of a once proud city of four thousand inhabitants. Its foundation dates back to the fifth century, and five hundred years later its seigneurs possessed the rights over more than sixty neighbouring towns. It was only saved in recent years from total destruction by the foresight of the French government, which has stepped in and passed a decree that henceforth it is to rank as one of those “_monuments historiques_” over which it has spread its guardian wing.

Les Baux of the present day is nothing but a squalid hamlet, and from the sternness of the topography round about one wonders how its present small population gains its livelihood, unless it be that they live on goat’s milk and goat’s meat, each of them a little strong for a general diet. As a picture paradise for artists, however, Les Baux is the peer of anything of its class in all France; but that indeed is another story.

The historical and architectural attractions of Les Baux are many, though, without exception, they are in a ruinous state. The Château des Baux was founded on the site of an _oppidum gaulois_ in the fifth century, and in successive centuries was enlarged, modified, and aggrandized for its seigneurs, who bore successively the titles of Prince d’Orange, Comte de Provence, Roi d’Arles et de Vienne, and Empereur de Constantinople.

One of the chief monuments is the Église St. Vincent, dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, and containing the tombs of many of the Seigneurs of Baux.

There is, too, a ragged old ruin of a Protestant temple, with a series of remarkable carvings, and the motto “_Post tenebras lux_” graven above its portal. The Palais des Porcelets, now the “communal” school, and the Église St. Claude, which has three distinct architectural styles all plainly to be seen, complete the near-by sights and scenes, all of which are of a weather-worn grimness, which has its charms in spite of its sadness of aspect.

Not far distant is the Grotte des Fées, known in the Provençal tongue as “Lou Trau di Fado,” a great cavern some five hundred or more feet in length, the same in which Mistral placed one of the most pathetic scenes of “Mirèio.” Of it and its history, and of the great Christmas fête with its midnight climax, nothing can be said here; it needs a book to itself, and, as the French say, “_c’est un chose à voir_.”