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Those who know not St. Jean-de-Luz and its charms had best hurry up before they entirely disappear. The Automobile Club de France endorses the Hôtel d'Angleterre of St. Jean as to its beds and its table, and also notes the fact that you may count on spending anything you like from thirteen francs a day upward for your accommodation. The Touring Club de France swears by the Hôtel Terminus-Plage (equally unfortunately named), and here you will get off for ten francs or so per day, and probably be cared for quite as well as at the other. In any case they both possess a salle des bains and a shelter for your automobile.
We stopped only for lunch, and found it excellent, at the Hôtel de la Poste, with vin compris– which is not the case at the great hotels. En passant, let the writer say that the average "tourist" (not the genuine vagabond traveller) will not drink the vin de table, but prefers the same thing – at a supplementary price – for the pleasure of seeing the cork drawn before his eyes. The "grands hôtels" of the resorts recognize this and cater for the tourist accordingly.
We were bound for Fontarabia that night, just over the Spanish border. The Spanish know it as Feuntarabia, and the Basques as Ondarriba. For this reason one's pronunciation is likely to be understood, because no two persons pronounce it exactly alike, and the natives' comprehensions have been trained in a good school.
Fontarabia is gay, is ancient, and is very foreign to anything in France, even bordering upon the Spanish frontier. We left the automobile at Hendaye, not wishing to put up with the customs duties of eighteen francs a hundred kilos for the motor, and a thousand francs for the carrosserie, for the privilege of riding twenty kilometres out and back over a sandy, dreary road.
We dined and slept that night at a little Spanish hotel half built out over the sea, Concha by name, and left the Grand Hôtel de Palais Miramar to those who like grand hotels. We lingered a fortnight at Fontarabia, and did much that many tourists did not. One should see Fontarabia and find out its delights for oneself. There is a quaintness and unworldliness about its old streets and wharves, which is indescribable in print; there is a wonderfully impressive expanse of sea and sky on the Bay of Bidassoa, a couple of kilometres away, and all sorts and conditions of men may find an occupation here for any passing mood they may have.
We just missed the great fête of the eighth of September, when processions, and bull-fights, and all the movement of the sacred and profane rejoicings of the Latins yearly astonish the more phlegmatic northerner.
Another great fête is that of Vendredi-Saint (Good Friday). Either one or the other should be seen by all who may be in these parts at these times.
Near by, in the middle of the swift-flowing current of the Bidassoa, is the historically celebrated Ile des Faisans, on which the conferences were held between the French minister Mazarin and the Spanish Don Louis de Haro, which led to the famous Treaty of the Pyrenees, 1659, and the marriage of Louis XIV. with the daughter of Philip IV. The representative of each sovereign advanced from his own territory, by a temporary bridge, to this bit of neutral ground, which then reached nearly up to the present bridge. The piles which supported the cardinal's pavilion were visible not many years ago. The death of Velasquez, the painter, was caused by his exertions in superintending these constructions; duties more fitting to an upholsterer than a painter.
We finished our tour of the Pyrenees at Fontarabia, having followed along the shadow of these great frontier mountains their entire length; not wholly unknown ground, perhaps, but for the most part entirely unspoiled, and, as a touring-ground for the automobilist, without a peer.
Chapter III
In Languedoc And Old Provence
The dim purple curtain of the Pyrenees had been drawn behind, us, and we were passing from the patois of Languedoc to the patois of Provence, where the peasants say pardie in place of pardou when an exclamation of surprise comes from their lips.
Cast your eyes over the map of ancient France, and you will distinguish plainly the lines of demarcation between the old political divisions which, in truth, the traveller by road may find to exist even to-day, in the manners and customs of the people at least.
Unconsciously we drew away from the sleepy indolence of Perpignan and Roussillon, and before we knew it had passed Narbonne, and on through Béziers to Agde, where we proposed stopping for the night.
Quite as Spanish-looking as Perpignan, Agde was the very antithesis of the gay and frivolous Catalan city. The aspect of its purple-brown architecture, the bridge-piers crossing the Herault, and the very pavements themselves were a colour-scheme quite unlike anything we had seen elsewhere. Brilliant and warm as a painting of Velasquez, there was nothing gaudy, and one could only dream of the time when the Renaissance house-fronts sheltered lords and ladies of high degree instead of itinerant automobilists and travelling salesmen.
The Hôtel du Cheval Blanc was one of these. It is not a particularly up-to-date hostelry, and there is a scant accommodation for automobiles, but for all that it is good of its kind, and one dines and sleeps well to the accompaniment of the rushing waters of the river, at its very dooryard, on its way to the sea.
From Agde to Montpellier is fifty odd kilometres over the worst stretch of roadway of the same length to be found in France, save perhaps that awful paved road of Navarre across the Landes.
Montpellier is one of the most luxurious and well-kept small cities of France. It is the seat of the préfecture, the assizes, and a university – whose college of medicine was famous in the days of Rabelais. It has the modern attributes of steam-heated, electric-lighted hotels and restaurants, a tramway system that is appalling and dangerous to all other traffic by reason of its complexity, and an Opera House and a Hôtel de Ville that would do credit to a city ten times its size.
We merely took Montpellier en route, just as we had many other places, and were really bound for Aigues-Mortes, where we proposed to lunch: one would not willingly sleep in a place with a name like that.
Of Aigues-Mortes Ch. Lentherie wrote, a quarter of a century ago:
"The country round about is incomparably melancholy, the sun scorches, and the sandy soil gives no nourishment to plants, flowers, vines, or grain. Cultivated land does not exist, it is a desert: ugly, melancholy, and abandoned. But Aigues-Mortes cannot, nay, must not perish, and will always remain the old city of St. Louis, a magnificent architectural diadem, with its deserted plage an aureole most radiant, a glorious yet touching reminder."
One other imaginative description is the poem of Charles Bigot on La Tour de Constance, in which the Huguenot women were many long years imprisoned. It is written in the charming Nimois patois, and runs thus in its first few lines:
"Tour de la simple et forte,
Simbol de glorie et de piété,
Tour de pauvres femmes mortes
Pour leur Dieu et la liberté."
These few introductory lines will recall to the memory of all who know the history of the Crusades and of St. Louis the part played by this old walled city of Aigues-Mortes.
More complete, and more frowning and grim, than Carcassonne, it has not a tithe of its interest, but, for all that, it is the most satisfying example of a walled stronghold of mediæval times yet extant.
With all its gloom, its bareness, and the few hundreds of shaking pallid mortals which make up its present-day population, the marsh city of Aigues-Mortes is a lively memory to all who have seen it.
One comes by road and drives his automobile in through the battlemented gateway over the cobbled main street, or struggles up on foot from the station of the puny and important little railway which brings people down from Arles in something over an hour's time. Ultimately, one and all arrive at the excellent Hôtel St. Louis, and eat bountifully of fresh fish of the Mediterranean, well cooked by the patron-chef, and well served by a dainty Arlésienne maiden of fifteen summers, who looks as though she might be twenty-two.
"C'est un chose à voir" every one tells you in the Bouches-du-Rhône when you mention Aigues-Mortes; and truly it is. As before suggested, you will not want to sleep within its dreary walls, but "it's a thing to see" without question, and to get away from as soon as possible, before a peculiarly vicious breed of mosquito inoculates you with the toxic poison of the marshes.
Now we are approaching the land of the poet Mistral, the most romantic region in all modern France, where the inhabitant in his repose and his pleasure still lives in mediæval times and chants and dances himself (and herself) into a sort of semi-indifference to the march of time.
The Crau and the Camargue, lying south of Arles between Aigues-Mortes and the Etang de Berre, is the greatest fête-making pays, one might think, in all the world.
How many times, from January to January, the Provençal "makes the fête" it would be difficult to state – on every occasion possible, at any rate.
The great fête of Provence is the day of the ferrande, a sort of a cattle round-up held on the Camargue plain, something like what goes on in "le Far West," as the French call it, only on not so grand a scale.
Mistral describes it of course:
"On a great branding-day came this throng,
A help for the mighty herd-mustering,
Li Santo, Aigo Marto, Albaron,
And from Faraman, a hundred horses strong
Came out into the desert."
Here we were in the midst of the land of fêtes, and if we could not see a ferrande in all its savage, unspoiled glory, we would see what we could.
We were in luck, as we learned when we put into St. Gilles for the night, and comfortably enough housed our auto in the remise of the company, or individual, which has the concession for the stage line across the Camargue, which links up the two loose ends of a toy railway, one of which ends at Aigues-Mortes, and the other at Stes. Maries-de-la-Mer.
Our particular piece of luck was the opportunity to be present at the pilgrimage to the shrine of the three Marys of Judea, which took place on the morrow.
The poet Mistral sets it all out in romantic verse in his epic "Mirèio," and one and all were indeed glad to embrace so fortunate an opportunity of participating in one of the most nearly unique pilgrimages and festivals in all the world.
We entered the little waterside town the next morning soon after sunrise, en auto. Others came by rail, on foot, on horseback, or by the slow-going roulotte, or caravan; pilgrims from all corners of the earth, the peasant folk of Provence, the Arlésiens and Arlésiennes, and the dwellers of the great Camargue plain.
The picture is quite as "Mirèio" saw it in the poem: the vision of the lone sentinel church by the sea, which rises above the dunes of the Camargue to-day, as it did in the olden time.
"'It looms at last in the distance dim,
She sees it grow on the horizon's rim,
The Saintes' white tower across the billowy plain,
Like vessel homeward bound upon the main."
On the dunes of the Camargue, between the blue of the sky and the blue of the Mediterranean waves, sits the gaunt, grim bourg of fisherfolk and herders of the cattle and sheep of the neighbouring plain. The lone fortress-church rises tall and severe in its outlines, and the whole may be likened to nothing as much as a desert mirage that one sees in his imagination.
At the foot of the crenelated, battlemented walls of the church are the white, pink, and blue walled houses of the huddling population, and the dory-like boats of the fishers.
Officially the town is known as Stes. Maries-de-la-Mer, but the reliques of the three Marys, who fled from Judea in company with Sts. Lazare, Maxim, and Trophime, and other followers, including their servant Sara, have given it the popular name of "Les Saintes."
The exiles, barely escaping death by drowning, came to shore here, and, thankful for being saved from death, thereupon celebrated the first mass to be said in France, the saints Maxim and Lazare officiating.
Maxim, Lazare, Sidoine, Marthe, and Madeleine immediately set out to spread the Word throughout Provence in the true missionary spirit, but the others, the three Marys, St. Trophime, and Sara, remained behind to do what good they might among the fishers.
The pilgrimage to this basilique of "Les Saintes" has ever been one of great devotion. In 1347 the Bishops of Paris and of Coutances, in Normandy, accorded their communicants many and varied indulgences for having made "la feste S. Mari Cléophée qui est le XXVe Mai, et la feste S. Marie Salomé, XXIIe Octobre, festeront, O l'histoire d'elles prescherent, liront ou escouteront attentilment et devotement."
In the fourteenth century three thousand or more souls drew a livelihood from the industries of "Les Saintes" and the neighbourhood, and its civic affairs were administered by three consuls, who were assisted in their duties by three classes of citizen office-holders —divities, mediocres, and paupers, the latter doubtless the "povres gens" mentioned in the testament of Louis I. of Provence, he who bequeathed the guardianship of his soul to "Saintes Maries Jacobé et Salomé, Catherine, Madeleine et Marthe."
The first day's celebration was devoted to the further gathering of the throng and the "Grand Mess." At the first note of the "Magnificat" the reliques were brought forth from the upper chapel and the crowd from within and without broke into a thunderous "Vivent les Saintes Maries!" Then was sung the "Cantique des Saintes:"
"O grandes Saintes Maries
Si chéries
De notre divin Sauveur," etc.
On the second day a procession formed outside the church for the descent to the historic sands, upon which the holy exiles first made their landing, the men bearing on their shoulders a representation of the barque which brought the saints thither. There were prelates and plebeians and tourists and vagabond gipsies in line, and one and all they entered into the ceremony with an enthusiasm – in spite of the sweltering sun – which made up for any apparent lack of devoutness, for, alas! most holy pilgrimages are anything but holy when taken in their entirety.
The church at "Les Saintes" is a wonder-work. As at Assisi, in Italy, there are three superimposed churches, a symbol of the three states of religion; the crypt, called the catacombs, and suggestive of persecution; the fortified nave, a symbol of the body which prays, but is not afraid to fight; and the chapelle supérieure, the holy place of the saints of heaven, the Christian counsellors in whose care man has been confided. This, at any rate, is the professional description of the symbolism, and whether one be churchman or not he is bound to see the logic of it all.
Deep down in the darkened crypt are the reliques of the dusky Sara, the servant of the holy Marys. She herself has been elevated to sainthood as the patronne of the vagabond gipsies of all the world. On the occasion of the Fête of Les Saintes Maries the nomads, Bohemians, and Gitanos from all corners of the globe, who have been able to make the pilgrimage thither, pass the night before the shrine of their sainted patronne, as a preliminary act to the election of their queen for the coming year.
The gipsy of tradition is supposed to be a miserly, wealthy, sacrilegious fellow who goes about stealing children and dogs and anything else he can lay his hands upon. He may have his faults, but to see him kneeling before the shrine of his "patronne reine Sara," ragged and travel-worn and yet burning costly candles and saying his Aves as piously and incessantly as a praying-machine of the East, one can hardly question but that they have as much devoutness as most others.
The hotels of "Les Saintes" offer practically nothing in the way of accommodation, and what there is, which costs usually thirty sous a night, has, during the fête, an inflated value of thirty or even fifty francs, and, if you are an automobilist, driving the most decrepit out-of-date old crock that ever was, they will want to charge you a hundred. You will, of course, refuse to pay it, for you can eat up the roadway at almost any speed you like, – there is no one to say you nay on these lonesome roads, – and so, after paying fifty centimes a pailful for some rather muddy water to refresh the water circulation of your automobile, you pull out for some other place – at least we did. One must either do this, or become a real nomad and sleep in the open, with the stars for candles, and a bunch of beach-grass for a pillow. If you were a Romany cheil you would sleep in, or under, your own roulotte, on a mattress, which, in the daytime, is neatly folded away in the rear of your wagon, or hung in full view, temptingly spread with a lace coverlet. This in the hope that some passing pilgrim will take a fancy to the lace spread and want to buy it; when will come a trading and bargaining which will put horse-selling quite in the shade, for it is here that the woman of the establishment comes in, and the gipsy woman on a trade is a Tartar.
Finally, on the last day, came the "Grande Entrée des Tauraux," which, it would seem, was the chief event which drew the Camargue population thither. They came in couples, a man and a woman on the back of a single Camargue pony, whole families in a Provençal cart, on foot, on bicycles, and in automobiles.
Six Spanish-crossed bulls, were brought up in a great closed van and loosed in an improvised bull-ring, of which the church wall formed one side, and the roof a sort of a tribune. What the curé thought of all this is not clear, but as the alms-coffers of the church were already full to the lids, and the parish depends largely upon the contributions of visitors to replenish its funds, any seeming sacrilege was winked at.
For three days we had "made the fête" and saw it all, and did most of the things that the others did, except that we always slept at St. Gilles, far away by the long flat road which winds in and out among the marshes, flamingo nests, and rice-fields of the Camargue.
The "bull-fight," so called, was nothing so very bloodthirsty or terrifying; merely the worrying by the "amateurs" of a short-legged, little black bull, about the size of a well-formed Newfoundland dog, or perhaps a little larger – appearances are often deceptive when one receives a disappointment.
Truly, as Mistral says, Provence is a land of joy and, laughter, and fêtes followed close on one another, it seemed.
We had seen the announcements in the local journals of a "Mis à Mort" at Nîmes, and a "Corrida de Meurte" – borrowing the phrase from the Spanish – at Arles, each to take place in the great Roman arenas, which had not seen bloodshed for centuries; not since the days when the Romans matched men against each other in gladiatorial combat, and turned tigers loose upon captive slaves.
The "to-the-death" affairs of Arles and Nîmes appealed to us only that we might contrast the modern throngs that crowd the benches with those which history tells us viewed the combats of old. Doubtless there is little resemblance, but all the same there is a certain gory tradition hanging about the old walls and arches of those great arenas which is utterly lacking in the cricket-field, tawdry plazas of some of the Spanish towns. The grim arcades of these great Roman arenas are still full of suggestion.
We did not see either the "Mis à Mort" at Arles, or the "Corrida de Meurte" at Nîmes; the automobile got stalled for a day in the midst of the stony Crau, with a rear tire which blew itself into pieces, and necessitated a journey by train into Arles in order to get another to replace it. Owing to the slowness of this apology for a railway train, and the awkwardness of the timetable, the great "Mis à Mort" at Arles was long over ere we had set out over the moonlit Crau for Martigues on the shores of the Etang de Berre.
We knew Martigues of old, its bouillabaisse, the Père Chabas and all the cronies of the Café du Commerce where you kept your own special bottle, of whatever apéritif poison you fancied, in order that you might be sure of getting it unadulterated.
"La Venise de Provence," Martigues, is known by artists far and wide. Chabas and his rather grimy little hotel, which he calls the Grand Hotel something or other, has catered for countless hundreds of artist folk who have made the name and fame of Martigues as an artist's sketching-ground. After a three weeks' pretty steady automobile run the artist of the party craved peace and rest and an opportunity of putting Martigues's glorious sunsets on canvas, and so we camped out with Chabas, and ate bouillabaisse and the beurre de Provence and langouste and Chabas's famous straw potatoes and rum omelette for ten days, and were sorry when it was all over.
