CHAPTER I

THE SPELL OF PROVENCE

During the night there was a great and unexplained tumult: rustling sounds in the little courtyard to which our rooms looked out; whisperings along the corridors; distant bangings; footsteps, voices—or was it the remaining rumours of a dream?

Then a great sigh and a surging among the shrubs in the courtyard. The creepers sway against the windows, and something seems to sweep through the room. Presently a rush and a rattle among the jalousies, and a high scream as of some great angry creature flying with frantic wings over the courtyard and across the sky.

The mistral!

There was no mistaking our visitor.

A great angry creature, indeed, and no one who has seen the Land of the Sun and Wind only under the sway of the more benign power can have any conception of the passion and storm of this mighty Brigand of the Mountain.

We begin now to understand the meaning of the epithet, "windy Avignon." And if one considers its position on the plain of the Rhone and the Durance—the country stretching south and east to the mysterious stony desert of the Crau[1] and the great regions of the mouths of the Rhone—it is easy to see how the Black Wind, rushing down from his home in the ranges of Mont Ventoux and the Luberon, must sweep the streets of the city and fill every nook and corner with whirl and trouble.

The Rhone that "bends round Avignon to salute Our Lady on her high rock," as Mistral proclaims, grows white with anger under the lash, noble river that she is!

Round farmstead and garden, along her banks, and far away on the great spaces of this wonderful country, long, tall rows of cypresses keep guard over house and home; for only these steadfast trees of Wisdom and of Sorrow can stand against the fury of the mistral. For unnumbered ages, long, long before all human history or tradition, he has lorded it over the country, descending after the fashion of the ancient Ligurian inhabitants from the hill-tops, for raid and ravage in the valleys.

Many have been his victims from first to last; among them the daughter to whom Madame de SÉvignÉ addresses her famous letters. She suffers from his onslaught upon her ProvenÇal chÂteau of Grignan, which was nearly destroyed by the monster; unless, indeed, the lady is romancing a little to keep her lively mother amused and quiet; for Madame de SÉvignÉ writes: "Vous dÉpeignez cette horreur comme Virgile!"

A householder seriously damaged in his property would be most unlikely to describe the disaster thus classically. Perhaps a chimney or two blown off and a roof carried away may have stimulated Madame de Grignan's fancy. There were always those letters to be written and a certain dearth of subjects for a lady besieged by the mistral in a ProvenÇal chÂteau. What Madame de Grignan must have said one gathers from the mother's reply—

"Voila le vent, le tourbillon, l'ouragon, les diables dÉchainÉs, qui veulent emporter votre chÂteau.... Ah ma fille, quelle Ébranlement universel!"

The mother recommends taking refuge in Avignon; a curious place to flee to from such a foe! But in those days there was no swift flight possible, and a removal from the howling country to the whistling town was all that could be achieved even by the wealthy. One wonders how the removal of a household was effected when there were no railways and probably few roads—and a mistral at full tilt across the plains!

Poets of all ages have sung of the feats of the amazing wind, and there are descriptions of its furious descent upon the Crau, where in default of anything better to wreak its anger upon, it sends the stones hurling across the plain. Nothing can stand against it. Mistral says that in tempest "il souffle toujours. Les arbres ... se courbent, se secouent À arracher leurs troncs."

The ancients assigned a place to the great wind among their deities, and the Emperor Augustus erected a temple in its honour. It is curious how this pagan feeling of personality in the wind survives to this day.

Its famous namesake, the ProvenÇal poet, whose home is at Maillane, on the great plain among the guardian cypresses, expresses the sentiment in a hundred forms, and he adduces a still more striking instance in the account he once gave of his father—a fine specimen of the ProvenÇal farmer or yeoman—who had a positive adoration for "le bon vent."

"Le jour ou l'on vannait le blÉ, souvent il n'y avait pas un souffle d'air pour emporter la poussiÈre blonde, alors, mon pÈre avait recours a une sorte d'invocation au mistral.

"Souffle mon mignon, disait il, et il priait et implorait.

"Eh bien, le vent venait et mon pÈre, etait plein de joie, et il criait 'brava, brava.'"

In his house at Maillane, protected from foreign intrusion by the double army of the winds and the mosquitos, this chief of the FÉlibres passes his days, rejoicing in their scourges because they frighten away the wandering tourist—"tempted by our horizons and our sky"—from the land of the Sun and the Cypress.

To him the roar and shriek of the mistral is always a "musico majestuoso."

This tremendous being (as indeed he seems when one has once felt the very earth shaking beneath his assault) must be responsible for much in the ProvenÇal character and literature; it is impossible to believe it to have been without profound influence on the imagination of the many races that have made the country their home.

Its voice is elemental, passionate, sometimes expressing blind fury, but often full of an agony that even its own tremendous cry cannot utter; a torment as of Prometheus and a grandeur of spirit no less than his.

The mistral produces effects of astonishing contrast; for when he is silent Provence is the most smiling, kindly land in the world; and half its stories are of gentle and lovely things: of chivalry, of romance, of dance and song and laughter. But when once the Black Wind begins to rouse himself from his lair on Mont Ventoux, then tragedy and pain and despair are abroad on wide dark wings.

All the "merry hamlets" of Provence have delightful courts or places shaded with plane-trees. Here the villagers assemble on Sundays and Saints' days, and here may always be found a few happy loungers resting on the benches, or playing some game of whose mysterious antiquity they are blissfully unconscious.

It is the country of mediÆvalism; it is still more the country of paganism, of Greek temples, Phoenician inscriptions and tombs, Roman baths, amphitheatres, aqueducts; it boasts a profusion of exquisite churches, splendid mediÆval castles; scenes of troubadour history, of the reputed Courts of Love; of a thousand traditions and stories that have become the heritage of every civilised people.

In the valley of Elorn, near Landerneau—called the Cradle of Chivalry—was found, according to the legend, the veritable round table of King Arthur, and here rose into the sky the towers of the ChÂteau de Joyeuse Garde of the Arthurian legends.

But Provence rests its claim to having been the birthplace of Chivalry on better grounds than this, for the first troubadour was a ProvenÇal, the Comte Quilhelm de Poictier; a most debonnaire gentleman, of attractive appearance, courtly manners, and an exhaustive knowledge of the Gay Science, making great havoc with the hearts of ladies.

The colour of the landscape in Provence is as vivid as the history of its people.

A writer speaks of "la couleur violente, presque exaspÉrÉe, des montagnes."

There is no country that can be less conveyed to the imagination by an enumeration of topographical facts. The more exact the description the less we arrive at the land that Mistral sees and loves.

Of this poet, characteristically ProvenÇal, Lamartine is reported to have said—

"I bring you glad tidings, a great epic poet is born among us. The West produces no more such poets, but from the nature of the South they will spring forth. It is from the sun alone that power flows."

It is from the sun that life flows, is the irresistible conclusion that one comes to under the skies of the Midi.

Science has insisted upon the fact, and no one seriously disputes it, but not to dispute and to actually accept are two very different conditions of mind. Legend, proverb, history, song, all seem to tell of a life more intense, more "vibrant," as their great poet describes the ProvenÇals—in the troubadour country than elsewhere; unless indeed one goes still farther into the regions of the sun and falls under the kindred spell of Italy.

In England archÆology seems cold and dead. In the South it conjures up visions of a teeming life; generation after generation of peoples, race after race, civilisation after civilisation.

Paradox as it seems, the multitude of dead or ruined or vanished cities that have lined the coast from the Pyrenees to the Var strangely enhances this sense of vitality and persistence of human activities.

But one records and records, and yet one has not Provence. One has but her mountains and contours, her blue sky, and perhaps her wild wind—but there is always something beyond.

One sees the Rhone and the Durance on their way to the sea—splendid headlong rivers; one sees the melancholy brooding wilderness of the Crau, where Hercules and the quarrelsome Titans flung those huge stones at one another in the dim old days; one sees always the strange, fantastic little limestone chain of the Alpilles which finishes to the south-east the great semicircle begun to the west by the higher ranges. The eye follows everywhere, fascinated, the battalions of cypresses, while over all is the flooding light, vibrating, living. And yet after all is said, Provence is still an unknown land.

It is one of the haunted lands, the spell-weaving lands. It enslaves as no obvious technical beauty of landscape can enslave.

Provence is like one of its own enchanting ladies of the troubadour days, and strangely significant is it that this nameless quality of the country should have been thus reproduced by the crown and flower of its people. For this attribute of charm belongs to knight and baron, soldier and singer, if we may trust the old songs and the old stories. But, par excellence, it belonged to the cultivated lady of the epoch. Take, for instance, the mysterious Countess of Die or Dia, of whose identity nothing is certainly known. She was a writer of songs and the heroine of one of the poetical love-stories of the age: a lady capable of deep and faithful love, unhappily for her peace of mind. Of the subtlety of her attractions one may judge by the power which the mere dead records wield to this day over the imagination. This is how a modern author writes of her—

"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."