CHAPTER XII

TARASCON

"You seem to have found a very interesting book," said Barbara, with an amused smile, to which I had grown accustomed.

"You have been poring over it for half an hour. I suppose it's poetry," Barbara went on, with philosophical but not at all disdainful aloofness from that particular form of human aberration.

"No—o; not conventionally speaking, poetry."

In truth it was the local time-table.

But it was poetry after all. Consider the list of names: Avignon, Tarascon, Beaucaire, Arles, Nimes, Montpellier, BÉziers, Carcassonne, Albi, Aigues Mortes, Carpentras, Cabestaing, UzÈs, Vaucluse, L'Isle sur Sorgue, Aix-en-Provence—all printed irreverently in heartless columns, as if they were not worth mentioning except for their relation to time and tide.

"Now which of all these desecrated shrines of history shall we go to?"

Barbara said they were one and all Greek to her at present, and she would be happy with any of them.

"Suppose we just drift along this line—this bejewelled line—and let things happen to the south-east, with only a few tooth-brushes in a hand-bag?"

Barbara was perfectly willing, but said she must take a night-gown and a comb as well.

It was a glorious morning when the train puffed out of the station at Avignon and took a sharp swerve in order to give us a fine last view of that "little city of colossal aspect," as Victor Hugo calls it. Always that dominating palace on the height stretching long and massive across the hillside. The high mountains to the south-east stood entrancingly blue, Mont Ventoux looking as heavenly and innocent as if the bare thought of harbouring—much more of deliberately producing a mistral were a baseness of which she was utterly incapable. She would hesitate at so much as a stiff breeze! Yet we had caught her in the act but yesterday and had left behind in our boxes damning proof of her guilt in the remnants of two once quite respectable hats which her protÉgÉ had playfully divided into segments as we crossed the street to post our letters.

"Let us go to Tarascon!"

Barbara jumped at it, and we centred our hopes and imaginings on that most ProvenÇal of ProvenÇal cities as the train puffed along on its leisurely way.

The towers of Chateau Renard in the middle distance have a romantic, mysterious effect, standing as they do on a rocky little hill just far enough away to look strangely mysterious, with the soft bloom of the spaces and the peaked ranges behind it. The station of Barbentane is on the line, but we did not succeed in making out the village on the hill-top.

Ardouin-Dumazet writes:—

"Les cultures enveloppent jusqu'au Rhone le petit massif sur lequel se dresse la haute Tour de Barbentane."

This gives one at once the character of the country. Further on we come to La Montagnette de Tarascon, which "contrasts its bare slopes with the opulent plain. It is like an island rising out of verdure—the white calcined rock takes in an amusing fashion, the airs of a chain of rocky mountains. The Montagnette is a miniature of the Alpilles, those miniature Alps."

The Alpilles—strange little knobbly mountains—grow into greater prominence as we move eastward and the outline shows itself more than ever eccentric and altogether out of fashion, as one imagines fashion among mountains.

They have a style of their own, a marked personality that is very fascinating. They were yet to explore, with their memories of the campaign of Marius, their Courts of Love, their rock-hewn city of Les Baux, their Trou d'Enfer, their haunts of the famous witch TavÈn and her demon-companies. We had half a mind to divert from our route at once and take the little local train up into the heart of the range, but not liking to think ourselves lacking in decision of character, we nailed our colours to the mast, and resolved to see Tarascon first.

The famous town lies charmingly on the river-side; a mass of roofs and towers, with its castle of King RenÉ—that most delightful and lively of monarchs; a real drawing-master castle, absurdly picturesque, with two vast round machicolated towers (very troublesome to shade), and a frowning entrance between them. (Surely all drawing-masters have taken this castle as their model since time began!) On the landward side is a dry moat and a stretch of grass and weeds (the weeds worked in with a sharp professional touch in the foreground). Just across the Rhone the vast bridge, which Tartarin thought too long and slender, leads to the town and high up on the hill, proud and desolate, the rival castle of Beaucaire.

"Embarras de Beaucaire!"

Ardouin-Dumazet says that in his childhood his family had a neighbour, a good woman, whose exclamation on the smallest obstacle was invariably "Embarras de Beaucaire!" And that, he adds, "gave us a grand idea of the encumbered state of this famous town."

"Si vous aviez vu Beaucaire pendant la foire!"

As we looked across that stupendous bridge, the phrase brought with it the picture of a mass of booths along the quay, shipping and flags and merchandise; and crowds in holiday costumes of every colour, for people flocked from all countries to buy and sell at the great fair "celebrated even beyond the Syrian deserts."

Dumazet records a conversation he had with one old man who remembered the great fair in his childhood.

"Then one should see Beaucaire!"

He described the coming of hundreds of ships, carrying each a whole stable full of horses for towing up the river on the return journey; and how the great canal brought boats from Aigues Mortes and Albi, and the sea brought Turks, Algerians, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, with silk, pearls, figs, and a thousand objects of merchandise. Then the good people of Beaucaire were inundated with heretics and pagans. When there were disputes between the merchants, a tribunal on the spot settled the matter. All was arranged in departments: silks, wools, cottons, whole streets of booths devoted to jewellery, spices, coffee, and so forth. In the evening the company cooked their dinners between stones on the shores of the river; "and one shouted and one laughed, and the physicians and the acrobats and the bear-tamers called to the crowd with loud cries amid the noise of cymbals and tambourines. Fine ladies and gentlemen came from long distances to see all that!"

We heave a sigh of regret at the passing away of so many bright and cheering things, such as fairs and picturesque shipping, and turn to wander, as the fancy takes us, about the pleasant streets of Tarascon, visiting the tomb of St. Martha, but, through misdirection, missing the Tarasque. However, we knew all about his very singular personal appearance from descriptions and drawings. Tarascon is now probably more associated with Tartarin in our minds than with St. Martha, but it is a beautiful legend of the gentle saint who by sheer force of lovingness was able to change the ravaging Tarasque—a creature certainly born with no hereditary turn for polite usages—into a pleasant, regenerate animal of gentlemanly manners. Along the bright ways of the city, as the legend goes, the procession moved: a crowd of excited people, a beautiful woman with a light playing round her head, leading by a silken cord the reformed monster who ambles after her as quietly as if he were a pet-lamb: this huge hybrid of a creature, with the body of an alligator, the legs of a grand-piano, the head of a dragon, and a "floreat tail" of heraldic design which he flourishes affably in response to the plaudits of the multitude.

And never again did he ravage the country round Tarascon or carry off so much as a single babe, after St. Martha had pointed out to him, with her usual sweet reasonableness, how wrong-headed and how essentially immoral such conduct had been.

It is disappointing to be told by an innovating savant that this sweet lady was not St. Martha at all, but merely the Christianised form of the ancient Phoenician goddess Martis, the patroness of sailors, who had for her symbols a ship and a dragon. What is one to be allowed to believe?

The Phoenicians, one has to admit, plied a busy trade along these coasts. Their language has left traces in the ProvenÇal dialects, and images have been found at Marseilles of Melkarth and Melita, or Hercules and Venus, known in the Bible as Baal and Ashtaroth. There has even been discovered a tariff for sacrifices in the temple of Baal, giving a list of dues legally established for the payments of the priests.

(Barbara was utterly confounded to find these distinctly Biblical deities figuring so far from home.)

The tariff is a long affair, and goes into all possible details. But the following extract maybe worth quoting:—

"For an entire ox, the ordinary sacrifice, the priests are to receive 10 shekels. At the sacrifice, in addition, 300 shekels of flesh," and so on.

But it does not follow, from all this, that St. Martha did not subdue the Tarasque. Moreover, Tarasques are being subdued every day by Marthas not by any means arrived at saintship. The old legend, be its origin Christian, Phoenician, Celtic or classic, reads almost like a parable by which to convey the old truth that love and kindness have power to subdue evil which force has failed to overcome.

St. Martha's tomb and shrine are in the church dedicated to her at Tarascon, and, until lately, there were yearly processions through the city, in which the gigantic creature was paraded in triumph, the legs of the man inside being ingeniously "dissimulated by a band of stuff."

The Tarasque is furious on the second Sunday after Pentecost. But later, on the day of St. Martha, he passes, gentle as a lamb, led by a young girl. The man inside, with his "dissimulated legs," curvets and gambols amiably. And the people sing the "Lagagdigadeu," a song invented, it is said, by King RenÉ himself, inspired perhaps by the tumult of the fÊte passing his castle down by the Rhone. Or just the swish of the waters as they sweep past the walls of the donjon might easily set fancies ringing in a head like King RenÉ's, who saw things as they are, with the song and the radiance in them.

And the people went following the procession, shouting:—

And the Tarasque wags his tail (a straight beam, be it remembered) and overturns some of the crowd. And the people are delighted with the prowess of their beast. If one is injured they cry:

"A qua ben fe, la tarascoa rou un brÉ" ("Well done, the tarasque has broken his arm").

And the clumsy procession moves away and the crowds sing and shout: "Voulen mai nostro tarasco" ("We wish again for our tarasque"). And so they let off any amount of superfluous energy.

It is a subject for reflection among sociologists whether the dying out of pageants and dancing, festivals of harvest and seed-time—all the natural expressions of human joy—does not constitute a serious danger to the modern state. For either that joy will find some less healthy kind of expression or it will be killed altogether; and in that case the race, as a race, must be killed also, as a flower deprived of the sunshine and the airs of heaven. It is not joy, but the lack of it that drives a nation mad!

So much for Puritanism!

No one can be in the South, above all in Provence, knowing of its ancient festivals, its music, its farandoles and Saracenic dances, and fail to be startled into new realisation of this element that has passed out of our life, the menace that lies in the pervading dullness, that benumbed worship of sorrow, of "work" and "duty" without understanding and without freshness, that absence of fantasy and outcry that binds the modern world in a terrible and unnatural silence. Of what avail is it that the people are law-abiding at the cost of the very spring and essence of being? There is a Nemesis that follows this sort of virtue: and it visits the virtues of the fathers upon the children for many a hapless generation. There is a curious example of this in the experience of the Society of Friends who took upon themselves to banish colour and music from their lives, for righteousness' sake, and have now succeeded—according to the testimony of one of their number—in also destroying all response to those artistic appeals, so that whole realms of being are shut off from the children of a race that was afraid to accept their complete inheritance as human beings. It is to be hoped that the heart too has been atrophied, for it is difficult to imagine a hotter hell than that must be for a man or woman capable of the full tide of emotional life and yet unable to find expression for it in heaven or earth!

For the vast majority of mankind there are now no recurrent pleasures worthy of the name, no balance to the dead weight of mere toil and ennui, no taste of that mysterious magnetism that dwells in throngs bent on the same object, inspired by the same joyous idea. With the world of to-day has come a dulling of the aspect of things, a loss of Élan and fire; a perilous deprivation of the primitive form of artistic outpouring. And it is more than doubtful whether mankind can exist without it. Is there indeed any object in trying that dangerous experiment?

Why are the majority of moralists, who are so much concerned for the "good of humanity," so terrified at the sight of humanity a little happy and spontaneous?

It is at Tarascon, for some unknown ProvenÇal reason, that the famous Arles sausages are made. We wondered if the accomplished city also provided Arles with its beautiful women.

There is some difficulty in persuading oneself of the great antiquity of the cheerful, sleepy little town. It looks indeed by no means new, but the wear and tear seems rather that of the life of to-day than of centuries ago. Yet Strabo (says Paul MariÉton) mentions ta?a???? as much frequented in his time. Moreover, at Beaucaire, just across the Rhone, there is a quarter called Rouanesse, which is said to be a corruption of Rhodanusia, an ancient Greek colony.

For some reason or other we happened, in our wanderings, to return and return again to the place till at last all strangeness seemed to depart from it. It was beginning to have for us more or less the aspect that it probably had for the natives, allowing, of course, always for the effect upon them of never having seen much besides the sunny main street and broad square, with their hotels and homely houses, and the plane-trees whose thin shade is grateful even on a November morning. To see a place too much is never to see it at all.

We grew familiar even with the faces of the people as they came and went along the ample pavement which sets back the houses pleasantly far from the road.

In the middle of this spreading, easy-going, desultory main street a row of carriages for hire stand waiting under a few small trees for the chance traveller who descends to see the sights of Tarascon between trains.

"Voulez-vous une voiture, Mesdames, pour voir la ville? l'Église de Ste. Marthe, le ChÂteau du Roi RenÉ, la tarasque, et Beaucaire; tout dans une heure et quart, ou vingt minutes sans Beaucaire."

We made this classic round on our first visit, including Beaucaire, and a wonderful circlet of picturesque mediÆvalism it is; but afterwards we preferred to find our own way; to wander through the great stone gate on the left and glance or saunter down dozens of alluring byways, where one would come upon fine old doors, carved lintels, canopies, shrines at the street corners, flowers on the window-sills, the quick perspective of street line dark against the sky, and everywhere the sharp lights and shadows of the south.

Sometimes, indeed, we would take a drive if only to please the good-natured "Tartarins" who drove the carriages. Their black eyes and bronzed skin were very impressive at first, but when the effect of these had begun to wear off, we realised that close resemblance to the tenor of an opera did not involve anything dramatic in type of character. They were quiet, industrious, polite fellows, earning their meagre living by a somewhat precarious industry. But of that presently.

Our particular Tartarin was somewhat shocked that we had not yet seen the tarasque, so there was nothing for it but to set forth in quest of the monster.

There is in the museum at Avignon a strange, uncanny beast carved in stone which is called the tarasque, but the effigy that is, or used to be, carried round the town at Tarascon is quite a young and giddy creature, built of painted wood, and passes its existence during the intervals of public function in a sort of large stable which is kept under lock and key.

We were driven solemnly through the narrow streets, till at length the fly drew up and we alighted at a stately portal, where, after a few moments of waiting, the custodian appeared with his keys, and then back the doors scrooped on their hinges.

Laughter was out of keeping with the occasion; our poor cocher would have been cut to the heart, but it was hard work to behave decorously. Out of an old-Dutch-master gloom of background loomed forth a grotesquely terrible monster, whose proper sphere was certainly the pantomime. Enormous red-rimmed eyes stared ferociously at the intruders from a round, cat-like face rayed with bristling white whiskers. There was also a touch of hippopotamus in the cast of countenance, only it lacked the sweeter expression of that more philosophic beast. The creature had evidently had a new coat of paint—black with red facings—for the huge body was beautifully glossy.

"La voilÀ, la tarasque!" said our coachman, with pardonable pride.

We hesitated in our comments. Barbara, rather from lack of familiarity with the nuances of the language than from any want of frankness, murmured something about "trÈs jolie"; and Tartarin said, "En effet, Madame, mais on devait la voir quand on fait le tour de la ville au jour de fÊte, mais c'est Épatant!"

"Je le crois bien," I murmured appreciatively.

Tartarin suggested that we might like to see the rest of the animal before leaving, and so we made the round (he extended far into the depths of his gloomy dwelling), admiring the pose and the noble proportions of the creature—rather like an old-fashioned locomotive—and the formidable nature of the tail. Then we felt that without indiscretion we might depart. As we drove off we caught a last glimpse of that unspeakably ridiculous beast who stood glaring at nothing in the darkness, silent and steadily ferocious to the last. Then the great doors were swung together and the pride of Tarascon was hidden from our view.

One could but laugh, and yet that absurd effigy was the representative of the beginnings of our history as a race!

The Christian version of the story is of yesterday: the arrival of the saints on the shores of pagan Gaul and the conversion of Tarascon to the new faith by St. Martha. Some trace the legend to Phoenician sources, as has been already mentioned; more frequently the animal is regarded as a Celtic deity or demon, and there are stories of Hercules and a giant named Taras or Tauriskos: the classic form of the tradition. In any case it belongs to the Twilight of the Gods, and if one could really trace the family tree of that mongrel monster to its roots one would possibly acquire a good deal of knowledge that would startle archÆologists.

It was not till late in the fifteenth century, however, that the fÊte of the tarasque was instituted by King RenÉ, that most artistic of monarchs, who loved to see his people gay and happy; so it was somewhat later than the real troubadour days that our cat-hippopotamus began to enjoy a sort of established position; which shows that no one need despair of appreciation if only he will wait long enough.

We visited more than once the shrine of the gentle conqueror of the tarasque: standing—it was startling to remember—on the very spot where Clovis, King of the Franks, once stood, when newly converted to Christianity by his saintly wife Clothilde. The shrine is in a quiet, half-subterranean chapel in the church of her name. The tomb is under a low vault and the marble figure of the saint rests on the big stone slab with joined hands and a look of deep peace on her beautiful face. Certainly it is the face of a woman who might win over ravaging monsters to sweetness and light. Above the tomb is the inscription:

Solicita non turbima.