CHAPTER XXVII

ACROSS THE AGES

There is a vast work on Provence by le Sieur HonorÉ de Bouche, Docteur en Theologie, A.P.D.S.I., printed at Aix, by Charles David, "printer to the King, the clergy and the town," MDCLXIV. It is bound in ancient brown leather;—two majestic volumes which have to be propped up against something substantial or laid upon a family dining-table in order to be read in any sort of security. Less serious treatment, such as an attempt to balance the tomes on the knee between the arms of a chair, however solid, always results in a temporary eclipse of the student. The difficulties of acquiring erudition in this case are physical as well as intellectual. But the dangers of the road are worth braving even if one does come off with an aching head and some few marks of conflict.

The author, as beseems a doctor in theology, begins the history of his country from the creation of the world, and goes steadily on with a really terrible staying power till the reign of Louis XIV., where he is forced to stop, having arrived at his own times. The height of the volumes is such that the reader has the sensation (and almost the necessity) of alternately stretching and collapsing like a telescope in order to read a page from top to bottom; and this movement seems to emphasise the sense given by the narrative of journeying through the centuries in company with the whole brilliant procession of Counts and Kings, rulers and high sovereigns of Provence.

Roman governors, Pagan Emperors, Christian Emperors, Burgundian and Visigoth Kings, Ostogoths and Franks, Merovingians, Carlovingians, Kings of Arles and Burgundy, Kings of Arles "high sovereigns"; Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire; Counts Proprietary and Hereditary of Arles and Provence, Counts of Anjou of the 1st Race of the House of France, Counts of Anjou of the 2nd Race, in the direct line of St. Louis; and finally, from Louis XI. onwards—Kings of France: the long pageant streams by in ordered magnificence, picturesque in setting, rich in colour and attire, with splendid names and sad, splendid destinies.

The Sieur de Bouche heads his first book in the following full-blooded manner:—

This is a mere preliminary, a slight introduction to the body of the work.

The next Book treats of the country under the Romans during 591 years, from 125 b.c. to 466 a.d. This period is divided into three sections.

• I. Provence under the Republic.
• II. Provence under the Pagan Emperors.
• III. Provence under the Christian Emperors

until the arrival of the Burgundians and Visigoths.

Then comes Provence under the first barbarian kings, Burgundian and Visigoth.

The period of the Frankish kings is again divided into Sections (and let no one who has not tackled le Sieur HonorÉ think lightly of a Section!)

The first Section gives 127 years of Carlovingians till 879, when we enter upon the important era of the Kings of Arles and Burgundy, and the beginning of Provence as an independent territory.

Here again we have three Sections:—

• Kings of Arles of the 1st Race,
• Kings of Arles of the 2nd Race,
• Kings of Arles of the 3rd Race,

the latter also being Kings of Burgundy.

Book III. treats of the "Kings of Arles (without property in Provence or Burgundy)."

Section I.—Kings of Arles, high sovereigns, relatives, and heirs testamentary of Rudolph the last King of Arles and Burgundy.

Section II.—Kings of Arles calling themselves high Sovereigns "en qualitÉ d'Empereurs estimant que ce royaume a estÉ uny a l'Empire."

There were 254 years of this dispensation, and among these rulers occur the names of the Emperor Lothair II., Frederick Barbarossa, and so forth.

Then comes the division into "Fiefs of the Kingdom of Arles."

• 1st Fief. The County of Arles from the Durance to the sea.
• 2nd Fief. The County of Forcalquier.
• 3rd Fief. The County of Venaison or of Avignon.
• 4th Fief. The County of Marseilles.
• 5th Fief. The Principality of Orange.
• 6th Fief. "Le DauphinÉ."
• 7th Fief. The Duchy of Savoie.
• 8th Fief. The Sovereign Principality of Meurgues (Monaco), the County of Grignan, the Barony of Les Baux, of Castellane, &c.

All this wide territory constituted the ancient Kingdom of Arles.

Book IV. treats of the Counts Proprietary and Hereditary from 910 until Provence is reunited to the Crown of France (1481). To these the Sieur de Bouche devotes many of his formidable Sections. There are long lines of Bozons and Rothbolds of the 1st Race, and of Raimonds and Raimond Berengers Counts of Catalonia and of Barcellona and Kings of Aragon—beings of a most strange personal appearance if one may judge by the quaint old engravings which head each of the Sieur's Books of Chapters. They stare out of their medallions with a grotesque expression of royal blankness combined with a dull, obscure form of indignation which speaks ill for the "agrÉments" of the post of ruler of Provence in the later Middle Ages. The complication of names and races and titles is almost hopeless at this period. Even our dauntless author says wearily, "nous sortons d'un lieu fort nuageux pour entrer dans un plus tenebreux."

There are three different genealogies of the Counts of the 1st Race, and very little seems to be known of the Counts themselves with the exception of William I.

"It was by him and his valliance that this faithless and barbarous nation of Saracens was driven out who for nearly 100 years occupied the famous fortress of Fraxinet la Garde, whence they issued to make plundering expeditions by sea and land; their fort of Fraxinet and all Provence was entirely delivered from this impious and cruel race of robbers...."

Travellers on the Riviera may see the little village of Garde Freinet—as the ancient hornet's nest is now called—peacefully dreaming among the mountains of the Moors, that magnificent range whose name records for ever the long domination of those irrepressible brigands.

The inhabitants to this day are of obvious Saracen type and the grey hill-top villages of this region are living relics of that mysterious race.

As acknowledgment for his great services to his country William I. was presented by the Seigneur Grimaldi of Monaco with the lands contiguous to the fief of St. Tropez.

So uncertain seem to be the records of the dynasties of Provence that the author has to prove the existence of one of the Counts (Count Bertrand) by means of a document in which he "restores, restitutes, and gives" the Church of Notre Dame des Rats (qui est l'Eglise des Trois Maries en la Camargue) "to the Church of Saint Etienne and Saint Trophime of Arles."

The Catalan Counts of Provence: that is the 2nd Race of Proprietary Counts who were also Counts of Catalonia and Barcelona, give the same difficulty to their historians, who do not agree among themselves. They seem to have become confused by the multiplicity of the names of Raimond Berenger and of Ildefons and Alphonse—"qu'a moins d'avoir le filet d'Ariadne il est impossible de sortir de ce Labyrinthe."

Among these confusing Counts, Raimond Berenger I. stands out for his great virtues; and particularly, says the theologian, "for his great piety towards the Catholic religion and for the great pains he took for the destruction and conversion of the Moors to the Christian faith": "destruction and conversion" being apparently regarded as part of the same pious process.

He is followed by a procession of Raimond Berengers and Berenger Raimonds under whose reign were waged wars with the House of Les Baux alternating with conventions and agreements: long documents in Latin which the Counts of Provence and the Princes of Les Baux would meet in pomp to sign at Arles or at Tarascon.

About this date, late in the twelfth century, was held the great Council at Albi which condemned the Albigenses, so called from that incident.

The placing of the remains of St. Martha in a beautiful church at Tarascon where these had been hidden from the Saracens and the Goths and Vandals, is noted as an important event during the period.

Wars against the Vaudois and Albigenses are spoken of in the reign of Raimond Berenger V., and it is curious to see the account of these hideous persecutions given by a doctor of the Church. The Pope, one would suppose, had been an angel of patience, wearied out at last by the aggressions and crimes of a set of unmanageable criminals.

"Voyant que le douceur exasperait le mal il se resolut de venir aux remÈdes violants et extremes;" a resolution which his Holiness thoroughly carried out.

In all these vast volumes there is not one word of the unspeakable deeds of the Church during those awful wars.

The Counts of Provence were ardently orthodox and fought against Raimond, Count of Toulouse, the sole friend of the Albigenses (as we have already seen).

The troubles of this noble and tolerant race came to an end on the accession of St. Louis by the absorption of the County of Toulouse in the Crown of France, the brother of the king marrying the daughter of the Count, and as they had no children, the lands of the heiress of Toulouse (by compact) were ceded to the throne. Soon after this, Provence also came under the government of the House of France, for the brother of St. Louis, Charles, Count of Anjou, married Beatrice of Provence, and their union inaugurated the reign of the first race of Angevins in Provence.

The ambition of these two brought about the fierce dramatic struggle of Conrad and Manfred and Conradin and the Sicilian Vespers, which ended by making Charles of Anjou and Provence also King of Naples and Sicily.

It interests lovers of Provence to know that only one Frenchman escaped the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers, a ProvenÇal of the great name of Porcelet (whose sombre old house still stands intact at Les Baux) and he was spared because of the great benevolence and nobility of his character.

One of the great events in the history of the country is the transference of the Papal Court to Avignon. Philip le Bel successfully intrigued to place on the Papal throne as Clement V. a Frenchman living in France: Le Gotto, Archbishop of Bordeaux. Having quarrelled with Boniface VIII., Philip desired to have the management of the Papacy in his own hands. Avignon goes back to the Stone Age, so its claims to antiquity were as great as those of Rome herself.

But to return to the Angevin rulers of Provence. The most famous of these were "la Reine Jeanne" (Queen of Naples and Sicily and Countess of Provence) and the good King RenÉ: both of them beloved and admired by the ProvenÇals to this day: Queen Jeanne because of her wonderful beauty and grace, and King RenÉ for his goodness, his charm, his bonhomie, his genius.

There are accounts of the coming of the brilliant Queen to Avignon in order to obtain a dispensation from the Pope to marry Louis of Taranto. "Ravishingly beautiful, she arrived with great pomp, with a retinue on the Rhone," met doubtless by the Cardinals in their scarlet robes, and proceeding amongst the acclaiming people to the palace.

Froissart, in an account of a later interview, makes the Queen tell his Holiness that her father, son of Robert the Good of the first Angevin Counts of Provence, had advised her on his death-bed, if she had no heirs to yield all her territory to whomsoever should be Pope. "In truth, Holy Father, after his decease, with the consent of the nobles of Sicily and Naples, I wedded Andrew of Hungary—he died, a young man, at Aix-en-Provence...."

(As the Queen had had him murdered and thrown out of a window at Aversa, her account of his death lacked completeness.) She then casually mentions her next husband, Prince of Taranto, and in the same sentence alludes en passant to his successor, James, King of Majorca.

"Holy Father," she adds demurely, "I then married the Lord Otho of Brunswick."

The Sieur de Bouche, always methodical, arranges Queen Jeanne's husbands in a list according to priority (not alphabetical).

It is as difficult to arrive at the real story of this famous lady as at that of Mary Queen of Scots. Both were renowned for beauty, but both must have possessed a quality of charm less easy to define or they could not have exerted so powerful a hold on the imagination of their contemporaries. Both were accused, if not convicted, of great crimes, and both came to a tragic end; Queen Jeanne dying in prison in her own kingdom of Naples.

King RenÉ, the kind, merry, artistic, unpractical monarch, who is said to have been able to do all things except govern a kingdom, is remembered with real love by his people. There is a romance attached to his name. His first marriage was merely one of State policy and during his wife's lifetime he is said to have loved Jeanne de la Val, to whom he gave the "celebrated and illustrious barony of Baux," in 1458.

On the death of the Queen Isabel, he married the lady of his heart, and there appears good reason to believe that this love-match was a deeply happy one, King and Queen though the lovers were.

RenÉ the Good seems to have been made of that sort of fibre that radiates happiness as the sun radiates warmth.

During this reign the town of Orange gave birth to an institution which seems curiously out of keeping with the spirit of the time and place, viz., the ProvenÇal Parliament, the creation of Count William of Orange.

It was regarded popularly as one of the scourges of the country,

and later we hear complaints against the Parliament to the Council of the Lateran for attacks made by it on the "liberty of the Church," interference in the functions of the bishops, and so forth.

But this is after the death of RenÉ, and after Charles III., his nephew and successor, had left all his territory to his cousin, Louis XI., and Provence once more lapsed to the Crown of France.

From this point French history and ProvenÇal history become one, and Provence has for her Counts Louis XI., Francis I., Henry II., Francis II. ("Roy de France et d'Ecosse," as de Bouche entitles him). Then come the religious wars in Dauphiny and Provence, the suspension of the Parliament, the Great Plague in the time of Henry III., and the "birth of the Ligue, which has caused so many evils in France," according to our historian.

The Etats GÉnÉraux de Provence were held at Aix in the reign of Henry IV.

From this time to that of Louis XIV. the country is hopelessly given over to religious troubles. Religion, or the passions that are let loose under that name, have been the scourge of this distracted land made by nature for happiness and peace.

Such are the bare outlines of ProvenÇal history during the times that, in this country of ancient lineage, present an aspect almost modern. Those authors who have studied the drama of its farthest past treat familiarly of ages in which the Glacial Epoch plays a quite juvenile rÔle.

One writer (Berenger Feraud) divides the Paleolithic Age into several epochs, one of which (Epoque SolutrÉen) he alludes to as a relatively short one of 11,000 years; generally they are about 100,000 years or so.

In Provence the human story can be traced to the earliest of those geological epochs when man could only express himself by "modulated cries." It took centuries and centuries to acquire a rudiment of words.

From the second epoch, when the country had become colder, dates our venerable Hearth and Home; the family living in caves (such as are still to be seen at Les Baux, for instance), and sleeping or crouching round the wood fires on long winter nights and days, slowly developing speech from the increased need of exchanging sequent ideas.

Then came the awful darkness and death of the Glacial Period, changing still further the contours of the country.

The retreat of the glacial cold ushered in the "Epoque Magdalenienne," when life became comparatively easy, though the climate of Provence was still "colder than that of St. Petersburg." The Magdaleniens had arrived at sculpturing rough figures on the rocks, and from those records it is concluded that they were gay, jovial, and inclined to pleasantry; the sort of person apparently who makes a dinner-party go well. Strange dinner-parties they must have had in their wild nooks and caverns in the mountains of Provence!

Gradually from these mysterious days we emerge upon centuries less absolutely hidden from our curiosity: the time of the invasion of the Ligurians, Iberians, Celts, and other races, from about the fifteenth century b.c. to 600 b.c. This brings us almost back to the light of day, with the rather startling consciousness that the ancient Ligurians, who represented to the imagination the beginning of all things ProvenÇal, suddenly appear as modern innovations.

A long stretch of time had still to pass, filled with a hundred half-fabulous events, before the Roman Conquest brought the country within the domain of actual history.

And during all those ages what language was being used and developed by the multitudes of races that passed like phantoms across the country, phantoms to our imagination, yet each race, each individual, driven to wild and eager deeds and desires by the strange life-force, the "will to live," that sets the whole extraordinary pageant of things in motion?

From the "modulated cries" of the men who lived in holes in the earth—not yet in the comparatively elegant cave-dwellings—to the exquisite language of the troubadours, what has been the course of its growth? No one knows. The only real guide that remains is the language itself, a confusing phonographic record of the whole troublous existence of the country of its birth.

The nearer a language is to its origin the more it is complicated. Ingenious and subtle grammatical forms prove an ancient tongue.[25]

The natural progress is from synthesis to decomposition; and this decomposing force is nothing more nor less than the natural laziness of the human being, one of the most tremendous forces of the universe!

"All dialects originate from this germ of decomposition, in opposition to the antique synthetic principle of the language," says M. Fauriel.

Thence progress can be studied by following backwards a language to its source, that is to its more complex form. But for long stretches of time no specimens of written language existed. Most of the popular songs and stories were transmitted orally, and so there is only a document here and there to reveal the slow development.

The influence of Rome as a civiliser was so enormous that it acted as a break on the new movement which was destined in time to create the world we call modern. That new world which the Barbarians were to bring into being was postponed in the making by the very excellence of the institutions that it gradually superseded.

This slowness of pace affected the language. It took six centuries to transmute the Latin into the Romance tongues, a process as tremendous in its way as the formation during geological eons of the limestone and the chalk.

Two great movements had taken place in the speech of Gaul and Spain; first the imposition of the Latin tongue on the conquered provinces and then the reversal of the process till the Latin was again corrupted back into dialects. In the return journey the Latin remained as a foundation and in it were left many words belonging to the ancient language of the country, so that non-Latin words in Romance may date from either before or after the introduction of the classic tongue.

It was not until the fourth century that it showed signs of giving way. It broke up gradually into modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian ProvenÇal. The tribes of the Acquitani gave the character to the dialects of the South-west, where, according to many writers, their speech still survives in the Basque language.

It would be a long story, that of the great Romance tongues from the earlier waverings of the Latin in the fourth century, to the eleventh century, when the first troubadour, Guillem de Poictiers, delighted the knights and ladies of Limousin and half France with his songs.

The langue d'oc was by that time ready to his hand, or so it would seem, for it is a remarkable fact that there is scarcely any difference between the language of this pioneer troubadour and that of his latest successors in the thirteenth century, whose voices were so soon to be drowned in the din and horror of the Albigensian wars.

Two hundred years of dance and song! Something at least saved from the gloom and folly of the human story!

During the six hundred years from the fourth to the eleventh century modern Europe, its religion, its institutions, its language, its destiny were in process of formation. And a rude process it was.

A PROVENÇAL FARM.
By E. M. Synge.