DISTANCES ALONG THE ROUTE

NOTES FOR DRIVERS

PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE ROUTE

Montpellier does not boast many antiquities, but it has some spacious promenades and boulevards which give a dignity and charm to the city. Hare, writing before some of the more modern streets had assumed their present appearance, says:

The place became prosperous in the thirteenth century with the founding of the School of Medicine, which is famous to this day. It is housed in the buildings of the Episcopal Palace, and its frontage is still machicolated.

The MusÉe Fabre in the Esplanade contains the best provincial collection of pictures in France next to Lille. It is open on week-days—except Mondays—from 9 to 12, and 1.30 to 4 or 5; Sundays, 11 to 4 or 5.

The Cathedral, with a very odd-looking porch, is the church of a Benedictine abbey founded in 1364. Three of the original towers at the angles of the nave survive; the fourth and the Gothic choir were rebuilt about 1857.

The Tour des Pins is a survival of the early fortifications of the town, now restored. The inscription is to the memory of Jayme, the conqueror of Arragon.

The Jardin des Plantes, founded in 1593 by Henry IV., is the earliest in France.

A triumphal arch, called the Porte du Peyrou, was put up at the end of the seventeenth century to the glory of Louis XIV. The Promenade de Peyrou, begun about the same time and completed in 1785, has a statue of the same Louis, and a great prospect towards the sea and the Cevennes across the level country bordering the mouth of the Rhone.

The impression one gets of Montpellier in a short visit is that of a city mainly composed of buildings that are all of a uniformly creamy-white colour, and that the only other colour besides the dusty green of the foliage is the bright red of the soldiers’ uniforms and the gaudy colour of advertisements.

THE ROAD TO NÎMES

Keeping to the edge of the plain, the road goes eastwards to Lunel, which stands in the great vine-growing plain. In the Place de la LibertÉ one may see a small facsimile of the New York statue of Liberty by Bartholdi. The church is Romanesque in part.

From Lunel a dÉtour of a most profitable character may be made to Aigues-Mortes (meaning ‘stagnant waters’), one of the dead ports of that blighted land called the Carmargue. The road passes through Marsillargues and St. Laurent-l’Aigouze, and for the last three kilometres runs parallel with the Beaucaire Canal, which has to some extent reanimated the ancient walled town from which St. Louis embarked for the Holy Land in 1248 and 1270. The lofty walls and square towers, without any machicolation to relieve their grim strength, were built by Philippe-le-Hardi, and are said to have been copied from Ascalon, in Syria, even as the ChÂteau Gaillard was based on the experience Richard I. gained in the Holy Land. It was the Crusades that seem to have brought the town into being, and, like everything connected with those unsuccessful efforts to roll back the Mohammedan power, Aigues-Mortes, being surrounded by fever-producing swamps, was doomed to failure from the first day St. Louis founded it. But the constant depletion of the population in the past—at the rate, it is said, of five or six a day in the spring out of a population of 1,500—has given the modern antiquary a walled medieval town only comparable to Carcassonne and Avignon, and in some respects of greater interest than either.

From Lunel to NÎmes the country is a vast vineyard, with here and there an Aleppo or an umbrella pine or a few olives.

NÎMES

To the tourist who has never seen Roman remains outside a museum, or has only looked dully at a few foundations of Roman walls in situ, NÎmes brings the reality of Rome’s power before his eyes with such overwhelming vividness that he begins to forget the remoteness of the civilization which raised these enduring monuments. That the vast amphitheatre, the perfect temple to Caius and Lucius CÆsar, the gateway called the Porte d’Auguste, the complete aqueduct known as the Pont-du-Gard, and the Roman tower, 90 feet high, called the Tour Magne, date from the early years of the Christian era, or even before the birth of Christ, seems at first easy to grasp. But these structures stand so imposingly among the buildings of 2,000 years later which have grown up around them that there comes in time a feeling almost of incredulity. Perhaps some clever French architects have done most of the building, one thinks; but a glance at the stonework of any of these great works shows that the restoration that has taken place has been of a trifling character, the main work in the case of the arena having been the clearing away of the later accretions which were hiding the Roman fabric.

It was in 121 B.C. that the capital of a Gaulish tribe became the Nemausus of the Romans. For over five centuries it remained a Roman city of the greatest importance, a period equal to England’s history from the crude times of Richard II. to the present year. So much did the Romans appreciate their new colonies in Provincia (now Provence) that they even considered the transference of the capital of the Empire to the banks of the Rhone. One need not wonder, therefore, at the magnificence and the permanent character of the buildings they erected. At Orange, at St. RÉmy, and at Arles the survivals are equally forceful, and the most ill-informed who gaze upon them go away with an impression of Roman power so vivid that they cannot ever again regard archÆology as a musty science.

In its modern aspect NÎmes is a thriving city with a busy trade in wine and silk. The main streets are wide and cheerful, with trees which are a boon during the hot time of the year.

The chief features of the town are:

THE ROAD TO ARLES

From NÎmes the road is practically level all the way to Arles, whether one goes by St. Gilles or direct through Bellegarde.

ST. GILLES

The St. Gilles route is only seven kilometres longer, and the slightly increased distance will not be regretted when the remarkable church has been seen. It was planned on a vast scale, and, if carried out, would have been one of the finest Byzantine churches in France; but for some reasons, perhaps connected with the decline of St. Gilles as a port owing to the constant silting up of the Rhone delta, or possibly owing to war or pestilence or a weakening of religious enthusiasm, the great structure was never finished, and a smaller church in the Gothic style is all that came to completion. It embodies, however, the splendid western faÇade of the earlier scheme, and the details of its columns, its mutilated statues and carved enrichments, are finer even than those of St. Trophime at Arles. The abbot of the monastery, which had been founded by St. Egidius in the sixth century, administered justice seated between the grotesque lions of the portal, and the charters often began with, ‘Sedente inter leones.’ The crypt, the tomb of St. Gilles and his altar, the twelfth-century sacristy, and the Vis de S. Gilles, a remarkably fine newel staircase, should all be seen. There is also a restored Romanesque house in the town of St. Gilles. [J]

It should be remembered that historical and geological evidence prove that the flat marshy country called the Carmargue was in Roman times a beautiful district of rivers, tree-grown islands, and extensive seaways. No doubt there were marshes at the mouth of the Rhone then, but that mouth was a long way north of the present outlet, and the area must have been comparatively small before some of the large inlets were silted up and became fever-breeding swamps. Everywhere one goes in the Carmargue, from Arles to Aigues-Mortes, St. Gilles or Les Saintes-Maries, the same tale is told of prosperous ports becoming land-locked and fever-stricken. To-day the flat treeless land is cultivated where the swamps have dried up, but it is a sad desert even under a cloudless sky. In the summer there is dust everywhere, and in the winter the ground has a tendency to become a morass.

ARLES

is entered from the west side through the old suburb of Trinquetaille, the business quarter of the Roman city, and the Rhone is then crossed on a semi-suspension bridge of lattice girders, on which, when the mistral blows, it is scarcely possible to keep one’s feet. It is on the east side of the river—the official and patrician quarter—that the thrilling relics of Greek and Roman Arles survive.

In the importance of these ancient monuments Arles is a close rival to NÎmes, and in some ways Arles is pre-eminent.

The origin of the name is generally considered

to be the Celtic ‘Ar-lath,’ meaning a wet place, and its position at the mouth of the Rhone, with the island which is now the corner of the Carmargue opposite, was so advantageous to traders that, long before the Romans conquered Provence, earlier even than the founding of Marseilles by the Greeks from PhocÆa, there was a busy commercial town at Arles, well known to the Phoenician traders of the Mediterranean. When the Romans found it necessary to conquer Provence they found a Greek city at Arles, and the ruins of the beautiful theatre, built before the Roman occupation was a reality, impress on the mind the change which took place, for within a few paces of the theatre there stands the amphitheatre—the time-defying evidence of the power of Rome. The amphitheatres and most of the other Roman remains in Provence are due to the Imperial policy of ‘panem et circenses,’ and what the huge arenas really meant is vividly brought to mind by Mr. Theodore Cook.

The beauty of the women of Arles astonishes the stranger even when he is prepared by the statement of the fact in all guide-books. The classic features of their Greek ancestry are constantly reproduced to-day, although in the men the intermingling of Roman, Saracen, and Frank has destroyed all resemblance to the Hellenic type. In a book of this character one is compelled to summarize where expansion is so inviting, and the reader is advised to study Mr. Cook’s two volumes entitled ‘Old Provence’ if he wishes to know more of the story of the region which teems with evidence of the Roman occupation.

The historic monuments of Arles are therefore briefly tabulated below:

THE ROAD TO AIX-EN-PROVENCE

leaves Arles from the Avenue Victor Hugo, and after winding a little for about twelve kilometres, with trees interfering with the view, goes due east in a straight line across the open plain called La Crau (pronounced ‘Crow’). It is a strange level waste of round stones, very uniform in size, which the torrents of innumerable ages have brought down from the Alps. The early peoples of Provence were mightily impressed with these monstrous pebbles, and Strabo has preserved the legend that Zeus rained them down on the earth to scatter the Ligurian tribesmen who often attacked the adventurous Phoenician traders and colonizers. The heat of the sun on the mass of stones, which has a depth averaging from 30 to 45 feet, produces the phenomenon of the mirage, and the conditions of wind and temperature are always inclined to be different to less exposed places. A clear sunrise over the mountains north-east of the Crau is a memorable sight. The desert of stones, broken here and there with lines of cypresses, is full of a strange shadowiness under the crimson-streaked sky as the eastern light grows in intensity, and one half expects to see a caravan of camels and the burnous of Arabia in place of the country cart of the French peasant.

The curiously isolated ridge called Les Alpines is prominent to the north wherever one goes between NÎmes and Salon.

Salon is a cheerful town at the very edge of the Crau. The main street has a bright and almost Parisian touch, with its numerous cafÉs having their tables under the shade of old plane-trees. There is a fourteenth-century chÂteau, and in the Church of St. Laurent, a Gothic building of the same period, is the tomb of Michel de Notre Dame, Catherine de Medici’s favourite astrologer. Another church is dedicated to St. Michael, and is a century earlier.

At the fork just beyond Salon the turning to the right is taken to PÉlissanne, a village with tall cream-washed houses. In the centre one goes to the right and immediately afterwards to the left. Beyond this the road runs through pine-covered hills to St. Cannat, and finally through open country down a long descent into Aix-en-Provence.