Draguignan and Saint-Maximin

Early on Monday morning I set out to walk to Draguignan, which lay on the other side of a range of hills to the southwest, at a distance of about twenty-two miles. I kept to the high road all the way, but did not pass a single village, although the land was cultivated almost everywhere, with olives, vines, mulberries and cereals. The only episode of a rather dull walk that remains in my memory is a chat with a very stout proprietor of vineyards, who sold me a litre of his bon vin for fourpence. He said that his wine was very wholesome, and I had no fault to find with any of its qualities, except possibly that of taste. He talked to me about Mistral, the poet. He had seen him, and said he was a very great man; but he did not seem to have read his poems. There was to be a big ProvenÇal fÊte at Draguignan in May, and Mistral would be there, as gay as any of them, in spite of his eighty-four years. But alas! Mistral's death was to move all this country for which he had done so much in little more than a week from that time.

It was on that day that the wind, from which the poet's family took its name, and which so vexes the plains of Provence, began to blow. I did not recognize it at first. The sun still shone brightly in a blue sky, and I was rather glad of the strong clean wind that cooled me as I walked. There is something about the name mistral that had seemed to me to connote an unhealthful fever-bringing air. I suppose I had unconsciously connected it with the word "malarial." But the mistral of Provence is the magistral, the great master-wind from the north or the north-east, which rushes down from the Alps and Cevennes to replace the hot air that rises from the sun-baked plains in the great RhÔne delta. It is like our east wind, keen and strong, and seems to deprive the air of all moisture, and to make even a cloudless sky look cold.

I first saw Draguignan some four miles away, as I rounded the shoulder of a hill. It is the capital of the Department of Var, having replaced Toulon, which now has more than ten times its population, at the end of the eighteenth century. Baedeker describes it as an assez belle ville, but it was not assez belle for me. I thought it the dullest possible sort of town, although there were picturesque "bits" in the streets of the older quarter. The first thing that struck the eye as I neared it was an enormous range of new barracks, with a huge barrack square. The bugles were blowing gaily, and when I came to the town it was alive with soldiers in dirty white, with dark-blue waist sashes, puttees and tam-o'-shanters. As I walked up the narrow streets of the old town into the untidy-looking newer part, I could not help comparing it with another French military city that I had visited some months before. This was BesanÇon, the brightest, cleanest, pleasantest large town that I have seen in the whole of France, and I have seen a good many. Perhaps it was hardly fair to compare the two, for I was in BesanÇon on a fine mellow September day, and Draguignan must have been about at its worst, with the mistral tearing along its streets, filling the eyes with dust and making the pavements look as if all the waste paper and light rubbish of the town were habitually thrown on to them.

And they were pruning the plane-trees. No one who has not visited the south of France when this operation is going on can form any idea of what it means. These trees are planted everywhere, and in summer give a most welcome shade to the hot streets and the wide squares of the bigger towns. They grow to an immense girth, and those in Draguignan were especially fine. The way they prune them, from the very first time of their planting, shows that they know very well what they are about, for they get a wide spread of branch and an even and impenetrable roof of green. The trees are never allowed to get out of hand, and are kept at school when they have passed the span of the longest human life. With ladders and saws and ropes they remove great branches with as little concern as one cuts into a rose-bush. The reward comes in the summer, but an avenue or a "square" of these trees in March, when the saws have been at work upon them, is a desolating sight. Those that I photographed the next morning are umbrageous compared with some. I have seen far bigger planes than these kept to three branches, each as big as a good-sized tree.

I read in the official Directory of the Department of Var that towards the end of the fifth century the town was infested by an enormous dragon (symbol of heresy). The inhabitants had recourse to St. Hermentaire, Bishop of Antibes, who delivered them from the monster. To perpetuate the memory of this happy disencumbrance the town changed its ancient name of Griminum to that of Dragonia, from which has come Draguignan. And St. Hermentaire has been regarded with affection in the locality ever since, though his name is little known outside of it.

I had been recommended by my friends among the commis voyageurs at Fayence to an hotel of the right sort. I should certainly have passed it by but for that, for it seemed to be nothing but a large restaurant, not of the first order nor even of the second, and there was nothing to show that it had much accommodation elsewhere. But when I asked for a bedroom, and suggested two francs for it instead of two and a half, I was introduced to a noble apartment, which reminded me of the pictures one sees in the illustrated papers, when His Majesty the King is put up for a few days at an Embassy abroad. It was very large, and the furniture was old, and some of it handsome, especially the bed, which had more in the way of canopy and curtains than I am accustomed to. The lady of the house told me afterwards that she kept a shop of antiquities in the town, which accounted for some of the unusual splendour. I felt ashamed at paying no more than one and eightpence for the privilege of sleeping in such a room.

The dinner was the same price, and included a bottle of white wine that was worth thinking about as one drank it. A good many men came in to dine, at any time between half past seven and half past eight. Very few of them looked to be above the rank of a workman, and all of them kept on their hats as they ate. They sat in groups at different tables, and enjoyed themselves in much the same way as men do in a club in London. Probably they paid even less for the same dinner than I did, and I hope their wives had as good a one at home.

The mistral blew as keenly as ever the next morning, and I determined to cut off a bit of the distance by train. I wanted to get to some of the interesting places, which are nearly all in the west of Provence. It was a two days' march to Saint-Maximin, where there is a noble church, but I thought I would sleep there that night.

The train did not start until half past nine. I had time to walk out a few miles on the other side of Draguignan to see a famous dolmen, the only remains of prehistoric life to be found in this immediate region.

It was a curious well-preserved structure, hard by a little farmhouse just off the road. I paid a youth who said he was the proprietor fifty centimes for the privilege of looking at it, but thought his demand for a further two francs because I had photographed it unreasonable. He blustered, but made no effort to detain me as I walked off the field with the two francs in my pocket instead of his. I had already been asked once or twice if I was travelling for the purpose of taking picture postcards, and probably that was his idea. But he was a potential robber all the same, and I doubt if he was the proprietor at all. I wish I had thought of threatening him with St. Hermentaire.

It took three hours to cover the thirty miles to Barjols, where I took the road again at half past twelve. Barjols is quite out of the beaten track, although this pottering little line, which eventually reaches Arles, passes near it. As I walked through a very wide place I stopped to ask a group of school children playing marbles which was my route. At the sound of my voice they scattered away with every sign of alarm, and I laughed at them and went on, with my vanity rather wounded at being regarded as an object of terror.

When I had gone a mile down the hill I met a man in his best clothes reading a newspaper. I had seen the start of a funeral procession in Barjols, and I supposed him to have the intention of joining it at his own convenience. He asked me where I was going, and told me I could cut off four kilometres if I followed the route he would describe to me. He took immense trouble about it, and it was a kindly thought, but I wished afterward that he had not had it, although I found his interest in me soothing after having so lately been run away from.

I left the road bye and bye and followed the path that he had indicated, but, as generally happens in such circumstances, it soon ceased to be a path at all, and I found myself wandering among the hills with a very small idea of where I was on the map. There was frequent cultivation, but very few signs of habitation, and I saw no living soul until I struck the high road again more than two hours later. It was not the high road I had expected, and left me about eleven miles to do out of what would have been a total of fifteen if my adviser had been punctual at the funeral. The road to Saint-Maximin was quite straight for the last three miles, and I saw the long line of the great church standing high above the roofs of the town from far away.

I approached Saint-Maximin with an agreeable sense of anticipation. The learned M. Rostan considers that its church shows the fairest page of Gothic art in the South, and to be the only religious monument of real architectural importance in Provence. This is perhaps extravagant praise, but it was at any rate the first big thing of its kind that I was to see. I had surveyed the country at large for a week, and was ready for a different sort of interest, especially as the mistral had blown steadily all day long and walking was beginning to lose the edge of its rapture.

It is not only the architectural beauties of this noble church that give it its interest. It is its connection with a tradition that has left its marks all over Provence, and in past centuries has met with such universal acceptance that it is small wonder that innumerable people firmly believe in it to this day. Saint-Maximin was the first place to which I came that had to do with it.

I read about it that evening sitting before a wood fire in a room more comfortable than is to be found in most French inns. I had come in to Saint-Maximin as dusk was beginning to fall and had gone straight to the church. But it was closed for the night. All I saw was the disappointing west front, which has never been finished. So I betook me to the hotel. Saint-Maximin is a town of small importance in the present day, but it contains a good one, something like an old English coaching inn, both in appearance and custom. It was a pleasant change to dine in a medium-sized parlour instead of a large bare cafÉ, and to find a fire in it; for the mistral had blown away all the warmth in the air and was blowing still.

Possibly it was from this inn that Lucien Bonaparte married his first wife, who was the daughter of an aubergiste of Saint-Maximin, where at the age of twenty-one he administered the military provisions of the Revolutionary army. The Revolutionists, disliking any name inclusive of Saint, called the town Marathon, but it reverted later.

So I sat very late before the fire and read about Saint-Maximin and about the legend of the three Marys. It must have been after ten o'clock when I took my candle and went up to bed. Here is the story, adapted from the learned M. Rostan, who made a life study of the antiquities of Provence and especially of Saint-Maximin, and whose memory is deservedly held in honour throughout the country.

After the death of Jesus Christ and his divine resurrection, the Jews, alarmed by the rapid progress made by the new faith in Jerusalem, began a terrible persecution, for which the martyrdom of St. Stephen was, so to speak, the signal. They threw into a boat, without sails, oars or rudder, the following saints: Mary Magdalene,[4] Lazarus and Martha with their servant Marcelle, Sidonius, the man who was born blind, Maximin, one of the seventy-two disciples, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary the wife of Zebedee, also called Salome, and several others, including Sarah the black servant of these last two Marys, Trophimus, and Joseph of Arimathea.

(The list extended itself as the legend grew, for it almost certainly began with three only, as we shall see later. But M. Rostan includes most of the above.)

The illustrious confessors were exposed to what seemed a certain and horrible death, but the sacred barque, far from being overwhelmed by the waves, floated in a calm that spread immediately around it, and protected by the mercy of Providence on its long and perilous voyage, touched at last the shores of Provence at the mouth of the RhÔne, at the place now called Saintes-Maries, or Notre Dame de la Mer.

Mary the mother of James the Less, and Salome stayed in that place with their black servant Sarah. The other holy men and women spread themselves over different parts of the country and diligently preached their religion. St. Maximin went to Aix, of which he was the first bishop, St. Martha to Tarascon, which she delivered from the ravages of a horrible monster, St. Lazarus and St. Mary Magdalene to Marseilles.

Now although the church and town of Saint-Maximin bear the name of that illustrious saint their chief glory is of a still greater. St. Mary Magdalene made herself celebrated at Marseilles, then one of the chief cities of the world, by her preaching. After having made numerous converts and performed striking miracles, she went to Aix, where she was named in the charter of the Church of St. Saviour as co-founder with the bishop, St. Maximin. After some years she formed a wish to take refuge from the eyes of the world, and betook herself to the heart of the mysterious mountain forest now called Sainte-Baume, because of the cave in which she passed the last thirty years of her life in the practice of the most austere penitence. Seven times a day angels came to her in this wild retreat and exalted her to the summit of the mountain, so that her ears might be ravished by the celestial harmonies. As her last moments approached they transported her some distance from Sainte-Baume near to an obscure spot in which St. Maximin was then in retreat. She received the last sacraments at his hands, and a few days later breathed her last sigh, leaving behind her, says the Golden Legend, "an odour so sweet that the oratory was perfumed by it for seven days." Her mortal remains were reverently interred, and her tomb became thenceforward an object of remarkable devotion. Shortly afterwards the holy Prelate himself, with others of the blessed saints, was buried at her side, and above these sacred remains arose a church that became from that time a place of pilgrimage and deep veneration.

It is unfortunate that the invasions of the Saracens in the eighth century should have made it impossible to produce documentary evidence of any of this earlier than that date, for those barbarians devastated everything. Seven or eight hundred years is a big gap to cover, and when we begin to look into profane history the gap becomes much bigger; for the legend cannot be traced earlier than the translation of the relics of St. Trophimus in the twelfth century, and did not receive general acceptance until three hundred years later still. But since that time it has exercised an immense power upon the imagination of Christendom.

M. Rostan, who was an antiquarian of note, believed in it. He summons in evidence the stones of Saint-Maximin itself. In 1859, when the church was undergoing restoration, he examined a brick-built tomb which was incontestably of the date of the early Christian era, and "might well be the primitive burial-place of one of the holy personages venerated on this spot." It is true that the tomb was empty, but the sacred relics are stated to have been removed after the persecutions of the fifth century into the sarcophagi which are there to this day. The walls of the crypt also, exposed in course of further restoration thirty years ago, convinced M. Rostan, who saw them uncovered, that this was "the veritable Cubiculum, the sepulchral chamber of St. Magdalene, not only in its plan and dimensions, but in its still living reality, as it existed when the celebrated penitent was buried there, and where they placed her sarcophagus in the fourth or fifth century after the triumph of the Church. The vaulting alone is not the same."

Out of all of which the sceptic may at least accept the fact, interesting enough, that the crypt as it stands is of the date at which St. Mary Magdalene probably died.

When the Saracens were burning all the churches, and scattering all the sacred relics that they could lay hands upon, the Cassianite monks who had been in charge of these peculiarly holy ones for three hundred years, filled the crypt of their church with earth so as to hide it, and for further precaution moved the bones of St. Mary Magdalene from their tomb in the place of honour into that previously occupied by those of Sidonius, where they remained for five hundred years.

So far, then, we have in evidence the tradition of the landing of this company of saints on the shores of Provence and their subsequent missions, not from St. Maximin alone, but also from Aix, Marseilles, Tarascon and Saintes-Maries, in each of which places are monuments to their glory. We have also the evidence of a burial-place of the first century which was an object of veneration at that time and remained so thereafter.

It is true that during the epoch of the Crusades the magnificent church of Vezelay in Burgundy, in which Bernard of Clairvaux preached and Richard Coeur de Lion took the vows, attracted to itself great honour by its claim to possess the true relics of St. Mary Magdalene. But M. Rostan points out that this belief on the part of Vezelay, so far from being in flagrant contradiction to the ProvenÇal tradition, confirms it; for the monks of the Abbey of Vezelay attributed the possession of these sacred relics to the piety of their founder, GÉrard de Roussillon, who was Count and Governor of Provence under the Emperor Lothair. "But as the body of St. Magdalene had not been visible at Saint Maximin for a long time, and the precise spot in which it was hidden was not known, the statement of Vezelay was believed, and conferred great celebrity upon it as a place of pilgrimage, until the moment when it entered the designs of Providence to clear up the mystery that enveloped the tomb of the glorious saint and dispel all uncertainty upon the subject of her relics."

The instrument of this discovery was the Prince of Salerno, known later as Charles II, King of Sicily and Count of Provence, who was the son of Charles of Anjou, the belligerent brother of St. Louis.

It was in 1279. While Charles I was fighting in Italy, his son, then at Aix, moved by a great devotion towards St. Mary Magdalene and a lively desire to recover her relics, betook himself to Saint-Maximin in order to have excavations made beneath the pavement of the church. He put himself at the head of the workers, and on the ninth day of September had the singular happiness of uncovering the ancient sarcophagus which held the venerated body. Restraining the zeal of his assistants the prince put his seal on the tomb, and at once summoned a convocation of prelates to witness the exhumation of the sacred bones, which took place on the eighteenth day of the same month. In the dust of the tomb was discovered a box of cork enclosing an inscription on parchment or papyrus, which, translated from the Latin, runs thus:

"In the year of our Lord 716, in the month of December, very secretly in the night, when the most pious Odo was king of the French, at the time of the invasion of the perfidious nation of the Saracens, this body of the most dear and revered Mary Magdalene was translated from its own tomb of alabaster into this one of marble, out of fear of the said perfidious nation of the Saracens, because it is more secret here, the body of Sidonius having been removed."

Contemporary historians unanimously report the miraculous circumstances that accompanied the discovery. All make mention of the delicious odour that came from the sarcophagus when it was opened. They tell, too, how a verdant plant of fennel grew from the tongue of the blessed penitent, whose body had not yet known corruption. The noli me tangere, the spot on the forehead which the Saviour had touched, was in a perfect state of preservation. Among the eminent churchmen who vouched for the miraculous events that surrounded the disinternment was the Cardinal de Cabassoles, Petrarch's friend, whose country retreat at Vaucluse we shall visit later.

Prince Charles caused a magnificent reliquary to be made at Aix to hold the head of the saint. It was of silver gilt, in the form of a hollow bust, into which the skull was fitted. The face and the hair were of gold, and it was surmounted by a gold crown set with precious stones.

In the next year Prince Charles was taken prisoner by Peter of Aragon, and shut up in Barcelona for four years. He attributed his deliverance and the restoration of his kingdom—his father having died in the meantime—to the influence of St. Mary Magdalene, and set in hand the building of a church at Saint-Maximin which should be more worthy of the holy relics it contained. But it was not until more than two hundred years later that it was finished.

Charles carried to Rome the sacred head, to offer it for the veneration of the Pope, Boniface VIII. We are not told how it had come about, but the head had been discovered deprived of the lower maxillary. The Pope knew that a relic of this sort was honoured at the church of St. John Lateran in connection with St. Mary Magdalene. It was found to fit perfectly, and the Pope presented it to the King, who did not keep it with the greater part of the head, possibly because the magnificent reliquary would have had to be altered to receive it, but presented it in his turn to the nuns of Notre Dame de Nazareth at Aix. There it remained, until the amiable King RenÉ, who has left such a pleasant memory of himself in Provence, finally restored it to Saint-Maximin.

During all the two hundred and forty years that the great church was in the building the precious relics that it enshrined attracted pilgrims without number. Six Popes visited them, to say nothing of two anti-Popes; in one year alone five kings bowed before the shrine; royalties came from as far off as Sweden; the unfortunate Albigenses, after they had "abjured their errors," were compelled to make pilgrimage to it; and finally Louis XIV, with his mother, Anne of Austria, his brother, afterwards Duke of Orleans, and a numerous and splendid following, bent his knee at the sacred tomb, and assisted in the translation of the relics into a magnificent receptacle of porphyry. These relics would not, of course, include the head. Some vertebrÆ were offered to the Queen, who accepted them with gratitude. The sacred bones were examined by the King's head physician, and immediately placed in a case of lead covered with gold brocade, upon which the King placed his seal in six places. It was carried the next day in procession, and the church was filled with people, who shed tears of joy to see renewed in their own day "a devotion so holy and august in the presence of a king and queen so pious and devout."

During all these years, however, the relics had not been preserved without vicissitude or diminution. Under the Queen Jeanne, Provence was overrun by brigands, and for three years they were hidden at Sainte-Baume. King RenÉ gave part of the lower arm to the nuns who had the lower jaw. In 1505 a Neapolitan monk robbed the reliquary of its jewels, and was caught and hanged. After this mutilation a new reliquary was presented by the Queen of France, Anne of Brittany, as splendid as the old one, and a statuette of herself was added to it in enamelled gold. Louis XIII asked for some fragments of the body, and was refused. Four years later he asked again, on behalf of the Queens Mary of Medici and Anne of Austria, and was more successful, obtaining also a fragment to be presented to the Sovereign Pontiff.

In 1639 a portion of the much venerated noli me tangere was stolen from the head, and, whether it is the same or not, a minute particle of the noli me tangere is cherished in the church of Mane, in the Basses-Alps. In 1781 Louis XVI ordered a thigh bone to be detached and presented to the Duke of Parma, which was done.

We have followed the story for nearly eighteen hundred years, and now comes the Revolution, which wrought more havoc than all the successive disturbances that had taken place before it. The church was spoiled and the sacred relics profaned. The porphyry urn was violated, and the documents it contained burnt. The glorious remains of the saint were thrown pell-mell on the pavement, the head was torn from its gold case, and the other bones from their reliquaries. But the piety of the sacristan preserved the chief glory of the church, which was restored to it five years later. The head, a bone from one of the arms, some locks of hair, together with the reliquary of the Holy Ampulla, and sundry fragments of the bodies of other saints were received back when the storm had passed over, and there the bulk of them remain to this day.