Salon and the Crau

Ever since I first saw Les Baux, on a motoring trip from the north to the south of France, I had wanted to get back to it. I saw Aix and Avignon and NÎmes and Arles at the same time, and I wanted to get back to them. But Les Baux was the bonne bouche. When I contemplated this spring walk it was what I was thinking of as the central point of interest of the whole expedition; and I was thinking of it all the time I was walking through the country during those first nine days.

For it sums up the whole past of Provence. It is connected with the GrÆco-Phoenician colonies that preceded the Roman occupation; with the Roman occupation itself, and especially with that stirring episode of the Marian defeat of the barbarian invaders; with the Christian Marian legends; almost more than any other place with the romantic era of the Troubadours; with every internal struggle of the many that disturbed the country during the Middle Ages; with the religious wars; and indeed with every movement of significance in Provence down to the time of the merging of the kingdom into that of France.

After that its importance dwindled, but did not expire until much later. When it did, its ruin was so complete that it acquired another sort of interest altogether. It arouses much the same feelings now as the one-time flourishing cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, for it is almost as dead as they, and its ruins tell as eloquently of the time when it was alive. Added to which, it is most romantically situated, in the very heart of the country that is most characteristic of Provence as it is today—the Provence that lives its rich, picturesque life with an eye kept always on its rich, picturesque past; the country of Mistral, and the scenes of that moving epic in which all the poetry and glamour of Provence is garnered up: "Mireille."

I shouldered my pack once more, but was in such a hurry now to get to Les Baux that I took the train early in the morning as far as Maussane. It was well that I did so, for the rain fell heavily when I reached Salon, where I had an hour to wait.

Nostradamus, who was born at Saint-Remy, lived at various times at Salon, and died there. Out of his thousand prophecies it is not surprising that a few hit the mark, and from them he gained an immense reputation. Exactly a hundred years after his death we find Pepys writing: "Amongst other discourse we talked much of Nostradamus, his prophecy of these times, and Sir George Cartaret did tell a story how at his death he did make the town (of Salon) swear that he should never be dug up or his tomb opened after he was buried; but that they did after sixty years do it, and upon his breast they found a plate of brasse saying what a wicked, unfaithful people the people of that place were, who after so many vows should disturb and open him such a day and year and hour, which, if true, is very strange." Probably it was not true, as to the time; but he would not have risked much if he had prophesied the fact. He did, however, prophesy that a new era would begin for France in the year 1792, which was a bold shot, as it was more than two hundred years after his death; and Napoleon is said to have seen predictions that concerned himself in his writings.

M. MariÉton tells of the fashion in which he seized his opportunity in the town of Salon.

Charles IX was making a solemn progress through Provence with his mother Catharine de' Medici and the little Prince Henry of Navarre. The town of Salon made elaborate preparations for their reception, and Nostradamus was asked where he would like to walk in the procession. He said that he proposed to have a little procession of his own. When the royal party appeared before the gates the queen mother looked anxiously about for the prophet, and when she saw him apart from the rest beckoned him to take up his position between herself and the king. He had been counting on something of this sort, for he had already been in Paris, and had gained a considerable ascendancy over Catharine. He was lodged in the castle during the royal visit, and invited to a solemn consultation on the subject of the stability of the royal line. Catharine wanted him to tell the fortune of Prince Henry. He was quite ready to do it, and ordered the child to be undressed, as a preliminary. The little prince thought he was going to be whipped, and filled the castle with his howls. When he had calmed down, Nostradamus boldly announced that he would come to be king.

If this story is true, it shows the prophet to have been a schemer rather above his kind. Catharine had three sons still alive, and could not have been expected to welcome the announcement. Nor would the young king have been particularly pleased with it. Indeed, it may be said to have been a prophecy not altogether free from risk to the man who was bold enough to make it. But he seems to have judged human nature aright. His reputation was vastly increased by the prediction, and Catharine summoned him to Paris for the second time, which was no doubt what he wanted.

The royal visit to Salon took place in the year 1564, and while the great humbug of the time was preparing for his own little private effect there must have been somewhere in the crowd that filled the streets strewn with rosemary and lavender and thyme a young man who deserved far better to be noticed. This was Adam de Craponne, who by that time had already begun his work of fertilizing the Great Crau.

Mr. Baring-Gould, in the book already mentioned, gives an interesting account of this "little Sahara in Europe," which occupies 30,000 acres.

"At a remote period, but, nevertheless in one geologically modern, the vast floods of the diluvial age that flowed from the Alps brought down incredible quantities of rolled stones, the detritus of the Alps.... This rubble, washed down from the Alps, forms the substratum of the immense plain that inclines at a very slight angle to the Mediterranean, and extends for a considerable distance below the sea.... There is a break in the chain on the south, between the limestone Alpines and the sandstone TrÉvaresse; and the brimming Durance, unable to discharge all her water, choked with rubble, into the RhÔne, burst through the open door or natural waste-pipe, by Salon, and carried a portion of her pebbles into the sea directly, without asking her sister the RhÔne to help her. Now the two great plains formed by the delta of the RhÔne, and that of the Durance with the RhÔne, are called the Great and the Little Crau. They were known to the ancients, and puzzled them not a little. Strabo says of the Great Crau: 'Between Marseilles and the mouth of the RhÔne, at about a hundred stadia from the sea, is a plain, circular in form, and a hundred stadia in diameter, to which a singular event obtained for it the name of the Field of Pebbles. It is, in fact, covered with pebbles, as big as the fist, among which grows some grass in sufficient abundance to pasture heads of oxen.'"

The singular event referred to was the fight between Hercules and the Ligurians. Hercules had used up all his arrows, and had retired to a cave in the Alpilles to make his last stand, when Jupiter came to his assistance and rained down a shower of stones which killed all his enemies. When the hero, thus miraculously aided, emerged from his cave, he saw the great plain covered with stones as it is today. Or rather, as it was; for thanks to Craponne and those who came after him the desolate area is now much circumscribed.

This legend, which is still alive in Provence, takes us back to the very earliest times. For Hercules is the Phoenician Melkarth, and wherever his name survives it is in connection with Phoenician trading, before the Greek colonization.

Craponne's scheme was to bring "some of the waters of the Durance through the gap where some of its overspill had flowed in the diluvial period, by a canal, into the Great Crau, so that it might deposit its rich alluvium over this desert of stones. He spent his life and his entire fortune in carrying out his scheme, and it is due to this that year by year the barren desert shrinks, and cultivation advances."

There are few things more interesting to learn about than the bold works by which man gets the better of nature, or rather sets nature to work to correct, as it were, her own mistakes. About a hundred years later than this, Vermuyden, the Dutch engineer, started draining the Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire fens, a work of even greater magnitude, which gave England some of its richest agricultural land. The draining of Holland was already a thing accomplished; the draining of the Rommy marshes in Kent and Sussex was partly effected before the Roman conquest of Britain. Of late years Australia has dammed up a great river, and turned a dry valley into a lake over two hundred feet deep, from which land will be irrigated as many miles away.

In all these great works, varied in means but the same in intention, the thing to be done is as simple as a child's diversion of water on the sloping sands of the seashore. What he does with his wooden spade, digging his channels and building up his banks, the engineers do with their laborious machinery, trenching canals, and piling up the huge masses of their dams. The waters, obeying the few simple laws of their fall, do all the rest.

The greatest of all these works, and one of the simplest in idea, was the damming of the Nile at Assouan. More than two thousand years before Christ the yearly rise and fall of the great river began to be recorded, but it was not until four thousand years later that the action was adapted to man's more effective use. The natural laws are there waiting, always to be trusted. There is no scale too great, as there is none too small, upon which they can be applied.

The result of this slow fertilization of the ProvenÇal Crau is plain to be seen from the line that skirts it on the way to Arles. There are great plantations of olives, each tree clipped and pruned like a rare shrub in a conservatory, every branch and almost every twig at an even distance from the next, so as to get the maximum of air and sun to the buds and the fruit. And there are wonderful sheets of almond blossom, sometimes covering acres. As far as the eye can see on the level, the plain is of the richest. There are frequent villages and homesteads, and everywhere lines of cypresses, planted very close together and allowed to grow as tall as they please. These are to break the force of the bise, which blows so strongly as to scoop the crops out of the ground if they are left unprotected, and once actually carried away the suspension bridge between Beaucaire and Tarascon.

We pottered along the little single line, while the rain still came down, but the clouds began to look a little lighter. One of my fellow-travellers was a young conscript who was on furlough from his regiment in Tunis. He was a handsome, charming-mannered youth. He said that he liked soldiering, and there was little hardship in the life. He wore his uniform when he was going on a journey, because soldiers are taken at half fares on the railways. He told me with a grin that he was liable to be court-martialled for wearing patent-leather boots, but on this line he thought he might risk it. He was inclined to be facetious at the expense of the line, and told me a story about it that I first heard some twenty years or so ago in connection with one of our own railways. And he said that it was a good deal used by companies of cinema actors; that at any time you might find yourself in the society of desperate characters prepared to do desperate deeds, or slowing down between stations so that somebody might be photographed crawling along the footboard or the roof of the carriages. The railway company had obligingly arranged for a collision not long before, being glad enough to sell some of its antiquated stock for this purpose; and in fact, if it had not been for the money made out of the cinema operators, it would have closed down long before.

He told me something about the Crau, too. This fertile tract through which we were passing was very unlike the part that was still desert, which I should be able to see from the heights of Les Baux. It is dry and desolate, scorched by the sun in summer, but in winter affording pasturage for flocks and herds that are brought down from the Alps.

The flocks are led by wise old goats, who know every mile of their three weeks' journey; then come the she-goats, and after them the innumerable company of sheep. The dogs of the shepherds surround the flock, and the rear of the procession is brought up by asses, carrying the baggage, and the little lambs that are too young to follow their dams. Every night the great flock is shut in with hurdles, and the shepherds keep guard over them. There are said to be two or three hundred thousand sheep in the flocks that make these yearly migrations, which have been going on for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Pliny mentions them, and there is little doubt that the order followed in his day was much the same as it is now. For the primal industries of the world do not change much, and in this ancient land scarcely at all.

I asked my young soldier if he had ever seen the flights of flamingoes that are said to make lovely the desert of the Crau, but I do not think that he had, although he would not say that they were not to be seen. He expressed himself with admiration and affection about his beautiful country of Provence, and especially about this corner of it, in which he had been brought up. A station or two before we reached Maussane, he got out. There was an open carriage waiting for him, and an elderly, prosperous-looking gentleman in it whom I took to be his uncle, on no grounds except that I liked to think of him during his holiday coming out from Salon to visit relations who lived in some roomy, picturesque "mas," where there was welcome and good cheer for him in the hospitable old-fashioned way of the country.