Vaucluse

It was very pleasant to get on to the road again, with my pack on my back. I was not yet tuned up to the nearly twenty mile walk between Avignon and Vaucluse, though my damaged muscles were now giving me little trouble, so I took the train to L'Isle-sur-Sorgue, which is distant from Vaucluse between four and five miles.

In 1789, Arthur Young made this pilgrimage to the shrine of Petrarch and Laura, and allowed himself to be more moved by sentimental interest than was his custom. L'Isle has changed very little since that time. It is still the bright, pleasant, well-watered little town he describes it.

"L'Isle is most agreeably situated," he wrote. "On coming to the verge of it I found fine plantations of elms, with delicious streams, bubbling over pebbles on either side; well dressed people were enjoying the evening at a spot I had conceived to be only a mountain village. It was a sort of fairy scene to me. Now, thought I, how detestable to leave this fine wood and water, and enter a nasty, beggarly, walled, hot, stinking town; one of the contrasts most offensive to my feelings. What an agreeable surprise, to find the inn without the town, in the midst of the scenery I had admired! And more, a good and civil inn. I walked on the banks of this classic stream for an hour, with the moon gazing on the waters, that will run for ever in mellifluous poetry: retired to sup on the most exquisite trout and crawfish in the world. To-morrow to the famed origin."[21]

I do not remember the elms, but the planes were there, as usual, and fine, spreading ones they were; and what was more, they were beginning to show a delicate haze of green, which was very delightful, and what I had been looking out for ever since I had started on my expedition. During the two days I had been at Avignon the spring seemed to have taken that little definite step forward which makes all the difference. In the south, where the sun gets hot long before the trees get green, and so many flowers come forth to greet it, this longed-for arrival of the true spring is apt to be discounted, and comes with less of a thrill than is felt in the north. But the thrill is there, if one's senses are open to it; and I felt it on that morning as I walked to Vaucluse.

"I am delighted with the environs of L'Isle," Arthur Young wrote of his next morning's ride; "beautiful roads, well planted, surround and pass off in different directions, as if from a capital town, umbrageous enough to form promenades against a hot sun, and the river splits and divides into so many streams, and is conducted with so much attention that it has a delicious effect, especially to an eye that recognizes all the fertility of irrigation."

It is still a fertile, carefully cultivated country, but gets wilder as one approaches the famous spring "justly said to be as celebrated almost as that of Helicon." The river Sorgue, whose source provides the fountain, is already a full and rapid stream as one nears the village, and flows through green meadows down the valley not far from the winding road. The hills are high on either side and a great cliff looms in front of one, closing in the gorge. One's eye instinctively searches for a cleft down which the torrent must descend; but none is to be seen—only the tall rampart of rock.

The village is pleasant enough, and contains two inns, each of them quite capable of providing for a comfortable night's lodging. Too much, I think, has been written in disgust of the paper-mills, which use the power of the stream and provide the village with employment. Their buildings are old enough to make them not so very incongruous, and they are a small detail beside the huge masses of rock that enclose the village on three sides. Nor is either of them in the village itself. There is an ancient church, an old stone bridge, gardens and terraces and parapets, and much shade of trees, and the beautiful sparkling river that makes music all the time. And dominating the village on a high crag are the ruins of the Bishop of Cavaillon's castle, up to which Petrarch so often climbed to see his friend.

The fountain is some little distance beyond the village. The road, which runs by the river, passes one of the factories and then the garden of a cafÉ, where everything was being painted up and prepared for the coming influx of visitors, and "La Belle Laure," the motor-boat upon which trips can be taken on the river, was just about to be drawn from her winter quarters. With all this, and with the booths for the sale of picture-postcards and all sorts of reminiscent rubbish, most of which has nothing to do with Vaucluse, or even with Provence, the place has been cockneyfied enough, and I dare say that if I had seen it later in the year, or on a Sunday, when it is crowded with people, I should not have carried away with me the next morning such an agreeable impression. But I had it pretty well to myself, and when I had got past the last of the booths on to the rocky path above the stream it was as lonely as it must have been in Petrarch's time, six hundred years ago.

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But where was the fountain? I had read of a rocky cave in which it bubbles up, and had pictured I don't know what in the way of gloom and mystery. The path led up to the straight, towering cliff, and there stopped. To my right was a broad pool of water, and that was all. At first sight it was just a pool at the foot of the great rock.

Then I saw that the water was flowing all the time as it were from the face of the rock itself. There may have been an inch, but not more, of the top of the cavern showing. I had found it at its fullest. Sometimes it sinks so low that the waters of the pool do not rise to the rocks over which they were now thundering to the torrent below, and then the river is fed by an underground stream, of which the waterfall is only the overflow.

The pool was very still, and very blue, and the rocks about it were very bold, but naked and oppressive. I must confess to having been rather disappointed; for this is a place in which countless people have been moved to tears by the beauty of their surroundings as well as by a sensibility to the past of which we seem in these prosaic days to have lost the knack. Mr. Okey tells us how in 1783 Alfieri, "on his way to buy horses in England, turned aside with transport to visit the magic solitude of Vaucluse, and 'the Sorgue,' he writes, 'received many of my tears; and not simulated or imitative tears, but verily hot, scalding, heartfelt tears.'" Also how Wordsworth, "on his way to Italy in 1837, was most of all pleased with the day he spent at Vaucluse, where he was enchanted with the power and beauty of the stream and the wildness and grandeur of the rocks."

In the eighteenth century the cult of Petrarch and Laura was very much alive, and no traveller with any pretensions to taste would have omitted a visit to the famous fountain if he had found himself anywhere near. We have already seen how Arthur Young, who was anything but a sentimentalist, thought nothing of Avignon except in connection with the loves of Petrarch and Laura. The engaging rascal Casanova, who was a sentimentalist beyond everything, went to Avignon for no other purpose but to make the pilgrimage to Vaucluse. Of course he wept copiously; nothing else was to be expected of him, and I do not see why Mr. Okey should take it for granted that his emotion was not genuine.[22] He was not the most estimable of characters, but there can be no doubt of his love of letters, nor indeed of the power of such a story as that of Petrarch and Laura to touch him. "I threw myself on the ruins," he tells us, "arms extended as if to embrace them; I kissed them, I moistened them with my tears; I sought to breathe the divine breath which had animated them." And then he characteristically proceeded to draw a moral from his emotion that would help him with the lady to whom he was paying court at the time.

"I asked pardon of Mme. Stuard for having relinquished her arm to render homage to the shade of a woman who loved the finest spirit that the age had produced.

"I say spirit; for the flesh, as it seems, was not concerned in the matter. 'It is four hundred and fifty years, madame,' said I to the frigid statue that regarded me with an air of amazement, 'since Laura de Sade walked on the very spot on which you stand now. It is quite likely that she was not so beautiful as you are, but she was gay, bright, sweet, merry and good. May this air which she breathed, and which you are breathing at this moment, enliven you with the divine fire that ran in her veins, that made her heart beat and her breast palpitate! Then you will capture the homage of all sensible men, and you will find none who will dare to cause you the least annoyance. Gaiety, madam, is the lot of the happy, and sadness is the dreadful shadow of spirits condemned to eternal torments. Be gay then, and thus merit your beauty!'"[23]

It is sad to read that this inspiring address was received by the lady with no signs of emotion whatever. She took the chevalier's arm again and the party returned to the house of Messer Francesco d'Arezzo, where Casanova spent a quarter of an hour in carving his name; after which they dined and went back to Avignon.

From Casanova's description this scene must have passed at a house just below Philip de Cabassole's castle, as he describes himself mounting to the point of a rock. Such a house was shown as Petrarch's during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and one opposite to it, with an underground passage between the two, was shown as Laura's. I do not remember either of these houses, which I believe no longer exist. And it is pretty certain that none of the places that were ever celebrated as Petrarch's house was really his, though a fair case for the situation of his dwelling, and the garden he describes with such affection, has been made out.

The story of Petrarch's love for Laura, like that of Dante for Beatrice and Abelard for HÉloÏse, has passed into the very texture of literature, and need not be told here. And it would be an affectation for one who is unable to read Italian to pretend to any absorbing interest in Petrarch's expression of it. I must confess that, for my own part, I find much more to delight me in the details of his life at Vaucluse than in anything that I can gather at second-hand of his worship of Laura, and those details are real and fresh enough to give to the place such a charm as hangs over no other that I visited in Provence. Mr. Okey has collected them so well in his chapter "Petrarch at Vaucluse," that I cannot do better than make a long extract from his pages.

"In 1337 the poet, revolted by the atmosphere of the papal court, and perhaps a little disappointed at curial insensibility to his claims for beneficial favours, turned his back on Avignon and withdrew to live the simple life near the source of the Sorgue at Vaucluse, whose romantic beauty had been impressed on his mind since a boyish excursion he had made thither in 1316. To a modest little house fit for a Cato or a Fabricius, with no companion but a dog given him by Cardinal Colonna, living on hard rustic fare and dressed like a peasant, figs, nuts, almonds and some fish from the Sorgue his sole luxuries, the poet retired with his beloved books; the only sounds that greeted his ears in that sylvan solitude were the songs of birds, the lowing of oxen, the bleating of lambs, the murmuring of the stream. Like Horace, he scorns gold and gems and ivory and purple; the only female face he looks upon is that of his stewardess and servant—a visage withered and arid as a patch of the Libyan desert, and such that if Helen had possessed it, Troy would yet be standing. But her soul was as white as her body was black, and her fidelity was imperturbable. By indomitable industry she was able to attend to the poet's wants as well as to those of her own household; faring on hard, dry, black bread, watered wine, sour as vinegar, she lay on the bare ground, and would rise with the dawn; in the fiery heat of the dog-days, when the very grasshoppers are overcome, her invincible little body would never tire. Two small gardens the poet had: one a shady Transalpine Helicon, sacred to Apollo, overlooked the deep, mysterious, silent pool where the Sorgue rises, beyond which there was nothing save naked, barren, precipitous, trackless crags, inhabited only by wild animals and birds—the like of it could not be found under the sun. The other garden, better tilled and nearer his house, was bathed by the crystal waters of the rapid Sorgue, and hard by, separated by a rustic bridge from his house, was a grotto whose cool shade and sweet retirement fostered study; there, in a little retreat, not unlike the atriolo where Cicero was wont to declaim, the happy recluse passed the hot afternoons in meditation; in the cool of the evening he roamed about the green meadows, and in the morning rose early to climb the hills. Were not Italy so far and Avignon so near the poet could end his days there, fearing nothing so much as the return to a town.

"Dear friends, too, are not lacking. The cultured Philip of Cabassoles, Bishop of Cavaillon, dwells in the chÂteau that crowns the hill above his hermitage, and the great ones of the earth are pleased to seek him in his rustic home. The island garden of the Sorgue gave incessant trouble. Writing to Guglielmo di Pastrengo, the studious recluse recalls the stony patch of ground his friend helped to clear with his own hands, and informs him, the once barren waste is now enamelled with flowers, rebellious nature having been subdued by human toil. In a charming epistle, in Latin verse, to Cardinal Colonna, Petrarch tells of the fierce frontier wars he waged with the naiads of the Sorgue in order to recover possession of the garden which he had usurped from them and which they had reconquered during his absence in Italy. By dint of strenuous labour he had cleared a stony patch of land and planted there a little green meadow, as a retreat for the Muses. The nymphs, taking it ill that he should establish strangers in their territory and prefer nine old maids to a thousand young virgins, rushed furiously down the mountain to ravage and destroy his budding garden; he retires terrified, but, the storm passed, he returns shamefacedly and restores the desolated land to its former verdure. Scarce had the sun run his course when the furious nymphs return, and once more undo all his labour. Again he prepares to restore the evicted Muses, but is called away to foreign parts. After six years he returns to his solitude: not a vestige remains of his handiwork, and fish swim at their ease over the site of his garden. Grief gives him arms, and anger, strength; he calls to his aid the peasant, the shepherd, the fisherman; together the allies roll away great stones and tear out the entrails of the earth; they chase forth the invading nymphs; with Phoebus's help re-establish the sacred Muses in their place and build them an abiding temple. The enemy retires breathing vengeance and awaits the help of the winter floods and storms; but the victorious champion of the Muses is prepared; he defends his conquest by a rocky rampart and defies the fury of the nymphs. Now will he enjoy a lasting peace and fear no foes; not even were they allied to the waters of the Po and the Araxes. His triumph was, however, short-lived, for we learn from a further letter that with their allies, the winter floods, the naiads of the spring gained a final victory, and the defeated Petrarch was forced to lodge the Muses in another spot.

"The poet always found solace and refreshment in his gardens. A true lover of horticulture, he cultivates exotics, experiments on soils and plants, and writes to Naples for peach and pear trees. He invites the Archdeacon of Genoa to his dwelling, happy, celestial and angelic; to the silence and liberty of his grateful solitude; he will find secure joy and joyful security, instead of the noise and strife of cities; he shall listen to the nocturnal plaints of Philomela, and the turtledove cooing for her mate.

"He bids the convalescent Bishop of Viterbo find health of body and serenity of mind in the soft and balmy air of Vaucluse. There in the warm sun, by the crystal fountain, in umbrageous woods and green pastures, he shall experience the delights of Paradise as described by theologians, or the charms of the Elysian fields as sang by poets; a good supply of books and the society of faithful friends shall not be lacking."[24]

That is a picture worthy to be put beside those that one makes for oneself of Horace enjoying his Sabine retreat, and indeed, if one were to leave Laura out of consideration, there is an almost exact parallel in the retirement of the two poets. If one could have read Petrarch, as one reads Horace, there would have been a constant series of little discoveries and recognitions to be made all about Vaucluse. Even as it was, wandering about the pleasant quiet place as I did that afternoon and evening, with the music of its many waters always in my ears, I gained an impression that comes back to me now as among the best that that land of many memories afforded me. It was only the "fountain" itself in which I was a little disappointed. The rest was as sylvan and poetic and peaceful as one would wish such a place to be, and the shade of the courtly nature-loving poet seemed to brood over it all, so little has it changed in essentials.

I made my way up through the olive gardens to the ruins of the castle, of which there are enough left to provide a most picturesque feature, but hardly enough to enable one to picture it as it was when Petrarch visited his friend there. One sees the pool and the cliff from it, and the river running over its stones below, the curious cave dwellings high up in the rocks opposite, and the pleasant fertile valley opening out on the other side. It must have been a delightful country retreat, and in that remote spot fairly safe from the disturbances that were apt to centre round such dwellings, although it was strongly built and fortified.

The next morning I set out early to walk back to L'Isle by a roundabout way which took me over the hills to Saumane, where I had heard that there was an ancient castle still inhabited.

I found a hill village, very picturesque, as is the way of such villages in Provence, and walked round the walls that guarded the chÂteau from the gaze of the vulgar, but found it more inaccessible to curiosity than is usual with such places. So I went down again to the village and into the auberge to refresh myself, and found a friendly postman also refreshing himself at a table in the kitchen, who conversed with me on many subjects but particularly on that of dogs. He seemed to take an occasional bite as something in the ordinary way of his rounds, and only showed apprehension in the case of the dog that bit him being "malade." I am bound to confess that this possibility gave me something of a chill. I had seen the teeth of so many dogs, which seem to be of a particularly unfriendly disposition in that country, and although I had always managed to drive them off, my accident at Les Baux had made me nervous about them. But I had not considered the chance of hydrophobia, which an Englishman is apt to forget all about. However, I suffered nothing further, except an occasional scare; but whenever I approached a farm and heard the bark of a dog, I went past very gingerly.

Both the postman and the woman of the inn gave me to understand that, although the chÂteau was kept strictly closed against unauthorized visitors, something might possibly be done for me if I called at a certain cottage with a large rose over the porch and rattled the coins in my pocket. Which I did, and was sent up the road hopefully. On it I met a man leading a donkey laden with fagots, who promised to join me at the entrance when he had disposed of his load.

Parts of the chÂteau date back to the twelfth century, but the dull square front is of the seventeenth. It is magnificently situated on a point of rock above the village, and commands splendid views. Or rather, the terraces do, for a grove of ilexes has been planted all along the front—I suppose for shade, and shelter from the wind—and nothing can be seen from those windows.

I had exhausted the interest of the gardens, and the immediate surroundings of the chÂteau long before the man with the ass reappeared. There was an untidy "piÈce d'eau" on the sandy square in front of the house, and some dejected-looking peacocks in a cage, and over all the rest was that air of makeshift and economy which marks so strange a contrast between the chÂteaux of France and the lavishly kept-up country houses of England. Nor was the impression altered when I was taken inside, as far as the appointments of the rooms were concerned. I have never been inside any of the great French provincial chÂteaux, but I have seen a good many of the size of an ordinary English country house, and never one that was not full of rubbish, or that had gardens kept up except with the bare minimum of labour. They have the air of places to which their owners occasionally retire for a sort of picnic existence, and I suppose that is what they are generally used for—as appanages to some fine house in a city.

But all the rubbishy furniture and decoration of this chÂteau could not detract from its interest. It had belonged to the Marquises of Sade. I do not know whether the infamous eighteenth century marquis ever owned or lived in it, but it was the property of the Sades when Petrarch was at Vaucluse, and even if Laura had not married into the family, as it is generally supposed that she did, Petrarch must have visited it. The vaulted dining-hall, with its curious echo, can have changed but little since his time, and one can say almost with certainty that his feet trod the stones upon which one stands today, or at least that he knew the room as one sees it.

The appalling dungeon cells, most of them too dark and inconvenient to be used now even as storerooms, show that this castle was equipped with all the conveniences of the middle ages. One could more easily imagine a nobleman of those days doing without his dungeons than a modern one without his bathrooms or garage. But the owners of this chÂteau seem to have been more enterprising in making economic use of their prisoners than most of their fellows. They ran an illicit mint. There are the stone trough and table in one of the maze of cells underground. Nobody could have been indelicate enough to pry into the domestic arrangements of a gentleman's dungeons, and the coiners were no doubt as safe from detection there as anywhere. Nor was it probable that any of them would give away the secret. They did not mix with the outside world, and were not likely to do so again when once they had been initiated into their new trade.