NÎmes and the Pont du Gard

The surpassing charm of NÎmes is provided by its waters, which are the chief feature of a garden as beautiful of its kind as is to be seen anywhere. But these waters were considered too sacred for common use in Roman times, and in order to provide this quite unimportant colonial town, which is not even mentioned by classical writers, with pure drinking water, an aqueduct was built to convey to it the waters of the springs five and twenty miles away; and the remains of this aqueduct are one of the wonders of the world. We will take the Pont du Gard first, as I did on this expedition, walking from Remoulins, and then back again by the other side of the river, and on to NÎmes.

It was a bright, hot, spring day, and the first view I had of the famous aqueduct was through a haze of foliage which later on would have been thick enough to hide it until one was almost underneath its soaring arches. Taking this road to the left, which is the usual and the shorter one, the huge structure comes as a sudden surprise; but I am not sure that it does not provide a more interesting sight seen over miles of olive gardens from the other road.

No detailed description of this mere fragment of a monumental and enduring work is necessary, as I am able to give an excellent photograph of it from a point of view that is not usually taken. But I doubt if its immensity can be gauged from any photograph that it is possible to take. It rises a hundred and eighty feet from the level of the river. The huge blocks of which it is composed are put together, and have held together, without any mortar. It has lasted for close upon two thousand years, and looks as if it would last till the end of the world, without much trouble being taken to keep it in repair. Its effect, indeed, as one lingers about it, and looks at it now from the hills above, now from the road below, now from a distance across the plain, and tries to get some definite outstanding impression, is of a work on such a scale that it rivals that of nature herself. It is huge and yet it is light; it is regular in design, but irregular in detail; its use is gone, yet it has life.

It stands in majestic solitude. The blue river with its sandy bars flows between rocky, wooded hills, and the white road keeps it company, but seems to be little used. There is some sort of a cafÉ near it, but it is hidden by the trees. I had the place all to myself during the hour or so that I stayed there. The impression of something belonging to nature more than to the art of man deepened.

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The photograph, taken from the north bank of the river, shows the end of the squared channel which conducted the water, and a little farther along the roofing with which the whole length of it was covered. A tall man can walk under it upright; but if he is inclined to be bulky there are places where he may have to squeeze himself through. This is because of the calcareous deposit left by the water flowing through the channel for centuries. The thickness and hardness of this coating must be seen to be believed. At first I could not imagine how such enormous masses of what looked like natural rock had been raised to the summit, and then I remembered reading something about the deposit, and recognized it for what it was. Houses have been built of it, and a whole church in a village not far off.

The jutting-out stones in the middle row of arches may also be noticed. They were put there by the Romans probably to provide for scaffolding when repairs should become necessary.

I do not know why it is that my stay in NÎmes seems in retrospect rather depressing. The weather was fine, and what there is to see is well worth seeing. Perhaps I was getting a little tired of being alone; perhaps the large, dirty hotel in which I spent the night had something to do with it. One puts up with very poor quarters in the country, and always has some sort of intercourse with one's fellow-creatures. But in a town it is different, and I was glad enough to get away from NÎmes the next morning, bearing with me nothing very fresh in the way of impressions to add to those that I had formed of the place during an hour's visit two years before. In fact, a motorist who stays to lunch at NÎmes, and sees the fountains, the arena and the Maison CarÉe, may congratulate himself that he has tasted the full flavour of the brew.

But these three sights, and the "Temple of Diana," by the fountains, are by all means worth seeing. Except the Arena, which is somewhat similar to the one at Arles, there is nothing to equal them.

The "fountains" are, as to their aspect, seventeenth century of the happiest. How far they follow the lines of the Roman baths and washing pools I have not troubled to enquire, nor does it very much matter. Probably the semi-circular basin in which rises the once sacred spring is much the same as it was in shape. From it the waters are led underneath pavings and bridges to the various balustraded and ornamented pools of the central garden, and then into canals, still of formal architecture, until they disappear somewhere at either end of the long tree-shaded Quai. It is always fascinating to see water flowing, and I know nothing more attractive of its sort than the way this limpid spring comes from under the dark arches leading to the central pool and covers a shallow stone floor recessed all the way round in a colonnade. The photograph gives some idea of this happy invention, but it is not possible to convey its pleasing ingenuity. The gardens, beautifully planted, slope up in a series of bold staircases and terraces. They show a wealth of variegated foliage that makes a most pleasing background to the graceful architecture of the pools and fountains, and on the lower side broad avenues of trees lead away from the charming place quite in the best style of French garden planning.

In the garden itself are the ruins of a Roman temple, which has for long been known as the Temple of Diana. In 1739 an inscription was found dedicating it to the god Nemausus and the goddess Diana on behalf of the commonwealth of NÎmes, and attributing its building to the munificence of the Emperor Augustus.

Part of the beautiful colonnaded portico has been reconstructed. It connected the temple with the NymphÆum, which was where the central square basin now is. Preserved in the temple is a single tall pillar—one of those used to support the velarium under which the Roman ladies reclined in the course of their bathing.

The architecture of this temple forms a valuable connecting link between that of the Romans and of the later ProvenÇal builders, concerning which Mr. Cook has something interesting to tell us. He is more interesting still on the subject of the Maison CarrÉe, for he gives us, with a wealth of technical detail and illustration, the curious reason for its being so supremely satisfying to the eye.

No one even with an uneducated eye for beauty can look at this little gem of Greek architecture without a sensation of pleasure. Mr. Baring-Gould, whose eye is not uneducated, writes of it: "It is the best example we have in Europe of a temple that is perfectly intact. It is mignon, it is cheerful, it is charming. I found myself unable at any time to pass it without looking round over my shoulder, again and again, and uttering some exclamation of pleasure at the sight of it."[25]

And Mr. Henry James, in that delightful book, "A Little Tour in France," writes in his own way:

"The first impression you receive from this delicate little building, as you stand before it, is that you have already seen it many times. Photographs, engravings, models, medals, have placed it definitely in your eye, so that from the sentiment with which you regard it curiosity and surprise are almost completely, and perhaps deplorably, absent. Admiration remains, however,—admiration of a familiar and even slightly patronizing kind. The Maison CarrÉe does not overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great sensations of the antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvellously preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming compactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest that vibrates from one age to another when the note of taste is struck."

In a word, the beauty of this little temple is alive, and one of the reasons for its being so I now proceed to extract from Mr. Cook's discussion of a subject that he has made particularly his own.

Why is it that the Maison CarrÉe is so eminently pleasing to the eye—is alive—while the Madeleine in Paris, which is a strictly mathematical enlargement of it, is "dull and unsuccessful"? Because the lines of the Madeleine are straight, and those of this temple, as of all Greek architecture, are not, though they are so nearly so that the fact was not discovered until about twenty years ago.

The divergences are surprisingly small, and in fact this great secret of the ancient builders—Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine and Gothic, as well as Greek—was not suspected until it was proved on the Parthenon in the middle of the last century. "In the Parthenon the curve is under four inches in two hundred and twenty-eight feet. At NÎmes it is nearly five inches in less than a hundred feet."[26]

These skilful curves can be traced in Gothic cathedrals. The walls in the nave of Westminster Abbey "are bent inwards at about the height of the keystones of the arches and outwards above and below this point, and they are structurally sound unto this day."[27]

Mr. Cook explains the difference caused by following this principle "as something of the difference between an architectural drawing done with compass and rulers, and an artist's painting of the same building done with a free hand and with just those 'inaccuracies' which give it life and beauty." It is "an essential principle which, known to Greece, and known to the builders of the Maison CarrÉe, is one of the chief reasons why this little temple is the greatest treasure of classical architecture north of the Alps."[28]

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The Maison CarrÉe has been at various times a kind of HÔtel de Ville, a private dwelling, a stable, a church, a granary, and a public market, and it is surprising that with all the structural changes it has undergone there is anything of it left. But fortunately its exterior was never much interfered with, and now its interior has been cleared out, and is used as an antiquarian museum.

The amphitheatre at NÎmes is very slightly smaller than that at Arles, but it is rather better preserved. In fact, it is the best preserved of any of the Roman amphitheatres—far better than the Coliseum, for instance. Its seating accommodation was about twenty-two thousand, as against ninety thousand of the Coliseum, but the area of the arena was in the proportion of about seven to twelve, so that this provincial city was very well off in this respect, as compared with the capital of the world.

The photograph will show what a noble building this was, and will incidentally provide an example of the manner in which the French treat their ancient monuments. You may imagine from it an ellipse of about four hundred and thirty feet by three hundred and thirty, all of it in much the same state. It will be seen that where the original structure is strong enough it has been left, where it needs repair the old work has been copied, and here and there—as in the balustrading beneath the upper row of arches—features have been restored not absolutely necessary to the support of the building. There are those who object to this sort of restoration. I suppose it is a matter of knowledge and imagination; but ordinary persons, of whom in questions of architecture and archÆology I am one, may be grateful for a system that shows plainly what an ancient building really looked like, and what purposes it served, while he is nowhere invited to take the new for the old.

As the original seating accommodation of the amphitheatre would provide for more than a quarter of the present inhabitants of NÎmes—that at Arles would take some thousands more than there are now people in Arles—it has not been necessary to restore all the tiers of seats for the uses to which the arena is put. Consequently, it is possible to see the ingenious plan on which it was constructed, so as to give ample means of ingress and egress, and to divide up the spectators according to their rank. There were thirty-four tiers of them—four for the senators, ten for the knights, ten for the freedmen, and ten for the slaves and menials—and everybody had an uninterrupted view of what went on in the arena. The holes for the masts supporting the gigantic awning that sheltered the spectators can be seen here and there in the topmost circle; but the moderns do without that luxury, and watch their bull-fights in the full glare of the Southern sun.

I cannot describe a ProvenÇal bull-fight, as the season had not begun when I was in the country, though preparations were being made for a spectacle on the following Sunday. It is an ancient sport with the ProvenÇaux, but, as Mr. Henry James says, "the thing is shabbily and imperfectly done. The bulls are rarely killed, and indeed often are bulls only in the Irish sense of the term,—being domestic and motherly cows." But the "Grande Tauromachie" is creeping in. Large bills were posted about the amphitheatre announcing events in which Spanish matadors and torÉadors would compete for the favour of the populace, and the organizers of the sport were full of self-commendation of the noble struggle they were making over the innovation. It seemed to be almost a matter of conscience with them. They spoke of their loyalty and simplicity, of their scrupulous honesty and untiring good-will, and of the inexhaustible force of energy that they would bring to bear in this contest against discouraging circumstance.

Mises À Mort they call their Spanish bull-fights, and to judge by a picture postcard that I bought of one in progress, in which every seat in the amphitheatre is occupied, and dense masses of people are standing where there are no seats, they are taking very kindly to the pastime.