The Last Walk. St. Michel de Frigolet

I walked on from Montmajour through the most delightful country. The road dipped up and down, crossed thymy, brambly, rocky heaths, and gave promise of pleasant villages to come. One begins here to get out of the plain, and on the low heights the comfortable land, dotted with nestling farms and towers and steeples, can be seen stretching away to the white Alpilles, upon which Les Baux perches and makes its romantic presence felt, though it cannot be seen.

This little corner is full of curiosities, but I had a long walk before me and a fair one behind, and turned aside to see none of them. There are the remains of the Roman aqueduct, built to carry the waters of Vaucluse into the Arena at Arles. It is still called Ouide de Sarrasin (stonework of the Saracens) by the country people, because the Spanish Moors marched along it to attack Arles. At the foot of the Montagne de Cordes are the remains of fortifications, contemporary and perhaps built by the invading Saracens. On the top of the same hill is the Grotto of the Fairies, with its curious pavement and stones which were cut in prehistoric times. And there are other megalithic remains in the little hill of Castellet, and a cavern in which were found a hundred skeletons, and among other objects ornaments of a stone only to be found in the Indies and the Caucasus. The French call it calaÏs; I do not know its English name. All these things are to be seen within a mile or two of Montmajour.

But two of the sights I did see, because they lay right on my road, and the second of them I would have gone out of it a reasonable distance to see in any case.

The first was the "allÉes couvertes," of which signposts obligingly give notice, at so many metres from the road. They are subterranean passages, running at a short distance beneath the surface, on either side of the road and parallel to it, broken into here and there, and their entrances covered with brambles. When they were constructed, or what for, I have not the slightest idea, and no book that I have been able to get hold of tells me. My impression is that they extend for some miles, but I don't know where I got it from, and perhaps I am wrong. The "allÉes couvertes" are a mystery of which I am content to be without the key.

But nearly halfway between Arles and Tarascon is the charming little village of Fontvieille, and there is something to see there that I would not willingly have missed. It is the disused mill which Alphonse Daudet bought to retire to as a young man, and from which he wrote that delightful collection of tales and essays about his beloved native country to which he gave the title "Lettres de Mon Moulin." They breathe Provence, as nothing modern does, except the works of Mistral and his brother FÉlibres, and some of the tales of Jean Aicard, and if one wanted to make a pilgrimage to the heart of it, one would come either to the "Mas" at Maillane in which Mistral was born, or to Daudet's mill at Fontvieille.

Nevertheless when I came within sight of it I was a trifle disappointed. There it stood on its thymy hill overlooking the village, familiar enough in its aspect from the photograph in my edition of this book. But there were two other mills exactly like it on the little hill, and all three quite close together; and it was in full view of the village, and not very far from it. I had imagined a place of more reflective solitude. I was glad to have seen it, but did not trouble to go up and examine it more closely.

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In the evening I came to the roadside chapel of St. Gabriel, which was marked on my map with a cross, showing it to be something worth looking at, but was left without mention alike by the German Baedeker and the French Joanne. It is just a single, heavily buttressed nave with a richly carved porch, within the arch of which is a curious relief representing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It stands in an olive garden by the side of the road and there are no other buildings quite near to it, so that it comes as something of a surprise. It is important, as I have learnt since from Mr. T. A. Cook, as a link in the progression of early ProvenÇal architecture, and is certainly worth seeing on its own account.

A little farther on was an auberge, before which some great wagons were standing while their drivers refreshed themselves within. It was in a quiet and pleasant corner, where four roads met, all overshadowed by trees now in their full leafage. I should have liked to get a bed and a dinner there, as by this time I had walked quite far enough, and it was the sort of peaceful countrified place that it is pleasant to wake up in. But they did not want me, and after sitting there for a time I tramped the three or four miles into Tarascon.

It was dark by the time I got there, and I saw very little of the immortal Tartarin's town. I went up under an old gateway, and wandered about the streets on the lookout for an inn. I would have taken the first that came, for I was very tired by this time. But I could not find one at all. At last I was directed to a large hotel, where they gave me a bad dinner and charged me preposterously.

But I got a good deal of fun out of it. Tarascon is a military town, and the big dining-room in a corner of which I sat was providing entertainment for many of the soldiers of the regiments quartered there, and their friends among the townspeople. There were cavalry officers in natty little Cambridge-blue tunics, and troopers with tunics of a deeper shade of blue. They did not mix, but their friends were all of the same class, and of course a trooper of a French cavalry regiment may be just as well bred as his officers. It seemed to me, remembering the character that Daudet fixed upon the Tarasconnais, that he had done them no injustice. There was a sort of theatrical swagger about those that came within my view that marked them off from their companions of the military even more than their civilian garb. I remember Sir Henry Irving in "The Lyons Mail" taking a meal with his back to the audience. He seemed to be eating chiefly with his shoulders, and that was exactly the way in which these gentlemen of Tarascon ate, as if they were in the limelight, and everything must be done for effect. When they talked, they did so with terrific emphasis and gesticulation, and when somebody else was talking they would suddenly withdraw themselves from the conversation and reflectively twirl their moustaches. And when my waiter, who was tremendously overworked, did bring my long pauses of reflection to an end, he served me with a flourishing air that would have made it almost indecent to complain of being kept waiting, since my reward was to be attended to with an amount of pomp and circumstance that must warm the coldest of victuals.

I was up early next morning and walked out of the town by a roundabout way, which gave me a sight of its quaint arcaded streets, King RenÉ's castle, which would have been worth a visit if I had had time for it, and the suspension bridge across the river to Beaucaire. I passed along a plane-shaded boulevard on the outskirts of the town, always on the lookout for Tartarin's villa, which I think I saw, though there were no signs of the india-rubber tree in its elegant little garden.

I was on a literary pilgrimage. You remember Daudet's story "L'Elixir du RÉvÉrend PÈre Gaucher"—how the monastery of the White Canons had fallen upon such evil times that even the belfry was as silent as a deserted dovecot, and the monks, for lack of money, were obliged to sound to matins with rattles of almond-wood; how the humble cowherd restored them to affluence by the cordial cunningly distilled from ProvenÇal herbs, of which he had learnt the secret from the naughty old woman who had brought him up; and the dreadful things that followed when the wonderful elixir proved too seductive for his soul's health. Now this monastery was St. Michel de Frigolet, up in the hills a mile or two off the road from Tarascon to Avignon, and there is a good deal more attached to it than Daudet's story.

To begin with, Mistral went to school there, and I will make use of another chapter of his Memoirs to describe its situation and tell its story.

It was nearly eighty years ago that he was taken there from Maillane in the farm cart, together with a small folding bed, a deal box to hold his papers and a bristly pigskin trunk containing his books and belongings.

"At the Revolution, the lands of Saint-Michel had been sold piece by piece for paper money, and the despoiled abbey, deserted and solitary, remained up there, bereft in the wilds, open to the four winds and the wild animals. Sometimes smugglers would use it to make their powder in. When it rained the shepherds would shelter their sheep in the church. The gamblers of the neighbourhood would hide there in winter at midnight to avoid the police, and there by the pale light of a few candles, as the gold followed the movement of the cards, the vaulted roof echoed with oaths and blasphemies instead of psalms. Then when their game was finished these rakes ate and drank and revelled and rioted until dawn.

"About 1832 some mendicant friars established themselves there. They had put a bell in the old Roman belfry, and rang it on Sundays. But they rang in vain; nobody came up the hill to their offices, for they had no faith in them. The Duchess de Berry about this time had come to Provence to raise the Carlists against Louis Philippe, and I remember it being whispered that these runaway friars were nothing but Spanish bandits under their black robes plotting some dubious intrigue.

"Following these friars a worthy native of Cavaillon, M. Donnat, came and started a boarding-school for boys at the Convent of Saint-Michel, which he had bought on credit.

"He was an old bachelor, yellow and swarthy in complexion, with lank hair, flat nose, large mouth with prominent teeth, in a long black frock-coat and tanned shoes. Very devout, and as poor as a church mouse, he had made shift to start his school and to find pupils without a penny to bless himself with.

"For instance, he would go to Graveson, or Tarascon, or Barbentane or Saint-Pierre to a farmer who had boys.

"'I have come to tell you,' he would say, 'that I have opened a school at Saint-Michel de Frigolet. You have thus at your very door an excellent institution to which you can send your sons and have them prepared for their examinations.'

"'My dear sir,' the father of the family would reply, 'that may be all very well for rich people, but we are not the sort of folk to give our boys so much learning. They will have quite enough for working on the land.'

"'Look here,' M. Donnat would say, 'there is nothing better than a good education. Don't worry about payment. Give me every year so many measures of corn, so many casks of wine, so many drums of oil, and arrange matters in that way.'

"So the worthy farmer would send his children to Saint-Michel de Frigolet.

"Then I suppose M. Donnat would go to a tradesman and begin thus:

"'What a fine boy you have there! He looks sharp enough, too. I suppose you are not going to turn him into a counter-jumper.'

"'Oh, sir, if we only could, we should be glad to give him a little education, but schools are dear, and when there isn't much money——!'

"'If it's a question of a school,' M. Donnat would reply, 'send him to mine at Saint-Michel de Frigolet. We will teach him Latin and make a man of him. As for payment, let it come out of the shop. You will have an extra customer in me, and a very good customer too.'

"And then and there the shopkeeper would promise him his son.

"Another time he would pass a carpenter's house, and supposing he saw a child playing in the gutter who looked pale, he would say to his mother: 'What's the matter with this pretty little fellow? He looks very white. Is he ill, or has he been eating cinders?'

"'Oh, no,' she would reply, 'it is always playing about that makes him look like that. Play is meat and drink to him, sir.'

"'Well, then, why not send him to my school at Saint-Michel de Frigolet?' M. Donnat would say. 'The good air alone will give him rosy cheeks in a fortnight. And he will be watched over and taught his lessons; and when he has been well educated he will find an easier occupation than a carpenter's.'

"'Ah, sir! But when one is poor!'

"'Don't trouble about that. We have up there I don't know how many doors and windows to mend. I can promise your husband more work as a carpenter than he will know how to get through; and so, my good woman, we shall settle the matter of fees.'

"So this child would also find himself at Saint-Michel, with those of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker, and by these means M. Donnat collected into his school about forty boys, of whom I was one. Out of them all, I and a few others were there for a money payment, but three-quarters of them were paid for in kind, or by the labour of their parents. In a word, M. Donnat had solved the problem of the Bank of Exchange, quite simply and without any fuss, which the celebrated Proudhom tried in vain to establish in Paris in 1848....

"In those days Saint-Michel was of much less importance than it has since become. There was left just the cloister of the Augustinian monks, with its green in the middle of the court; to the south the refectory and chapter-house; then the dilapidated church of St. Michael, with its frescoes of the damned, and of demons armed with forks, and the battle between the devil and the great archangel in the middle; and then the kitchen and stables.

"But apart from this little group of buildings there was a buttressed chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of Succour, with a porch in front of it. Masses of ivy covered the walls, and the interior was lined with gilded carvings which enclosed pictures said to be by Mignard representing scenes in the life of the Virgin. Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV, had given these decorations in accordance with a vow she had made to the Virgin if she should bear a son.

"This chapel, a real gem, hidden in the mountains, had been saved during the Revolution by the good people who piled up fagots under the porch and hid the entrance. It was there that every morning in the year, at five o'clock in summer and six in winter, we were taken to hear Mass; it was there that I prayed, I remember—we all prayed—with a faith that was really angelic....

"The little hills all around were covered with thyme, rosemary, asphodel, box and lavender. In odd corners there were vines, which produced a wine of some repute-the wine of Frigolet; patches of olives on the lower slopes; plantations of almond-trees, twisted, dark and stunted, on the stony ground; and wild fig-trees in the clefts of the rocks. This sparse vegetation was all that these rugged hills could show; the rest was nothing but waste and scattered rocks. But how delicious it smelt! The scent of the mountains at sunrise intoxicated us....

"We became as rugged as a troop of gipsies. But how we revelled in these hills and gorges and ravines, with their sonorous ProvenÇal names ... eternal monuments of the country and its language, all embalmed in thyme and rosemary and lavender, all illumined in gold and azure. Oh, sweet land of scents and colours and delights and illusions, what happiness, what dreams of paradise thou didst reveal to my childhood!"[31]

This idyllic existence came suddenly to an end. M. Donnat, being frequently away collecting pupils, neglected to educate them when he had found them, and being anxious to increase his numbers took pupils who paid little or nothing, and they were not those who ate the least. One morning the cook disappeared.

"No cook, no broth for us. The masters left us in the lurch one after the other. M. Donnat had disappeared. His poor old mother boiled us some potatoes for a few days, and then his father said to us one morning, 'Children, there is nothing more to eat; you had better go home.'"[32]

This was the end of poor M. Donnat's experiment, and he finally died in an almshouse.

The old monastery was abandoned for twelve years, and was then bought by a Premonstrant, who restored it under the rules of his order, which had ceased to exist in France.

"Thanks to the activity and preaching and begging of this ardent zealot, the little monastery grew enormously. Numerous crenellated buildings were added to it, a new, magnificently decorated church was built, with a nave and two aisles and two towers. A hundred monks or novices occupied its cells, and every Sunday the neighbouring people drove up to admire the elaborate pomp of their offices. The abbey of the White Fathers became so popular that when in 1880 the Republic ordered the convents to be closed a thousand peasants or inhabitants of the plains shut themselves up in it to protest against the execution of the decree. And it was then that we saw a whole army on the march—cavalry, infantry, generals and captains, with their commissariat and all the apparatus of war—and encamping round the Convent of Saint-Michel de Frigolet, seriously undertaking the siege of a comic-opera citadel, which would have given in to four or five gendarmes."[33]

It may be remembered that the romantic heart of the immortal Tartarin was stirred within him to take part in these proceedings. Equipped with a regular arsenal of weapons, he led his followers up the hill one dark night and taking immense pains to circumvent the investing troops crawled laboriously to the gates of the monastery. As he was crouching behind a stone, an officer on guard, who had often met him at his club, called out affably, "Bon soir, M. Tartarin," and made no difficulty whatever about his proceeding. The more people there were inside the monastery to consume its stock of provisions the quicker the siege would end. It has been made the basis of other stories and poems, but Mistral assures us that none of them are half as comic as were the facts themselves. I have read elsewhere that two thousand soldiers, horse and foot, united to expel twenty recalcitrant but unarmed monks, who were finally reduced by hunger and led triumphantly between two files of dragoons to Tarascon.

I do not know when or how the monks came back to their monastery, but they were finally expelled with all the rest ten years ago, and settled themselves somewhere in Belgium.

Well, you will agree that Saint-Michel de Frigolet was a place to see. I got up to it by a winding track among the hills. It was a clear, sunny morning, and the bees were humming among the scented herbs that give such a character to these stony hills, just as they did in the poet's happy childhood. On this side of the hill were a few olives here and there, but no other sign of cultivation until I came to the top of a hill, where there was a patch of dug ground, and beyond it a collection of pinnacles and walls conveying the impression that I had unexpectedly hit upon a large modern cemetery.

The first building I came to was a tall, jerry-built structure which seemed to have been used as a sort of factory. Its doors were open and its chambers empty and already beginning to fall to pieces. I walked down the hill between this and another building of the same sort, modern, hideous and deserted, and came to a large church, which looked on the outside much like a pretentious Nonconformist chapel in a London suburb. The west doors stood open, and I looked over an iron railing to find the interior blazing with gold and bright blues and reds and greens on every inch of wall and roof, and with coloured windows to match. At first sight it looked gorgeous, at second, its gorgeousness was seen to be mere garish vulgarity. The sacristan was inside, and I pushed open the iron gate and went in. He showed me the glories of the church with pride. He said that the decorations alone had cost one million six hundred thousand francs, which is £64,000, and the more I looked the more depressed I became at the senseless, conscienceless waste of it all. This was the building that the Premonstrants had erected in 1854, the "magnificently decorated church" to which Mistral describes all the neighbouring countryside flocking to admire the elaborate pomp of its offices. But all Mistral's artistic genius went into his poetry. He seems to have been incapable of appreciating the art that surrounded him so richly. I was told that the tomb he had erected for himself in the churchyard at Maillane was a close copy of the Pavillon de la Reine Jeanne at Les Baux, but that he had substituted the heads of favourite dogs for the carvings on the keystones of the arches; and I came across another instance of his lack of artistic understanding later on in his MusÉe Arlaten.

The Premonstrants have for their object the celebration of the ceremonies of the Church with the highest possible degree of elaboration, and I suppose that when they acquired this monastery money was lavished upon them for enriching it. It was the same spirit, one would have said, that had created the treasures of ecclesiastical art and architecture of which Provence is so full, but if so, what had become of its creative force? And yet the people—the uncontaminated sons of the soil, to whom the latest doctrine would have us look for the truest appreciation of art—flocked to this pinchbeck shrine, and took its gaudy ignorance for a true revival of ancient splendours.

The sacristan took me over the rest of the buildings. They had all been bought a few years before by a rich priest who admirably uses them for the training of boys whom he sends out to the colonies. He has bought farms and large tracts of land all around, and the score or so of youths that he looks after work on them. I should have liked a chat with him, but he was away for the day, and I suppose the boys were all out at work, for I did not see any of them.

Some of the buildings that were used by the original monks—and I suppose also by M. Donnat—are used now; others, even of the newer ones, are empty and some of them dilapidated. I was shown the library—two big rooms fitted up with painted deal shelves from which all the books had been removed. They looked poor and desolate, and there was not a trace of architectural dignity about anything else I saw that had been built in the last century, though it was all convenient enough for its purpose.

And yet there was the old church which these aspiring religionists had left to its quiet decay while they built their vulgar modern one, the sweet little peaceful cloister, the chapel of Our Lady of Succour, which Mistral has described, with its gilded Louis XIV boiseries round the altar, from which, however, the pictures had been removed. They had models around them, if they had had the wit to use them.

I went down the expensively embanked road towards Graveson, when I had seen all that there was to see. It was lined on either side with heavily built shrines exhibiting the Stations of the Cross, which looked like the rooks of a set of clumsy chessmen. And the last thing I saw of this derelict monument of bad taste, before the windings of the road hid it, was a large cross toppling over sideways, as if even that had not been built to last.