taste for poetry is a form of patriotism, will be to the great province what even as it was in Ireland in the days of the "Spirit of the Nation." The sentiment, which is pretty and touching, appears quite genuine.

We had forgotten that Roumanille was dead, and we made a pilgrimage to his book-shop. We were greeted by a dark-eyed little lady; when we asked for the poet, the tears started into her fine black eyes, and we realized, with a tightening of the heart, the cruel carelessness of our question. But Madame Roumanille (for it was she), with the beautiful courtesy of her nation, would not let us depart in this unhappy mood. She talked sweetly and seriously of her husband's latter days and of his deathbed, cheerful and courageous as the last pages of the "Phædo; " these Provençal poets have a classic temper in their souls! He would not let them wear a mournful face. "Life is a good thing," ," said he; "chequered, no doubt, with melancholy moments, but none the less bright and excellent as a whole. We have come now to one of these melancholy passages, but, believe me, my friends, the sadness of death is greatly overrated! There is nothing cruel or tragic to lament about. Life has been very good and now - at the end of itdeath comes in its place, not unkind."

So the good Félibre passed away, mindful, no doubt, of that passage in one of his poems where he says-but I have forgotten the words:

Now let me depart in peace,
For I have planted in Provence
A tree that shall endure.

Joachim du Bellay has been to Anjou. True, he has written too much, but posterity is an excellent editor, and reduces the most voluminous to a compendious handful. Mistral is the greatest of the Félibres, and perhaps the only one whose works will survive the charming Davidsbund of poets and patriots which so loudly fills the public ear to-day.

We went more than once to see the great man in his garden at Maillane, a pleasant place surrounding a cool, quiet villa, where the poet lives with his young wife. It is the only house of any pretensions in Maillane, and to the good people of the commune Monsieur Mistral is both the poet and the squire. He comes out to receive you-a strikingly handsome man with a beautiful voice; so much like Buffalo Bill in his appearance that one day, when the two celebrities met by accident in a Parisian café, they stared at each other, bewildered for one moment, and then, rising, each advanced towards the other and shook hands! We talked of many things, and among others, of course, of Félibrige. I ventured to ask him the meaning of the name, which is a puzzle not to philologists alone. He confessed that it had no particular meaning; that thirty years ago, when he and Roumanille, and the other five discussed their projected Provençal renaissance, one of them reminded the others of a quaint old song, still sung in out-of-theway Provençal villages, in honor of certain prophets or wise men dimly spoken of as

Les félibres de la Loi. No one knew precisely what the word designed so much the greater its charm, its suggestiveness! The name was adopted by acclamation; and henceforth the meaning of Félibre is clear.

If even the gay, the cordial Roumanille gave out at the last this savor of antique philosophy, the likeness of Mistral to the elder poets is far more striking. He is the Provençal Theocritus, and his poems, with their delightful literalness of touch, their unforced picturesqueness and natural simplicity, will probably endure when more striking monuments WE went the next day, in company of our nineteenth-century literature are with Mistral and his charming, intelliless read than remembered. We can- gent wife, to see the races at Saint not imagine, at any distance of time, a Remy. "Regardez nos fillettes!" said Provence in which some posy of Mis- the poet. "On dirait des statues tral's verses will not be treasured. He Grecques."

VI.

A Greek statue is severer

in its beauty; but certainly the girls of | out its space with gardens, with orSt. Remy might be the sisters of the chards, with hay-meadows. The garstatuettes of Tanagra; so dignified, so dens of St. Remy are the fortune of the graceful, do they appear in the beauti- place, and owe to their happy situation ful costumes of Arles. They were the behind the range of the Alpines an great adornment of these mild provin-earlier harvest of flowers and fruit than cial sports, as they came in troops from elsewhere, even in the sunny South. Maillane and Tarascon, from Avignon, In the roomy inn-garden we wondered from Arles, all dressed in the plain- at the luxuriance of the spring, as we falling skirt, the fichu of pure fresh sat in the shadow of the blossoming tulle, and the long-pointed shawl, or Guelder - rose bush, or picked great "Provençale," which recalls the grace- trails of rose and syringa. We gathered ful garb of Venetian women. Some- our first dish of strawberries on the times the skirt is pale pink or apricot, 23rd of April. There are but two with a dove-colored shawl, or green with openings at St. Remy-miller or mara lilac shawl; but nearly always the ket-gardener; the two prettiest trades, skirt and shawl alike are black, relieved suitable to this greenest, most pastoral only by the narrow muslin apron, which of cities. reaches to the hem of the skirt before, and by the abundant fulness of the white fichu across the breast. Every one who has been to a fancy ball recalls the charming coiffure which surmounts this costume - the thick wavy black tresses, parted in the middle of the brow, taken down either side of the face loosely, then suddenly raised from the nape of the neck high at the back of the head, coiled round there and fixed under a tiny band of white lace, and a large bow or sash of black ribbon. | Few headdresses are at once so irresistible and so dignified, and none could be better suited to the regular features, ample beauty, and melting eyes of the daughters of Provence.

St. Remy is but gently raised above the plains; still low enough to nestle among the white-flowered hawthorn hedges by the runnels bordered with flowers. But, scarce two miles beyond, there rise the scarred, fantastic, sunbaked crags of the Alpille Mountains -the Alpines in modern guide-book parlance. These are true southern hills, barren and elegant, grey, lilac, blue, pink even, or purple against the sky; but never green. Walk thither along the upward road till, at the mountain's feet, you come to a round knoll of fine turf, fringed with stone-pines, under every tree a marble sarcophagus for a seat. Hence the view is beautiful across the wide blue valley to the snowstreaked pyramid of Mont Ventoux. But you will turn your back upon the view, for, placed on the middle of this grassy mound, is the pride of St. Remy, the Antiquities, sole relic of the prosperous town of Glanum Livii. Nowhere in Provence have we seen so beautiful a setting to monuments so perfect in their small proportions as the Triumphal Arch and the Mausoleum. Time has much ruined, it is true, the decorations of the arch; the winged

We fell in love with St. Remy; we stayed there for a week, in the Hotel du Cheval Blanc, where the long, dark, convent-like corridors and the cypressscreens behind the house give one already, as it were, a waft of Italy. St. Remy is a delightful little place. All its streets are avenues of great zebratrunked, century-old plane-trees, garlanded in April with quaint little hanging balls, or else of wych-elms, gay with pinkish-buff blossoms, and yet so gnarled and hollow that they might victories are bruised and battered; only almost be those famous elms which the feet of one warrior remain, the Sully planted about the towns of France. head and fighting arm of another; the La Ville Verte the people call it, and chains of the slaves have fallen into never was name better chosen. Even pieces. But nothing has marred the as at Orange, the town has shrunk style, the grace, the purity of the within its ancient girdle, and has filled exquisite outline, Greek rather than

Roman in its simple elegance. The history begins with the French RevoMausoleum is less correct in style, but lution. Every ploughman, every shepmore picturesque, more suggestive. A herd, in the kingdom of Arles is aware flight of steps lead to a sculptured pedi- that their country was to Rome, two ment, from which there rises a quad- thousand years ago, much what Nice ruple arch, itself supporting a small and Cannes are to the Parisians of toround temple, roofed, but enclosed merely by a ring of columns, in the style of the Temple of Fortune, at Rome. Within these columns stand two tall figures, robed in the ample toga of the consul, and seem to lean forward as though they gazed across the valley to some ancient battle - field. Standing so high, and screened behind their wall of columns, the statues do not show the trace of the modern restorer. The opinion of archeologists is still, I believe, divided as to their identity, but the peasants have views of their own on the matter. Some of them aver the figures to be the portraits of those twin emperors, Julius and Cæsar; but most of them, with some show of reason, consider that they commemorate the victories of Caius Marius, the hero of all this country-side. The figures are twain, so the peasants have doubled the general; Caius and Marius look out towards the Fosses Mariennes. Others, aware of the individuality of their hero, have solved the difficulty by giving him his wife as a companion! One shepherd, however, offered me the best explanations.

"Those two figures," said he, " represent the great Caius Marius and the prophetess Martha, the sister of Lazarus and the patroness of our Provence. They were, as you may say, a pair of friends."

"Dear me !" said I. "I thought there was a hundred years or so between them.”

"Maybe," "said the good man, "that well may be, madame; but, none the less, they remained an excellent pair of friends.'

The facts of these good people were, as you see, a little incoherent. Yet, indistinct and fallacious though it be, their vision of a distant glorious past gives their spirit a horizon, their minds a culture which I have never met in the provinces of the North, where ancient

day. Their inheritance of so ancient a
civilization, their contemplation of the
vast and beautiful monuments of Latin
triumph, have given them a certain
dignity and sense of importance which
may degenerate here and there into the
noisy boastfulness of Tartarin, but
which far more frequently remain
within the limits of a proper pride.
Those whom I met, the peasants and
shepherds at St. Remy and Les Baux,
had each a theory of his own concern-
ing the great campaign of Marius, and
pointed me out — at varying quarters of
the horizon the line of the retreat of
the barbarians. If I sometimes felt
that, from the height of their ancient
glories, they looked down on me as one
of that defeated horde, their attitude
was always that of the kindest, the
most courteous superiority. They are
citizens of Arles or Avignon, as
was a citizen of Rome when the great-
est honor was to boast Civis Romanus
sum.

-

VII.

one

ONE day we drove across the plain to Tarascon, a cheerful little town beside a yellow river, overshadowed by a great yellow castle, the Château du Roi René, the painter-king. On the other bank of the river rises the Castle of Beaucaire, and the two old fortresses, whose enmity was once so cruel, glare at each other as harmlessly in our days as two china dogs across a village mantelpiece. Tarascon possesses a fine old church, whose porch would seem still finer were it not so near a neighbor of St. Trophime at Arles. We descended into the crypt to pay our reverence to the wonder-working tomb of St. Martha, sister of Lazarus, who, as every one south of the Côte d'Or is well aware, was cast ashore upon the coasts of Provence in company with the two holy Maries. She founded the city of Marseilles, and is buried under the church

at Tarascon.

As we picked our way | panther-like person; his fore-claws are underground we perceived in a dark dug deep into two half-scalped human recess of the staircase a second tomb, heads. A portion of a human arm reunvisited of pilgrims, but far more in-mains between his gruesome jaws. teresting to our eyes. A marble youth Flaxman himself never imagined a more lies along the sarcophagus, dead. It is hideous devil. "Le progrès a du bon," Jean de Calabre, the son and heir of we sighed, as we looked at the amiable King René, an old friend of ours, for we vulgar Tarasque of Tarascon. have followed him in many a Neapolitan campaign. But after all he did not gain his crown of Naples, the brilliant young pretender. He lies here, forgotten, in the mouldy vault of St. Martha.

VIII.

WHEN people come to stay at St. Remy, it is nearly always in order to make the excursion to Les Baux; a When we emerged to the outer air more desolate cannot well be imagined, from this underground sanctuary of nor one that places in stronger relief saint and hero, we remembered modern the contrast between the sane and beautimes, and asked our guide for the latest tiful relics of antiquity and the misery, news of M. Tartarin. She protested the squalor of mediæval ruins. Who her ignorance, but with a certain sub- was the misguided man who first made dued irritation (or so we thought) as of it fashionable to admire mountains and one weary of a scie that has lost its ruins, and other such dismal monstrosiedge. We were more fortunate, how-ties? I should like to quarter him to ever, when we asked for the Tarasque. all eternity in a palace at Les Baux. She ran with us along a narrow street The road thither quits the lovely in great impatience until we reached a flowery plain, to rise among barren large stable. The door swung open, limestone mountains. Flocks of sheep and we beheld a sort of huge, long- are grazing there, but there are more tailed, cardboard whale, green, with herbs than grass, and as the poor beasts scarlet scales stuck all over with yellow climb in search of a more succulent spikes, like the almonds in a plum pud-blade, they send out beneath their feet ding. The creature has a half human the exquisite fragrance of mountain head with goggle eyes, a vulgar, good- thyme and lavender and myrtle. On natured smile, and a drooping black the steeper scaurs, the pale mountain moustache, with a long, horsehair mane roses of the cystus are all a-flower, and depending from its neck. It suggests a shed a spring-like beauty about the descavalry "sous-off" who has in some olate scene. way got mixed up with his charger.

The eponymic monster of Tarascon is no longer led along the streets in glory once a year, accompanied by men and maidens, in commemoration of the day when St. Martha tamed the dragon by a prayer, and led him along in fraternal peace, tied in a leash of her slender neck ribbon. The recent law against processions has stopped all that. 'Tis a pity, for the monster is a pleasant, vivid, childish-looking monster, no more terrible than a devil by Fra Angelico. He made us remember the horrible Tarasque which is to be seen in Avignon Museum. This noble monster was excavated under the foundations of an Early-Christian chapel in the church of Mondragon. He is a

It soon becomes more desolate. We wind higher and higher up the barren flanks of the Alpines. The wind-eaten crags of white, friable stone defy even the mountain herbs. It is a melancholy, cinder-grey, lunar landscape.

This white stone is the sole harvest of these regions. As we advance we find the mountain scarred and hacked into countless quarries. Here and there, the great pale slabs are piled into a tomb-like dwelling for the quarrymen. Far off, on the very crest of the mountain, we see, above all this desolation, an orchard of almond-trees, the sole thing that betokens a human presence more happy than the slave-like labors of the quarry. Behind these trees there rises, as it seems, an uttermost wall of

crags, yet more jagged, more prettily | have seen in the dead city, but when we

desolate than the others. They are, as a matter of fact, the ruins of churches and palaces, the residue of the once princely city of Les Baux.

were there the relic had departed to a barber's shop at Aigues Mortes. Some time ago, the landlord of the tavern at Les Baux, digging in his garden, came When at last we jog into the tiny on a slab which, being removed, exPlace of the city, we find a squalid vil-posed a mediæval princess, still young lage nestling in the centre of the former and living. A moment after she had capital, like a rat in the heart of a dead crumbled into dust, all save her wonderprincess. About three or four hundred ful golden hair-yards of it, crisp, poor creatures live here. God only silky, and shining-which filled the knows what they find to live on! Slices stone coffin with its splendor. In this of white stone, I suppose, and almond- poetic treasure-trove the landlord saw shells. an excellent opportunity. He changed They are, at any rate, eager for pence the name of his inn, which forthwith and human society. The carriage has became The Sign of the Golden Hair, not stopped before a guide pounces out and there, sure enough, on the parlor upon us, and carries us up through a table, in a coffin of glass and plush, lay steep, unspeakable wilderness of dead the thousand-year-old tresses of the houses, deserted these three hundred dead princess. The curiosity attracted years, and all falling most lamentably custom, and having made his pile, the into dissolution. There is a poor Prot- landlord sold the tavern and retired to estant temple, with its elegant, delicate shave the inhabitants of Aigues Mortes sixteenth-century carvings all in ruin." at the sign of the Capello d'Or.” "Post tenebras Lux" is proudly carved The villagers of Les Baux spend most above the dilapidated portals. All these of their time in delving for similar ruins, varying over some two-and-treasure. No one else has found a twenty centuries, appear of the same coffin full of golden hair, but skeletons, age, the same dead-level of abjectness. coins of all periods, and armor, are The "baums" of the cave-dweller, their cupboards and door-holes still perceptible, appear little older than this or that medieval palace. Ah, the place is terribly changed since I came here with Jean Lefèvre in 1382 to purchase for the Duke of Anjou the rights of the Seigneurs des Baux to the Empire of the East!

Under the crag-like tower of the castle there is a wind-swept mountain-top, whence you look down on the vast level of Camargue and Crau. From these coast-like summits the sad-colored salt marsh appears infinite; it is treeless, melancholy beyond words. That blue streak on the horizon is the Mediterranean. There the three Maries landed, and began their inland march. Their three effigies, carved by their hands, are still perceptible yonder, on a stone at the very foot of the mountain where we stand. Apparently they were wise enough not to seek the inhospitable summits of Les Baux.

There was one thing I should like to

every-day occurrences. I made a mistake in thinking that these people lived off freestone and almond-husks. They dine on Gaulish tibias, skulls of Roman soldiers, dead cats of the Stone period, and a miscellaneous assortment of rusty iron. Not one of them but will sell you a human bone from a desecrated sepulchre as an appropriate souvenir of your visit to Les Baux.

IX.

LES BAUX is on the way to Arles, and you cannot do better than push on to that delicious city. Among our impressions of Provence, Orange gave us an exquisite sense of ancient peace, of dignity not uncheerful in its seemly ruin; and St. Remy, with its flowery paths, its lilac mountain scaurs towering above the Roman arch and temple on the pine-fringed knoll, has left in our memory as it were a perfume of poetry and grace. But for a profound and melancholy beauty we saw no place like Arles. In that tiny city every step calls