I find that I declared one evening,in a little journal I was keeping at that time,that I was weary of writing (I was probably very sleepy),but that it was essential I should make some note of my visit to Les Baux.I must have gone to sleep as soon as Ihad recorded this necessity,for I search my small diary in vain for any account of that enchanting spot.Ihave nothing but my memory to consult,a memory which is fairly good in regard to a general impression,but is terribly infirm in the matter of details and items.We knew in advance,my companion and Ithat Les Baus was a pearl of picturesqueness;for had we not read as much in the handbook of Murray,who has the testimony of an English nobleman as to its attractions?We also knew that it lay some miles from Aries,on the crest of the Alpilles,the craggy little mountains which,as I stood on the breezy platform of Beaucaire,formed to my eye a charming,if somewhat remote,background to Tarascon;this assurance having been given us by the landlady of the inn at Arles,of whom we hired a rather lumbering conveyance.The weather was not promising,but it proved a good day for the mediaeval Pompeii;a gray,melancholy,moist,but rainless,or almost rainless day,with nothing in the sky to flout,as the poet says,the dejected and pulverized past.The drive itself was charming;for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the graygreen landscape of Provence.
It is never absolutely flat,and yet is never really ambitious,and is full both of entertainment and repose.It is in constant undulation,and the bareness of the soil lends itself easily to outline and profile.
When I say the bareness,I mean the absence of woods and hedges.It blooms with heath and scented shrubs and stunted olive;and the white rock shining through the scattered herbage has a brightness which answers to the brightness of the sky.Of course it needs the sunshine,for all southern countries look a little false under the ground glass of incipient bad weather.This was the case on the day of my pilgrimage to Les Baux.Nevertheless,I was as glad to keep going as I was to arrive;and as I went it seemed to me that true happiness would consist in wandering through such a land on foot,on September afternoons,when one might stretch one's self on the warm ground in some shady hollow,and listen to the hum of bees and the whistle of melancholy shepherds;for in Provence the shepherds whistle to their flocks.
I saw two or three of them,in the course of this drive to Les Baux,meandering about,looking behind,and calling upon the sheep in this way to follow,which the sheep always did,very promptly,with ovine unanimity.Nothing is more picturesque than to see a slow shepherd threading his way down one of the winding paths on a hillside,with his flock close behind him,necessarily expanded,yet keeping just at his heels,bending and twisting as it goes,and looking rather like the tail of a dingy comet.
About four miles from Arles,as you drive northward toward the Alpilles,of which Alphonse Daudet has spoken so often,and,as he might say,so intimately,stand on a hill that overlooks the road the very considerable ruins of the abbey of Montmajour,one of the innumerable remnants of a feudal and ecclesiastical (as well as an architectural)past that one encounters in the South of France;remnants which,it must be confessed,tend to introduce a certain confusion and satiety into the passive mind of the tourist.Montmajour,however,is very impressive and interesting;the only trouble with it is that,unless you have stopped and retumed to Arles,you see it in memory over the head of Les Baux,which is a much more absorbing picture.A part of the mass of buildings (the monastery)dates only from the last century;and the stiff architecture of that period does not lend itself very gracefully to desolation:it looks too much as if it had been burnt down the year before.The monastery was demolished during the Revolution,and it injures a little the effect of the very much more ancient fragments that are connected with it.The whole place is on a great scale;it was a rich and splendid abbey.The church,a vast basilica of the eleventh century,and of the noblest proportions,is virtually intact;I mean as regards its essentials,for the details have completely vanished.
The huge solid shell is full of expression;it looks as if it had been hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith,and it opens into a cloister as impressive as itself.Wherever one goes,in France,one meets,looking backward a little,the spectre of the great Revolution;and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and precious.
To make us forgive it at all,how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself!
Beneath the church of Montmajour is a most extraordinary crypt,almost as big as the edifice above it,and making a complete subterranean temple,surrounded with a circular gallery,or deambulatory,which expands it intervals into five square chapels.
