Julia C. R. Dorr.

II.

THE HOUSE AND GARDEN WE DID NOT FIND IN PROVENCE, TOURAINE, THE PYRENEES, ALGERIA, AND SPAIN.

THE dark, chilly Paris winter had imparted an especial value to sunshine and warmth. When I started, alone, on my journey southward to spy out the land for a new home, it was agreed that sunshine should be the first consideration. "Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun," said the Preacher, with the august authority of Scripture, and I might have blazoned the sentiment on my banner as its motto. We were to have floods of sunshine, an unlimited supply of it. Apart from that, we were to have a house and garden, and the surroundings of the house and garden were to be pleasantly romantic in the medieval or other antiquarian way, as heretofore described. We had not liked the suburbs of Paris, but, of course, the nearer to Paris this could be realized, the better.

that vaunt, with reason, their winter climate, and returned to Paris from quite another point of the compass.

Allowing a sufficient interval for a presumable change of climate, the first place I got off at was Nevers, a hundred and fifty miles down the P. L. M. Naturally, you contract your railroads here, too. The Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean is reduced to those few letters, just as we talk about the cabalistic C. B. & Q. at home. Do I catch at once the remark that nobody ever heard of living at Nevers, or that it offered any inducements whatever? The observation permits me to say that I myself have more than once wondered whether those persons who are trying to do something nobody else has ever done, — a passion quite impossible of gratification, furthermore, in these populous times, whether such persons are not all wrong. Very likely, the conventional people who follow the beaten track have been through it once for themselves, or somebody else has for them, and know there is nothing in it, and so do not let it interfere with their comfort. Thus, perhaps the would-be pioneers are only laggards instead. An eighteenth-century French writer, very notable in his day, says he thinks an excellent book could be made on prejudices justified; and so original a person as the great Goldsmith himself tells us bluntly, "Whoever does a new thing does a bad thing; whoever says a new thing says a false thing."

I can discourse in this tone with the

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more freedom since we did not live in Nevers, nor were ever at all near doing so. It was a charming bright book that made me get off there, - Champfleury's The Faïence Violin, the most amusing satire I know of on the china craze. I did my best to make it known, some years ago, in The Atlantic. Dalègre, in Nevers, agrees to pick up, under instructions, some odd bits for Gardilanne, an old schoolmate in Paris. He imbibes the collecting mania himself, becomes guilty of astounding treasons, and the whole ends in comic catastrophe. I walked about, and looked at the houses where these worthies might have lived, and at the chief manufactory of pottery, and at some good specimens of the old ware in a small museum bundled up into the attic of the fine sculptured palace of the Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, who introduced the manufacture into the place. But Nevers would not do.

A traveling acquaintance in the train had assured me I should find just what I was in search of on the Boulevard Victor Hugo. It was lately the Boulevard Saint Gildard, but the saint had been upset for the poet. Everywhere you go, in France, in these republican days, you are certain to find a boulevard or avenue, generally one of the best, named for Victor Hugo, another for Gambetta; and now Carnot, also, is having his turn. This was a raw new one, and the stiff little gardens had exactly the same lack of privacy I had already found so unpleasant in suburban Paris. It is a general complaint, I fear. As the wealthy have too much behind their massive walls, which spoil the prospect, an average is got by giving the more modest too little. Saint Jean — Midsummer's Day —is the great renting-day here, as it is also in Touraine and the Pyrenees, Saint Michel resuming his sway again further south. It is true, there were two firststory apartments in the old part of the town, close to the ducal palace and the cathedral, that might almost have done.

They were thirteen hundred francs and six hundred and fifty francs respectively, and the latter was much in need of repairs; but we were not yet at the stage of considering apartments.

Lyons would not do. Tame and featureless, in spite of the bold heights around it, up which the ficelle, the string, as they call it, takes you, horses, carts, and all, like the cable-road in Cincinnati, I can only conceive of any one living in Lyons if he were kept there by some commercial appointment with handsome pay. Ancient Vienne, Valence, and Orange would not do. At Valence lodgings might have been had in the house next to the one occupied by the young Napoleon when a second lieutenant in garrison there, and I am not sure but in that very one itself. He must often have looked off from the eastern terrace of the town to the Alps, and from the western to the splintered old ruin of Crussol that accompanies the view so long as you journey down the wide plain of Provence. Of what were his meditations in those days? Surely not much of house-hunting. How are great things ever accomplished when the smallest require such a deal of pains?

What I had really thought of in advance was Avignon. I sincerely hoped Avignon would do. When we talked of

Avignon in Paris, however, a French friend used to pooh! and bah! at it in what we should call a highly American spirit.

"You will have used up its antiquities in three days. Petrarch's Laura will last you but half an hour," he would say, "and then how will you occupy yourselves? No, if you will seek the Midi, keep on rather to Marseilles. There you will find movement, a proper stir of life, the theatre — a big city, in fact, and its resources."

Each one speaks after his own taste, and these considerations left us unmoved, though Marseilles itself, all unknown as it was, evoked ideas of southern warmth

and gayety, and it would have seemed by no means a disagreeable fate. Provence opened well as to the forwardness of vegetation. Cold and wintry behind us still, here, on the 9th of April, the peach and almond trees were in bloom, and the generality of the trees well budded out. In spite of this, however, and the perennial foliage of the olive, the moist green of Burgundy was abandoned. The face of the plain and the mountains that inclose it have a gray, mud-colored, sad tone that it would take all the traditional sunshine of Provence to brighten. It recalled Southern California in the dry season, but without the oranges. It recalled it, too, even to the winds, except that the winds that raise the dust-storms at Los Angeles or Riverside have no such persistency as the famous mistral, which tears through the gorges of Montélimar, and becomes the scourge of all the country down to Marseilles, and of Marseilles worse than all the rest.

The first requirement of an Old World town was always a good site for its fortress, just as the starting point of a Western border town is its railway station, “saloon," and grocery. At Avignon was found an excellent bold, flat topped rock to put the castle upon, and the broad Rhone beside it made the best of waterways for commerce. When the expatriated popes had acquired it, in the time of the great schism, they covered the rock with a gigantic brown-stone fortress palace, which ancient Froissart calls "the strongest and finest abode in all the world." It is on so great a scale that the city round about, though it contains forty thousand people, seems a mere scattering of tributary huts. Connect this with a ruinous suburb, having a mediæval fortress pure and simple on a like scale, by a bridge with most of its arches broken, the bridge upon which, according to the nursery rhyme, there used to be so much dancing, — and you have Avignon. Its antiquities, its archi

tecture, its traditions, were all charming, and corresponded to the preconceived ideal; occupation for one's idle moments would never have been wanting there. Then, too, the principal modern street, leading from the station, made an unexpectedly fine display of shops; there was a clinking of officers' swords, and a cheery promenading in the evening in the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville; and there was, above all, the fresh vitalizing breath of the Felibrige, the literary movement which has revived the glories of old Provençal poetry. It was my good fortune to see something of the new troubadours,

bluff, hearty old Roumanille in his little bookshop in the Rue Saint Agricol, and manly, kinglike Mistral in his village of Maillane. Amiable, genuine people of modest merit, all those leaders, who drew back in reserve, and would not willingly lend their countenance to a sort of traveling showman and foolish apostle of the moment, who was trying to turn their movement into a bombastic parade for his own notoriety.

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On the Doms rock, the choicest of all sites, nothing rural appeared but the small public garden, whence you had the view over the level country, — the wide Rhone, turbid and headstrong as another Mississippi, and snow - patched Ventoux in the distance. Ventoux is the signal while snow rests upon the head of Ventoux, it is not yet summer. In the old town, once compressed within ramparts, it was useless to seek any open space for living. And let us make a general rule of it at once; the same is true of all old towns everywhere. In the new district, near the station, which, crabbedly, never comes to meet an European town more than halfway, — this district h-m! h-m!- it was low and flat, and filled up with factories smoking lustily, and the cottages of their hands. It was Avignon, to be sure, but, even supposing something presentable to of fer there, - and it did not chance to,

such an environment was not within

the plan laid down for the expedition. I began to surmise for the first time that the search for the desired house and garden might be a difficult one.

I had been in wretched, many-storied Rue Abraham and Place de Jérusalem of the ancient Jews' quarter, not househunting, but curiosity-hunting, for the two pursuits were inextricably mingled; then under the brown awnings of the queer, crowded, entertaining market in the Place Pie; and had swung round back to the Rue Joseph Vernet and the chapel of the Oratoire, which, being circular and quite open within, pleasingly suggests a little Gothic Pantheon. There were bills out on two houses near by, — wide, respectable, even stately houses. My ring was answered by an ancient servant, or concierge (though the concierge system can hardly be said to prevail in the smaller towns), in an extraordinarily clean white cap. She retained a guarded air, as who should say, "You "You may be all right, coming along in this sudden way, with a stranger accent, making inquiries as if you meant to live here, and I shall say nothing to your face to the contrary, but the thing is very much open to doubt." She had a first-story apartment, at one thousand francs a year. It could not be shown, however, for another fortnight, and, as it would obviously have been imprudent for me to wait so long, I do not know to this day what it was like. The other was a second story, at only six hundred francs. It was up a very high cold stone stairway. The parquetry floors of the north have disappeared; we are in a land of stone and tiles now, a land that plans for summer ▾ rather than winter. There was no way of entering the various rooms, five or six of them and of good size, except through each other, there being no corridor. All the water to be used would have to be brought up from a fountain in the court below. It would be a compensation, of course, that there were some carven lions' heads, but I fear hardly enough.

I did not often avail myself of the services of house-agents, where they existed, nor of the notaries who sometimes charged themselves with renting property. These persons, quite unaware that you might have all Europe, with Africa thrown in, for your hunting-ground, or that you could think of settling in any other place than theirs, proceeded with a hopeless deliberation. They proposed to settle comfortably down to it and make a campaign of weeks, or, for what I know, of years, as the case might require. In the first place, they wanted to make an appointment with you, to prepare a list. Then they would accompany you themselves, and, being rheumatic or otherwise disabled, get on with mortal slowness; and they would try to show you everything, even to the last windowcatch in a given apartment. Or they would send a blundering youth with you, who brought the wrong keys or could not find the right address. Or they would, perhaps by way of showing you the extent of their affairs, send you to places that were already rented, or that the occupants declared had never been to rent. And finally they would take great pains to prevent your getting any general grasp of all the vacancies in the place, or looking at any other than such as chanced to be in their hands. The advertisements in the local papers are but a slight resource, as these are not advertising communities. It is the general custom to put out bills on all houses to rent; thus you have only to choose the quarter that suits you, and if you do not find what there are it is the fault of your own diligence. My plan of verifying in advance the architectural and other attractions of the given place, to see if these were going to be strong enough to hold us, took me to all parts of it. Indeed, were it not for this plan, I should have to marvel, in summing up the general collection, how uniformly the habitations to rent found themselves in the neighborhood of some fine monument, — much

as that other sage traveler marveled that wherever you found a great city you were apt to find a great river flowing before it. It was precisely in issuing from these monuments that I saw the habitations to rent. Of course there was liability to oversight, under such a system, and I will not maintain that I did not overlook plenty of opportunities, veritable jewels of homes for our purpose.

The Rue de la Vieille Poste was a mere winding dark alley, but the apartment at the corner had a window looking into the Place du Palais. A mosaicpaved vestibule, a dining-room, and a kitchen on the damp entrance floor, the kitchen faced with Moorish-looking tiles; then, up a narrow winding stair, a handsome large sunny drawing-room and a bedroom, and above that, again, a servant's room; and finally the right to share in an inclosed square of garden, full of rather sober myrtles, laurels, and cypress, with a bit of historic tower looking down upon it. I tried to figure how, if we took it, we would harden our hearts to the lot of the maid in the damp kitchen, pass but the briefest possible moments daily in the damp diningroom, and then seek refuge in the sunny salon, and pass our time gazing out rapturously at the glimpse of the Palace of the Popes. It went down on the list, for want of something better. As I turned into that same Place again, the mistral was whistling loudly, and even rattling small gravel along the base of the grandiose Palais de la Monnaie, close by, which is more boldly original and striking in its way than its vaster rival across the square. My French local guidebook naively pretended that the streets of Avignon were made narrow and tortuous to defeat the searching violence of this remorseless north wind. This theory would do very well, except that every other town and village in Europe, Turin excepted, is built upon the same plan. What is more certain is that the modern Chamber of Commerce

was put where it is, across the opening at the southern end of the Place, to break the irruption of the hurricane into the heart of the city.

Other apartments could have been had in a private palace of Julius II., the heritage of a decayed noble family, the vestiges of whose escutcheon remain over the door where it was battered to pieces in the Revolution. Henry IV., and even so much rarer a celebrity as Saint Francis de Sales, had slept in it. But it was in a darker and narrower street than all the rest; they did not mind such things in those days. Meantime, too, the mistral, which I would not greatly believe in at first, was more impressed upon me daily as a positive and standing disadvantage of climate. The best authorities, including those whose local patriotism might well enough have obscured their honesty, agreed that it was a veritable scourge. Stendhal says it is the drawback to all the pleasures one might enjoy in Provence. The lamented Roumanille told me it had flattened him against the wall like a leaf. It uproots trees and tears down houses, and blows three, nine, even twelve days at a time. What then should we do here, when I recollected that S, in Paris, has a horror, above all things, of having her hat-brim blown about in the breeze?

Nevertheless, as there are degrees and variations of it, I continued to look longingly in Provence, and sometimes almost to forget it. I looked at Tartarin's — and King René's - Tarascon; at Saint Remy; at the rock-cut marvels of Les Baux, which some one has called "a Pompeii of the Middle Ages ;" and at Arles. At Les Baux you could have bought a beautifully carved Renaissance dwelling outright for three hundred dollars, and could probably have rented it in proportion. It would not have been bad at all to pass a vacation in. At Arles there is a pleasant Moorish touch in the minor habitations, a trace still, perhaps, of the long Saracen domination