Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  But of course the heart of it all is Avignon with its honey-coloured, rose-faded walls and machicolated towers rising steeply from a country dusted silver with olives, and—more likely than not—swept by the roaring mistral. An old distich alleges that it is the mistral which keeps the town healthy.

  Avenio ventosa

  Cum vento fastidiosa

  Sine rente venenosa.

  All I know of the matter is that when the wind is blowing at full force one must grip tightly to the balustrades of the bridge when trying to cross it on foot. Avignon belongs to the Popes as Venice belongs to the Doges. (Seven popes and two anti-popes succeeded in Avignon during the “second captivity of Babylon,” when, in the words of Petrarch, “they kept the church of Jesus Christ in a shameful exile.”) Nevertheless their relics have made of Avignon one of the most beautiful and romantic towns on earth. Even travellers like Dickens, who were fundamentally unsympathetic to the sunny south, were moved to admiration. Of Avignon he says: “All the city lies baking in the sun, yet with an underdone piecrust, battlemented wall, that will never be brown though it bake for centuries.” He is right, for the tones of these marvellous palaces combine a dozen soft shades from the brown of dried tobacco or coffee to the violets and pearl-pinks of cooling lava—shades of nacre and bistre and honey according to the stoop of the sun. There is so much to see that the traveller almost succumbs, realizing that the town truly needs a residence of some weeks to be fully appreciated. As for the travel-writer—what can he do but feel abashed? So very much has been written of the place by so many writers of the front rank! Rabelais christened it “Isle sonnante” from the perpetual tolling of the convent bells which in the Middle Ages was the most characteristic thing about the approach to the city by water. That Laura should have been buried here seems appropriate; but why John Stuart Mill, why Bishop Colenso? History has a sense of humour perhaps? But if your time in Avignon is limited, try at least to visit the Church of St. Pierre which is reached by a strange rock-hewn street among the giant buttresses of the palace. From the clock tower you will get one of the finest panoramic views of the city.

  The ruined bridge of St. Benezet somehow contrives to be the centrepiece of every good view in Avignon, and with justice, for it has made the city world-famous through the little ronde that has become a nursery rhyme for children everywhere. Severe textual critics, however, maintain that our children have got it slightly wrong. The bridge was never wide enough for dancing they tell us, and the correct wording of the little song should be:

  Sur le Pont d’Avignon

  Tout le mondey passe.

  This criticism, however, has always fallen on deaf ears. The dancers are too lovely an image to sacrifice, and the little song (like “London Bridge is falling down”) will last for ever in its current form, whatever the grim professors tell us. (Besides, the correct version doesn’t scan.)

  The two most magnificent bridges over the Rhône were those of St. Benezet and the still intact Pont St. Esprit—a miracle bridge indeed; and magnificent both as works of science and as aesthetic monuments. It is true that Trajan managed to bridge the Rhône with a narrow stone bridge, but it did not last and for centuries heavy traffic had to be entrusted to wherries, or pick a suitable low-water season in which to try and ford the river. There is hardly a chronicle which does not mention the hazards of this crossing. The first real bridges were not attempted before the end of the twelfth century when St. Benezet, who was then a shepherd boy of twelve years old, had his famous vision in which Jesus commanded him to bridge the Rhône at Avignon. Infecting the good friars of the town with his message he actually put this fantastic project into execution. It took twelve years to build it, and when it was complete the river was safely spanned by twenty-three graceful arches and Avignon found itself on the main highway of the western world. But, as any traveller will see with a pang of regret, the Rhône had the last word. Of the ancient bridges only that of Pont St. Esprit is still standing with its brave span of twenty arches. For the rest, the steel hanging bridges have managed to do the job at last, but one cannot deny that they are less beautiful.

  As the route nationale rolls south from Avignon the echo of the name prolongs itself; we are reaching the end of our journey, and the other “children of the Rhône”—Beaucaire, Tarascon and Aries—strike a somewhat obituary note. So much has vanished from this sun-kissed world. The great Fair of Beaucaire was one of the famous sights of Europe. Three of our hundred thousand visitors flocked there every year, Maître Apian among them, to trade as well as to enjoy the carnival spirit which turned this great entrepôt into a brilliant city of lights and banners. Alas! today the monuments of Beaucaire are all that are left to enjoy. It stands proudly fronting Tarascon across the broad Rhône. But both are relatively dead. The great festival of the dragon (the Tarasque) was Tarascon’s contribution to the yearly festivities which were fathered by the river. Attempts have been made at reviving them, but I doubt if the past is so easily recapturable. After all, the Tarasque belonged to the age of dragons; indeed it is one of the more famous of the legendary inhabitants of the river. From time to time it would emerge from the Rhône and carry off the villagers until the doughty Saint Martha heard of its depredations and marched up in the dust from the Saintes Maries to quell it. In honour of this notable victory the gallant poet-king Rene decreed a twice yearly procession in which this notable feat was re-enacted with a mock-dragon made of plaited osiers and reeds. But this, too, died with the river-trade of Maître Apian and his fellow-sailors, with the great fair of Beaucaire.

  “Silence and monuments,” says a French traveller, “echoes and elucidations of ancient history. Aries is the Mecca of the archaeologist; but its life, so severe and aristocratic, belongs to the past rather than the present.” I think the chief regret is that the Provençal costumes have disappeared—though they are proudly revived whenever there is a bullfight. The arenas of Aries are among the most famous in Provence for bullfighting of both the Spanish and Provençal kind. Before every fight the young girls and boys dress themselves up in the magnificent costumes of a hundred years ago and walk through the town in procession to be pelted with sweets and flowers. Only the life of the present-day Camargue still preserves some of its old flavour, and the hawk-featured gardiens with their bull-tridents at the ready, and their lovely wives in the saddle behind them, make the most impressive and most authentic picture of old Provence during these parades. Their life has not yet been changed, nor their costumes—and presumably will not as long as there are bulls to herd and horses to ride in those desolate green estuaries of the Delta.

  After Aries the Rhône “weary,” says Mistral “after so much journeying, slows like a pulse.” It has reached the sand-buffer of the Camargue Delta where it divides into two rivers, losing momentum and rapidity, losing its colour too as it fades into the dunes.

  The two branches—les Rhônes morts—now cross the Camargue, that strange and rather desolate sand-delta, which is today a great zoological preserve. Of the two Rhônes the eastern is the only one worth following to the sea for it leads to the little Church of the Two Marys on the seacoast, the spiritual headquarters of the Gipsies of all Christendom. The long straight roads run between low dykes overgrown with white ranunculus, across plain covered with corn and vines. Here and there you pass a large mas or farm, often with the remains of a defensive tower still standing. Salt marshes stretch away on either side with their grey blighted vegetation; here in these grey expanses among the salt pans and swamps roam the herds of half-wild cattle and the manades of bulls destined to fight in the arenas of all the surrounding towns and villages. This is the breeding ground for the Camargue bull, smaller and more ferocious than his lumbering Spanish cousin. He is not destined to be done to death; he carries the red cockade which must be snatched from between his sharp and curving horns. They say that this little breed is a direct descendant of the bull of Apis, the unevolved child (it has six lumbar vertebrae) of one of the prehistoric bulls. It
is not as unlikely as it sounds, for the Camargue has always been a desolate spot, left very much to itself because of the swarms of mosquitoes which even today are not under control despite large-scale efforts made to stamp them out. Successful efforts are being made now to grow rice and the ripe green paddy-fields break up the grey monotony of this salty estuary. But the real beauty of Camargue is inseparable from its most characteristic inhabitant—the small white horses, swift and mettlesome, which are of a Saracen strain and without which the ardours of bull-herding would be greater than they are.

  This, then, is the end of the Rhône, no longer swift and unpredictable, but slow-flowing to the sea. There is little to see at the Stes. Maries save the beautiful and melancholy church where the gipsies come in May every year to worship St. Sara, their patron saint. But driving back across the delta the traveller will think he is in the Nile Delta, with its flights of pink flamingoes, of wild geese. At the half-way stop there is a small zoo which illustrates the wild life which exists, even today, in the Camargue. Foxes and wild boars abound; eagles and pelicans and buzzards patrol the white beaches. Beavers build their strange dams among the dykes. It is a natural paradise for wild birds, and a not inappropriate monument to the last part of the Rhône’s long journey from the glaciers to the blue Mediterranean.

  Laura, A Portrait

  of Avignon

  Published in Holiday. Philadelphia. February 1961.

  Republished in Woman’s Own. London. October 1961.

  THE PSYCHO-ANALYST INCAUTIOUS enough to ask me to associate freely on the word Avignon, or indeed to riffle through my travel diary, would not I think be too surprised by the word Laura as an opening gambit. Literary men are supposed to be literary. But what would he make of the other entries. I wonder? They run like this. (I always use the laws of free association in my diaries. It saves time and keeps them fresh.)

  Bringing Laura!! back.

  Plumber, water-tap, Gargantua.

  Edgar Allan Poe.

  “If her ragoût is good.…”

  Mysterious enough to baffle an analyst I think, but really quite simple. The truth of the matter is this, that I went to Avignon with a plumber called Raoul to find a water tap and bring back a bride called “Laura.” There is nothing more Petrarchian than a girl called Laura, living in Avignon, who advertises in the Marriage section of Midi Libre saying, “Lasse d’être seule, je veux me marier.”

  But let me begin with the plumber called Raoul. He was, as plumbers go, one of the most careless and destructive men I have ever known. He had one hand rather bigger than the other, which may explain it. I don’t know. But the fact is that if he tried to take a pipe out of a wall the whole wall came; whatever he tried to bend broke off short. He would stand with an air of dribbling amazement looking at the smashed object, blushing. He didn’t know his own strength and seldom looked where he was going. When he fell down the earth shook. He had a high foolish neighing laugh which he used continuously. I imagine the damned in hell laugh in just this way. In fact I cannot think why I ever liked him. I think I was curious. He was so like an infant Gargantua, so typically Provençal, that I listened to his accounts of what he ate and drank like a man in a dream. Barrels of oysters, drums of red wine, whole oxen fresh from the spit. Often he ate so much that he was indisposed and this affected his work. His clients never knew at such times what might not come out of the kitchen tap. It was safer not to turn it on.

  Now this absolute fool of a man had a mate, a silent morose little man who looked like Schopenhauer, whose job was to trot behind him and pick up the remains. He never spoke, the mate. It was hardly necessary. He wore a soiled beret and had a cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. When Raoul got playful he often threw pieces of pig iron about, and I think the mate kept all his energies for side-stepping. Anyway between them they broke the garden tap, a rather fancy one with a sort of key-shaped handle which could be removed in order to foil marauders. (In the summer a good deal of water-pinching from the neighbour’s well is quite fashionable. You wait till your neighbour goes out and then swiftly water your geraniums.) The tap itself came from Paris, and it wasn’t replaceable (so Raoul said) unless he went to the wholesaler in Avignon. This meant a journey of about seventy miles. “Why,” he said, “don’t you come for the ride?” The idea didn’t seem a bad one. Raoul added suddenly, blushing to the roots of his mane—he grew his hair half-way down his back—“I have got to go there anyway soon to arrange for my marriage.” Then he showed me the advertisement in the paper. He had been in touch with the girl and she sounded rather promising. They had agreed to meet. Then he added hoarsely, “Her name is Laura.”

  Laura! I thought of the honeyed sonnets of Petrarch, of the long years of his agony (was it contrived?). I thought of the splendid simplicity of the old anonymous Abbé J. T. who described the meeting in his smoothly turned French. I have an old biography of Petrarch which I picked up on the banks of the Seine. “Le lundi de la Semaine-Sainte, à six heures du matin, Pétrarque vit à Avignon, dans I’Eglise des Religieuses de Saint-Claire, une jeune femme dont la robe verte était parsemée de violettes. Sa beauté le frappa: c’était Laura” It was as simple as that. Love at first sight! And now Raoul was going to get his. He looked quite dazed at having confided in me. For my part I had a sudden feeling of apprehensive sympathy for the poor girl. With such an infant Gargantua for a husband anything might happen. She would have to be as stoutly built as a camel-backed locomotive, I thought, not to run the risk of being overlaid or hit by the odd piece of pig-iron.

  I said I would go.

  I have always been a rash, foolish, intemperate, and hasty man. Raoul was delighted. “In that case,” he said, “I will drive you, and you will pay for the petrol.”

  I said I would. Raoul appeared one afternoon in the strange old covered wagon which he drove round the countryside full of twisted taps and pig-iron. His mate sat behind nursing a large demijohn of a wine he called Picpoul. As we snarled among the white roads he decanted it precariously into a blue mug which was passed around, each taking a ceremonial sip. It was rather fortifying, though it did not loosen the little man’s tongue. Raoul, on the contrary, was extremely talkative and was pleased to expound some of his philosophy of life to me. “Now I would never have gone for a girl from one of those agencies,” he said confidentially. “You never know what you get from an agency. But a girl who bothers to pay for her own advertisement is clearly serious. They cost a good deal, those private ads. I let hers run for over a week before I answered. It must have cost her a pretty penny. Of course one can easily be mistaken, though I must say she sounds all right from her specifications.” He sounded as if he were thinking of buying a barge. “First of all,” he said, clearing his throat, “she is religious and of good family; her father was a well-digger and she has a vineyard. She is strong and capable of a child or two, which would be fine. Lastly she is a Cordon Bleu. This is the only point on which one has to be a bit careful. Sometimes one passes these cooking exams through a bit of piston. So I’m going slowly until I know. We’ll try her out on a ragoût first. It is my favourite dish. If her ragoût is good.…” Involuntarily we all licked our lips and passed the blue can of wine. It seemed to me such a healthy, such a practical attitude.

  “Mind you,” added Raoul, “one can easily make a mistake. It comes from lack of detail in the advertisements. It is so costly that you have to abbreviate everything. And nobody confesses to the sort of faults which make or mar a marriage. For example in a woman one would expect to find a list of the dishes she really does well, and whether she nags. But what woman would confess to nagging? Similarly in a man a woman should know if he snores, is bad-tempered in the morning, and if he leaves a razor and brush unwashed after using. Such small questions sometimes make or mar a marriage. And you cannot put them all into a two line advertisement. A friend of mine who was unwise enough to get his wife from an agency only found out too late that she liked the music of Chopin. All day long she was glued to the radio.
She would not play bowls, and she hated the smell of drink on his breath. Naturally they are divorced. Now as for Laura, she confesses that she is often melancholy and lonely, but I think it is due to being alone. Her parents are dead. She works part-time in a mercer’s shop. All this will have to be gone into very carefully before I decide anything. Also she says she does not dance very well, which makes me doubtful, for I love a good dance. However we shall see.”

  Surprisingly his mate opened his mouth in the back to say, in tones of melancholy resignation, “Ah she is probably a whore.” Raoul shook his head sadly; as one who deplores such a lack of faith in one’s fellow man. “You,” he said softly, “never believe anyone. Pass the wine.”

  We passed the wine, and I watched the slow Provençal roads unwinding among the foothills to right and left of us. Raoul’s car stank horribly of burning rubber and hot steel, but it seemed to go quite well.

  “Will you bring Laura back?” I asked and Raoul shrugged an elephantine shoulder as he replied. “First we must settle this matter of the cooking. Then I have to show her my papers, all duly certified by the notary so that she can see how much property I have. A girl has to be cautious too.”