Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1001
There ensued for the unfortunate kingdom of Provence a period of distraction enlivened by massacres. The good Queen had left her inheritance to her cousin Louis of Anjou which accounted for the perhaps legitimate irritation of Charles of Durazzo who was nearer of kin to her. Immediately on her death atrocious fighting broke out between the partisans of Charles and Louis, the fields being even more deeply encarnadined by the exploits of brigands, led by a German-descended adventurer called Raymond de Turenne. Louis I–who really built the castle of the good King René at Tarascon–was sufficiently successful in the prosecution of his claims, to die in Naples…. His widow and her young son continued the struggle, also with some success and in 1387 that son, Louis II, was able to seize Aix-en-Provence and to become undisputed ruler of Provence and Naples. Nice however and a couple of towns of the Provençal Riviera refused to swear allegiance to Louis and gave themselves to the Duchy of Savoy, under Amadeus VII, the Red Earl. Nice remained separated from Provence until, after many adventures, all of them blood-stained, she was ceded to Napoleon III by Victor-Emmanuel of Savoy in 1860. It is cheering to think that the inhabitants accepted the cession with rapture, 25,033 inhabitants voting for it and 159 against.
Louis II nevertheless remained in more or less peaceful possession of his territories from 1387 to 1417 when he was succeeded by his son, Louis III who reigned for 17 years when he died and left the two thrones and the Duchy of Anjou to his brother, the Good King René…. The good but unfortunate king was deprived of Naples by Alphonse V of Aragon, known as the Wise or the Magnanimous, and of Anjou by his nephew, Louis XI of France who, as is well known, worshipped leaden medals which he kept in his hat-brim and is less celebrated as having initiated the posting-service in France…. It was thus manifested that Wisdom and Magnanimity, aided by Superstition and the Post Office, will triumph over Goodness and a devotion to the Arts.
That the Good King, who finally took refuge amongst his faithful Provençaux, was devoted to the Arts there seems to have been no doubt, in spite of the mirage of legends that blurs the outlines of his figure. In Tarascon he surrounded himself with a real Court of poets, painters and musicians and, though it may be doubted that he painted the great picture in the Hospital of Villeneuve-les-Avignon, he has left sufficient in the way of verse and of illumination to bear witness to the peacefulness of his aims and the beauty of his aspirations. And, if he did not actually build the foundations of the Bastide that goes by his name and is one of the most beautiful of all the monuments of Provence, the beauty of proportion and of the ornamental details that he added to it may well leave him with the deserved reputation of a skilled and enamoured architect.
I have spoken already of his renown as a justiciar. Whether all the judicio-penological problems of today could be solved by his device of punishing all crimes by fines and amercements is a matter rather for criminologists. The invention seems to me to be logical in a world the great majority of whose crimes, if you include wars, are committed for the sake of gain. If you can, by process of remorseless law deprive the criminal not only of his gains but of even more, thus leaving him poorer than when he set out upon his enterprise, it would seem to be reasonable to expect him to give up a career of depredation which can only in the end utterly impoverish him. For myself I have always been averse from every kind of punishment whether regarded as a deterrent or as a revenge on the part of a presumably outraged State. In the one case punishment has no deterrent effect and at worst serves as a hypnotic inducement to others; in the other, the State degrades itself to the conditionof an executioner whom it is human to regard as the lowest of mankind.
The answer to that argument is that, if the State does not occupy itself with punishment, the Public inevitably takes the matter in hand, so that you get a condition of lynch law in which more often than not it is an innocent party that suffers.
That answer appears to be incontrovertible. But it seems to me that if the Public can be brought to see all criminals reduced to begging by a wayside which itself has been furnished, embellished or improved by the penalties inflicted on wrong-doers the Public should be induced to give up degrading itself to the status of a murderer. At any rate in the golden reign of the good King the Provençaux saw their roadways improved, their public buildings embellished, the functions of the State carried on with smoothness and all that without undue exactions in the way of taxes from themselves. There is then no wonder that they and their descendants to this day considered and have continued to consider René of Provence as a lawgiver equal to Solomon and as a ruler giving to his country a Golden Age such as history has known neither before nor since.
It would be agreeable to consider that the life and reign of the good King coincided with the other Provençal Golden Age–that of the Popes at Avignon…. Alas. The first of the Popes to occupy that city was Clément V who was elected in 1305 and the last of the Anti-Popes, Benedict XIII, died in 1411. And René was not born in Angers till 1409, dying in Aix-en-Provence in 1480, coming to his poor thrones–of Sicily and of Naples over which he never reigned, in 1434, and of Provence which has remained faithful to him ever since, in the same year.
Nevertheless there was an intimate relationship between the Golden Age of the Good King and that other of the Avignonnais pontiffs, let alone that it was his ancestress, the good Queen Joan, who confirmed the Popes in their occupation of the happy city….
“He who never saw Avignon in the days of the Popes, never saw anything … From morning to night it was processions, pilgrimages, streets strewn with flowers, bordered by the tall lists: the arrival of Cardinals by way of the Rhone, banners in the wind, galleys dressed in bunting; the soldiers of the Pope sang Latin in the places, to the sound of the rattles of friars mendicant … and the tic-tac of the lace-bobbins, and the rustle of the shuttles weaving the cloth of gold chasubles, the little hammers of the goldsmiths tapping the altar-cruets; the lutes and recorders a-tuning, the canticles of the warp-throwers; and over all the sound of the bells and always the under-sound of the tambourines coming up from the Bridge. For, in our country, when the people is glad, there must be dancing, there must be … dancing! And, since in those days, the streets of the city were too narrow for the farandole, fifes and tambourines kept to the Bridge of Avignon, in the fresh breezes of the Rhone and day and night was dancing; was … dancing! … Ah, happy days, happy city! The pikes that did not cut; the state prisons where wine lay cooling! … Never famine; never wars … That was how the Popes of the Comtat knew how to govern their people; that is why their people has so much regretted them!”
Those words of Daudet must have been the first of French that could be called Literature that my eyes can have fallen on, so that here with fair confidence I can translate them out of my head. And that perhaps is why, be my days never so dark, I cannot enter the walls of Avignon without becoming glad–and why, no doubt, I am writing all this book.
I went to school at a time when the first waves of belief in German education were welling across a hypnotised world–and indeed the first school I went to was kept by the favourite pupil of Froebel at Folkestone–a very great educationalist, Mrs Elizabeth Praetorius from whom I suppose I learned everything that I ever learned in school, except the writing of Latin verse in which I have still some skill. So, by a very tender age I could speak both French and German with as much facility as English. I can still remember standing when I must have been ten or eleven by the desk of one of Mrs Praetorius’ ushers–David Watson, B.A., of Sir J. M. Barrie’s Thrums–and teaching him French out of the novels of Jules Verne–our favourite book being “Les Enfants de Capitaine Somebody” … perhaps “Grant.” It had to do with North Polar Exploration and I know we preferred it to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and to “Round the World in Eighty Days.” … And one of the minute incidents of childhood comes back to me with startling vividness…. I was standing by Mr Watson’s pulpit on a clear day. We were puzzling over a singular word “Hein!” that Captain Grant was always using–it was an ejaculation that in those days was in fashion but that I had not yet come across. Mr Watson–who had enormous blood-red ears and who must have been very young–was sharpening lead pencils for the drawing class. Very long, thin points he could make. Suddenly his hand holding a pencil was poised over my hand which lay on the desk. He jabbed the pencil into my hand; the long lead broke in, and to this day after half a century or so the lead is still visible under the skin….
In any case when I eventually went to the ancient public school where very properly all education except the teaching of Latin verse and the reading of Plutarch was treated as a joke I was put into a French class with boys extremely above my years and we were set to read in a book called “Ausgewaehlte Erzaehlungen von Alphonse Daudet,” annotated and “verbessert” by a Professor Hauser of, I think, the University of Tuebingen.
So there, in the dim, whitewashed rooms of a city school, beshadowed by steeples and what the French would call “crasseux”; with inkstains on the desk and bars before the windows I made my first acquaintance with the suns of Avignon whilst a Big Boy who did not approve of my being in his class and disliked me because I would not indicate to him the more salacious passages of “Tom Jones” was twisting my arm behind me.
Nevertheless, in spite of the pain–or indeed ignoring it–I let my arm be twisted and read on with my torso over the desk.
“Ah, l’heureux temps; l’heureuse ville! Les hallebardes qui ne coupaient pas; les prisons d’Etat où l’on mettait le vin à rafraîchir. Jamais de disette; jamais de guerres … Voilà comme les Papes du Comtat savaient gouverner leur peuple….”
I don’t know what it was that engrossed me–the idea of the sunlight in those glooms; the idea of a land where there were no oppressors…. But still more, I am sure, the rhythm of Daudet’s piece. Nothing, I imagine could be much more exciting than after the good household article of Jules Verne’s prose, to come suddenly upon:
“c’était encore le tic tac des métiers à dentelles, le va et vient des navettes tissant l’or des chasubles, les petits marteaux des ciseleurs de burettes, les tables d’harmonie qu’on ajustait chez les luthiers….”
The massing and the sparkle of the objects presented, the hurry of the prose culminating in l’on y dansait, l’on y dansait….
I don’t know to what extent Professor Hauser, supposedly of the University of Tuebingen, had “verbessert” that passage. I remember that, from time to time, on his platform M. de Bovis who presided over our studies, would spit and mutter under his breath and re-amend one of the “improved” passages.
For with the sturdy English common-sense that let us be taught with seriousness nothing but the writing of Latin verse, the authorities of that school disregarded the pressure from above of a practically German Court and tradition and let us, for the time, have a Frenchman to teach us French. And M. de Bovis was an ardent Méridional and a very distinguished philologist whose name is still remembered with a certain consideration in places where dictionaries are compiled–a little, dark man, with a black, square-cut beard, dark-black eyebrows and vivid scarlet patches of subcutaneous blood on his vertically wrinkled check bones.
He used to curse and spit–into his handkerchief–at the changes that Professor Hauser, with all the contempt of a Tuebingen Don for a mere modern French conte-writer, had made in Daudet’s and Molière’s texts. When he calmed himself he would tell us about Nîmes where Daudet had been born and Font-Vieille near Tarascon in whose mill Daudet had not written his “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” since actually they were all written in Paris or in the house of friends who lived near the mill. And he would pull papers out of his tail-pockets and read us passages from the Félibristes, commenting on the language of Provence and criticising, as philologist, the phonetic spelling that Mistral had invented for his language….
I think that a little after my leaving that school he succumbed to Teutonic pressure and resigned as a protest against being forced to teach French classics out of cheap German textbooks…. Or it may have been before I left. I remember at least, after I had been taken off French, hearing boys still in the French-class complaining that they had a master called Bluecher who made them read “Le Philosophe Sous Les Toits”–a work that they called piffling–from an edition annotated and improved by himself…. Dr Bluecher comes back to me as a very tall, corpulent and stooping figure, with an immense faded-blond beard, red eyelids behind spectacles and disagreeable personal habits as to which the boys complained a great deal.
However that may be unfair, for we all preferred de Bovis who to the spitting animation of a cat added a great knowledge of the things of the world. I remember that he earned all our gratitude by getting out of trouble with extraordinary sangfroid and velocity a very Big Boy called Hutchinson who was the school hero. He had got into a mess with one of the Bad Girls who used to beset the elder boys on their way back home from school…. You should have heard the whispers that went from desk to desk!
I have to confess that, even at that tender age, I did not like Daudet…. And if you have read the earlier chapters of this book you will see that my prejudice against him still prevails whilst in earlier years I was heavily belaboured by the New York press for confessing that I used to differ from Conrad in my estimate of the author of “Jack.” … I cannot account for the dislike.
Yet he has written passages that will never die as long as writers like Prosper Mérimée are read…. Last October, on a very hot day, I was sitting in front of a café on the main-road through Arles. Suddenly the uphill horizon was obscured by a great cloud of dust filled with swaying, half-seen dark forms, as you might have thought, those of camels on the horizon…. Then there ran anxious dogs, their red tongues descending almost to the dust. They were seeking ways through the arrested traffic of automobiles and threshing machines; seeking to open them. And then a great tide of great, horned rams; then sheep, their lambs beside them and immense men in great bérets falling over their ears, in great cloaks, directing with their great staves and their enormous hoarse voices all those vehicles into channels for the passage of the sheep. And then, in a bulk of camel-like forms the great dark mules, each swaying with a pannier on each side of it, and in each pannier two new-dropped lambs, the dams trotting with noses against the mules’ fetlocks. And, in the golden haze of the final dust more shepherds, carrying in their great cloaks the sock lambs whose mothers had died giving birth to them on the blazing roads.
And immediately there rose in my mind:
“Il faut vous dire qu’en Provence c’est l’usage, quand viennent les chaleurs, d’envoyer les moutons dans les Alpes. Bêtes et gens passent cinq mois là-haut, logés à la belle étoile, dans l’herbe jusqu’au ventre; puis au premier frisson d’hiver on retourne au mas, et l’on revient broùter bourgeoisement les petites collines grises que parfume le roumarin….”1
It was the retour des troupeaux–the return of the flocks from the High Alps where they had passed the hot summer…. I do not profess to have remembered more than that passage there in Arles. But I did and do remember….
“Il faut voir quel émoi dans la maison. Du haut de leur perchoir, les gros paons vert et or, à crête de tulle, ont reconnu les arrivants et les accueillent par des formidables coups de trompette….”
And the sheep-dogs returning to the farm….
“Useless for the watch-dog to call to them from his kennel; the clear cold water in the pail from the well winks at them in vain; they will see nothing and hear nothing before the herd is in the byres; the great latch dropped on the little, grilled door and the shepherds seated at table in the low hall. Then only they will consent to go to their kennels and there, lapping their bowlsful of soup they will tell their comrades of the farm all that they have done up there in the high Alps, a black country where there are wolves and great foxgloves, all purple, filled to overflowing with dew.”
In this London garret that grows sadder and sadder as we approach the Spring–for how is it bearable to support the thought of Spring in the parish of St Marylebone!–I have no copy of any work of Daudet but I would not mind betting that within a word or two those quotations are letter perfect….
It becomes however time to think of testing quotations and dates and, having written the above words, I look up and say to my poor New Yorker who has chanced in on my labours:
“It is time that I went to the Museum Library…. You had better come along too and look up those drawings you want to see.”
That patient transatlantic looks down at shoes, stockings, lower garments and, emitting a “Huh!” of want of conviction ejaculates:
“I guess they won’t let me in…. I look like a tramp. And you aren’t not to call it much better.”
I exclaimed with my usual impetuosity:
“My amiable Huron from the Bronx, don’t you even yet realise that you have come to a civilised country? … Isn’t it you that have said that this place is the last stronghold of the spirit of Christianity? Isn’t it you–not I–that have said that its inhabitants are of an unimaginable kindness and that the public servants are such servants of the Public that contact with them is like receiving the kisses of the blessed angels? … Remember the soft, gentle customs house officer who came all the way from Mark Lane to Victoria to throw himself at your erring feet! Remember the cop at the corner of Trafalgar Square–not Trafflgàr–who with the languid Harrow manner and the exquisite Oxford intonation explained over and over to you the writings on the road that you found so confusing, what time he held up all the traffic in an inextricable and shouting confusion. Remember the bus-conductor who, because you had no small change, stopped his vehicle at the top of Regent Street for nearly a quarter of an hour whilst he went to a distant tobacconist’s and came back soaked, with the change for your five dollar bill…. And then refused your tanner…. And is it to be imagined that, if these illiterate underlings waft you so blissfully upon your lawful occasions, the great scholars and almost too delicately civilised officials of the Mecca of the world of learning will not fall on your neck? … Why at the mere production of your card and at the first whisper of your distinguished name, the great doors will fly open; you will be wafted to the softest of seats and before you, in the twinkling of an eye, there will arise stacks and hundredweights of the learned and decorated books that are your desire and delight….”
