OLD PROVENCE.* THE author of Old Touraine is very well
qualified to write a history of Old Provence. It is a greater and more difficult undertaking, for it was not necessary to begin the story of Touraine further back than the Angevin ancestors of the Plantagenets; and here in Provence, on the banks of the Rhone, we go back to the Phoenicians. They, the Greeks, and the Romans, with the traces they have left in this wonderful country, are the subject of Mr. Cook's first volume. He claims a certain originality of treatment, or at least works rather on the lines of French students of the country, such as M. Lentheric, than on strict classical authority. This, it must be confessed, makes his book much more attractive. He would not, perhaps, care to have it said that his method is not unlike that of Ampere. For that charming and romantic writer lived before the days when scientific correctness became a necessity to every one who touched the history or the art of Greece or Rome. But Mr. Cook, like Ampere, takes history, scenery, and art together, and not forgetting the careful study of probabilities, knowing very well all that is to be said on the subject, makes such a vivid picture of the rule of Rome and the influence of Greece that he brings the old world of Marius or of Augustus as near to us as that of Simon de Montfort, King Rene, or the Popes at Avignon. This is an achievement; for modern travellers and readers are apt to feel like Madame Duclaux as to the comparative sentiment of the ancient and the mediaeval world. Writing of the small remains of the chivalric age at Orange compared with its great amphitheatre, she says :—" Yet as we look at them an emotion awakes in our heart and a mist comes before
• Old Provence. By Theodore Andrea Cook, M.A., F.S.A. 2 vols. London : Bivingtons. [lee.]
our eyes that Roman antiquity does not evoke." It is true; and we will add, with reference to the book before us, that many readers—the present writer is among them—will find the second volume more fascinating than the first. Yet it is always to be remembered that in Provence, of all countries, you see and feel the direct descent from Greece and Rome. "Deep as we may bury the Roman Empire, we cannot hide it in the valley of the Rhone ; for its bones pierce through Provençal soil in many places as though that giant grave were still too narrow for the skeleton of a past that can never wholly die." And it would be difficult in mediaeval history to equal the picture that Mr. Cook gives us, with the touch of heroic romance needed to make those old bones live, of the great campaign of Marius against the Teutons and Cimbri, marching from the North to lay waste the coasts of the Mediterranean. The temple on the Mount of Victory, which commemorated the tremendous battle in which the barbarians were destroyed, became a Christian church and convent many centuries ago— see Anne of Oeieratein—but down to the Revolution the peasants kept up the memories of that day and place with rejoicing. They marched with music to the Mont Ste. Victoire from all the countryside :—
" As soon as all had arrived upon the summit a vast bonfire was lit, and round it, with garlands on their heads, the peasants danced the farandole with shouts of Victoire! Victoire !' As the start was only made in the late afternoon, it was long after mid- night before the mon and women returned to Pertuis, all carrying boughs and branches, and shouting as before. At dawn the curb of Vauvenargues, the village near Mont Ste. Victoire, on the route taken by Marcellus and his three thousand, celebrated Mass. Immediately afterwards all moved on towards the Garagai (the abyss of Caius Marius) to see the rocky cleft down which he hurled a hundred prisoners the day after the battle, by the advice of Martha, his prophetess."
Still, though the last hundred years have known nothing of these celebrations, stories and terrible legends hang about mountain and precipice and cavern; the folk-lore of Provence will never let die the memory of the greatest event in her ancient history.
One supposed result of that victory of Marius, grown to life in the course of ages, is curious and interesting enough. Martha, the Syrian prophetess who accompanied Marius and acted as an oracle in the direction of his campaign, became in Christian legend St. Martha of Bethany. The tradition of St. Martha leading captive the Tarasque, the terrible dragon that desolated the country, seems to be in direct descent from the story of Martha the prophetess and her triumph over the Teutons. And the whole well-known story of the Threo Maries landing in Provence with Martha and Lazarus, of which the ancient fortified church and village of Les Saintes- Merles is the most remarkable outcome, may probably, according to antiquarian study, have grown out of the age-long popular veneration for certain mysterious Roman carvings of three figures on the rocky hillside at Les Bans. It is supposed that this carving, known as the Tremaui, represented Marius, his wife Julia, and Martha the prophetess, but Christian legend from the earliest centuries called the figures either the Three Maries, or, a later development, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. This is only one of the many links between the new and the old Provence. The study of them is wide and very interesting, for, as lovers of Provence know, hardly Italy itself contains more splendidly preserved monuments of Rome. And Greece too has left her traces, as well in art as in human beauty. The women of Arles, as Mr. Cook once more bears witness, have the gift of that special loveliness "that race alone can give." If we want a further reminder of this, it is to be found in two charming drawings by Mrs. Cook, which are among the most attractive of her son's illustrations.
The second volume carries us, with deepening interest, through many terrible stories of the Middle Ages, during u hich Provence suffered more keenly than laud= less sensitive,
ph:iionate, and proud. Mr. Cook traces with •uch charm the dit went strains of thought and ways of lif and death that lee int of the Roman Campi Elysii, the Champs Elysees of Fans, the Alyscamps of Arles. He tells very vividly the story of the plague which decimated Arles over and over again, its centre being in the vile dens and hovels which then crowded up
the Roman amphitheatre, now an empty and noble ruin ; the Crusades and St. Louis; the Albigenses and Simon de Montfort, the savage father of that hero who fell for England on the hillside overlooking the quiet Vale of Evesbam ; the Popes at Avignon and their now desecrated palace ; St.
Catherine of Siena, Urban VI. and the great Schism of Christendom. As to the Papal palace, European taste seems to be turning against museums ; yet we fancy that Mr. Cook would not fail to welcome the " grandiose " scheme of the Municipality of Avignon for turning the palace from the barrack it now is into a museum of Christian art. This plan, at any rate, would restore some ancient dignity, besides saving what remains of the frescoes of Memmi and Giovanetti, cut in two by floors of dormitories and carelessly, if not wantonly, injured by soldiers. However, the last word in impressionism seems to be : Let time and humanity do their worst for palace and frescoes, and let the soldiers remain !
Mr. Cook does a good deed in directing public attention to the most interesting paintings of the early French school in the church and museum at Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, which were exhibited at the Louvre in the Exhibition of "Primitifs " in 1904. One of the most beautiful of these, the " Coronation of the Virgin," by Enguerrand Charenton, was long supposed to be the work of that artist, poet, and King, Rene of Anjou. He is of course one of the chief heroes of the mediaeval history of Provence, and his romantic figure and adventurous story would bear a great deal more study than has yet been bestowed upon them. Through his unhappy daughter he throws a good many curious lights on English history, then so much mixed up with that of Provence and of Italy. ,Mr. Cook's pages dealing with the good King Rene are among the most delightful in his second volume.
About this time the old troubadours were singing their last songs, with no successors till Provence woke once more from the poetical sleep of centuries, and till her language and her romance were born again with the Alibres, with Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, and their fellow-singers. Their modern story, of course, is outside the limits of the book ; but Petrarch has his full share of attention, and to us, at least, there is a good deal that is new and interesting in Mr. Cook's study of his life and of Laura. It has always been a curious fact in the history of poets and their loves how very little is positively known of Laura; and it seems as if careful deduc- tions from Petrarch's poetry may do away with most of the received tradition. It appears now that Laura was not the wife of De Sade or of anybody else, and certainly not the mother of eleven children. We must confess that we do not see much force, considering times and manners, in Mr. Cook's argument :—" Are we to believe that any wealthy husband, even in Papal Avignon, would have permitted a courtship of twenty-one years with a poet " &c. ? There were many such cases, and Petrarch's might well have been another. But we feel no difficulty in accepting modern conclusions : that Laura never married ; that she was born and brought up in a "somewhat squalid farmhouse," and therefore not far removed from a peasant-girl ; that she was very pretty, refined, modest, and religious, with dark eyes and golden hair ; that so far from living in Avignon, she was not known there, and Petrarch's love was a puzzling mystery to his contemporaries ; that she died humble and quiet, as she lived, and was buried at Pieverde, where she was born, with "a few stones" upon her little grave. All this is only saying that the poet of mediaeval Provence and his loved maiden might be alive among the Felibres to-day.
We commend these attractive volumes to every one who cares for truth and romance blended in European history.
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