"Cette,with its glistening houses white,Curves with the curving beach away To where the lighthouse beacons bright,Far in the bay."That stanza of Matthew Arnold's,which I happened to remember,gave a certain importance to the halfhour I spent in the buffet of the station at Cette while I waited for the train to Montpellier.I had left Narbonne in the afternoon,and by the time I reached Cette the darkness had descended.I therefore missed the sight of the glistening houses,and had to console myself with that of the beacon in the bay,as well as with a bouillon of which I partook at the buffet aforesaid;for,since the morning,I had not ventured to return to the table d'hote at Narbonne.The Hotel Nevet,at Montpellier,which I reached an hour later,has an ancient renown all over the south of France,advertises itself,I believe,as le plus vaste du midi.It seemed to me the model of a good provincial inn;a big rambling,creaking establishment,with brown,labyrinthine corridors,a queer old openair vestibule,into which the diligence,in the bon temps,used to penetrate,and an hospitality more expressive than that of the new caravansaries.It dates from the days when Montpellier was still accounted a fine winter residence for people with weak lungs;and this rather melancholy tradition,together with the former celebrity of the school of medicine still existing there,but from which the glory has departed,helps to account for its combination of high antiquity and vast proportions.
The old hotels were usually more concentrated;but the school of medicine passed for one of the attractions of Montpellier.Long before Mentone was discovered or Colorado invented,British invalids travelled down through France in the postchaise or the public coach to spend their winters in the wonderful place which boasted both a climate and a faculty.The air is mild,no doubt,but there are refinements of mildness which were not then suspected,and which in a more analytic age have carried the annual wave far beyond Montpellier.The place is charming,all the same;and it served the purpose of John Locke;who made a long stay there,between 1675and 1679,and became acquainted with a noble fellowvisitor,Lord Pembroke,to whom he dedicated the famous Essay.
There are places that please,without your being able to say wherefore,and Montpellier is one of the number.It has some charming views,from the great promenade of the Peyrou;but its position is not strikingly fair.Beyond this it contains a good museum and the long facades of its school,but these are its only definite treasures.Its cathedral struck me as quite the weakest I had seen,and I remember no other monument that made up for it.The place has neither the gayety of a modern nor the solemnity of an ancient town,and it is agreeable as certain women are agreeable who are neither beautiful nor clever.An Italian would remark that it is sympathetic;a German would admit that it is gemuthlich.I spent two days there,mostly in the rain,and even under these circumstances I carried away a kindly impression.I think the Hotel Nevet had something to do with it,and the sentiment of relief with which,in a quiet,even a luxurious,room that looked out on a garden,I reflected that I had washed my hands of Narbonne.The phylloxera has destroyed the vines in the country that surrounds Montpellier,and at that moment I was capable of rejoicing in the thought that I should not breakfast with vintners.
The gem of the place is the Musee Fabre,one of the best collections of paintings in a provincial city.
Francois Fabre,a native of Montpellier,died there in 1837,after having spent a considerable part of his life in Italy,where he had collected a good many valuable pictures and some very poor ones,the latter class including several from his own hand.He was the hero of a remarkable episode,having succeeded no less a person than Vittorio Alfieri in the affections of no less a person than Louise de Stolberg,Countess of Albany,widow of no less a person than Charles Edward Stuart,the second pretender to the British crown.Surely no woman ever was associated sentimentally with three figures more diverse,a disqualified sovereign,an Italian dramatist,and a bad French painter.The productions of M.Fabre,who followed in the steps of David,bear the stamp of a cold mediocrity;there is not much to be said even for the portrait of the genial countess (her life has been written by M.SaintReneTaillandier,who depicts her as delightful),which hangs in Florence,in the gallery of the Uffizzi,and makes a pendant to a likeness of Alfieri by the same author.Stendhal,in his "Memoires d'un Touriste,"says that this work of art represents her as a cook who has pretty hands.I am delighted to have an opportunity of quoting Stendhal,whose two volumes of the "Memoires d'un Touriste"every traveller in France should carry in his portmanteau.I have had this opportunity more than once,for I have met him at Tours,at Nantes,at Bourges;and everywhere he is suggestive.But he has the defect that he is never pictorial,that he never by any chance makes an image,and that his style is perversely colorless,for a man so fond of contemplation.