I strolled over his dusky habitation it must have taken all his goodhumor to light it up at the heels of the custodian,who showed me the usual number of castleproperties:a deep,welllike court;a collection of winding staircases and vaulted chambers,the embrasures of whose windows and the recesses of whose doorways reveal a tremendous thickness of wall.These things constitute the general identity of old castles;and when one has wandered through a good many,with due discretion of step and protrusion of head,one ceases very much to distinguish and remember,and contents one's self with consigning them to the honorable limbo of the romantic.I must add that this reflection did not the least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects Tarascon with Beaucaire,in order to examine the old fortress whose ruins adorn the latter city.It stands on a foundation of rock much higher than that of Tarascon,and looks over with a melancholy expression at its betterconditioned brother.
Its position is magnificent,and its outline very gallant.
I was well rewarded for my pilgrimage;for if the castle of Beaucaire is only a fragment,the whole place,with its position and its views,is an ineffaceable picture.It was the stronghold of the Montmorencys,and its last tenant was that rash Duke Francois,whom Richelieu,seizing every occasion to trample on a great noble,caused to be beheaded at Toulouse,where we saw,in the Capitol,the butcher's knife with which the cardinal pruned the crown of France of its thorns.The castle,after the death of this victim,was virtually demolished.
Its site,which Nature today has taken again to herself,has an extraordinary charm.The mass of rock that it formerly covered rises high above the town,and is as precipitous as the side of the Rhone.A tall rusty iron gate admits you from a quiet corner of Beaucaire to a wild tangled garden,covering the side of the hill,for the whole place forms the public promenade of the townsfolk,a garden without flowers,with little steep,rough paths that wind under a plantation of small,scrubby stonepines.Above this is the grassy platform of the castle,enclosed on one side only (toward the river)by a large fragment of wall and a very massive dungeon.There are benches placed in the lee of the wall,and others on the edge of the platform,where one may enjoy a view,beyond the river,of certain peeled and scorched undulations.A sweet desolation,an everlasting peace,seemed to hang in the air.Avery old man (a fragment,like the castle itself)emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the honors,a very gentle,obsequious,tottering,toothless,grateful old man.He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower,from which you may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon,and the barefaced,baldheaded hills behind it.It may appear that I insist too much upon the nudity of the Provencal horiion,too much,considering that I have spoken of the prospect from the heights of Beaucaire as lovely.But it is an exquisite bareness;it seems to exist for the purpose of allowing one to follow the delicate lines of the hills,and touch with the eyes,as it were,the smallest inflections of the landscape.It makes the whole thing seem wonderfully bright and pure.
Beaucaire used to be the scene of a famous fair,the great fair of the south of France.It has gone the way of most fairs,even in France,where these delightful exhibitions hold their own much better than might be supposed.It is still held in the month of July;but the bourgeoises of Tarascon send to the Magasin du Louvre for their smart dresses,and the principal glory of the scene is its long tradition.Even now,however,it ought to be the prettiest of all fairs,for it takes place in a charming wood which lies just beneath the castle,beside the Rhone.The booths,the barracks,the platforms of the mountebanks,the brightcolored crowd,diffused through this midsummer shade,and spotted here and there with the rich Provencal sunshine must be of the most pictorial effect.It is highly probable,too,that it offers a large collection of pretty faces;for even in the few hours that I spent at Tarascon I discovered symptoms of the purity of feature for which the women of the pays d'Arles are renowned.The Arlesian headdress,was visible in the streets;and this delightful coiffure is so associated with a charming facial oval,a dark mild eye,a straight Greek nose,and a mouth worthy of all the rest,that it conveys a presumption of beauty which gives the wearer time either to escape or to please you.I have read somewhere,however,that Tarascon is supposed to produce handsome men,as Arles is known to deal in handsome women.It may be that I should have found the Tarasconnais very fine fellows,if I had encountered enough specimens to justify an induction.
But there were very few males in the streets,and the place presented no appearance of activity.Here and there the black coif of an old woman or of a young girl was framed by a low doorway;but for the rest,as I have said,Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta.
There was not a creature in the little church of Saint Martha,which I made a point of visiting before I returned to the station,and which,with its fine Romanesque sideportal and its pointed and crocketed Gothic spire,is as curious as it need be,in view of its tradition.It stands in a quiet corner where the grass grows between the small cobblestones,and you pass beneath a deep archway to reach it.The tradition relates that Saint Martha tamed with her own hands,and attached to her girdle,a dreadful dragon,who was known as the Tarasque,and is reported to have given his name to the city on whose site (amid the rocks which form the base of the chateau)he had his cavern.The dragon,perhaps,is the symbol of a ravening pagani**,dispelled by the eloquence of a sweet evangelist.The bones of the interesting saint,at all events,were found,in the eleventh century,in a cave beneath the spot on which her altar now stands.I know not what had become of the bones of the dragon.