Provence E-Book

Ford Madox Ford

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 629

Beschreibung

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in the south of France, near Toulon. In Provence (1935), written four years before his death, he explores both the place and the idea of it: 'not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind'. Suffused with a northern European's love for 'the Roman province that lies beneath the sun', Provence evokes scents of rosemary and thyme in the dry air, games of boules amid shadows of ancient ruins, the food and flinty local wines. Part memoir, part travel narrative, part history of the region, Provence displays Ford's wise, beguiling curiosity. Humorous, informed digressions take in the Albigensian heresy, bull-fighting, a favourite recipe for bouillabaisse, Henry James and Ellen Terry, the Troubadours and much else. Over the gaiety looms the coming barbarism, the 'fixed bayonets, machine guns, uniforms and arresting fists', against which Ford's Provence is a fragile, precious hope for civilised values. This edition is based on the authoritative 1935 Lippincott edition and includes the original illustrations by Ford's companion, the outstanding American artist Biala.

Leseprobe

To Caroline Gordon who chronicles another South and to Allen Tate who came to Provence and there wrote to ‘that sweet land’ the poem called ‘The Mediterranean’ and where we went in the boat was a long bay

E.M.F. and B.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Illustrations

PART I

THE GREAT TRADE ROUTES

I On the Latest Route

II London from Provence

III Destiny on the Great Route

IV Fin de Section

PART II

PROVENCE SEEN FROM THE NORTH

I Provence from London

II Nature

III Darkest Provence

IV Courts of Love

V Church and Stage

VI Fine Arts

PART III

MISE A MORT

I There the Poor Dare Plead

II Paris-Dijon-Méditerranée

III Animam non Coelum Mutare

Afterword

INDEX

About the Author

Also by Ford Madox Ford from Carcanet Press

Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS

Avenue at Tarascon12

Beaucaire from across the Rhone15

King René’s Bastide28

The Café de Paris, Tarascon43

The great and forever impassive Lalanda45

Memorial Tablet, Antibes49

Lou cat dor sus mi cambo e roundino71

The Roman Theatre at Orange81

The Aliscamps, Arles84

Provence and the Narbonnais94

Playing Boules in the dust99

Detail of Cloister at Aries110

Procession. The Maries come up from the sea111

Tower at Le Revest les Eaux118

The Castle of Villeneuve les Avignon151

Piccadilly Circus, London153

Mistral. A Statue to the Poet157

The Bridge of Avignon176

The Maison Carrée at Nîmes188

The Rade, Toulon229

A Votive Picture231

Good King René in his Cap of Vair235

Boulangerie 251

Entry of Corrida254

Quai des Etats Unis, Nice274

Place Massena, Nice275

The Surf of Bathers, Juan les Pins277

First Communicants, Tarascon280

The Great View into Italy from Provence326

Suertes339

Bravo Toro343

The Great View from Italy into Provence359

PREFACE

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in Provence, which he always regarded as his spiritual home, in the company of the American artist Janice Biala. The simple life which they were to lead there was partly a matter of temperament, partly one of economic necessity since Ford had been impoverished by the depression and by failing sales of his fiction, A letter written in January 1934 to Jefferson Jones of Lippincott, his American publisher, announces a new project:

I have now had a bit of rest and am thinking about work again. I have in contemplation two books, the one my history of our own times for which I have been collecting materials for a number of years and the other a book about Provence and the Côte d’Azur.

The book on Provence is the sort of thing I like writing and usually write with spirit. It will form in one sense a book of reminiscence since I have spent so much time in those regions, in another one of cheerful history since the story of Provence and the Riviera extends not only from the time of the Romans but as you might say from the courts of Love of the Troubadours to the love without Courts of Monte Carlo and Cannes today – though I do not mean that the book will be at all erotic! The contrast of this antiquity and modernity will give me naturally the chance to make digressions on many things from the heresy of the Albigenses to cooking, bull-fighting, the wines of the Rhône, and the Crisis, and all the South of France is so full of international literary and aesthetic memories – with which in later years I have been a good deal mixed up – that the result should be much like that of It Was the Nightingale with possibly an appeal to a rather larger public since almost everybody with any money at all goes at one time or another to the Midi and likes to be reminded of it…

The resulting volume, with thirty-three illustrations by Biala, was published in 1935 to enthusiastic notices and respectable sales. It is every bit as digressive and wide-ranging as Ford suggests, and pioneers a whole sub-genre of travel writing which celebrates the good life of the inland Midi as opposed to the more flashy hedonism of the coast. In an age when Eurostar can whoosh the British passenger directly from St Pancras to Avignon, Provence reminds us of a time before the examples of Elizabeth David and Peter Mayle, reaching even larger publics, popularised rural France as a retreat for the moneyed English in flight from their sunbathing compatriots and fellow-travellers. The twin towns facing each other across the Rhône are still recognisable as in Ford’s day, although the Café de Paris, once frequented by the well-fed bourgeoisie of Tarascon, and celebrated in this book, is now a bank. The plane trees are still there as Biala drew them, however; other cafés have sprung up and taken root, and the land about Tarascon remains what it was for Ford, a country where there is room to think.

John Coyle 2009

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text is that of the first American edition (Lippincott 1935). The first British edition (George Allen and Unwin 1938) introduces a small number of misprints and misreadings which Ford at the time was too ill to correct. (See letter to Stanley Unwin, 4 August 1938.)

Part One

THE GREAT TRADE ROUTES

Avenue at Tarascon

CHAPTER I

ON THE LATEST ROUTE

THIS is to be a book of travel and moralising–on the Great Trade Route which, thousands of years before our day, ran from Cathay to the Cassiterides. Along the Mediterranean shores it went and up through Provence. It bore civilisation backwards and forwards along its tides…. And this may turn out to be in part a book of prophecies–as to what may and mayn’t happen to us according as we re-adopt, or go ever farther from, the frame of mind that is Provence and the civilising influences that were carried backwards and forwards in those days.

I have told somewhere else the story of the honest merchant who came to Tarascon which is at the heart of Provence on the Greatest of all the Routes–driven there by an elephant. But the book in which I told that story is long out of print and I do not think it is to treat a reader dishonestly if one repeats in a new book some story or piece of morality that is contained in an old and unobtainable work by the author.

For if the reader wants to read that piece he must buy this book–or obtain it from his library–since he cannot get the other without going to more trouble than any sane or normal person would take over a mere book. If on the other hand he should buy this one whilst already possessing the other, one may, as an honest vendor, assume either that he is so mad as not to be considered or that he so likes the writer that he will pardon in him the very slight dishonesty of obtaining–for a new book should be new all through–the fraction of cent or penny that will be represented by that repetition…. I indulge in that speculation to show that considerations of commercial morality are not completely alien to this writer…. I may or may not repeat the story of the elephant: if I do I shall now consider the repetition to be justified.

Long ago, then, I was sitting in the Café de Paris which is the most fashionable café in the city of the Good King René and of St Martha. That is not to say that it is very fashionable but that it is the resort of the ex-officers of the famous but disbanded Fourth Lancers, the officers of the brown-skinned, scarlet-fezzed troops that now occupy the casernes of the regiment of Ney, of the notaire, the avoué, the avocat, the justice of the peace, of the ex-picture dealer who still possesses Gauguins and Van Goghs that he bought from those artists when they were in Arles at twenty francs a time; and the honest–and indeed never to be sufficiently belauded–merchant who still prints and purveys beautiful bandannas. They have been made in Tarascon for hundreds of years and still shine in and beautify, not only the darkest forests of darkest Africa, but the brightest suns of the most coralline of far Eastern strands. Officers, lawyers, judges, honest merchants, professors, surgeons, land-owners … twice a day all that Tarascon has of the professional and not too newly-wedded classes meets under those awnings, basks beneath the shade of the planes or shivers beneath the blasts of the immense, life-giving and iced mistral.

And, careful as this writer is of commercial morality he is not less careful of the company that he keeps, for twice a year, twice a day, he will be found amongst those impeccables taking his vermouth-cassis before lunch and before dinner his mandarin-citron. Twice a year, twice a day for five or six days at a time. For wherever I may be going in the round-and-round of the great beaten track, begin it where you will, stepping on the eternal merry-go-round at the Place de la Concorde, the Promenade des Anglais, Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly–wherever I may be going on that latest of the Greatest Trade Routes I contrive to fetch up both going and coming for my four or five days in the little city that looks across the Rhone at Beaucaire. Beautiful Beaucaire of the ivorine castle of Nicolette “au clair visage,” whose feet were so white that they made the very daisies look dim!

Beaucaire from across the Rhone

I am bound to say that Beaucaire, one of the stations of the great pre-historic Trade Route that ran from Cathay up the Rhone to the Cassiterides and then sighed for more worlds to conquer…. Beaucaire that still has her fair that has existed every year on the old merchants’ tabu ground since before history began…. Beaucaire, then, looks far the best, when seen across the Rhone, with her white façade and her white tower. And I am equally bound to say that when, the other day, I asked the young lady who presides over the bookshop at Tarascon for a copy of “Aucassin and Nicolette” … “V oulezvousentendrel’histoirededeuxbeaux enfants, Aucassin etNicolete?”… she replied:

“Monsieur desires the book of M. Francis Carco? We are not allowed to stock such works.”

I do not know what book of M, Carco’s she may have meant but I know that none of the inhabitants of the city of the Good King René had ever heard of the shining figures that are, at least for Anglo-Saxondom, the chief glories of the town in which the great Napoleon first saw service. To be sure that city is as unaware of the latter fact as of the former. And I am consolingly reminded that when in June 1916 I asked in Rouen–another of the stations of the prehistoric trade route–for a copy of Flaubert’s “Bouvard et Pecuchet” not one of the bookshops of the city that saw the burning of Joan of Arc could yield one up…. Yes consolingly, when I remember that the Reading Room of the British Museum cannot provide for you nearly all the books of the writer whose lines you are now reading! … Nousautrespauvresprophètes! … Still, Rouen has this in revenge. The captain of the transport that was bearing us, reinforcements, to the first battle of the Somme pointed excitedly to the banks when we were passing Croisset and exclaimed to the astonished British officers who were on his bridge:

“Voilà…. There…. It is in that pavilion that ‘Bouvard et Pecuchet’ was written!” … And all the population of the Rouennais country were there to cheer our passing and great streamers bearing words of welcome covered all the headlands…. Alas!

At any rate I have spent hours and hours in the Café de Paris at Tarascon…. And on one of those occasions I saw, depressedly in a corner, drinking gaseous lemonade, the honest  merchant who was chased–by an elephant–from Ottery St. Mary’s to the city opposite Beaucaire. He was complaining bitterly of his drink and when I asked him why in the country of the vine, the olive tree–and the lemon–he should be drinking highly diluted sulphuric acid, for it is of that that artificial lemonade consists, he answered with agitation:

“You wouldn’t have me drink their wines or eat their messy foods!”

Alarm grew and grew in his wild eyes and he exclaimed:

“Why, I might get to like them and then what would become of me?” … I think that, at his brilliant exposition of that theory that is at the root of our uncivilisedness, I had my first impulse–it must have been eleven years ago!–to write this book.

He was an honest merchant, retired…. To Ottery St Mary’s which, though he did not know it, had been the home of a great poet. He would have been horrified at the idea of writing verses; he had passed an honest life as a cutler at Sheffield where they supply, to the ignorant heathens that trick themselves amidst forests and on coral strands with the bandannas that are the glory of Tarascon, knives that will not cut.

He had, he said, been all his life aware that merchants did not receive the social respect that should be due them. The most honest of Sheffield merchants retired will not be received by the County. That seemed to me odd in a cosmogony whose chief claim to call itself civilised lay in the successes of its merchants. But he, presumably, knew what he was talking about. He continued, however: All his life he had dreamed of visiting and travelling along the Great Trade Route–the one and only Great one. It ran, he said, from China across all Asia to Asia Minor; then along the shores of the Mediterranean as far as Marseilles. There, up the Rhone, it ran inland, by way of Beaucaire and Lyons to Paris; then down the Seine past Rouen to the English Channel which it crossed at its narrowest and so away along the South Coast of England past Ottery St Mary’s to the Scilly Isles where it ended abruptly…. And for ever backwards and forwards along that beaten track had gone the honest merchants bearing the merchandise of China to Cornwall and the products of Cornwall to Pekin. And they were regarded as sacred messengers, the protégés of the gods.

To that honest merchant it had seemed all his life that that track must be a paradise. Bearing your goods, regarded as sacred and so protected by kings and priests, you moved from tabu ground to tabu ground–at Nijni Novgorod, at Stambul, at Athens, Marseilles, Beaucaire, Lyons, Paris, Dover, Salisbury, Ottery St Mary’s. On the tabu ground, as in the great shaded fair-ground at Beaucaire, today, you laid down such goods as you were minded to sell and retired. The inhabitants came, inspected your offerings, laid down such goods as they were minded to give in exchange for yours and in turn retired. You advanced again; inspected their goods and if they seemed sufficient took them and went off with them…, And you were sacred. Druids with their sickles, priests of Moloch with their tridents, of Mithras with their arrows, of Baal with their serpents, all kings and princes with their myrmidons and, more dreadful still, all gods, hidden in mountains and seas, with their appalling thunderbolts, their dread pestilences and famines, protected you. You were tabu. Sacred!

That honest merchant sighed when he thought of that splendid vision, the image of a great beaten track extending across the world, like a broad swathe cut through vast plains of very tall grasses. All his life, till the elephant aided him; … who is a symbol of a very high Trade Route God indeed … he had had dreams of moving one day along that track. And for me it caused the realisation that in all my always migratory life no place outside Provence has ever seemed really a home to me though all my life I have been moving along parts of that same track, resting for five days, or a month, or six, and then moving on and on again. For me–as for most of humanity–the Route has today become the Grand Tour. At Monte Carlo or Mentone or possibly even Genoa, it suddenly takes a turn to the right, across the Mediterranean and through the Straits of Gibraltar and so to the west…. And indeed it occurs oddly to me that the only place in which I ever spent eight solid months, never sleeping outside its city walls–the only place in all my life must have been New York which is usually accounted unrestful enough…. But still, from Genoa to Sandy Hook and Sandy Hook to Tilbury Dock and thence to Calais Pier and so, by the Overland Route to Marseilles and the Quai de Cronstadt at Toulon the gyratory journey continues and continues….

It is my thoughts upon those journeys and the projections of the places that form the beads of that string of voyages that I am setting down…. My thoughts on faiths and destinies and chances and cuisines and digestions and the Stage and music and the fine arts and the neglect of writers and love and honest merchanting and treason and death and strategies … and the Parish of St Marylebone and the harbour of Chichester and the Sixth Arrondissement and the semi-circular Place in front of the palace of the Dukes of Burgundy at Dijon and the Roman city of Vaison where Provence begins and was begun and the theatre of Orange and disasters at Tarascon and so onwards….

If I write of Provence a little as if it were an earthly Paradise the reader must amiably condone what, not being fully in the know, he will consider as a weakness. I shall dwell on Provence far, far more than on Piccadilly or the Place de la Concorde. But let him again pardon the writer whose whole motive is to get him into that “know” as fully as lies within the power of his pen. The well-advertised motive of the sainted of many centuries has been to leave the world a little better than they found it. To such haloes it is not for me to aspire. It has however become more and more manifest to me as the years went by me that the safest road to fame and fortune is that of the Moralist, whether he be Marcus Aurelius or St Paul or the late Robert Louis Stevenson or my friend Miss Katherine Anne Porter’s life’s hero, Cotton Mather. And, if I do not set about soon to procure myself those desiderata, fame, fortune and the consequent esteem of my fellows will be for ever strangers to me. So I here make that bid…. I shall point out recurrently to my reader–recurrently and apparently without relevance in the middle of paragraphs otherwise devoted to the climate of the parishes of St Marylebone and Greenwich or to the lost and gone speak-easies round and about West Forty-eighth Street–that Provence is the only region on the Great Route fit for the habitation of a proper man. I run thus, I am aware, the risk of being styled prolix or of having lost control of my pen or faculties. But it is proper that the good should be defamed by people like reviewers and my strength is indeed as the strength of ten because of the purity of my purpose. That purpose is none other than to induce my readers–that goodly and attractive band–either to settle in the land of Clemence Isaure, St Martha, the Tarasque, Marius and Olive of Marseilles, MM. Gambetta, Thiers and M. Bonhoure, the winner of the Five Millions, and other fabulous monsters, or at least to model their lives along the lines of the good Provençal and his Eden-garlic-garden. So in the end, like the jongleur who juggled before Our Lady and was rewarded by a smile from the Bambino in her arms, I may be pardoned my sins of inclusion. And if I may not receive the reward of those who have left the world better than they found it I may have led my readers to a world better than any they yet knew. And the rest of the world may, for all I care, go on living in its former abomination….

In the middle of some reflections on the meeting, on East Forty-second Street, of the spheres of influence of Mrs Patrick Campbell coming from Her Majesty’s Theatre and Mrs Aimée Macpherson coming from California, I may introduce some directions as to the real, right and only best way to make bouillabaisse…. That will be because I am capable of anything in the furtherance of a just cause and not because I suffer from a senile impotence to marshal my thoughts. Moreover I may desire to suggest to my reader how much better engaged those two electrifying ladies would have been had they been seated one on each side of a bowl of that amazing fish stew, at Martigues on the Etang de Berre, in the sunlight, than the one in the pulpit of an East Side Temple and the other, not of course with a baby in her arms, but at least lost in the snowdrifts outside that fane…. For where better and more fittingly could Beauty and Righteousness kiss and clasp hands than over one of the great steaming bowls of M. Pascal? And indeed if Beauty and Righteousness cannot be induced soon to be reconciled what is to become of this poor world? That at least is the moral of this book. For, in the end, it is about the Courts of Love that the Troubadours held in the little castle of Roumanille in the Alpilles above St Rémy de Provence five miles or so from Tarascon. Since the last of those Courts was holden our Western World under, or awaiting, the leadership of Mr Mather, gave up the attempt to reconcile those necessary concomitants of the existence of a civilisation–and slid towards the Pit. And still slides.

I do not mean to say that even in Provence it is all perfection. A really perfect Garden would not be one in which the dog had none of the little irritants that a dog’s life calls for. Provence will always have its three flails … LeParlement, leMistral etlaDurance sontlestroisfléauxdelaProvence… Parliament, the North Wind and the dire river that with sudden and utterly unforeseeable disaster floods the whole valley of the Rhone….

And Providence there too is apt to be inscrutably lavish of her gifts. Of the first six great Lots of the new French lottery five have gone to the inhabitants of the Midi as against all the rest of France. The cold Northerner will point out that that is because the Provençal, being a gambler, has bought exactly five times as many tickets as all the rest of France together…. But the Northern world is dying because of the disappearance of that very gambler’s spirit; Provence alone continues on her tranquil way beneath the sun … and mops up the Gros Lots in addition.

CHAPTER II

LONDON FROM PROVENCE

FORTUNE and ruin strike you each alike without reason, as a gift from the High Gods in Provence. On the face of it, there is no relationship or similarity between Tarascon and London except perhaps that neither St Martha of Tarascon whose marble feet are all but kissed away by the lips of suppliants nor all the preachers and minor catechists of London Town can save a fool from the consequences of his folly.

My honest merchant of the Ottery St Mary’s elephant whilst lamenting in the shades of the Café de Paris at Tarascon the hardship of travel on the Great Trade Route had frequent recourse to a little box labelled: “Bile” … Something. He resembled in that the snuff-takers of the eighteenth century: there was nothing else of the eighteenth century about him. He persisted in sitting in the deepest shades of that place of rest and refection although, as I pointed out to him, Provence is the country of the sun-god and that health-bringing flail, the mistral–and the deeper recesses of the cafés of Provence are neither very sanitary nor anything but malodorous.

He replied that he in his turn had conquered that country that, since the beginning of time, has lain at the feet of ten thousand succeeding devastators. By persisting that every place in which he dined should give him the tepid pink india rubber that in his home he called underdone roast beef and potatoes boiled in water without so much as a tiny piece of gros-sel, he had succeeded in maintaining himself, with the aid of the specific in the little box, at his usual level of home-health. He was disagreeable at breakfast and the whites of his eyes were yellowish, his pepper and salt hair was ruffled and without shine and he sat in those shades that smelt slightly of urine. A proper conqueror of Provence he was. Did you expect him to sit in the sun and mistral at the little white marble-topped tables of that café front? And let any passer-by from Ottery St Mary see him? And be suspected of ogling the Bad Girls? And lose his church-wardenship and his membership of the Junior Imperial League? He would be damned if he would….

He would of course be damned if he did….

It is a curious coincidence that it should be dusk when with precaution–and afterwards with quickly vanished triumph–I introduced the artist who has decorated these pages to what I consider to be the only Great View in London or the British Empire. And the only thing that Biala could see were the pink, shuddering, illuminated letters of publicity for the anti-bilious specific that that honest merchant had drawn from his vest pocket in the shades of Tarascon. The View itself was invisible behind them.

It is to be seen from the third step of the left-hand entrance-staircase of the National Gallery. You look from there across Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, that wide historic street that has seen the fall of our kings and the making of the histories of worlds, to the dreaming spires of the Abbey in which Nelson expected to be buried and was not and the other, taller-mounting spires of that Mother of Parliaments who too has played her not always inglorious part in the story of our planet. In certain weathers and most usually at dusk these things are lifted up; Whitehall becomes a majestic canyon, the spires tower and tower, filling the skies, and if the Londoner ever wants to be inspired with thought of his Imperial destinies there is the place where he may be proud. That View cannot show you the Parthenon, or the Forum of Rome, or the Place de la Concorde or even the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. But in its way it is enough!

The Londoner, however, practically never wants to remember that or anything else–except the cup-tie results. I doubt if, now, he even wants to be bothered with the late scores of that game that supplies us at once with our morals and the iron bonds that bind together our far-flung realms. At any rate we stood side by side on those steps and those livid, shuddering and blazing portents chased themselves across the dusk. We were recommended to purge one organ; we were warned that we should not sleep unless we wore ONE WAY PANTS; that we were starved and should lie awake all night unless we CRAMMED OURSELVES  with CRAM’S MALTO or washed out another organ with SOMEONEELSE’S SOMETHING ELSE. It gave irresistibly the impression that someone having murdered London’s sleep all the witch-doctors of Macbeth were dancing in a Walpurgisnacht across the London skies.

My artist said hesitantly beside me:

“It may be a Great View…. But isn’t it extraordinarily like New York?” I expressed my sense of outrage and Biala timidly changed the subject to:

“Let’s go quickly to a café so that I may get down my impressions while they are new….” It was that artist’s first dusk in London.

A new sound almost drowned my voice as I exclaimed:

“A CAFE!!! Don’t you know that there are no cafés in London? Besides, I’ll be damned if I let you be seen in a café if there was one…. Don’t you realise that you are supposed to be illustrating a serious book? … A moral one….”

Biala said:

“But if London does not provide cafés for her artists how can she expect to have any art? … Or any letters? Or any civilisation? Or any anything?”

I was considering the new sound. It is very difficult to explain the fine shades of London to the alien and it was twenty-odd years since I had been there for anything like keeps…. This is a book of travel.

The new sound was made by starlings…. Their evening chorus drowned our voices, the dull roar of the traffic and seemed to obliterate the very dithering of the tumultuous sky-signs. Every cornice of the National Gallery, of St Martin’s, of the whitish buildings that give Trafalgar Square the aspect of any Capitol in any Middle Western Capital–every high-line round the square was blacked in by the line of heads of those birds singing their evensong of thanks to the not unkindly city of my birth. I saw nothing else in particular that was new to make me love the great careless, sinful, brown, sooty place. But that at least was new and extremely lovable. Even Biala had to remark that in that at least London was one up on New York…. Even on Paris! Perhaps only Tarascon, where in the heart of the town you cannot sleep for the nightingales, can equal for that the city where the pale ghost of Hudson, who in life was so appalled in her streets, can at last there take pleasure.

I have never known such a place for nightingales…. Alphonse Daudet, who was born in Nîmes in 1837, has, to serve his private ends, represented the inhabitants of Tarascon as being so avid of targets to blaze away off the surface of the earth that no living thing is to be seen or heard on the rocks and groves around it. But Daudet was not a true Provençal; for, with all its charms and the mises à mort and the Maison Carrée and one memorable eating place, Nîmes is not true Provence, is Royaume, not Empire–as you shall later read. And the author of “Tartarin de Tarascon” treasured up numerous grudges and avenged them as he saw fit. So his making fun of the Tarasconnais is at times bitter enough and has done no great good to Provence–has done more harm than his “Lettres de Mon Moulin” can ever atone for. Perhaps that is because he never really lived in any mill in Fontvieille near les Baux where the letters pretend to have been written. But he certainly was in Tarascon where something disagreeable happened to him–even if it was nothing worse than being rather painfully worsted in an argument by the great Frédéric Mistral….

My good friend M. Devin who for many years owned the India-print works which he had inherited from his fathers, used to declare that that was what was the matter with Daudet. He claimed to have been present–in that very Café de Paris–at a frightful argument at which Mistral, who was seven years older, brought tears to the eyes of the young Daudet. I do not know how that may be. My old friend was a Tarasconnais of the Tarasconnais and may be excused if he wished to avenge his city on the author of “Jack.” As against it I remember sitting as a young and by no means too unargumentative man, with Mistral in the café at Aries in the Place du Forum and being treated with extreme gentleness and tolerance by the great poet…. At any rate Daudet was too hard on Tarascon and does not refrain from poking fun at Mistral himself–however gently and skilfully, aceto, as you might say, infuso–in the “Lettres” … Or again I do not remember Daudet as being too kindly or tolerant to me when as a still younger and then quite unargumentative, shy boy, I was detailed to shew him the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. But at that time Daudet was suffering terribly from the disease of the spine that rendered his life a martyrdom. It was however no fault of mine that Lord Elgin should have taken those statues from the Parthenon….

It is curious that the two French men of letters on the great scale to whom as a boy I was privileged to shew bits of London were each suffering from painful diseases, each not of but connected intimately with Provence and each–and Zola almost more than Daudet–inclined to take the very gloomiest views of the habits, tastes and climate of the city of my birth.

At any rate there have always seemed to me to be more nightingales in and around Tarascon than in any other spot on the earth and it was in Tarascon that I acquired the habit of writing to that bird’s strains. How that was I have already recounted1 but I intend to go on writing about the nightingales at Tarascon for a minute or two in order to clear the inhabitants of that little town from one at least of the hits below the belt of M. Daudet.

There is, then, round the city a high wall which serves not so much to keep away Northern invaders as to keep out the waters of the Durance at such times as that flail-stream chooses to try to devastate the lowlands of the neighbourhood. This wall prolongs itself for some miles in the direction of Avignon. On the one side it shuts in, between itself and the miniature mountains that are called indifferently the Alpilles and the Alpines, a little territory of an extreme fertility where the Tarasconnais garden in the evenings and erect the little huts that serve them for week-end cottages. For the Tarasconnais, like the Parisian and like myself, is an inveterate kitchen gardener. Be he never so much a fonctionnaire or ever so honest a merchant, the moment the shades of evening begin to fall he is up and away from desk or counter and wading amongst the profusions of his melon-patch, his pumpkins, his gourds, pimenti and his tomatoes. On the outer side of the wall is the high-road to Barbentane and then some flats that–for purposes of their own cultivations of osiers, flax, hemp and certain kinds of vine–the proprietors like to see inundated from time to time and covered with the thick layers of alluvial soil that the Rhone there deposits.

Shutting in road and wall on themselves runs as stately a grove of planes and chestnuts as you will see anywhere–an avenue running, not to any palace, but just out into the open country. It is in these shade-trees and in the thickets upon the flats that there are nightingales. Nightingales! … I have never imagined that so many nightingales could be got together for, like the robin to which it is related, the nightingale is a solitary bird and does not like the propinquity of neighbours of its own species.

But upon that wall–and at noon–I have known the nightingale voices to be as loud and extended as were those of the starlings on the cornices of the National Gallery, the other evening.

King René’s Bastide

I am accustomed to twit myself with exaggeration and, when I can, I like to check up on my statements. So, the other day, I took a long-suffering New Yorker–who is accustomed to twit me with exaggeration even more than I do myself and whom, in consequence, when I can afford it, I take on gastronomical and other tours–I took the long-suffering pilgrim from Gotham, where there are sky-signs but neither nightingales nor starlings, towards that grove beside the Rhone. I say “towards” advisedly because we had hardly got out of the shadow of King René’s bastide where by the force of the mistral and at the hand of God the worst disaster of my life had formerly overtaken me, than it became evident that, since there was no mistral, we should never reach the grove towards which our rash footsteps had set out. For, in the latter end of May, when there is no mistral, you do not go on pedestrian expeditions. You sit in your dim room watching in the arrow shafts of light that the sun hurls through the cracks in your jalousies the slow dance of motes that are brighter than the flashes from an electric drill at midnight…. We looked questioningly the one at the other and took a step or two. The tar-fixings of the road scorched the soles of our espadrilles. We took two slow steps more. That New Yorker said:

“I’ll accept your statement as to the number of those singing tit-bits!”

I cried: No! no! My veracity had been impugned. Better be carbonado’d than live in an ice-box where no honour is.

We plodded on. When, eschewing the temptation of the deep shadows of the little park, we stood at the foot of the long slope that blazed up towards the wall-top, I could already raise my finger and cry listen. That New Yorker expressed the conviction that a thousand nightingales were singing from on top of that wall. But, no, no, I said, we must be exact. Today was the day of the empire of the Scientist. Besides, nightingales do not sing on walls….

Finally, on top of the town-wall, with its view of the blazing convent-front, the red-hot castle wall, the streak of flame of Beaucaire castle tower across the boiling Rhone, we heard nightingales…. In the pitiless stare of the white sun I counted seven–a hundred yards away from the beginnings of the grove. One was on the top of a lime-tree; three in cypresses in the convent garden; two in thickets between the wall and the river and one sang from a wild olive tree above a white hut in the allotments…. Seven … at broad noon…. What would there not be in the dusk?

My American friend wanted to make it twenty-two and get away into the shadows of the park.

But: No, no, I fulminated. This thing must be settled–and without exaggeration! I pointed to the lime-tree “One!” I said.… America is a vast continent but it contains no nightingales; no New Yorker could know how polyphonic and how ventriloquial a bird that is…. I turned my back on my friend to point out one by one the three black cypresses in the convent garden….

“There are three there,” I said, “but only three. They produce the illusion of being nine which in your characteristic locution,àla Tom Sawyer, you would call ‘mornamillion.’” …

But I was addressing the empty, scorching air. My friend was already seated on a bench, amongst green shadows and dust, beside the green bust of the félibrist poet, above the little pond where the goldfish were asleep, amongst the dead stalks of the asphodels.

Yet, often as I have eaten in the town of the Good King–I may as well interpolate that he was called the Good because, being short of money, he substituted for the executions, drawings and quarterings, tortures and other penalties for crimes that were the delight of most mediaeval potentates, an intricate and weighty system of fines so that crime disappeared and peace brooded through all his realms. For a man will face the thumbscrew for murdering his grandmother but will not even contemplate that atrocity if it is going to cost him more than the old lady’s meagre savings. Upon that fact I shall dwell more at length when I come to my chapter of moralising on the incidence of penal laws…. But I will depose before a notary that never in Tarascon have I partaken of bird smaller than a chicken. I have never so much as been offered one.

Whereas in Nîmes! … Aha, M. Alphonse Daudet!

For shall I, or anyone who was with me, ever forget the exquisite–the exquisite–flavour of the huge platter of little birds, with their little claws in the air, with their little eyes disproportionately enormous in their tiny skulls, lying on the tiniest of croûtons of an incredible deliciousness, that we ate in the wine-vault behind the Protestant temple at Nî….

But no! … See to what turpitudes local patriotism will lead one! … I have enrolled myself under the banners of Frédéric Mistral and of Tarascon against the mendacious hosts of Alphonse Daudet and of Nîmes. At once I find myself about to perjure myself. It is true that in Tarascon I never ate robin, wren, tomtit or nightingale but neither did I in Nîmes. It was in Aries, the capital of the true kingdom of Provence and the very seat of Mistral and of félibrisme, in a wildly clamorous farmers’ ordinary that we ate that miraculous platterful of microscopic songsters.

I may formally discuss the cruelty or the reverse of eating tiny creatures when I arrive at my chapter on bull-fighting, football, stage-tumbling, the humane slaughtering of cattle and the slaughter of men in war and my meeting with Mr Ernest Hemingway on the bridge between Tarascon and Beaucaire when I was coming back from seeing six bulls disposed of by Chicuelo, Maera and some matador from Mexico whose name I have forgotten and he hastening to see the same heroes function at his first tauromachic fiesta at Pampeluna.

For the moment I will content myself with giving you a menu, some receipts and, since we are about to set out on a journey, some hints as to how to find good restaurants in the country of Provence where as a whole the cooking is very indifferent.

The South of France–the Midi–divides itself into three zones. In Provence proper–from Mentone to Marseilles–they cook with oil and the products are discouraging. In the territory from the Rhone to Spain which is only by courtesy called Provence you begin to find traces of butter introducing itself into the cuisine àl’huile. There are two good restaurants in Marseilles and one in Carcassonne–in a little street in the Basse Ville. But if you want to eat really well there you must order your meal beforehand. By Carcassonne they have already begun to use a little pork-fat. Twenty-one years ago I ate there some côtelettesdeveauàlaMaréchal that were really good.

But it is not until you get to Castelnaudary–of the cassoulets–that cooking with goose-fat begins, and foiegras and truffles and the real haute cuisine of the Toulousain district and the real, high wines of the Bordelais. There too I remember eating…. But to say what would be unkind. We have to do the best we can with Provençal food. A shadow fell across my memories of the Toulousain the other day. I was in the train between Avignon and Tarascon with opposite me a masterly lady from Toulouse who had only one working arm and an infinitude of parcels. I helped her with these and we fell into conversation–about cooking. She expressed the deepest con tempt for the cooking of Provence. She said that there the peasants were too miserly to cook properly or to do anything else with dignity or generously…. “Parcequ’ilsvonttropsouventàlamesse!”… “Because they go to Mass too often!”

Guessing that she was a Huguenot, I avoided the subject and fell to complimenting the cuisine àgraissed’oie of Toulouse. She said:

“Of course you only find cooking with goose-fat in private houses, now.”

Consternation fell upon me. Was it possible that Toulouse–and Castelnaudary itself–had become Anglo-Saxonised and that there, even as in the regions of the Palaces of the Côte d’Azur and Paris, and as in London and New York, unless you ate in private houses you had to content yourself with tepid, pink, india-rubber beef, wet potatoes and wetter greens or string beans all cooked in water without salt? Was it possible that one more invasion of Northern barbarism had taken by storm an apparently untakeable fortress?

The lady however comforted me. She said that in the eating-places of her district the methods of preparation and purging by fire were the same as they always had been. Only, since the crisis, the proprietors of restaurants had determined to use ordinary butter in place of the specialty of Périgord and Alsace. Even at that such Toulousains as had no homes in which to eat had gone on strike and there was some hope that the restaurateurs would be brought to their knees. For herself it did not matter very much because she cooked at home and every winter laid down several half-hundred weight jars of goose-fat….

Indeed, àquelquechose malheurestbon and I have eaten lately a decent meal in Tarascon where for twenty years since quarrelling over prices with a Basque chef who used to make Tarascon eating bearable, I have fared very indifferently indeed. But now I have eaten several quite passable meals. This astonished me for, as a Papist, I am forbidden to be a perfectibilist and seldom expect to see things improve. And indeed I had thought to see public cooking in all France as lost a battle as it was in the Strand or in Forty-second Street. But, for ever blessed be the Crisis! the proprietor of the place where in Tarascon I eat tells me, that that world phenomenon having stopped the flow of Anglo-Saxon tourists, he has been forced to take another chef and cook French again for the sake of the Parisians and commercial travellers who are now his mainstay and till lately had abandoned him. So that there is hope.

In spite of that ray of sunshine the traveller in Provence will never, I feel sure, be able to enter an unknown town and go into any restaurant with any certainty of good food. That used to be the case in almost every district in France and may well again be so if the Crisis continues and the Anglo-Saxon tourist keeps away. But except along the sea-shore where the indigenous populations have several ways of producing savory–usually garlic-saffron-flavoured fish stews, fish-soups, sauces or stuffings, Provence has no regional dishes and the true Provençal has neither the gift, nor the patience nor yet the materials that are necessary for the serious cook.1

Nevertheless every Provençal town harbours a number of French officials, officers, federal policemen and a certain number of real Provençaux who are careful of what they eat. So you may be certain that every town of any size at all will contain one restaurant where food at least eatable may be had without ordering it beforehand.

To find it you must adopt one of two courses: Walk the streets with your eyes open until you see a comfortable, good-humoured-looking man and then ask him where to eat. The only way in which good humour can be secured for humanity is by habitual good eating and even though your good-humoured-looking man–he should be of a certain age and embonpoint–even though he eat usually at home there will certainly be occasions enough in his life in which he will need to give dinners to acquaintances at restaurants. So he will have the necessary knowledge.

Or, going about your town you will see a café that must be clean but not too American in aspect…. The café-keeper who has Americanised–or Lyons-Corner-House-ised–the appearance of his establishment will imagine that he has done enough for the world. He will spend the rest of his life raising his prices, debasing the quality of what he supplies, employing cheap waiters and quarrelling with his lavatory attendant over the proportion of her tips that he should get…. But look for a clean, old-fashioned café with the bowls for napkins shining like the glass spheres in a Dutch garden and a good-humoured-looking waiter. Take your apéritifs at one of the tables of that waiter. Get into conversation with him if you can. Tell him that he is better off where he is than in London or New York–or in Paris. Before leaving give him a good–but not an extravagant–tip. If you under-tip him he will think you a miser, if you over-tip, a fool. He might tell you the name of his good, secret restaurant if he thought you close; he would never do so if you presented to him the aspect of a squandering Anglo-Saxon, because he would despise you. And he will not want the prices and tips of his restaurant put up. He will want to dine there himself–and tip.

A café waiter should be given a slightly higher tip than one in a restaurant, ten per cent on the bill being the established wage. If in a restaurant you have an expensive wine you do not tip ten per cent on that, nor, in restaurants where ten per cent is charged for the service, has the proprietor a right to ten per cent on his wine. The theory of the tip or the ten per cent is that they are gauged on the amount of service the attendant puts in. As it gives no more trouble to bring a hundred franc bottle of wine to the table than one costing five or fifteen francs it would be absurd to give the waiter who brings it ten francs. But of course if the wine calls for special care in carrying from the cellar, basketing, chambrer-ing, uncorking and pouring, you give the sommelier a tip all for himself–supposing the results to be satisfactory. But watch his every movement, test the heat of the wine against your cheek and inspect your cork with minute attention so as to be sure that it is newly drawn. I will tell you why later on….

The tip in the restaurant should be ten per cent. At the café it should be a little more if you are a reasonable user of cafés … if, I mean, you limit yourself to a single apéritif before dinner, a cup of coffee with a possible fine, afterwards, or a bock at odd moments … and if while consuming them you ask the waiter for the time-table, the telephone book, the local directory, writing-materials, postage-stamps. You can do all that for the price of a cup of coffee as far as the management is concerned. But it would be absurd to give the waiter only twelve and a half centimes as being ten per cent of the Frs. 1,25 that the coffee has cost…. And above all, give your tip with the air that you are the one that accepts favours. Remember that he has as much right as you to be there–and more. Remember that he is as honest a man as you, with as engaging a family to support and that, the human cosmogony being what it is, he has as much right to his tip as you to the emoluments that by force or guile you extract from the universe–and then more. And remember above all that whilst you are a mere transitory nuisance he is carrying on, for his town, the great work of civilisation since for you, and how many others, he can and, if decently treated, will, infinitely soothe your way through life and his town.

Remember, I say, all these things. And having given a tip of a franc on your four franc apéritif, ask with proper deference of your good-humoured-looking waiter:

“Où est-ce-qu’onpeutbienmanger ici…. Etmodestement,bienentendu?” … “Where can one eat well here…. And, of course, reasonably?”

The waiter will then address himself seriously to the task of guiding you and the chances are about nine to one that you will fetch up in some unpromising-looking place where you will eat real cooking. Of course he might have an aunt who kept an atrocious hotel. But that is very rare; waiters are adventurous souls and loving travel seldom ply their trade in their home towns until they have made savings enough to let them open their own establishments.

Yes, those two systems work very well. I owe to a fattish, cheerish-looking gentleman with a grey silk waistcoat whom I accosted in the market at Arles the wonderful meal in the farmer’s ordinary–the one at which we ate the petitsoiseaux as well as an inimitable soupe de poissons; and to a waiter at the café near the arena at Nîmes I owe the direction to the heavenly wine-vault behind the Protestant temple at Nîmes. There such pieds de mouton à la ravigotte were consumed by us that one at least of our party of good and true diners has never ceased to rave about them…. Personally I prefer my sheeps’ trotters àlasauce poulette. It is the more classical mode. Sauce poulette is made according to the old formula by…. But maybe I have given receipts enough!

At any rate the first thing you should do when you get to Provence is to achieve some intimacy with a waiter and then to ask him endless questions, for the more advice you ask of him the more he will respect you. Then, in an astonishingly short space of time, you will become un homme connu in that town. And to be a ‘known man’ in a Provençal township is very worth while…. When you go to get your carted’identité a smiling functionary will tell you that it is a quite unnecessary formality; you will be able to commit with impunity all sorts of minor irregularities with your car; you will be met with smiles in places where indifference is the lot of all other foreigners and when, purposing a longer stay than you had expected, you come to bargain with your hotel keeper you will find that he will reduce your rates with an alacrity that will astonish you, supposing you to be any sort of a bargainer at all…. And all that because one townsman asking your address of another will be answered:

“Nay, I do not know that monsieur’s address…. But his café, it is the Café du Commerce.” You will have achieved a local standing and the reputation of being ‘serious.’ Nothing more is needed to make of your life in these regions a bed of roses.

Something of the same sort is observable in London or New York–or even in Paris, but the incidence is slightly different. I went the other day–there are no cafés in London–to get my hair cut by a barber who lives underground in Charing Cross Station. The tonsorial artist put his sheet round my neck without any visible emotion, flourished his scissors, made a few passes and then with a fine casualness remarked:

“Forty years ago it was that I first cut your ’air, sir…. Cup Tie day, 189–, it was.” … He had indeed cut my hair most times when it had been cut during the twenty years which preceded the 4th of August 1914–when German troops at six in the morning crossed the Belgian frontier near a place called Gemmenich–and then never again! … I mean that he had never since that date cut my hair again. I don’t know about Gemmenich….

I had been used to go there because, living down in Kent, it had been convenient to have my hair cut in Charing Cross Station when I contrived to be a little early for a down train. But, during all those twenty years, no particular sort of relationship seemed to establish itself between that man and myself. He had cut my hair, had taken my tip and I had gone away….

He remembered now that I liked my hair cut: “that way”; that I never had anything “on it” and disliked powder after a shave. Also that I had given him “Pirate” for the Doncaster Autumn Meeting of nineteen hundred odd and hadn’t fancied “Bread and Cheese” for Redcar, next year so that on both occasions he had made a bit of money–Marwood of course had given me those North Country tips.–Also I had recommended him to buy somebody’s special sweet peas twenty-two years before and they had done proper in his Purley garden where he still grew the same strain….

When he had done with me he accepted my tip, brushed my hair and I went away without his making any comment. But the next time I went there and was fumbling for my money to pay, the cashier said: “Next time will do very well” and there was that rarest of conferrings of a citizenship–a barber’s offering credit. And the same phenomenon occurs every time I go back to New York … I dealt with the same tradesmen for many months, on Sixth Avenue between twelfth and eighth, on the first protracted visit I made to that city. Now, whenever I make another visit and enter one of those shops I get offered unlimited credit and all the bootleggers of that precinct would till lately call on me and offer to supply me with liquor on unprecedentedly easy terms!

In Anglo-Saxondom prolonged residence and settled behaviour are not in themselves sufficient to gain you marks of a neighbourhood’s esteem. But go away–settling of course your accounts–and return again and you are sure of being radiantly treated and reminded of virtues you have long forgotten….

I used the words “tonsorial artist” just now because I was thinking of M. Bonhoure–of M. Bonhoure of Tarascon, the most famous man of all France who must one day, surely, be the patron saint of all barbers the world over.

1 In “It Was the Nightingale”.

1 Here is the recipe for bouillabaisse as it was written by A. Caillat, chef of the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix at Marseilles in 1891–the year in which I first ate bouillabaisse in that city. It should be premised that there exist three schools of bouillabaisse–those who sanction langouste, those who sanction potatoes and those who sanction neither–though very occasionally you will find both together in the bouillabaisse of quite famous practitioners. Personally I favour potatoes and no langouste.

   Take then large quantities of the fish called rascasse–for which my dic tionary gives no translation; of the grondin–the red gurnet of the North Sea; of the boudroie, for which again I have no translation; of the conger eel; of the roucaou; of the merlan, or whiting; of the Saint Pierté, otherwise the zée which my dictionary calls the zeus-fish, which Larousse states to be a genus of Australian (!) though you see it caught every day in the Mediterranean, I believing it to be a species of haddock. And last of all you take the loup durocher, the most radiant, the most delicate and the most costly of all the fishes of all the seas and rivers that God has made, its flesh having the firmness of the finest trout, a consistency and whiteness of its own and a complete absence of the slight suspicion of aftertaste of mud that mars the finest of Scottish brook trout.

  Having chosen very fresh specimens of these fish, scale and clean them and cut them in vertical slices; set aside the whiting, the loup, the zée and the roucaou, which being more delicate call for less cooking.

  Place in a saucepan a minced onion, two tomatoes and three or four cloves of garlic, some fennel, bay, and peel of bitter orange all equally minced fine, a sprig of thyme; add the fish that you did not set aside, a quarter of a pint of olive oil, pepper, salt and saffron; just cover with boiling water and place on a quick fire so that it may come quickly to the boil. Five minutes later add the remaining fish; keep boiling five minutes longer, always very quickly so that the mixing may be thorough.

  Have ready on a soup plate or tureen slices of bread one-third of an inch in thickness; pour the bouillon over this whilst straining it; arrange the fish on another dish, removing the pot-herbs, sprinkle with parsley and serve.