The whole thing had the curious, senseless allure of dreams.
I believe that an account of a journey should be composed approximately in this fashion, just as the journey itself is experienced; and that there is no more coherence between the traveler’s assembled sensations than there is between the vases, the apes, and the demons in the picture book.
Hence the peculiar dream-like character of reflective memories of travel, in which we sense a foreignness greater than what was really there. That pleasurable, sensitive mode of travel, the mode of Sterne and Rousseau, has been lost to us. Theirs were truly journeys taken according to their moods. Travelers went slowly, in comical stage-coaches and gallant sedan chairs; they had time for certain adventures in country inns; to wax melancholy upon being confronted with a dead donkey lying in their path; time to pick fruit from the trees as they passed, and peek through open chamber-windows; to listen to the people singing their summer songs, the roar of fountains, the peal of church bells.
Today’s frantic travel has blurred all this over; our journeys lack all that is painterly or theatrical, amusing or sentimental—in short, all vitality.
Chambéry is the capital of old Savoy; it has belonged to France now for a hundred years, in honor of which a few weeks ago a young Savoisienne stood in the market square and embraced the tricolor. The city, like most cities, was most likely built in a wide range of styles, but by night, under the moon, it is uniformly rococo, with spiraling gables and curved balconies, stylishly populated by sundry cats. There are tiny little ones, whimsical, rolling, flirting and flattering, drunk on the moonlight; large ones who sit on the balconies in mannered dignity and heraldic stiffness; and others still who quietly glide along the city walls with dimly lit eyes in the deepest dark.
Near to this city of cats, in the hilly countryside’s pure balmy air, among great bowers of darkly glowing vines, are a great many small cottages. One of these is the house of the woman from Warens, the Charmettes, where Rousseau experienced his great love. She was a well-brought-up and beautiful lady with a bright decency and charm, elegant and sincere in her letters; he was a half-grown parvenu, full of bitter arrogance and an intense yearning for love, he was cruel and inconsiderate and had burning rhetorical antitheses in his heart. He called her “maman,” she him “petit.” It is all still there: her pictures, her beds, the window from which they looked out at the sunset, the evergreen that they plucked together . . .
There might be an opportunity here to offer a banality, which is still quite sad.—
But to continue: Grenoble is the birthplace of Henri Stendhal. Henri Beyle, known as Stendhal, the great psychologist of this century’s novelists—alongside Balzac and above all others—whom many in France have been reading again since 1880, and even some in Germany too.
They’ve named a street after him in Grenoble, a hideous, half-finished, characterless bourgeois street, redolent of chalk and bricks—after him, who created so many invariably wonderful and unusual people, he who was so arrogant, so “not like the others”; in any case, he couldn’t stand the city of his birth, and died after years of restless wandering around his adopted homeland—restoration Milan—surrounded by, the melodies of Cimarosa and the lovely sculptures of Canova, under the white marble cathedral roof and the warm charm of well-brought-up cosmopolitans. There on his gravestone, with a poet’s ostentation, he set the words: arrigo beyle, milanese.
Grenoble lies in the middle of the light green, hilly Dauphiné. On broad country roads that cut through bright woody valleys, one encounters a number of large herds of diverse animals, and it is quite like the peaceful nature of Gauermann and Waldmüller. It is thus, among round hills and agreeable greenery, all the way to Valence. There, in the city of Cesare Borgia and Diane de Poitiers, in Valentinois, French nature and the French language come to an end, and we enter Provence, its yellow sunburnt hills, its olives and figs and its own language, which has very little in common with French and very much with Spanish, and also a little with that forgotten Italian of the La Divina Commedia, and with the Greek of Phocaea and the Arabic of the Moors. In rhythm and tone it is wilder and darker than the other Romance languages, though nearest to Spanish. It has its poets, poetic schools, and poetic masters, but there is something pedantic about these masters’ poetry, something overrefined and artificial, and the true successors of Bertran de Born, Peire Cardenal, and Raimon de Tolosa, are the cobblers, barbers, and booksellers.
Its most famous work is the popular “Mirèio,” by Mistral, an idyll in precious artificial stanzas, half Homer, half Berthold Auerbach—a much-too-long poem, in which the wondrous things of the past are presented as if they were stiff and dead, like in a drab provincial museum.
Really, the past is less dead in this country than anywhere else; it has such a clear, still, dry, preservative air. Some women from Arles retain the solemn beauty of the Romans, their profiles like carved cameos, with princely gaits and princely gestures; others stand and recline with a Greek grace, like Tanagra figurines, and a Greek coquetry in their casual and light speech; still others carry a dull golden Moorish luster and glide softly and flexibly, “like leaves in the wind.” And they sit with simmering eyes on the steps of the arena: there is bullfighting there; black bulls with red eyes, banderilleros and toreadors with long, beautiful names from Zaragosa and Valencia, with the elegant poses of gladiators and green silk coats; and the music of Carmen in place of tubas and flutes. That is their theater. And when the streets glow in harsh sunlight, they stroll down dim cloister halls, between Moorish ornaments and Byzantine columns, or in the Alyscamps, the noblest burial ground in the world, where ancient sarcophagi lie under cypress shadows.
Or they go to pray in the great Cathedral of Saint-Trophime, where in near darkness, among stone apostles, griffins, angels, and winged bulls, Greek and Saracenic beauty breathes anew.
Many, however, take up that most charming profession, selling elegant ancient wares. They sit idly and graciously on fading thrones among destroyed statues, restored golden fabrics, and old-fashioned engravings, and wait. They smile strangely, dreamily, as if forever waiting for flowers, from somewhere, to fall upon them. Because they are very vain; they have a serious, almost religious vanity, and are accustomed to courtship by poets.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – ô jours
De ma jeunesse, quand serrant d’un long velours
Le tour de mes cheveux, la taille souple et fine,
Les seins mi-cachés sous la claire mousseline,
Nous descendions, riant au rire des galants,
Sous le porche du grand Saint-Trophime à pas lents!
This verse is not from Daudet’s “Arlésienne,” but there are a few pieces that could all be called “L’Arlésienne.” Their heroine always carries that curious antique beauty, is always irresistible, and usually rides on a white horse as fast as the wind.
The white horse comes from Camargue, a vast region on the Rhone, not far from Arles, and extending thence to the mouth of the Rhone into the sea. A wide, treeless plain, gray-green and shimmering with violet heather, not colored, only shimmering with violet heather—not colored, only shimmering (violacé)—under the pale, lilac-colored sky. There graze herds of these white horses and black bulls and pink flamingos.
It is an Egyptian landscape, with the silence of death, through which two-wheeled carts roll without making a sound.
Where the Camargue ends, the sea begins: “the light-blue sea, with dolphins and gulls.” It is, in fact, not that blue imbued with gold of Claude Lorrain, and not the hazy dark blue of Poussin, but rather the solid bright blue of Puvis de Chavanne.
It is no accident that I speak so much of colors. Here in these bright countries, one is far more concerned with color than in our gray and brown world. Even the menu is picturesque. The breakfast back in Savoy had the placid coloration of Huysum and Hondecoeter: under the grapevine leaves on a pure white cloth stood a Fayence jug full of bright wine, yellow butter, red crab, green spinach, and blue grapes as delightful as they were refreshing. Here, though, on the rolling phosphorescent sea, the lunch in the fisherman’s hut is a veritable orgy of color. The rudd fish swims in a saffron sauce, others flicker with silver scales, and the bright red langoustines are framed by dull green olives. All one needs is the gold-beaked peacock to replicate the colorful meals of the Renaissance. Along with this meal, the blue sea and the pines and cypresses on the white beach. It is thus all along the coast, from the Pyrenees to the Riviera. Inland, however, the provincial landscape is monochrome, like the Greek. Gray-yellow, with gray-green olive groves. Now and then a herd of sheep noiselessly scurries down the dusty old royal street. Then a dried-up riverbed. Then, in mute solitude, ruins: a dilapidated aqueduct, a triumphal arch. Then wide, shadowless groves of meager olives. It looks there like the narrow road where Oedipus encountered his father. And like the hill where Antigone sought her brother’s corpse. Modernity has no purchase here. The past lives on forever. And it was fitting when the Comédie Française came to this provincial land a few years ago and performed King Oedipus on the stony scaffolds of an antique stage . . .
