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ROMANTIC CITIES OF PROVENCE


[Illustration: CLOISTERS OF ST. TROPHINE, ARLES.
_By E. M. Synge._]


ROMANTIC CITIES OF PROVENCE

by

MONA CAIRD

Illustrated from Sketches by
Joseph Pennell and Edward M. Synge






New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
London: T. Fisher Unwin




   TO
   MARGUERITE HAMILTON SYNGE


[All rights reserved.]




Preface


This volume can hardly be said to have been written: it came about. The
little tour in the South of France which is responsible for its existence,
happened some years ago, and was undertaken for various reasons, health
and rest among others, and the very last idea which served as a motive
for the journey was that of writing about the country whose history is
so voluminous and so incalculably ancient. Nobody but a historian and a
scholar already deeply versed in the subject could dream of attempting
to treat it in any serious or complete fashion. But this fact did
not prevent the country from instantly making a profound and singular
impression upon a mind entirely unprepared by special study or knowledge
to be thus stirred. The vividness of the impression, therefore, was not
to be accounted for by associations of facts and scenes already formed
in the imagination. True, many an incident of history and romance now
found its scene and background, but before these corresponding parts
of the puzzle had been fitted together the potent charm had penetrated,
giving that strange, baffling sense of home-coming which certain lands
and places have for certain minds, remaining for ever mysterious, yet
for ever familiar as some haunt of early childhood.

An experience of that sort will not, as a rule, allow itself to be set
aside. It works and troubles and urges, until, sooner or later, some
form of transmutation must take place, some condensing into form of the
formless, some passing of impulse into expression, be it what it may.

And thus the first stray notes and sketches were made without ultimate
intention. But the charm imposed itself, and the notes grew and grew.
Then a more definite curiosity awoke and gradually the scene widened:
history and imagination took sisterly hands and whispered suggestions,
explanations of the secret of the extraordinary magic, till finally the
desultory sketches began to demand something of order in their undrilled
ranks. The real toil then began.

The subject, once touched upon, however slightly, is so unendingly
vast and many-sided, so entangled with scholarly controversy, that the
few words possible to say in a volume of this kind seem but to cause
obscurity, and worst of all, to falsify the general balance of impression
because of the innumerable other things that must perforce be left
unsaid. An uneasy struggle is set up in the mind to avoid, if possible,
that most fatal sort of misrepresentation, viz., that which contains a
certain proportion of truth.

And how to choose among varying accounts and theories, one contradicting
the other? Authorities differ on important points as radically and as
surely as they differ about the spelling of the names of persons and
places. There is conflict even as to the names in use at the present
day, as, for instance, the little mountain range of the Alpilles, which
some writers persistently spell _Alpines_, out of pure pigheadedness or
desire to make themselves conspicuous, as it seems to the weary seeker
after textual consistency. Where doctors disagree what can one do who is
not a doctor, but try to give a general impression of the whole matter
and leave the rest to the gods?

As for dates----!

Now there are two things with which no one who has not been marked out by
Providence by a special and triumphant gift ought to dream of attempting
to deal, namely, dates and keys--between which evanescent, elusive and
fundamentally absurd entities there is a subtle and deep-seated affinity.
If meddled with at all, they must