A Book of The Riviera. Baring-Gould Sabine
de Donzère, between calcareous rocks full of caves and rifts. Then, all at once, the line passes out of the rocky portal, and the traveller enters on another scene altogether, the vast triangular plain limited by the Alps on one side and the Cevennes on the other, and has the Mediterranean as its base. To this point at one time extended a mighty gulf, seventy miles from the present coast-line at the mouth of the Rhone. Against the friable limestone cliffs, the waves lapped and leaped. But at some unknown time a cataclysm occurred. The Alps were shaken, as we shake a tree to bring down its fruit, and the Rhone and the Durance, swollen to an enormous volume, rolled down masses of débris into this gulf and choked it. The Durance formed its own little crau along the north of the chain of the Alpines, and the Rhone the far larger crau of Arles, the pebbles of which all come from the Alps, in which the river takes it rise. But, in fact, the present craus represent but a small portion of the vast mass of rubbish brought down. They are just that part which in historic times was not overlaid with soil.
When this period was passed, the rivers relaxed their force, and repented of the waste they had made, and proceeded to chew into mud the pebbles they rolled along, and, rambling over the level stretches of rubble, to deposit upon it a fertilising epidermis. Then, in modern times, the engineers came and banked in the Rhone, to restrain its vagaries, so that now it pours its precious mud into the sea, and yearly projects its ugly muzzle further forwards. When we passed the rocky portal, we passed also from the climate of the North into that of the South, but not to that climate without hesitations. For the sun beating on the level land heats the pebble bed, so that the air above it quivers as over a lime-kiln, and, rising, is replaced by a rush of icy winds from the Alps. This downrush is the dreaded Mistral. It was a saying of old: —
“Parlement, Mistral, et Durance
Sont les trois fléaux de Provence.”
The Parliament is gone, but the Mistral still rages, and the Durance still overflows and devastates.
The plain, where cultivated, is lined and cross-lined as with Indian ink. These lines, and cross-lines, are formed of cypress, veritable walls of defence, thrown up against the wind. When the Mistral rages, they bow as whips, and the water of the lagoons is licked up and spat at the walls of the sparsely scattered villages. Here and there rises the olive, like smoke from a lowly cottage. It shrinks from the bite of the frost and the lash of the wind, and attains its proper height and vigour only as we near the sea; and is in the utmost luxuriance between Solliès Pont and Le Luc, growing on the rich new red sandstone, that skirts the Montagnes des Maures.
Presently we come on the lemon, the orange, glowing golden, oleanders in every gully, aloes (“God’s candelabra”), figs, mulberries, pines with outspread heads, like extended umbrellas, as the cypress represents one folded; cork trees, palms with tufted heads; all seen through an atmosphere of marvellous clearness, over-arched by a sky as blue as that of Italy, and with – as horizon – the deeper, the indigo blue, of the sea.
On leaving Arles, the train takes the bit between its teeth and races over the crau, straight as an arrow, between lines of cypresses. It is just possible to catch glimpses to the north, between the cypresses, of a chain of hills of opalescent hue. That chain, Les Alpines, gives its direction to the Durance. This river lent its aid to Brother Rhone to form this rubble plain, the Campus lapideus of the Romans, the modern crau. This was a desert over which the mirage alternated with the Mistral, till Adam de Craponne, in the sixteenth century, brought a canal from the Durance to water the stony land, and since then, little by little, the desert is being reclaimed. This vast stony plain was a puzzle to the ancients, and Æschylus, who flourished B.C. 472, tells us that Heracles, arriving at this plain to fight the Ligurians, and being without weapons, Heaven came to his aid and poured down great stones out of the sky against his foes. This is much like the account in Joshua of the battle against the Kings in the plain of Esdraelon.
At length, at Miramas, we escape from between the espalier cypresses and see that the distant chain has drawn nearer, that it has lost its mother-of-pearl tints, and has assumed a ghastly whiteness. Then we dash among these cretaceous rocks, desolate, forbidding and dead. They will attend us from Marseilles to Toulon.
The cretaceous sea bed, that once occupied so vast an area, has been lifted into downs and mountains, and stretched from Dorset and Wiltshire to Dover. We catch a glimpse of it at Amiens. A nodule that has defied erosion sustains the town and cathedral of Laon. It underlies the Champagne country. It asserts itself sullenly and resolutely in Provence, where it overlies the Jura limestone, and is almost indistinguishable from it at the junction, for it has the same inclination, the same fossils, and the same mineralogical constituents.
In England we are accustomed to the soft skin of thymy turf that covers the chalk on our downs. Of this there is none in Provence. The fierce sun forbids it. Consequently the rock is naked and cadaverously white, but scantily sprinkled over with stunted pines.
The Jura limestone is the great pièce de resistance in Provence: it is sweeter in colour than the chalk, ranging from cream white to buff and salmon; it has not the dead pallor of the chalk. Any one who has gone down the Cañon of the Tarn knows what exquisite gradations and harmonies of tone are to be found in Jura limestone. Here this formation stands up as a wall to the North, a mighty screen, sheltering the Riviera from the boreal winds. It rises precipitously to a plateau that is bald and desolate, but which is rent by ravines of great majesty and beauty, through which rush the waters from the snowy Alps. The chalk and the limestone are fissured, and allow the water flowing over their surface to filter down and issue forth in the valleys, rendering these fertile and green, whereas the plateaux are bare. The plateaux rise to the height of 3,000 or 4,500 feet.
The tract between the mountain wall of limestone and the sea is made up of a molass of rolled fragments of the rock in a paste of mud. This forms hills of considerable height, and this also is sawn through here and there by rills, or washed out by rivers.
Altogether different in character is the mass of the Montagnes des Maures, which is an uplifted body of granite and schist.
Altogether different again is the Estérel, a protruded region of red porphyry.
About these protruded masses may be seen the new red sandstone.
When we have mastered this – and it is simple enough to remember – we know the character of the geology from the mouths of the Rhone to Albenga.
“The colouring of Provence,” says Mr. Hammerton, “is pretty in spring, when the fields are still green and the mulberry trees are in leaf, and the dark cypress and grey olive are only graver notes in the brightness, while the desolation of the stony hills is prevented from becoming oppressive by the freshness of the foreground; but when the hot sun and the dry wind have scorched every remnant of verdure, when any grass that remains is merely ungathered hay, and you have nothing but flying dust and blinding light, then the great truth is borne in upon you that it is Rain which is the true colour magician, though he may veil himself in a vesture of grey cloud.”
In winter and early spring it is that the coast is enjoyable. In winter there is the evergreen of the palms, the olive, the ilex, the cork tree, the carob, the orange and lemon and myrtle. Indeed, in the Montagnes des Maures and in the Estérel, it is always spring.
The resident in winter can hardly understand the structure of the towns, with streets at widest nine feet, and the houses running up to five and six storeys; but this is due to necessity. The object is double: by making the streets so narrow, the sun is excluded, and the sun in Provence is not sought as with us in England; and secondly, these narrow thoroughfares induce a draught down them. In almost every town the contrast between the new and the old is most marked, for the occupants of the new town reside there for the winter only, and therefore court the sun; whereas the inhabitants of the old town dwell in it all the year round, and consequently endeavour to obtain all protection possible from the sun. But this shyness of basking in the sun was not the sole reason why the streets were made so narrow. The old towns and even villages were crowded within walls; a girdle of bulwark surrounded them, they had no space for expansion except upwards.
What Mr. Hammerton says of French towns applies especially to those of Provence: —
“France