Romantic Cities of Provence. Mona Caird

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

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