Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  “And if she is ugly?” I asked. The thought surprised him. He had clearly not taken into account any question of personal attraction in the matter of marriage. “Well she looks all right from her photograph,” he said. “Not beautiful but nice.”

  The little pessimist behind us said: “You can tell nothing from photographs. Do photographs show wooden legs? She may be a hunchback for all you know.”

  “In that case I shall withdraw from the deal.” said Raoul with simple dignity. “I do not want a wife that one unscrews and hangs up from a nail each night. Naturally we shall have to examine every possibility.”

  The little man belched.

  With the warm sunlight and the pleasant though slightly tainted breeze that came in through the side-windows I fell into a comfortable daze. Northward glittered the Cévennes foothills. We were running down on the long straggling net of roads which leads to Uzès and the Pont du Gard. Raoul was in talkative mood and was discoursing on the life beautiful, with all modern conveniences naturally. “Avignon,” he said, “is so old and so ugly. I could never think of living in such an old barrack of a place. Now give me a town like Alès.” I did not say anything, for there was nothing one could say. Alès is a hideous little mining town full of concrete brick modernities. The plumber’s dream—every plumber’s dream. “In Avignon I should go mad,” said Raoul “though I must admit,” he added, “that the state of the plumbing is so bad that I should have work for life. But those old buildings are so ugly.”

  I thought of the crumbling violet palaces of the vanished Popes, of the Rhône’s green swirling current around the smashed bridge of St. Benezet, and sighed. “I can’t think what they see in them. I myself would have the whole lot down and some decent modern apartment flats put up. Do you know that part of the town is still built on piles, and lots of the old houses have a trap-door in the basement which gives directly onto the river? It’s weird. That is why such a lot of murders are committed. You just push the body through the trap and it’s found later right downriver. It’s easy. No, I shouldn’t care to live there. It’s unhealthy.” He talked as if the river were choked with corpses.

  “And the tourism?” said the little man in the back, “what of the tourism? Foreigners come for the ancient things. They have their own apartments at home. They come to see the monuments. In this way Avignon gets rich.” Raoul admitted that he hadn’t thought of that. “One must live,” he admitted, though rather doubtfully.

  After Uzès he surprised me by suggesting a detour by the Pont du Gard. “But I thought you hated old monuments,” I said. Raoul looked at me scornfully. “That is science!” he said coldly. “It is not art but science, sir. It is a Roman triumph of the plumber’s science. I always take my apprentices out there. It is their first lesson in plumbing. Now the Pont du Gard I love and know well.”

  “But it is beautiful, no?”

  “It is practical, sir,” said Raoul firmly.

  I was surprised that this unromantic soul was capable of such intellectual distinctions. I was even more surprised to find that he was not boasting, for as we entered the magnificent defile, which is so reminiscent of the gorges of Syria, he slowed down in order to drink in once more the beauty of this fantastic ruin. “What do you tell your apprentices?” I said absently, letting my eye span the gorge to follow the harsh but sweet lines of the noble aqueduct. From whichever angle one comes upon it, at whatever time of day, that Pont du Gard is lovely. Raoul was talking. “I always stop the car here and make them descend. I say to them quite simply: ‘This is the noblest Roman monument in the world, built by Agrippa to carry the waters of Eure and Airam to Nîmes. Note it well, my children. It has three tiers of arches. At the bottom there are three, in the second tier eleven of equal span, and in the last thirty-five. Though of such gigantic size it exactly reproduces the side of a Romanesque cathedral—so I have read. It supports a canal five feet high and two wide. At the top its length is no less than 873 feet.’” He broke off proudly. His erudition floored me.

  “And what do they say?”

  “Usually they are silent. After a moment I take them up like this onto the bridge to see its reflection in the Gardon. Is it not wonderful?”

  “It is very beautiful.”

  “But that is because it is useful.”

  We did not pursue the argument. Besides in such a place aesthetics should be left to look after themselves. We idled about for twenty minutes or so among the great bronze arches, chatting in desultory fashion, awed by the spirit of place. Then once more we took the curling road into Remoulins, and so outward across the plain to where, beyond the shallow range of blue hills, the old town of Avignon lay waiting with its modern Laura.

  “What will you do while I am busy?” asked Raoul a trifle anxiously for he did not wish to appear as failing in hospitality. “I could find you a nice café. It won’t take me long.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I have an introduction to someone. I’ll go along and see if they are at home.”

  “But we must have a point of rendezvous,” said Raoul. “I will put you down at the Grand Café in the Place de la République. It is perfect. You will see all the actresses.” He licked his lips. I did not quite know the importance of this remark about actresses.

  We were now rumbling through Villeneuve-les-Avignon on the right bank of the Rhône, the road climbing and curving into the sky, to descend headlong to the bridge which spans the river. At the last corner before you take the plunge you can see, misty across the long flat expanse of the smooth-flowing river, the conglomeration of towers and belfries which has made Avignon one of the most beautiful of the southern French towns. Beautiful and yet somehow barbaric (I was thinking of Raoul’s emphasis on utility) Avignon is a colossal fortress, with its long crenellated ramparts (now burning rosy and honey-gold in the afternoon light) built for defence. For a hundred years it was a Rome in exile, and the proud Popes who inhabited it saw to the matter of defence with practical thoroughness that left nothing to chance. Less formally perfect than Venice, less symmetrical in organization than Carcassonne, it is nevertheless quite as magnificent with its muddle of towers and steeples and belfries as it rides, like a galleon in full sail, across the mistral-scourged plain. Today the sky was blue, with no wind. When the mistral gets up the blue skies of Provence turn white as a scar. “Well,” said Raoul. “There she is. And the famous Pont d’Avignon. It looks silly all broken off like a tooth. I would have it down and build something nice with a railway across it.”

  The big bridge which spans the island is an ugly one. In fact most of the architecture being executed in the south of France today conforms to type. We are destroying our monuments piecemeal in England, too. Nevertheless Raoul liked it. It was a step in the right direction, he thought. I reflected sadly that while each town has a Committee of Beaux Arts which is supposed to (and effectively does) protect the ancient monuments it has no powers over new buildings. Avignon is sliding down into urbanism like all the rest of the medieval towns. In fact Raoul gave a cry of delight at the sight of a giant crane poking up from behind the machicolated walls, and the glimpse of a new apartment block. “Good,” he cried, “there is something modern.” I wondered if in five hundred years from now these modern blocks would attract sentimental and wondering pilgrims as do the old palaces and churches today. Perhaps we are wrong and Raoul is right. But at any rate it was pleasing to see that urban-ism was being strongly resisted in the vacant lots around the walls, for here were several large gipsy encampments, and all the apparatus of a great country fair—the stalls set up along the outer ramparts, buzzing with insanitary but effervescent life. We swerved into the shadow of the great walls and found ourselves inside the town with its cramped medieval streets. Here all traffic is slowed to the pace of a bullock-cart. Abuse, bad language and gesticulation reign supreme. The policemen give the impression of having surrendered completely. They shrug and smile and playfully wave you down streets hopelessly blocked by drays and handbarrows and lorries
. Everything (this is part of the policeman’s private sense of fun) everything is marked ONE WAY. If one were foolish enough to observe these signs one would go round and round forever. Raoul knew this. He ignored the traffic signs and wherever he saw a NO ENTRY sign he took it. Even so it was slow work, though from his point of view spiritually uplifting. The arguments! The oaths! The invocations to Our Lord! We literally swore our way across the town to what he thought was the Place de la République but which turned out in fact to be the Place Clemenceau. Here I got down at last, somewhat shaken but glad to feel terra firma under my feet again. It was a good place of rendezvous. A beautiful square with a shady café just by the theatre, outside which brooded the statues of Voltaire (to judge by the foxy look) and Molière: both much weather-eroded and pigeon-bespattered. “Now,” said Raoul, “let us meet here. If I don’t come, you keep coming back to it, say every hour. If you don’t appear by midnight I shall assume that you have gone off with a girl and return home. You can come on by train tomorrow. I promise to remember the tap.” The tap! I had forgotten it myself by now.

  I walked about a bit down the twisted streets in the violet shadow of the Palace of the Popes. I had an introduction from a man I had known in Paris to a Count who lived in Avignon. It took me a little time to find the Count’s lodgings. I had despatched a telegram the day before asking if I might pay him a visit. Unfortunately he was away. His housekeeper however had a letter from him in which he apologized for his absence on business and then, with characteristic southern hospitality, added: “However I will not fail you entirely, for I have asked the Provençal poet Robert Allan to keep you company for the few hours you are here. You probably know his work. Curiously enough he is a descendant of Edgar Allan Poe.” Curiously enough! It is, appropriately, the most popular of phrases in the French Midi, and justly so. Everything that happens is curious, unexpected, out of the way.

  The rendezvous arranged by the Count was happily the café which I had just left, and I returned towards it at a leisurely pace, deliberately taking a turning or two out of my way in order to enjoy the sinuous windings of the little streets. Now, at twilight, the little square was humming with life. Waiters were setting out supplementary tables and all the bon ton of the town converged upon them; the lights had begun to go up, outlining the leafy trees and throwing into greater relief the violet sky against which the huge architectural lumber of the palaces loomed with an air of solitary abandon. Avignon at evening is like a rook’s nest. The Grand Café was bursting with life, its mirrors were swimming with colour. This was partly due (here come the actresses!) to the fact that it was a stage pub, situated hard by the stage door of the theatre. Consequently (stage people being the same all over the world) it was crowded with actors waiting for their cue, and actresses waiting for the call boy—and all in full make-up. At a glance it was clear that the piece was a Provençal epic, perhaps Mireille, for the mirrors threw back from a dozen corners of the room the costumed figures of Old Provence—figures which must have been familiar to Van Gogh and Gauguin during their ill-fated stay at Aries. High-coiffed Arlésiennes with their coloured bodices, and leather jacketed and booted gardiens. In the midst of all this swimming colour a youngish, dark man rose and came towards me with outstretched hand. It was the poet. In fact it was a rook’s nest of poets. As he murmured an introduction to verify my identity he said: “We are entertaining a poet from Spain. Please join us for a drink. Afterwards if there is anything you wish to see.…” His resemblance to the author of “The Raven” was striking.

  To most tourists Provençal is an obscure dead language of the past, something once used by the troubadours and now forgotten. Quite the contrary is the case. There are more people who read and speak Provençal today than there are who speak the Portuguese language. Geographically it is distributed over the whole of southern France, though it varies slightly with the district. The language found its Burns in the poet Mistral who used it for his great epic poems, and who indeed founded the poetry of Provence. It stemmed from a small group of poets in Avignon who called themselves “The Félibres.” No one knows what the title means today, but the poets have maintained their distinctive look. They wear a narrow tie of coloured wool. Young Allan was typical of them with his hair grown rather long at the back and his pronounced sidewhiskers. He wore a shirt of cowboy check. Of course he was a youngster. In later life he would doubtless graduate to rather long Victorian coats with a tail and a sombrero. The modern Félibres are as proud as the Scots of their tradition, and while they are all Frenchmen who could as easily write in French they prefer to keep the native tongue of the Midi alive. As Allan said: “The proof of a language’s existence is its poetry. So long as a language is ‘worked’ by poets it never dies.” He used the word “travailler” which is a happy one, for it is used also for tilling the earth. I was introduced in rapid succession to three other poets. (I began to have a sneaking feeling that everyone in Avignon was a poet.) Two were mildly bearded. One was extremely self-assertive and flamboyant and wore a sort of long-brimmed Homburg. I think he had had a drop or two for he was declaiming something with gestures, and casting hot side glances at a bevy of Arlésiennes who were waiting for the call boy in their pallid make-up. They at least were drinking coffee. Women are so rational. We poets were well away on some kind of local fire water. The assertive one in the hat was, I was told, the best bullfighting poet of the age. His only theme was the bullfight, and at every Easter corrida his ode usually won the prize.

  It is perhaps foolish to imagine that a group of people around a café table can give you any sort of insight to a place, and yet it is true. Just as you can smell the whole of London in one pub, or the whole of Paris on the crowded terrasse of a little student-quarter café, so Avignon became much more real to me as I talked to this little group of soberly dressed people. It was not their present conviviality either which suggested to me that the keynote of the place was gaiety. It was something about the smell of it all—the evening sinking behind the squat buttresses, drenching the plain and the long green curve of the Rhône with its successive washes of colour. And inside these walls, which one day enclosed the hopes and fears of all Christendom, lay this brilliantly lighted little square with all its colour, movement, and animation. I asked Allan if Avignon was gay. His eyes sparkled and he nodded. “It is strange isn’t it? I mean that we have a wretched climate. It is cold in winter and the river makes the air humid. And then the blasted mistral when it comes plays havoc. I think the town is probably the most exposed to it in the whole south. Talk about dancing on the bridge! Why, when the mistral gets up they have to stretch ropes along it for people to hold on to as they cross. Without the ropes you’d have to crawl on all fours. Yet, in spite of these apparent drawbacks, it is gay. Yes. You know that it is really the second town of France for the intellectuals. It is to Paris intellectually what Lyons is industrially. The visiting theatre companies adore playing here and the big festival is quite something to attend. There are quite a crowd of painters and writers living here. And then the gipsies. They can’t get rid of them. They camp outside the walls. And then of course all the gangsters and white slavers from Marseilles come here for week-ends to cool their minds. It’s quite cosmopolitan though it’s so small.”

  “I suppose you could say that of Aix.”

  “No. Aix is essentially a town for artists and tourists. But Avignon is like a small capital of a province. All the young painters in Aix want to get to Paris. Nobody ever wants to leave Avignon, and very few people do. As for the gangsters, if they do go to Aix it is with the intention of robbing some rich foreigner. But they come to Avignon to relax. Some of them are very stimulating indeed. There are one or two intellectuals among them. Last week I met one who owns a chain of bawdy houses and he turned out to be a book-collector. He has the finest collection of fourteenth-century books in the whole of France.”

  So we spent the time in pleasantly convivial chatter while I waited for Raoul. A cool river-breeze had begun
to shiver the awnings of the lighted shops and a young moon was struggling into the sky. The cast of Mireille came and went about their business, responsive to the sharp cry of the call boy, plunging into the darkness like divers into a pool. I was wondering whether to propose dinner to my host when the plumber materialized suddenly at my shoulder. He wore a vast smile of complaisance which hovered as if suspended by his pink flapping ears, “Eh alors,” he cried jovially. “She is all I thought and better. We have been talking before a notary. And I have your tap.” He flourished it as he spoke.

  “Is she coming back with you?”

  Raoul shook his head. “She will come day after tomorrow by train. She had some things to attend to. But first, before we leave we must visit her family house and have a drink. She promised that to her father’s memory. You will come won’t you? She is outside in the car.”

  Reluctantly I took my leave of Edgar Allan Poe, promising him to return one day with more time at my disposal. The poets bade me goodbye with the delightful civility of the south, removing hats and berets before shaking hands, while the convivial ones added a thump on the back for good measure. I made a feeble attempt to pay for the drinks I had had, and was shouted down and all but pushed out into the street. Raoul was waiting in the shadow waving his tap. He had parked his wagon down a side-street. Laura was sitting in the front seat and Raoul introduced us with a sort of shambling nervousness which he tried to offset by giving his nerve-shattering laugh. Laura was all that I hoped she might be, tall and strongly built, with great peasant hands. A sculptor would have caught his breath to see the way her square head was set on her spine, thick and true. She had the kind of beauty which comes from being perfectly designed for a traditional purpose—like a spade, say; she was the perfect peasant in a state of nature. She had very good grey eyes well set in her face, a short rather beautifully shaped nose, and high cheek-bones. Her hair was done in a bun. It was thick and lustrous in its darkness. Good teeth. Raoul really was in luck. I climbed into the back beside his mate and sat down on a box. The little man appeared to be half asleep. We started to negotiate the rabbit warren of streets, edging towards the river, and Laura politely apologized for detaining us. “I promised my father that if I married I would offer my intended a drink in our house on the first day of the meeting,” she explained seriously. Raoul chuckled. “And I want to see the house.”