seems more fitting that she should now rest at its foot than on the far-off rock of the Morvan; and one is glad that the belief was early enough established to produce the picturesque anomaly of this fine fragment of northern art planted against the classic slopes of the Maritime Alps.

The great Gothic church was never finished, without or within; but in the seventeenth century a renewal of devotion to Saint Mary Magdalen caused the interior of the choir to be clothed with a magnificent revêtement of wood-carving in the shape of ninety-two choir-stalls, recounting in their sculptured medallions the history of the Dominican order, and leading up to a sumptuous Berniniesque high-altar, all jasper, porphyry and shooting rays of gold.

Saint Maximin, though lying so remotely among bare fields and barer mountains, still shows, outside its church, some interesting traces of former activity and importance. A stout old Dominican monastery extends its long row of ogival windows near the church, and here and there a vigorous bit of ancient masonry juts from the streets - notably in the sprawling arcades of the Jewish quarter, and where certain fragments of wall attest that the mountain village was once a strongly-defended mediæval town.

Beyond Saint Maximin the route nationale bears away between the mountains to Nice; but at Brignoles - a city of old renown, the winter residence of the Counts of Provence- one may turn southward, by Roquebrussanne and the Chartreuse of Montrieux (where Petrarch's brother was abbot), to the radiant valley of the Gapeau, where the stream-side is already white with cherryblossoms, and so at length come out, at Hyères, on the full glory of the Mediterranean spring.

One's first feeling is that nothing else matches it that no work of man, no accumulated appeal of history, can contend a moment against this joy of the eye so prodigally poured out. The stretch

of coast from Toulon to Saint Tropez, so much less familiar to northern eyes than the more eastern portion of the Riviera, has a peculiar nobility, a Virgilian breadth of composition, in marked contrast to the red-rocked precipitous landscape beyond. Looking out on it from the pine-woods of Costebelle, above Hyères, one is beset by classic allusions, analogies of the golden age age-so divinely does the green plain open to the sea, between mountain lines of such Attic purity.

After packed weeks of historic and archæological sensation this surrender to the spell of the landscape tempts one to indefinite idling. It is the season when, through the winter verdure of the Riviera, spring breaks with a hundred tender tints pale green of crops, white snow of fruit-blossoms, and fire of scarlet tulips under the grey smoke of olivegroves. From heights among the corktrees the little towns huddled about their feudal keeps blink across the pine forests at the dazzling blue-and-purple indentations of the coast. And between the heights mild valleys widen down -valleys with fields of roses, acres of budding vine, meadows sown with narcissus, and cold streams rushing from the chestnut forests below the bald grey peaks. Among the peaks are lonely hermitages, ruined remains of old monastic settlements, Carthusian and Benedictine; but no great names are attached to these fallen shrines, and the little towns below have no connection with the main lines of history. It is all a tranquil backwater, thick with local tradition, little floating fragments of association and legend; but art and history seem to have held back from it, as from some charmed Elysian region, too calm, too complete to be rudely touched to great issues.

It was the mistral that drove us from this Eden, poisoning it with dust and glare, and causing us to take refuge north of the sea-board Alps. There, in a blander air and on a radiant morning,

we left Aix behind, and followed the Durance to Avignon. Approaching the papal city from the east, one may get a memorable impression by following the outer circuit of its walls to the Porte de l'Ouille, which opens on the Place Crillon just below the great rock of the palace. Seen thus from without, Avignon is like a toy model of a medieval city; and this impression of artificial completeness is renewed when, from the rock-perched terrace below the palace, one looks out on the Rhone valley and its enclosing amphitheatre of mountains. In the light Provençal air, which gives a finely-pencilled precision to the remotest objects, the landscape has an extraordinarily topographical character, an effect of presenting with a pre-Raphaelite insistence on detail its sharp-edged ruins, its turreted bridge, its little walled towns on definite points of rock. The river winding through the foreground holds its yellow curve between thin fringes of poplar and sharp calcareous cliffs; and even the remoter hills have the clear silhouette of the blue peaks in mediæval miniatures, the shoulder of the Mont Ventoux rising above them to the north with the firmness of an antique marble.

This southern keenness of edge gives even to the Gothicism of the piled-up church and palace an exotic, trans-Alpine quality, and makes the long papal ownership of Avignon-lasting, it is lasting, it is well to remember, till the general upheaval of 1790- a visible and intelligible fact. Though the Popes of Avignon were Frenchmen Avignon is unmistakeably, almost inexplicably, Italian: its Gothic vaguely suggests that of the Ponte Sant' Angelo, of the fortified arches and tombs of medieval Rome, and reconciles itself as easily to the florid façade of the seventeenth century Papal Mint in the square below as to the delicate classic detail of the west door of the church.

Rome - but Imperial not Papal Rome was still in the air as we left Avignon and followed the Rhone valley north

ward to Orange. All this part of France is thick with history, and in the ancient principality of Orange the layers are piled so deep that one wonders to see so few traces of successive dominations in the outward aspect of its capital. Only the Rome of the Emperors has left a mark on the town which lived with so vigorous and personal life from the days when it was a Gaulish city and a trading station of Massaliote Greeks, and which, when it grew too small for its adventurous brood, sent rulers to both shores of the North Sea; and the fact that the theatre and the arch survive, while the Orange of Carlovingian bishops and medieval princes has been quite wiped out, and even Maurice of Nassau's great seventeenth-century fortress razed to the ground-this permanence of the imperial monuments, rising unshaken through the blown dust of nearly a thousand years, gives a tangible image of the way in which the Roman spirit has persisted through the fluctuations of history.

-

To learn that these very monuments have been turned to base uses by barbarous Prince-bishops the arch converted into a fortified Château de l'Arc, the theatre into an outwork of the main fortress - adds impressiveness to their mutilated splendour, awing one with the image of a whole reconstructed from such fragments.

Among these, the theatre, now quite stripped of ornament, produces its effect only by means of its size, and of the beautiful sweep of its converging lines; but the great golden-brown arch-standing alone in a wide grassy square keeps on three sides a Corinthian mask of cornice and column, and a rich embossing of fruit and flower-garlands, of sirens, trophies and battle-scenes. All this decoration is typically Roman - vigorously carved and somewhat indiscriminately applied. One looks in vain for the sensitive ornament of the arch of Saint Remy, in which Mérimée's keen eye saw a germ of the coming Gothic: the sculp

ture of Orange follows the conventional lines of its day, without showing a hint of new forms. But that very absence of imaginative suggestion makes it Roman and imperial to the core.

Ahead of us, all the way from Avignon to Orange, the Mont Ventoux lifted into the pure light its denuded flanks and wrinkled silvery-lilac summit. But at Orange we turned about its base, and bore away northeastward through a broken country rimmed with hills, passing by Tulette, the seat of a Cluniac foundation of which the great Rovere, Julius II, was Prince and Prior- and by Valréas, which under the Popes of Avignon became the capital of the Haut Comtat, the French papal dominion in France.

Like too many old towns in this part of France, Valréas, once a stronglyfortified place, has suffered its castle to fall in ruins, and swept away its towers and ramparts to make room for boulevards, as though eager to efface all traces of its long crowded past. But one such trace nearer at hand and of more intimate connotations remains in the hôtel de Simiane, now the hôtel de ville, but formerly the house of that Marquis de Simiane who married Pauline de Grignan, the grand-daughter of Madame de Sévigné.

in the plain, evokes a not too audacious comparison with the rock of Caprarola. In France, at least, there is perhaps nothing as suggestive of the fortified pleasure-houses of Italy as this gallant castle on the summit of its rock, with the town clustering below, and the vast terrace before it actually forming the roof of its church. And the view from the terrace has the same illimitable sunwashed spaces, flowing on every side into noble mountain-forms, from the Mont Ventoux in the south to the range of the Ardèche in the west.

The ancient line of Adhémar, created Counts of Grignan by Henri II, had long been established on their rocky pedestal when they built themselves, in the sixteenth century, the magnificent Renaissance façade of which only the angle towers now subsist. Later still they added the great gallery lined with full-length portraits of the Adhémar, and under Louis XIV Mansart built the socalled Façade des Prélats, which, judging from its remains, did not yield in stateliness to any of the earlier portions of the castle. From this side a fine flight of double steps still descends to a garden set with statues and fountains; and be yond it lies the vast stone terrace which forms the roof of the collegial church, and is continued by a chemin de ronde crowning the lofty ramparts on the summit of the rock.

This princely edifice remained in unaltered splendour for sixty years after the house of Adhémar, in the person of Madame de Sévigné's grandson, had died out, ruined and diminished, in 1732. But when the Revolution broke, old memories of the Comte de Grignan's dealings with his people of unpaid debts, extorted loans, obscure lives devoured by the greedy splendour on the rock all these recollections, of which one may read the record in various family memoirs, no doubt increased the fury of the onslaught which left the palace of the Adhémar a blackened ruin. If there are few spots in France where one

more deeply resents the senseless havoc of the Revolution, there are few where, on second thoughts, one so distinctly understands what turned the cannon on the castle.

The son-in-law of Madame de Sévigné was the most exorbitant as he was the most distinguished of his race; and it was in him that the splendour and disaster of the family culminated. But probably no visions of future retribution disturbed the charming woman who spent a victim to her maternal passion - her last somewhat melancholy years in the semi-regal isolation of Grignan. No one but La Bruyère seems, in that day, to have noticed the "swarthy livid animal, crouched over the soil, which he digs and turns with invincible obstinacy, but who, when he rises to his feet, shows a human countenance" certainly he could not be visible, toiling so far below, from that proud terrace of the Adhémar which makes the church its footstool. Least of all would he be perceptible to the eyes on other lines so discerning! of the lady whose gaze, when not on her daughter's face, remained passionately fixed on the barrier of northern mountains, and the high

way that ran through them to Paris.

Paris! Grignan seems far enough from it even now- what an Ultima Thule, a land of social night, it must have been in the days when Madame de Sévigne's heavy travelling-carriage had to bump over six hundred miles of rutty road to reach the doors of the hôtel Carnavalet! One had to suffer Grignan for one's adored daughter's sake to put up, as best one could, with the clumsy civilities of the provincial nobility, and to console one's self by deliciously ridiculing the pretensions of Aix society — but it was an exile, after all, and the ruined rooms of the castle, and the long circuit of the chemin de ronde, are haunted by the wistful figure of the poor lady who, though in autumn she could extol the "sugary white figs, the Muscats golden as amber, the partridges flavoured with thyme and marjoram, and all the scents of our sachets," yet reached her highest pitch of eloquence when, with stiff fingers and shuddering pen, she pictured the unimaginable February cold, the "awful beauty of winter," the furious unchained Rhone, and "the mountains charming in their excess of horror."

THE storm that had threatened all the day now beat against the dirty window panes of the forlorn little inn. Through the driving rain-sheets Marshall could barely make out the black smoke-plumes, far below on the rough sea, of the small coast steamer on its way back to the Calabrian port. His spirits sank as he watched the steamer and realized that for at least twenty-four hours he was committed to this dot of an island, to this storm, and above all to this cheerless country inn. He doubted if that temple of Juno, so bepraised by all the belletristic guidebooks, could be worth the effort. The inn-keeper's wife was preparing places for two at the dirty table.

"Un' altra forestiere!" the woman explained proudly. "Una donna Inglese!" An Englishwoman, also in quest of the famous temple, and storm-bound, too! The news did not gladden Marshall's heart: the wandering Englishwoman of his acquaintance was not a mitigating prospect. He went back to the rain driving over the tiled roofs of the little town below, while the woman of the inn completed her arrangements. Presently there was a brisk footstep in the corridor, a flutter of skirts, and he turned reluctantly just as the stranger, having seated herself, looked up inquiringly.

In the surprise of their meeting eyes he was distinctly at a disadvantage. The roguish smile, that gay manner of taking the unexpected, which he had reason to know so well, carried her through even this.

With the air almost of having purposely arranged this impossible meeting, she spoke first, while he still fumbled with the back of his chair.

"Well, Alfred, it is unexpected!" she murmured.

VOL. 101- NO. 3

As her head bent over the soup he looked at her more closely. Ten years had touched the dark hair with a line of gray here and there, and the gentle curves of the chin and neck had flattened a bit; but he was conscious that she had far less of an account with Time than he, with his heavy figure, his undisguised baldness. Ten years! It was exasperating that they two who had striven so desperately to separate themselves were thus brought together at the end of the earth - where there was no escape.

-