Then suddenly--a ray of sunshine, the flight of a bird, and all the dark thoughts would melt away!
I almost started as Tartarin said these words. As a philosopher I already knew him, but here was an artist!
We parted with many expressions of good-will, I promising to send him a copy of Maeterlinck's "La Sagesse et la Destinée," for I thought he might gain comfort and enjoyment from a philosophy which had many points in common with his own. Perhaps the Belgian poet would help him a step or two further on his road, and teach him to know the value of the wisdom he had already won.
In acknowledgment, he sent me an illustrated post-card of the Pont du Gard, with a charming little inscription expressing his gratitude for my having thus remembered "_le pauvre cocher_."
And this good-hearted philosopher will hereafter always be to me the real Tartarin de Tarascon.
"The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few, for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature ... reaching ... an audience which the concentrated passion of those higher lyrics left untouched ... the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the latter half of the thirteenth century ... and there were reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin...."
Beaucaire, it may be remembered, has a hill-set castle opposite King René's at Tarascon. The two stand frowning at one another across the river, unforgetful of their old feuds.
The town was the property of the Counts of Toulouse, before the Albigensian wars snuffed out that great family, and it had its share of suffering in those desperate persecutions. The Pope gave all their domains to his accomplice, Simon de Montfort, because Raimon VI. of Toulouse--one of the noblest figures of the Middle Ages--had dared to oppose the massacre of the helpless Albigenses.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM VISIGOTH TOWER, BEAUCAIRE. _By E. M. Synge._]
At last the young Count raises a revolt against de Montfort while the latter is at Beaucaire. It is a relief to hear of his being seriously opposed after all the atrocities that he has committed in this exquisite land, all the savage destruction of beautiful things and thoughts of which he is guilty. He is, indeed, almost as terrible a scourge as his coadjutor, the Puritan of the north; they are spiritual twins: the soldier who persecutes with fire and sword, and the equally pitiless and bigoted saint who persecutes with the fire and sword of the spirit, rejoicing, he too, when the gladness and the passion of life lie bleeding beneath his feet. Between them, in their different spheres, they have lain low how much of beauty and of happiness!