Two Towns in Provence

Vintage Books Edition, August 1983

MAP OF ANOTHER TOWN

Copyright © 1964 by M.F.K. Fisher

Illustrations Copyright © 1964 by Little Brown and Company

Originally published by Little, Brown and Company in 1964.

A CONSIDERABLE TOWN

Copyright © 1964, 1977, 1978 by M.F.K. Fisher

Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1978.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

A Considerable Town

Part of Chapter 2 appeared in the Travel Section of

The New York Times on December 18, 1977.

Part of Chapter 7 appeared in Gourmet Magazine,

May 1978.

Part II of Chapter 11 was originally published as

The Mahogony Tree in Woman’s Day. Reprinted by

permission of Woman’s Day Magazine, a

Fawcett publication.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Fisher, M.F.K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908-

Two towns in Provence.

Contents:

A map of another town—A considerable town.

1. Aix-en-Provence (France)—Description.

2. Marseille (France)—Description.

3. Fisher, M.F.K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908-

I. Fisher, M.F.K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908-

A map of another town. 1983.

II. Fisher, M.F.K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908-

A considerable town. 1983.

III. Title.

DC801.A325F525  1983   944′.91   83-6901

eISBN: 978-0-307-80648-2

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map of Another Town

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

Aix-en-Provence

St. Sauveur

Main Street

The Two Havens

The Gypsy Way

The Foreigner

17 Rue Cardinale

Oath to Asclepius

The Sound of the Place

The University

The Man and the Words

A Familiar

The Unwritten Books

The Din

The Hôtel de Provence

Men and Women Mendicants

The Outlook Across

The Almond Blossoms

Correction on the Map

The Royal Game of Tennis

The Velvet Tunnel

A Considerable Town

Dedication

Contents

1 The Place Where I Looked

2 The Canebière

3 Port and Quays

4 Some of the Women

5 One of the Men

6 The Gamblers

7 The Food of Artemis

8 The Open Eyes

9 Some Differences

10 May Day, 1932–73

11 The Good Old Beauvau

A Conclusion

A Note About the Author

For Nan Newton

Contents

Introduction

Aix-en-Provence

St. Sauveur

Main Street

The Two Havens

The Gypsy Way

The Foreigner

17 Rue Cardinale

Oath to Asclepius

The Sound of the Place

The University

The Man and the Words

A Familiar

The Unwritten Books

The Din

The Hôtel de Provence

Men and Women Mendicants

The Outlook Across

The Almond Blossoms

Correction on the Map

The Royal Game of Tennis

The Velvet Tunnel

 … it is very probable that if I had

to draw the portrait of Paris, I would,

one more time, draw it of myself.

JEAN GIONO, 1961

OFTEN in the sketch for a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge one stroke of the pencil or brush to another are what really make it live. This is probably true in a word picture too. The myriad undrawn unwritten lines are the ones that hold together what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, their own visions of a thing: a town, one town, this town.

Not everything can be told, nor need it be, just as the artist himself need not and indeed cannot reveal every outline of his vision.

There before us is what one human being has seen of something many others have viewed differently, and the lines held back are perhaps the ones most vital to the whole.

Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.

Over the years I have taught myself, and have been taught, to be a stranger. A stranger usually has the normal five senses, perhaps especially so, ready to protect and nourish him.

Then there are the extra senses that function only in subconsciousness. These are perhaps a stranger’s best allies, the ones that stay on and grow stronger as time passes and immediacy dwindles.

It is with the invisible ink distilled from all these senses, then, that I have drawn this map of a town, a place real in stone and water, and in the spirit, which may also be realer.

Aix-en-Provence

 … 177 meters above sea level; 52,217 inhabitants; former capital of Provence; seat of an archbishopric since the fifth century, and of the departmental law courts and prison, and the schools of Law and Letters of the University of Aix-Marseille; one of the most beautiful art centers of Europe.

The town was founded in 123 B.C. by the Roman consul Sextius Calvinus, and was made into a prosperous colony by Julius Caesar. Between the fifth and twelfth centuries it lost much of its political importance to the town of Arles, although it was once more made the capital in the twelfth century under the Counts of Provence.

During the fifteenth century, before joining France, it became the hub of European culture under the benevolent administration of King René and his two queens.

Le Guide Bleu: France, 1960

SO HERE IS the town, founded more than two thousand years ago by the brash Roman invaders, on much older ruins which still stick up their stones and artifacts. I was as brash a newcomer to it, and yet when I first felt the rhythm of its streets and smelled its ancient smells, and listened at night to the music of its many fountains, I said, Of course, for I was once more in my own place, an invader of what was already mine.

Depending upon one’s vocabulary, it is facile enough to speak of karma or atavism or even extrasensory memory. For me, there was no need to draw on this well of casual semantics, to recognize Aix from my own invisible map of it. I already knew where I was.

I had been conditioned to this acceptance by a stay in another old town on the northward Roman road, when I was younger and perhaps more vulnerable. I lived for some time in Dijon in my twenties, and compulsively I return to it when I can, never with real gratification. And I dream occasionally of it, and while the dream-streets are not quite the same as in waking life (the Rue de la Liberté swings to the right toward the railroad yards instead of going fairly straight to the Place d’Armes and the Ducal Palace, for instance, but I always know exactly where I am going), still I am a remote but easy visitor, happier as such than as a visible one.

I do not, in my imagination, feel as easy there as in Aix. I have long since made my own map of Dijon, and it is intrinsic to my being, but the one of Aix is better, a refuge from any sounds but its own, a harbor from any streets but its own: great upheavals and riots and pillages and invasions and liberations and all the ageless turmoil of an old place.

I feel somewhat like a cobweb there. I do not bother anyone. I do not even wisp myself across a face, or catch in the hair of a passerby, because I have been there before, and will be again, on my own map.

I can walk the same streets, and make my own history from them, as I once did in a lesser but still structural way in Dijon, my first return to the past, forever present to me.

The town was put on its feet by a Roman whose elegant bathing place still splutters out waters, tepid to hot and slightly stinking, for a ceaseless genteel flow of ancient countesses and their consorts and a quiet dogged procession of arthritic postal clerks and Swiss bankers and English spinsters suffering from indefinable malaises usually attributed to either their native climates or their equally native diets. This spa, more ancient than anyone who could possibly stay in it except perhaps I myself, is at the edge of the Old Town, at the head of the Cours Sextius, and more than one good writer has generated his own acid to etch its strange watery attraction.

Countless poems have been written too, in wine rather than acid, and countless pictures have been painted, about the healing waters and the ever-flowing fountains of the place. They will continue as long as does man, and the delicate iron balconies will cling to the rose-yellow walls, and if anyone else, from 200 B.C. to now, ever marked the same places on the map, in acid or wine or even tears, his reasons would not be mine. That is why Aix is what it is.

St. Sauveur

Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.

The Acts of the Apostles, xxvi, 28

i THE BEGINNING

The structure of the baptistry of the Cathedral of St. Sauveur (end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth centuries) is strongly influenced by the liturgy of primitive baptism: immersion, conferred by a bishop upon adults once yearly during the night before Easter. To this sacramental rite of purification, performed behind curtains to protect the naked participants, two symbolisms are added: the passing from shadow to light (the water flows from east to west; two granite columns serve as entrance to the east, facing six of green marble; steps descend into the pool from the east …), and the resurrection and new life, symbolized by the figure 8, the primitive symbol for Sunday, the eighth day (the original baptistry was eight-sided, as was the marble-lined pool). In the sixteenth century the cupola was heightened …

JEAN-PAUL COSTE, Aix-en-Provence and Its Countryside

MANY old towns like Aix in the Western world have grown the way a pearl does, in micromillimeters of skin against the world, around a germ, an alien seed, an itch, which in most of them has been a Christian church, at once fortress and prison and spiritual core.

Aix, however, grew around its baths, which still flow healingly behind the last of the old walls in the spa that is now run by the government. Even the Cathedral that later became the heart of the town was built over a temple bath, which in due time became its baptistry.

In St. Sauveur, the Cathedral of the Holy Savior, the pool is empty now in the octagonal room under the high vaulted ceiling, but beside it a cumbersome font still serves the parish, and from its walls local archeologists are still, discreetly between Masses, tumbling the bones of believers built into the niches.

Far above the stone ribs of the hushed room a small eye of open sky in the cupola looks down upon the empty basin that the first Christians found so conveniently ready for their baptismal rites, after decades of Roman ladies had bathed hopefully there to give themselves children. Perhaps, it is said, St. Maximin himself, one of Christ’s disciples, stood beside that pool …

I remember it as about four feet deep, with crumbling steps down into it, and centuries dry. Once I was standing looking at it in the shadowy room, thinking of how long it and perhaps even I had been there, when I found myself a near-active party to a small christening that had suddenly shaped itself around the modern font.

There I was, and why would I be there for any other reason than to help make a new member of the parish? The parents and sponsors smiled at me with a polite preoccupied twitch, each probably thinking the other side of the family had asked me to come. I must not startle them, caught as they were in the hoarse whispers, the cold air, the irrevocability of the ritual.

I stood facing the fat careless priest, a man I saw often in the district of the Cathedral and never grew to accept as anything but obnoxious. His vestments were dirty, and he needed a shave and almost certainly a bath, whether Roman or Christian. He held the new child as if it were a distastefully cold omelet that might stick on his fingers.

The parents and sponsors were mute in their Sunday clothes, the convenient and almost essential uniform of black which will do for the next funeral, a vestment of respectability among poor people, who fortify themselves on what other poor people will think of them.

The new believer would most probably lead a long full life, although like many infants of its environment it looked moribund, a blue wax image faintly breathing, its eyes slits of world-weariness.

I prayed for myself that the lout of a priest would not ask me any direct questions about vouching for the little soul’s well-being, and then, when the insultingly mechanical drone was plainly drawing toward a final benediction, I made myself disappear.

This is something that takes practice, and by the time I was standing there in St. Sauveur trying not to accept any responsibility for the sickly newborn baby I had become fairly good at it. It is mainly a question of withdrawing to the vanishing point from the consciousness of the people one is with, before one actually leaves. It is invaluable at parties, testimonial dinners, discussions of evacuation routes in California towns, and coffee-breaks held for electioneering congressmen …

As I flitted, almost invisible by now, across the baptistry, I nearly walked straight into the roughly paved pit where Roman ladies on vacation had splashed hopefully, where the first Christians had doused themselves, pressed down into the flowing water by the hands of disciples who had once heard the voice of Mary Magdalene praying in her cave.

I wondered as I righted my course around the dim room if anyone had ever fallen in. It would be only a bruise or two, perhaps a cracked bone … But why risk it? Why flee? Did I run from looking once more into the cynical eyes of the newest Christian, or did I escape from the more materialistic hazard of having to explain to the dismal young family that I was nobody at all, no cousin’s cousin, an uninvited witness to the rites, not even real?

At the wide door into the comparative security of the nave I felt safe again, and the air had a different weight and coldness. I could hear footsteps up toward the choir stalls: chairs were being straightened between Masses on this Sunday morning. In the organ loft, Monsieur Gay flitted mockingly, tenderly, through two octaves of sound that came down to me as pure silver, like hollow clean beads on a string. I could not even hear the priest behind me. It was as if I had been bathed again …

ii AWAY, AWAY …

We hear the wail of the remorseful wind

In their strange penance.

ALEXANDER SMITH, Unrest and Childhood

THE SECOND TIME we returned to Aix for more than a few painfully nostalgic days, Anne and Mary and I made a point, with some trouble, of being there during Holy Week so that we could once again see the reposoirs.

They took place on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. It was like a fiesta. People walked gaily from one open church and chapel to another in a kind of jaunty quiet pilgrimage, part relief that Lent was almost over, part plain curiosity to see what the Order of This, the Guild of That would produce.

Chapels that were forever otherwise closed to the lay public were open that day, and in each one an offering of money could be left at the door. In the small convents and monasteries the whole main altar, with, as I remember it, no candle or flame burning, was turned into a wall, a solid wall, of the most beautiful flowers that could be found, which there near the Côte d’Azur meant beautiful indeed. In the larger churches the main altar was dim, and to the left of it, rising from floor to ceiling, sometimes perhaps thirty feet high, was the same solid mass of blossoms, now mixed all in a riotous jumble of spring, now austerely one kind of flower, one color.

It was a miracle that between the late night of Wednesday and the morning of the next day the old women and men could create such stormy pagan beauty, and then even more astounding that by dawn on Good Friday, or perhaps before, every sign of it would be gone, and the statues would be shrouded in black veils, and everything would be waiting for the recital of the Stations of the Cross.

When we saw the reposoirs in 1955 we decided that the most beautiful was in the Madeleine. It was, as I remember, mostly white tulips, with some scarlet.

Crowds filed into the great simple church with silent excitement, and gasped at its beauty, and as they left put money into the box to help pay for the flowers, and then went on to the next and the next churches, all over the town, which echoed to the sound of thousands of leisurely feet.

One of the prettiest walls was in the small chapel of a convent of Sisters of Charity behind the façades of the Rue Gaston-de-Saporta, a little below and behind Brondino’s bookshop. It was never open to the public except on that Thursday of Holy Week. No nuns were in sight, of course, but a postulant stood by the coin box, pretending not to listen to the size of the sound of each bit of money hitting the rest. A little sign over another alms box said, For the poor, the sick, and the ashamed.

The most impressive reposoir was in the chapel of the Gray Penitents, or the Bourras, called that in Provençal because they wear sacks over their heads.

They are the last of the three active orders of Penitents in Aix, who devoted themselves, most strongly in the Middle Ages, to the burying of hanged criminals and abandoned victims of the plagues. The brotherhood today is a secret one, made up of businessmen and professionals who celebrate their rites and functions wearing over their regular clothes long tunics made of a gray sacking in much the shape of the Ku Klux Klan costumes, so that on the one time we saw them, silent and nightmarish in their chapel, their secular trousers and shoes showed absurdly beneath their grim disguises. They clanked with brutal-looking rosaries hanging from their waist-belts around their waists.

Their chapel is a plain room, without statues as I remember, but with the whole end an enormous carving, almost life-size, on tortured rocks, of the descent of Christ from the Cross, with the Act of Mercy of the Good Samaritan and perhaps a few others painted behind it. The carving is of gleaming gray-black wood. The altar, which of course was stripped the day we saw it, is in front of the carving and a part of it, so that the figures crouch and swoon and mourn above and behind it.

There were no flowers anywhere. A few of the Bourras stood clattering their rosaries and watching the silent frightened people, who filed in and then quickly went away. My children were scared.

And in a way I was too: it was a stern mercy that led those first hooded men to defy custom and disease, in the far days, and I wondered what bones and ashes they might rescue now, so silent behind their sackcloth maskings.

In the vestibule we bought some postcards of the altar, which I lost, and we left money in the coin box, beside which one last thin Penitent stood, perhaps listening to the size of the sound as if he had a real face with a real ear on either side.

We wanted to see all this with our older eyes when we were in Aix again in Holy Week. My sister and her three sons came too, earlier than they had meant, to see the pagan beauty of the flowers, perhaps the medieval fearsomeness of the Bourras. But the town looked the same on Maundy Thursday as it had on Wednesday or Tuesday, and in St. Sauveur there was not a sign of the blossomed wall, and plainly one could not enter the little convents that are still everywhere behind the façades of Aix.

We went into the Madeleine, and there was nothing to show that once at least a mighty wall of white and scarlet blossoms had stood at the end of the south transept for some short hours, long enough for us to see forever.

I was perhaps a little drunk with being in the place again, and while my family stood gaping at a safe distance, I went up to a tall rounded young priest standing near the door and asked him where the reposoirs were.

That was the only time a man of the cloth has ever been discourteous to me, and later I saw this same one be quite rude to elderly women and very irascible with children, in a strangely sneering way. He sniffed, and stared down at me even farther than he needed, and asked in a high petulant voice, Why would anyone ask that?

Father, I said with polite boldness bred of my joy at being home again, "we came back for the reposoirs, and I wonder where they are."

He looked me up and down, as the old novels would say, and then remarked in a disdainful way, "Anyone who is a believer knows, and therefore it is plain that Madame is not a believer, that the reposoirs have been discontinued in Provence as unfavorable to true Christianity."

I knew at once what he meant about the pagan element in them, but was sorry to detect his puritanical triumph. I thanked him.

Where, if Madame is a believer, has she been? This is not a new edict, the priest stated suspiciously.

Away, away, I answered in a half-deliberately fey manner, and I disappeared from his immediate vision and returned to my family and told them that the reposoirs had been forbidden.

We went away, away … in this case to the Cours Mirabeau, where we consumed sherbets and vermouth-gins according to our natures, and as returned amateurs seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the plane trees, in the flowing tides of that street.

When the violet-man came along, we bought from him, and held the flowers in lieu of that older vision, ineradicable, of the walls of flowers, and perhaps of the painful sternness of the altar of the Bourras.

iii THE ENDING

Of a good beginning cometh a good end.

JOHN HEYWOOD, Proverbes

THE TWO BEST things for me, in St. Sauveur, were that I was able to know it full and know it empty, not of people but of the spirit.

Several times it was almost full when I went to concerts there, with an orchestra in the transept in front of the choir stalls, and then a full choir of men and of boys from the Maîtrise, and everything sacred delicately and firmly shut off. The organ was alive, with Monsieur Gay there at the console in his white cap and his wife beside him in a kind of choir robe to turn the pages, like two gallant old birds high above our heads, so knowing and so skilled in making near-celestial sounds.

Twice the Archbishop sat unobtrusively in one of the stalls to the right, in the big nave, and prelates and priests rustled beneath him and I sat close by, recognizing his spirit and looking, invisible and even more so than usual, at the hollows of his eye sockets.

The music sang out from in front of the dim altar, and I knew it was a good thing to play it thus in the house of God.

Once I went into the Cathedral and it was a shell, waiting. It was by accident.

We walked up from the Hôtel de Provence on Easter Eve, I think, for no reason that I can remember, along Gaston-de-Saporta and across the Place de l’Archevêché, and there at the entrance to the cloister some priests and acolytes were bending above a bonfire.

It was startling to see. The flames lighted their intense faces. Around them were a few old women, the kind who are always present at such rituals.

I am sorry and a little ashamed to say that I forget now what they were burning. It had something to do with the purification by fire and then water of the vessels perhaps, and probably it was old candles and such-like, or the robes of Judas himself, but at the end a large candle was lighted, I think, and then from it each of us lit a long thin taper given to us by an acolyte or perhaps a lay brother.

Then we walked silently through the passage and through the side of the cloister, where I had been used to watching my children playing handball against the Roman tombs, and into the St. Maximin aisle of the church. From there we went into the nave, and found seats.

It was in one of the most impressive darknesses of my life. There was no sound except for the muted shuffling of our feet and the mouselike whisperings of people telling their beads, and the darkness in that great place was as palpable as flesh. It was oppressive. It pressed in upon my skin like the cold body of someone unloved. There was no help for it, no escape, and so it was not frightening.

I looked toward the dead altar, and out and up, and there was nothing anywhere except from the few feeble tapers that seemed to unlight rather than to light the intense worn hands and faces that nursed them.

A long and to me very pagan ceremony unfolded before the altar and then down into the chancel. It had to do with fire and water and rebirth. I wish that I could remember more of it, but all that stays clear is that it was ageless and real. And then gradually light seemed to come.

Of course it was partly mechanical, electrical. But that did not matter. I watched the magnificent conglomeration, perhaps two thousand years old, come alive, softly, subtly, and then like a mighty blare of trumpets, and seldom have I been so startled in my soul. I had for once known true hollow blackness, and then light. And it seems to me now that there was music too, a great triumphant blast of it from the organ, but perhaps it was only the return of light that I heard.

And then the time that I knew the Cathedral full, not empty, was almost as enriching, for I went to a concert there during the Festival, and listened to even that great place hold as much sound as an egg its meat, or the sea its waters.

It was as full as it could ever be with people too, of course, who had come from many lands to listen.

There was a symphony orchestra. The choir and the middle transept were filled with one large chorus of men and women, and one of boys, with the four soloists for the oratorio. Monsieur Gay was at the organ. The walls hummed with the colors of the Canterbury tapestries; the triptych of the Burning Bush was open and glowing; artful lights made the stones vibrate with subtle colors, as I had often watched them do at sunset with a kind of absorption rather than reflection of the colors outside in the town.

But the thing that was real was the sound. It was awesome, whether from a little flute as single as a pearl, or mighty as Judgment Day from the whole orchestra. Everything was a part of it, and the breath that went into and out of the mortals there, and into and out of the great organ, was in a mystical way the breath of the place itself, very old and ageless. I have seldom felt myself more identified with anything. It was perhaps as if I were the right grain of sand for me to be, on the right beach.

Afterwards we were quiet and tired, and that too was in the right way.

Main Street

Aix is nobility itself. It gives to the least plane tree the grandeur of a cedar. On the Cours Mirabeau, where the song of the fountains mingles with Mozart’s music, its good taste comes so naturally that not even the students can disturb it. It was the last city of France to give up its sedan chairs. Since then (the beginning of the nineteenth century) the well-born people of the town have gone on foot, not to economize but instead to show their disdain for money in its weightiest form, that of time.

Marcel Renébon, La Provence

i THE COURS

Let the street be as wide as the height of the houses.

Leonardo da Vinci

THE Cours Mirabeau is the main street of Aix-en-Provence. It is less than half of a mile long (440 meters) and some hundred and twenty feet wide. It is bordered on either side by a double row of plane trees, growing in front of the straight façades of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century town-houses, most of them with shops or offices on the ground floor now. There are four fountains down the middle of the Cours’ length, and …

… and it is impossible to continue writing of it in this informative vein.

The Cours has teased poets and painters with its ineffable allure for more than three hundred years, but words and lines and colors do not capture the reasons why it is beautiful and not pretty, serene and not soothing, and dignified yet gladsome all the year, even in the stripped austerity of winter.

It is probable that almost every traveler who has ever passed through Aix has been moved in some positive way by the view from one end of the Cours or the other, by the sounds of its fountains in the early hours, by the melodious play of the pure clear sunlight of Provence through its summer cave of leaves. Some of them have tried to tell of their bemused rapture, on canvas and sketch pads and on scratch-pads and even postcards, but they have never been satisfied.

It is a man-made miracle, perhaps indescribable, compounded of stone and water and trees, and to the fortunate it is one of the world’s chosen spots for their own sentient growth.

Myself, for too few years I crossed it many times a day, and sat under its trees, and walked up and down it on both sides alone and with my children and now and then with friends, in sunlight and moonlight and rain and fog, and every time it was the first time, and I felt a kind of prickling under my skin and a tightening in my chest and belly and a kind of dazzling in my head and a generally excited stimulated moved sensation, like being in love.

The street was made in 1651, after Marie de Médicis brought from Italy to France the aristocratic pleasure of taking the air in public, either in carriages or on foot or in sedan chairs, instead of walking quietly in one’s own gardens. It became at once the center of life in Aix, and so it has remained.

Motor scooters and automobiles have replaced the chairs and open carriages that paraded during the cool of the evenings on the Cours of other days, but the delight of strolling its length at any time, in every season, has never ceased to charm, indeed almost to hypnotize whomever once sets foot on its majestic length and width.

The Cours is wider by some ten feet at its eastern end, for unknown reasons which have never marred the beauty of its perspective. It was built on the location of the ancient ramparts, which in one form or another had shielded the original town for almost two thousand years. Some Aixois say that a river flowed past these ramparts. Others say that the Cours covers the bed of an old canal. Whatever the reason, deep waters and long thirsty roots are why, everyone believes, the double rows of plantains on either side of the street have reached so high and withstood so long the ravages of wind and drought and gradual pollution of the city air.

The first trees were elms, and they too grew handsomely to shade the rich gentry in their carriages and the people of the upper class who strolled beneath their shade. They died in a plague that killed almost every elm tree in Provence, and beginning in 1830 they were quickly replaced by the plane trees which now thrive along the Cours and help make it what has often been called the most beautiful Main Street in the world.

Perhaps one reason is that it was a deliberate conception of balance, one of those human plans which seemed to be realized most neatly in the seventeenth century, in that part of the world. It was planned from its beginning as a whole, balancing its three dimensions of width, length, and the prescribed height of the buildings which lined it on either side. These laws have always been obeyed except for a few off-set attics above the set height, and the result is one of the most reassuring of all civilized vistas.

ii ITS FOUNTAINS

In the hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery column. In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

The Ovidian Elegiac Metre

THERE ARE STILL four fountains, the length of the Cours, just as at its beginning.

The one at the west end was first reconstructed in 1728, and then again in 1778 to allow traffic from Paris and Marseille to flow near the edge of the city. There were sea horses splashing, with Neptune whipping them, with his face staring up the length of the Cours, and with jets of water spouting into the air.

By 1860 it was plain that the Cours must surrender again to progress and let down its bars to the wagons and stage coaches which were pushing out the genteel carriages that had for so long been almost its only traffic. Neptune vanished, and a monumental waterworks became the center of a wheel of important roads leading out like spokes to other parts of France. This fountain was named La Rotonde, and unless the mistral is blowing its spray too far up the Cours, it stops its spectacular splashings only once a year, when the Canal de Verdon shuts off its pipes for cleaning.

Compared to the other fountains of Aix, the Rotonde is melodramatic, overstated, brassy, a trumpet call with flutes.

The first sight of it, when a traveler approaches from Marseille, is exciting. One of them, Emile Henriot of the Académie Française, wrote it for everybody else in 1920: … since I love fountains, especially when they sing sweetly, and this one pleased me so strongly, because of its long sprays of intertwined water which sprang from every direction into its pools, I felt that through it I should salute the whole town of Aix in this one symbol, and I raised my hand to my hat brim.

In daylight La Rotonde tosses out its many plumes and jets of water like the breath of a hundred spirited horses. At night it glows, as do many great modern fountains, with white and colored lights which turn it into a kind of glorified wedding cake, audible if inedible.

It is crowned by three nobly sentimental white stone females representing Justice, Agriculture, and the Arts. The first faces up the Cours, toward the law courts and the prison. The second looks toward Marseille, for rapidly vanishing reasons. The third turns toward Avignon and its older and perhaps even greater culture.

Four jets spout from these figures’ pedestal, into a wide basin from which many more mouths send out their waters. Far below an even wider basin catches them, and eight bronze cherubim astride frolicking dolphins send out double streams of water that curve like low rainbows and blow past the rim of the great bowl, sometimes, onto the wide circle of the Rotonde’s paving. Big turtles along the edge of the basin spout back at the energetically fat little boys their counterstreams of water, weaving a kind of web, and to hold it all to solid earth enormous lions lie in pairs around the base, at ease but always wary, at the edge of the tent of interwoven crystal.

It is, in truth, a monument to nineteenth-century romanticism, and perhaps it escapes vulgarity simply by being in Aix. Certainly it is curiously satisfying, full of life and joy. It acts as a kind of noisy but melodious introduction to the other fountains of the street, which stretches eastward from it.

At the opposite end, always called the head of the Cours, stands the fine statue of King René, which has lent its serenity since about 1820, when it was sculpted to replace two fountains which had crumbled away or been removed.

As everywhere in Aix, water flows musically below the King’s statue into the generous basin, and people fill their pitchers from its cool jets all day long, or perch on its wide rim to gaze about them tranquilly.

Traffic flows around the handsome King who made Aix known throughout Europe as a center of learning and beauty, and it seems right that he should hold in one hand a fat bunch of the grapes he helped develop, in his little kingdom, from its old Greek and Roman plantings.

Westward from René about three hundred feet is Old Mossback, which steams like a theatrically inverted cauldron into the cold air of winter. It was built in 1737 to stay as it is now, over one of the fountainheads which first brought gouty Romans to Aix. Old people still dip their aching hands in its warmth, and many others drink its waters sparingly to take the cure for various human troubles, for it is credited with being a purge, a diuretic, an active solution of minerals, a fluid saturated with actinic rays, and almost every other possible remedy that one looks for with faith.

It has a faint but harsh smell, and it is one of those strange fountains of Provence which consist of a great lump of live stone on which thick lichens grow, with the water flowing up to the top and then down over the short furry mosses. Often generations of moss pile one upon another, feeding through all the rich fur under them to the stone. These monuments can become grotesque, but Old Mossback is merely comfortable to look at, like an elderly and benevolent dog, a little steamy and pungent.

Further down toward the Rotonde is the fountain of St. Lazarus, which is also thought to be healing and which is now the most popular on the Cours for drinking-water. People come for blocks, at noon and before supper, to fill their pitchers from the graceful curves of its basin, which is one of the most beautiful examples of Louis XV design in this town of flowing waters. It is known by everybody as the Nine Canons, instead of its saint’s name, and it is an intrinsic part of many lives in the Old Town.

And then the Cours ends, after its harmony of light and color and sound and line, in the almost rollicking vigor of the Rotonde.

It is exciting, after the cool green cave of the street in summer, under the leaves, and then in winter the muted rose and yellow shadows on the old façades, to step into the penetrating brightness, never blinding, of its unshaded monument to the three Arts. It is like being a fish, up from the sweet depths to the surface for a different kind of air. Traffic flows around and around the great crossroads, but the sound of all the jets of water rises above it, and seems to drift always eastward, toward the Nine Canons and Old Mossback, to the feet of the tranquil King René with his fruits …

iii ITS FAÇADES

To blend in one tangible whole

The manifold features of change …

Gamaliel Bradford, Soul

THE HOUSES THAT face each other across the double width of the Cours Mirabeau, and then over the tops of the plane trees from their attics, are one of the few remaining entities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in European architecture, unbombed and unburned in spite of the hazards and crimes of progress.

None of them still exists as the elegant town-house it was built to be. The families that flourished in the richest days of Aix, and built these palaces to prove their positions, have long since died out or retreated to their often crumbling country estates.

A few beautiful private apartments are still preserved, and the exquisite iron balconies of most of the houses, and then their staircases inside, are tenderly protected by their caretakers and the city and the nation, so that students of all the arts may admire them.

From above the town one can see that many of the old houses now have artists living in their attics, with skylights that gleam like bloodied copper at sunset.

At street level, the tone of the Cours has changed almost completely since it was first built as an aristocratic promenade. For a long time not even a vendor of lemonades was allowed to endanger its gentility. Gradually its Left Bank let a few discreet merchants, all of them convenient purveyors to their social betters, open small shops. By now the Left Bank is an almost unbroken series of stores both great and small and mostly reputable, of open-air cafés for every class of people, of agencies for every need.

Occasionally a noble façade of delicate iron balconies and giant caryatids looms like a great jewel on the two firm straight lines of buildings. There are a few official residences, like the Sub-Prefecture, or like the Hôtel d’Espagnet, now owned by the University of Aix-Marseille which King René fostered, where the president of all the faculties lives and works.

Above the varied offices and shops, puny with silver and crystal and neckties or portentous with learning and crime, and especially on the Left Bank, the gracious old apartments, many of them looking back into gardens and courtyards, are rented to lawyers and doctors and strangers who are willing to fight their endless but beautiful stairways for what they find at the top, and a dwindling but dogged group of local people who still choose that rather than the modern houses of the flourishing new subdivisions that encircle the town like the tentacles of a bewildered octopus.

And it makes a mysterious whole, this generous vital stretch of trees and buildings and live waters. In any language, it cannot rightly be called street, thoroughfare, mall, road or roadway, route, boulevard, highway. It is the Cours.

The Two Havens

Fasten him as a nail in a sure place.

Isaiah, xxii, 23

i THE 2 Gs

Club: an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions.

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary

AT the turn of this century, a young Frenchman named Léo Larguier was stationed in Aix for part of his military service, and later he wrote a good little book about it called Sunday with Cézanne , for he knew the old painter as well as one could, so late and so shortly.

His view of the town, even from the dubious vantage point of middle age, was a quizzical one:

"We used to go sometimes, in good weather, to sit on the terrace of the Café Clément, which was at that time the best and most popular one in Aix, the place frequented by officers, rich students, and the dandies who were not afraid to lower themselves by being seen in a public drinking place.

"These last, not too numerous at that, belonged to old Provençal families, and their parents