Provence

From Minstrels to the Machine

Ford Madox Ford, John Coyne, John Coyle, John Coyne, John Coyle

• Publisher: Lives and Letters
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781847776945
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in the south of France, near Toulon. In Provence (1935), written four years before his death, he explores both the place and the idea of it: 'not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind'. Suffused with a northern European's love for 'the Roman province that lies beneath the sun', Provence evokes scents of rosemary and thyme in the dry air, games of boules amid shadows of ancient ruins, the food and flinty local wines. Part memoir, part travel narrative, part history of the region, Provence displays Ford's wise, beguiling curiosity. Humorous, informed digressions take in the Albigensian heresy, bull-fighting, a favourite recipe for bouillabaisse, Henry James and Ellen Terry, the Troubadours and much else. Over the gaiety looms the coming barbarism, the 'fixed bayonets, machine guns, uniforms and arresting fists', against which Ford's Provence is a fragile, precious hope for civilised values. This edition is based on the authoritative 1935 Lippincott edition and includes the original illustrations by Ford's companion, the outstanding American artist Biala.

Part One

THE GREAT TRADE ROUTES

Avenue at Tarascon

CHAPTER I

ON THE LATEST ROUTE

THIS is to be a book of travel and moralising–on the Great Trade Route which, thousands of years before our day, ran from Cathay to the Cassiterides. Along the Mediterranean shores it went and up through Provence. It bore civilisation backwards and forwards along its tides…. And this may turn out to be in part a book of prophecies–as to what may and mayn’t happen to us according as we re-adopt, or go ever farther from, the frame of mind that is Provence and the civilising influences that were carried backwards and forwards in those days.

I have told somewhere else the story of the honest merchant who came to Tarascon which is at the heart of Provence on the Greatest of all the Routes–driven there by an elephant. But the book in which I told that story is long out of print and I do not think it is to treat a reader dishonestly if one repeats in a new book some story or piece of morality that is contained in an old and unobtainable work by the author.

For if the reader wants to read that piece he must buy this book–or obtain it from his library–since he cannot get the other without going to more trouble than any sane or normal person would take over a mere book. If on the other hand he should buy this one whilst already possessing the other, one may, as an honest vendor, assume either that he is so mad as not to be considered or that he so likes the writer that he will pardon in him the very slight dishonesty of obtaining–for a new book should be new all through–the fraction of cent or penny that will be represented by that repetition…. I indulge in that speculation to show that considerations of commercial morality are not completely alien to this writer…. I may or may not repeat the story of the elephant: if I do I shall now consider the repetition to be justified.

Long ago, then, I was sitting in the Café de Paris which is the most fashionable café in the city of the Good King René and of St Martha. That is not to say that it is very fashionable but that it is the resort of the ex-officers of the famous but disbanded Fourth Lancers, the officers of the brown-skinned, scarlet-fezzed troops that now occupy the casernes of the regiment of Ney, of the notaire, the avoué, the avocat, the justice of the peace, of the ex-picture dealer who still possesses Gauguins and Van Goghs that he bought from those artists when they were in Arles at twenty francs a time; and the honest–and indeed never to be sufficiently belauded–merchant who still prints and purveys beautiful bandannas. They have been made in Tarascon for hundreds of years and still shine in and beautify, not only the darkest forests of darkest Africa, but the brightest suns of the most coralline of far Eastern strands. Officers, lawyers, judges, honest merchants, professors, surgeons, land-owners … twice a day all that Tarascon has of the professional and not too newly-wedded classes meets under those awnings, basks beneath the shade of the planes or shivers beneath the blasts of the immense, life-giving and iced mistral.

And, careful as this writer is of commercial morality he is not less careful of the company that he keeps, for twice a year, twice a day, he will be found amongst those impeccables taking his vermouth-cassis before lunch and before dinner his mandarin-citron. Twice a year, twice a day for five or six days at a time. For wherever I may be going in the round-and-round of the great beaten track, begin it where you will, stepping on the eternal merry-go-round at the Place de la Concorde, the Promenade des Anglais, Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly–wherever I may be going on that latest of the Greatest Trade Routes I contrive to fetch up both going and coming for my four or five days in the little city that looks across the Rhone at Beaucaire. Beautiful Beaucaire of the ivorine castle of Nicolette “au clair visage,” whose feet were so white that they made the very daisies look dim!

Beaucaire from across the Rhone

I am bound to say that Beaucaire, one of the stations of the great pre-historic Trade Route that ran from Cathay up the Rhone to the Cassiterides and then sighed for more worlds to conquer…. Beaucaire that still has her fair that has existed every year on the old merchants’ tabu ground since before history began…. Beaucaire, then, looks far the best, when seen across the Rhone, with her white façade and her white tower. And I am equally bound to say that when, the other day, I asked the young lady who presides over the bookshop at Tarascon for a copy of “Aucassin and Nicolette” … “V oulez vous entendre l’histoire de deux beaux enfants, Aucassin et Nicolete?”… she replied:

“Monsieur desires the book of M. Francis Carco? We are not allowed to stock such works.”

I do not know what book of M, Carco’s she may have meant but I know that none of the inhabitants of the city of the Good King René had ever heard of the shining figures that are, at least for Anglo-Saxondom, the chief glories of the town in which the great Napoleon first saw service. To be sure that city is as unaware of the latter fact as of the former. And I am consolingly reminded that when in June 1916 I asked in Rouen–another of the stations of the prehistoric trade route–for a copy of Flaubert’s “Bouvard et Pecuchet” not one of the bookshops of the city that saw the burning of Joan of Arc could yield one up…. Yes consolingly, when I remember that the Reading Room of the British Museum cannot provide for you nearly all the books of the writer whose lines you are now reading! … Nous autres pauvres prophètes! … Still, Rouen has this in revenge. The captain of the transport that was bearing us, reinforcements, to the first battle of the Somme pointed excitedly to the banks when we were passing Croisset and exclaimed to the astonished British officers who were on his bridge:

“Voilà…. There…. It is in that pavilion that ‘Bouvard et Pecuchet’ was written!” … And all the population of the Rouennais country were there to cheer our passing and great streamers bearing words of welcome covered all the headlands…. Alas!

At any rate I have spent hours and hours in the Café de Paris at Tarascon…. And on one of those occasions I saw, depressedly in a corner, drinking gaseous lemonade, the honest merchant who was chased–by an elephant–from Ottery St. Mary’s to the city opposite Beaucaire. He was complaining bitterly of his drink and when I asked him why in the country of the vine, the olive tree–and the lemon–he should be drinking highly diluted sulphuric acid, for it is of that that artificial lemonade consists, he answered with agitation:

“You wouldn’t have me drink their wines or eat their messy foods!”

Alarm grew and grew in his wild eyes and he exclaimed:

“Why, I might get to like them and then what would become of me?” … I think that, at his brilliant exposition of that theory that is at the root of our uncivilisedness, I had my first impulse–it must have been eleven years ago!–to write this book.

He was an honest merchant, retired…. To Ottery St Mary’s which, though he did not know it, had been the home of a great poet. He would have been horrified at the idea of writing verses; he had passed an honest life as a cutler at Sheffield where they supply, to the ignorant heathens that trick themselves amidst forests and on coral strands with the bandannas that are the glory of Tarascon, knives that will not cut.

He had, he said, been all his life aware that merchants did not receive the social respect that should be due them. The most honest of Sheffield merchants retired will not be received by the County. That seemed to me odd in a cosmogony whose chief claim to call itself civilised lay in the successes of its merchants. But he, presumably, knew what he was talking about. He continued, however: All his life he had dreamed of visiting and travelling along the Great Trade Route–the one and only Great one. It ran, he said, from China across all Asia to Asia Minor; then along the shores of the Mediterranean as far as Marseilles. There, up the Rhone, it ran inland, by way of Beaucaire and Lyons to Paris; then down the Seine past Rouen to the English Channel which it crossed at its narrowest and so away along the South Coast of England past Ottery St Mary’s to the Scilly Isles where it ended abruptly…. And for ever backwards and forwards along that beaten track had gone the honest mer...