Provence by Martin Garrett

Author:Martin Garrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Provence, France, Regional History, French Art
ISBN: 9781908493408
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

René was a prince of very moderate parts, endowed with a love of the fine arts, which he carried to extremity, and a degree of good humour, which never permitted him to repine at fortune, but rendered its possessor happy, when a prince of keener feelings would have died of despair. This insouciant, light-tempered, gay and thoughtless disposition, conducted René, free from all the passions which embitter life, and often shorten it, to a hale and mirthful old age.

When father and daughter are together in Aix he annoys her so much, miscalculates so badly but so blithely, that it becomes funny. She arrives deep in misfortune and depression and so he tries to cheer her up. He tells her to make ready for a solemn procession to the cathedral of St.-Sauveur and then, as she emerges gravely from the palace, ambushes her with “more than a hundred masks, dressed up like Turks, Jews, Saracens, Moors, and I know not whom besides.” They crowd round the furious woman “to offer her their homage, in the character of the Queen of Sheba.” Up bounces her father, “grotesquely dressed in the character of King Solomon”, a wiser monarch than himself, “with such capers and gesticulations of welcome to the Queen of Sheba as would,” reports a witness, “ ... have brought a dead man alive again, or killed a living man with laughing.” Striking the “truncheon, somewhat formed like a fool’s bauble”, out of the old fool’s hand, she breaks through the festive crowd and rides in a frenzy to the convent on Mont Sainte- Victoire. Later she becomes calm enough to praise his good intentions and gentle nature—their temperaments are different. But when she comes back to Aix the reader may wince as, undaunted, René prepares to greet her “at the head of an Arcadian procession of nymphs and swains” with their pipes and tambourines. His seneschal, however, persuades him, with some difficulty, that this is no way to meet someone arriving full of religious thoughts from the convent.

This René, a ruler who even wants to put off discussing the serious business of the future of Provence until “some dull rainy day”, is of course a travesty of the fifteenth-century original. Scott confesses, in his introduction of 1831, that he wrote Anne of Geierstein without benefit of his usual access “to a library tolerably rich in historical works, and especially the memoirs of the middle ages.” “Capers and gesticulations” are a pale nineteenth-century equivalent for sophisticated courtly shows, and to some extent the king is introduced to the novel for the sake of comic relief. The truth no doubt lies between this “merry monarch” and the noble, firm but benevolent figure sculpted by David d’Angers (1823) on the fountain in the Cours Mirabeau, who, says the Latin inscription beneath, “deemed himself contented only among the Provençaux”. He holds muscat grapes, another useful gift which, tradition says, he gave Provence.

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