Notes from the Cévennes, page 13
The crumbling façade stands almost within view of the Porte d’Auguste, a main Roman gate that straddled the Via Domitia: a route long before the classical period, it linked the Alps with the Pyrenees, running right across southern Gaul. Hercules and Hannibal used it, one in legend and one in fact. The gate was originally embedded in the city walls, which took four miles to embrace the city. Originally flanked by a couple of forbidding towers, it has archways for wagons and smaller ones for pedestrians, the sills well worn in each case by wheels and feet. A couple of carvings of bulls are faintly decipherable above, along with an inscription citing Augustus as the donor; this priceless ‘document’ was mostly destroyed – like much else of historic interest – in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm during the Revolution. Fragments of the ramparts turn up in cellars and behind shop walls. The surviving flagstones of the road passing through the arches remind me of Pompeii’s alleys. It’s an enriching place to pass by almost daily.
Every city is a palimpsest, but in Nîmes it is flagrant. One of the largest cities in Roman Gaul, its population was an estimated 25,000, descending dramatically to 1,000 – scarcely double that of our village – by the fourteenth century, the result of plague, economic collapse and serial occupation by Vandals, Visigoths and the Umayyad Caliphate. Yet it swiftly recovered and much has survived, especially underfoot. Major works in the square opposite the gate turned up the burial ground of a medieval monastery. For a month or so I could look down on the latest skeleton staring bemusedly up at the unmonkish twenty-first century, the bones flinching at the sharp buzzing of scooters. At one point there were several in view, like a ghoulish dormitory. I still see them under the fancy new fountain and trendy benches.
The late conversion of a long Haussmann boulevard into a Ramblas-like pedestrian thoroughfare lined with trees and jetting fountains revealed, not the anticipated artisanal workshops on the edge of town, but a huge, wealthy villa torched so abruptly that non-inflammable items like mosaics and metalware were left intact. Learning of one exceptional mosaic currently being exposed and soon to be transferred to a laboratory, we hurried down to the railed-off site and entered with the striding confidence of experts. We stood for at least two minutes before the great oblong of tesserae, its featured god hazily basking in the sunlight after a couple of thousand years under charred beams, soil and tarmac, before a member of Inrap (Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives) shouted at us. What most struck me was how unused we are to seeing archaeological items before they are restored and cleaned: the mosaic was a muddy monochrome of sepia, like an old photograph.
The discovery nearby of three tombs went unreported: each contained a male skeleton, their heads turned the same way. Towards Mecca, it is now established after several years of meticulous research: these bones are the earliest trace in France of a Muslim presence, dating from the eighth century – the time of the Arab expansion in North Africa. They are thought to be Berbers integrated into the army of the secular Umayyad Caliphate that ruled the city for several decades with the collaboration of its inhabitants (on retaking Nîmes in 737, a vengeful Charles Martel, history-book hero of the Front National, typically reduced much of it to rubble).
Even minor works reveal something. Next door to the flat, on the neighbour’s hammered-at façade, a relief of St George spearing the dragon appeared through the scaffolding and dust. Tools were downed until the experts had been. The lovely medieval carving remains in place, suitably restored. A refit of the public garden behind the nearby city museum, lowering the level by several metres, sprouted an intact and slender Roman column. Pale in the moonlight, the ground in shadow, it was like a message shot from the gods. A few days later it was gone, as phantoms must be.
Not every layer is classical. At times, on my way to the underground car park, I picture a little boy playing hopscotch beneath the arches of the Augustan gate. We are back in the 1840s, and the boy’s name is Alphonse Daudet. Nîmes’s most famous literary offspring was the author of, among many other books, Lettres de Mon Moulin, brilliantly witty provincial stories intended for a Paris audience.
There is an upper room dedicated to him next door, in the old-fashioned family bookshop and papeterie, the famous Lacour-Ollé, started on the back of a pedlar’s cart in 1791. The ‘museum’ is a kind of shrine with soft music, storyboard panels and the odd memento: Daudet’s promiscuous ways and eventual syphilis are somewhat skated over, as is his anti-Semitism. He was born around the corner in 1840; the rather grand boulevard house was left for a smaller one in the suburbs when he was seven. His father, a silk manufacturer, had fallen on hard times. Daudet’s increasingly impoverished childhood was said to be unhappy, although the surrounding streets and parks compensated somewhat in the days when children could roam freely. He described Nîmes as having, like any Midi town, ‘a great deal of sun, quite a lot of dust, a Carmelite convent and two or three Roman monuments’. One can sense, perhaps, the slight sneer of a provincial become a metropolitan sophisticate, although he never quite lost his local accent, ‘like a faint hint of garlic’ according to a friend.
To add to the time-warp sensation, much of the shop gives onto a nineteenth-century covered arcade, le Passage Guérin, built some 30 years after Daudet’s birth and an intact example of the once-fashionable forerunner of modern shopping centres (a long-vanished Parisian equivalent provided the memorably gloomy setting for Zola’s Thérèse Raquin). Ollé’s display includes the publisher-bookshop’s own numerous titles as well as life-size suits of armour, rows of plastic skulls in gaudy colours, faintly erotic bronzes, brooding figures of a hooded Death, marble busts of Louis XIV, ancient Egyptian replicas in black and gold, and lethal-looking Japanese swords. Familiarity has blinded me to the sheer oddity of it all, rich with suggestion, more Balzac or Flaubert than Zola. Passage Guérin also includes a barber’s, a Portuguese delicatessen, a key cutter, a dentist’s surgery behind heavy oak doors, and an organic café-restaurant where there was once a useful haberdashery.
A slingshot away is the Maison Carrée, a small pillared temple that is the best preserved anywhere thanks to the antiquarian efforts of Séguier; anywhere in this case being the old Empire, stretching from the heat-shimmered Red Sea to a rain-lashed Hadrian’s Wall. Henry James thought it ‘exquisite’, while Thomas Jefferson was overwhelmed, perhaps encouraged by the sheer steepness of the approach steps – whose sole embellishment is, rather disarmingly, my own acronymic initials carved deeply into a riser near the top: A N T.
Jefferson found the temple to be ‘the most perfect and precious remain of antiquity in existence. Its superiority over any thing at Rome, in Greece, at Balbec or Palmyra is allowed on all hands.’ He promptly had it copied for the Virginia State Capitol building, where it triggered a fashion for pillared façades throughout America.
Until recently, the interior boasted a 3D film recounting the city’s history: when the spears jabbed, I rather embarrassingly ducked. Recently restored and then cleaned by laser, the temple has a glowing ivory perfection, reflected in the glass walls of the ultra-modern médiatheque, or library-cum-arts centre, that faces it, designed by Norman Foster. The huge transparent volume brilliantly embraces not only the bright sunlight that so struck the architect on his first speculative visit, but a centennial micocoulier (hackberry) that might otherwise have been in the way. This contemporary masterpiece goes some way to offsetting my Spenglerian thoughts of cultural decline at every sight of the beautifully proportioned temple – in which you worshipped Augustus, of course, Rome’s very first emperor and a living deity.
Nemausus was, in fact, where every Roman official hoped to be posted: blessed by sun, nestling on a vine-growing plain scattered with luxurious villas, peaceful inside its stone girdle of walls, with a state-of-the-art amphitheatre and limitless water brought across 31 miles of dry, rocky terrain by a sinuous aqueduct. Faced with a serious obstacle to the latter’s completion – the volatile River Gardon in its gorge, prone to flash flooding – the Romans built what still remains one of the world’s greatest ouvrages d’art (as ‘engineering works’ are so beguilingly called in French). While I’m no great fan of humanity’s tendency to defy the physically impossible – gargantuan proofs of our own self-worth, projections of existential insecurity while Nature cowers – this particular multi-arched example, the Pont du Gard, takes the breath away. It is built in the same soft stone, pierre des Vers, as our flat – the large creamy blocks visible on the upper, distemper-stripped section of our staircase.
Like all such human feats, there is something absurd about the Pont du Gard. Water carried over water! It is so high that, in the days when tourists were allowed to walk along the top (as I did when on a childhood trip), with no guard rails before the cliff-like edge, they were regularly blown overboard by the gusts funnelling down the river valley. Or so locals claim. ‘You can see the individual memorials scratched into the stone,’ I was told by a trustworthy Nîmois. ‘Crosses marking the spot, and so on. Most of them were Dutch,’ he added, with a wink. ‘It’s because the Dutch are so tall. You know? Like trees in a gale.’
The structure that impresses me most of all, however, is the aqueduct itself, of which the Pont is a mere brief section, like the celebrity star of a production involving thousands no one remembers. Unshowily, keeping to an average gradient of 24.8 centimetres each kilometre, falling to an undetectable 7 millimetres per 100 metres at some points (achieved without the use of laser measuring by God knows what technique), frequently passing through dripping tunnels, the stone serpent brought its 400 litres per second on gravity alone: the endpoint, a round limestone water tank with lead pipes distributing the water over the city, still survives up a long and narrow street near the university. A very rare example of a castellum divisorum, yet few tourists bother with it.
Like my garden watering system, the working aqueduct found its chief challenge in limescale, along with local landowners illegally tapping the water to irrigate their own nearby fields. Nevertheless, it lasted five centuries until the final apocalypse of the barbarians. The whole thing is a metaphor for writing a novel, of course: you complete the impossible ouvrage d’art and the waters flow, to be delighted in or defiled, until it reaches its demise on the shelves of a charity bookshop, its conduit having been punctured by self-proclaimed reviewers on the internet or apathetic judges of literary prizes.
Incredibly, this gargantuan, millimetrically precise structure was a top-up: loving their fountains, ponds and elaborate baths (their daily consumption of water was higher than our own, per capita), the Roman citizenry had outdone the gallons still bubbling up from the ever-generous spring in the present and immensely attractive Jardin de la Fontaine, France’s first public park. Nemausus was the native tribal goddess presiding over this liquid abundance, the water drawn from the hills and mountains as far away as our own slopes in the Cévennes: the Roman method was usually to conquer and absorb rather than conquer and destroy (as long as you agreed to adore the Emperor), so they not only named the city after a local goddess but also made a sacred precinct of her spring. Swans glide over the gurgling, glittering surface of the source: this is a spot I am drawn to when inspiration weakens. It helps that Henry James, embarked on his own consciously provincial ramble (A Little Tour in France, 1884), once leaned on this very same parapet and gazed into the basin ‘full of dark, cool recesses, where the slabs of the Roman foundation gleam through the clear green water’ and thereby experienced a memorable epiphany: ‘it seemed to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world’.
He was not so keen, however, on the pre-Roman tower at the top that all paths lead up to over the slopes of steep Mont Cavalier: he wrongly identified it as medieval, calling it a ‘dateless tube’. The Romans sheathed it in stone cladding, much of which has come away to reveal the Gallic original. It was probably a look-out or a signalling station in a visual chain: you can see for miles from its top. Its pale stones catch every nuance of light, but my attempts to paint it in oils were more successful in catching polite comments from passers-by than the thing itself.
The liquid generosity of Nemausus still provides, and new Europe-funded fountains gush, but such natural abundance has never been enough, at least not for the progressive, restless element of Homo sapiens. In this respect, the topping-up aqueduct and its attendant bridge can also seem a metaphor for human foolishness, that hollow lust for prestige. Sustainability is not glamorous. Common sense never is. Who in their right mind would have invented plastic without considering its afterlife?
‘Stupidity,’ I had initially written, before scotching the sentiment as too extreme. I had entirely forgotten that the word was already used by James himself when describing both the Pont du Gard and the amphitheatre. Both bore ‘a touch of that same stupidity’, but of the oval arena in particular he added, ‘It is brutal, it is monotonous, it is not at all exquisite.’ Yet he also found it – or at least the fact that so much had survived – ‘wondrous’. I share his ambivalence, especially given that the arena’s sand is still soaked by the blood of beasts, poked and punctured to resounding cheers.
You can see les arènes from our third-floor roof: a creamy-white streak in the terracotta sea, this being ‘the rim of the monstrous cup – a cup that had been filled with horrors’, as James put it. Some years ago, I took Jo’s cousin, a university professor of classical sculpture, to a bullfight in the afternoon. Knowing he was a practising Buddhist, I was a little nervous. The spectators clapped and roared. As the fierce sun glared from limestone blocks and fawn-coloured sand, glittered off the clinging suits of the toreros, picadors and banderilleros, turning each bull’s punctured back into a sheen of red satin, he leaned towards me with a delighted look on his face and said, ‘This is the closest I’ve ever felt to the Roman world!’
The colossal arena was probably started during the Flavian dynasty around AD 70 and is the best preserved in existence. Its cliff-like bulk is a troubling presence in the relatively small historic centre, and not just because of its violent associations. It looks solid, despite a certain surface flakiness, but it isn’t. The drystone blocks are splitting and there is serious seepage. Several years into a massive restoration project, and the finished segment gleams like tiered icing, casting the remainder into an even grubbier state.
One of the arches is topped by another sculpture of bulls, equally disfigured by two millennia of weather but a reminder of the longevity of our enthusiasms. Modern bullfighting came to southern France from Spain some 150 years ago (it is banned elsewhere in the country). Otherwise, the arena’s perfect acoustics serve bands like Radiohead or singers like Björk, the volume much higher than is required and spilling over the surrounding rooftops like boiling milk in a pan. Around the rim, with no safety rails, individuals sit dangling their legs over the giddy, 70-foot drop or gyrate perilously to the beat. I recall the corrida that, because of a cancellation the previous day, was packed with twice the numbers it should have been, helped by the presence of the celebrated torero El Juli. I spotted my then-fifteen-year-old son sitting on the edge of a massive block of limestone in a non-seating area between the tiers, the equivalent of three storeys of air separating him from the bullfight’s little figures below. This was far more suspenseful for me than the tercio de muerte.
The Romans were at ease with their cruelty, but for modern Westerners it is hidden away, or glimpsed on a screen, or processed into abattoirs and chicken factories. Watching a bullfight does remind me, however, of what beasts we are: it takes a matter of minutes to turn a peaceable if bewildered grass-chewing creature into a tortured cadaver dragged around with chains. The smaller, more agile local bulls are reserved for the bloodless course libre, the huge black Spanish bulls for the killing game. Reared happily out of sight of humans in the wilds of the Camargue, they are pepped up and weakened a few days beforehand by various unpleasant methods: when it comes to the fifteen-minute finale, these rippling slabs of muscle have no idea what to make of the small, lanky figures darting about the ring, as these awaken no echo in their brains. What one does feel is their extreme disappointment not to have broken out of darkness into their familiar sunlit pasture.
Strange, then, that in the complex iconography of the corrida, the bull is symbolic of death.
Whenever I visit les arènes, usually in blazing heat, it is the cool breath of the vomitoria (exit passages), smelling of the underground galleries where machinery and victims were stored long ago, that brings that momentary Jamesian ‘touch’ of the ancient world. The chill draught seems full of the fear once felt by gladiators and animals alike, phantasmally crouched in the gloom beside doomed followers of an obscure prophet called Jesus. The hidden galleries – like giant corridors – once communicated with the exterior: lions, leopards and other exotic species could appear like magic, with a primeval force similar to the modern surge of the black bull through the wooden gate and into the light, bearing whiffs of straw and dung.
The corrida is technically illegal under European law, which bans the torture of animals, but an exception has been made for the 11 départements where it is regarded as traditional. For many years, I meekly went along with this local culture, persuading myself that a bullfight is the last echo of pagan ritual; of lost Minoan practices; of Theseus facing the Minotaur; of Mithraism and prehistoric battles with aurochs – of which the Spanish bull is only too visibly a direct descendant. It helped that Hemingway was a regular visitor, always booking the same room in the Hôtel Imperator, while Picasso preferred the Cheval Blanc opposite the arena. Both believed that bullfighting was not a sport but an art, like ballet, and sufficiently interwoven with Catholic iconography to bring it a glint of the sacred. Along with Cocteau, Coco Chanel, Jean Dubuffet and others, Picasso would watch and cheer from the shaded front row of the bottom tier, as close to the action as possible. I occasionally experienced a kind of transcendence when the bull and the matador were in perfect harmony through the silence of some 16,000 people collectively holding their breath, the bull transfigured into a gambolling feline. But the last corrida I attended was some seven years ago. The bull was close to me and seemed to explode in crimson at the so-called Moment of Truth. I left early in disgust.
