is a stately town, a provincial capital which Balzac
might well have described--with old, quiet streets that are a little
dreary, with a fine avenue shaded by great trees in whose shadows a few
fountains trickle, with lines of little stages that come each day from
the country,--a city whose life is as far in spirit from the near-by
modernity of Marseilles as it is from that of Paris, as quaintly and
delightfully provincial as that other little Provencal city, the
Tarascon of King Rene and of Tartarin.

Languedoc.

I.

CATHEDRALS OF THE CITIES.

[Sidenote: Nimes.]

Entering Languedoc from the valley of the Rhone, the Cathedral-lover is
doomed to disappointment in the city of Nimes. All that intense,
intra-mural life of the Middle Ages seems to have passed this city by,
and its traces, which he is so eager to find, prove to be neither
notable nor beautiful.

[Illustration: "AN AMPHITHEATRE WHICH RIVALS THE ART OF THE
COLISEUM."--NIMES.]

The great past of Nimes is of a more remote antiquity than the Cathedral
Building Ages. A small but exquisite Temple, a Nymphaeum, Baths, parts of
a fine Portal, Roman walls, and an Amphitheatre which rivals the art of
the Coliseum,--these are the ruins of Nimean greatness. She was
essentially a city of the Romans, and that, even to-day, she has not
lost the memory of her glorious antiquity was well illustrated in 1874,
when the Nimois, with much pomp and civic pride, unveiled a statue to
"their fellow-countryman," the Emperor Antoninus Pius. These are the
memories in which Nimes delights. Yet her history of later times, if not
glorious, is full of strange and curious interest. Like all the ancient
cities of the South, she fell into the hands of many a wild and alien
foe, and at length in 737, Charles Martel arrived at her gates. Grossly
ignorant of art, no thing of beauty that stood in his path escaped fire
and axe; and smoke-marks along the arena walls show to-day how narrowly
they escaped the irreparable destruction which had wiped out the Forum,
the Capitol, the Temple, the Baths, and all the magnificence of Roman
Narbonne. To both the early and the later Middle Ages, Roman remains had
scarcely more meaning than they had for the Franks. The delicate Temple
of Trajan's wife, scorned for its pagan associations, was used as a
stable, a store-house, and, purified by proper ceremonials, it even
became a Christian church. The Amphitheatre has had a still stranger
des