, a straight Greek nose,
and a mouth worthy of all the rest, that it conveys a presumption of
beauty which gives the wearer time either to escape or to please you. I
have read somewhere, however, that Tarascon is supposed to produce
handsome men, as Arles is known to deal in handsome women. It may be
that I should have found the Tarasconnais very fine fellows if I had
encountered enough specimens to justify an induction. But there are very
few males in the streets, and the place presented no appearance of
activity. Here and there the black coif of an old woman or of a young
girl was framed by a low doorway; but for the rest, as I have said,
Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta. There was not a creature in
the little church of Saint Martha, which I made a point of visiting
before I returned to the station, and which, with its fine romanesque
side-portal and its pointed and crocketed gothic spire, is as curious as
it need be in view of its tradition. It stands in a quiet corner where
the grass grows between the small cobble-stones, and you pass beneath a
deep archway to reach it. The tradition relates that Saint Martha tamed
with her own hands and attached to her girdle a dreadful dragon who was
known as the Tarasque and is reported to have given his name to the city
on whose site (amid the rocks which form the base of the chateau) he had
his cavern. The dragon perhaps is the symbol of a ravening paganism
dispelled by the eloquence of a sweet evangelist. The bones of the
interesting saint, at all events, were found, in the eleventh century,
in a cave beneath the spot on which her altar now stands. I know not
what had become of the bones of the dragon.

[Illustration]

Chapter xxx

[Arles]

There are two shabby old inns at Arles which compete closely for your
custom. I mean by this that if you elect to go to the Hotel du Forum,
the Hotel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it (at a right angle),
watches your arrival with ill-concealed disapproval; and if you take the
chances of its neighbour, the Hotel du Forum seems to glare at you
invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these
establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that it
had been the other. The two stand together on the Place des Hommes, a
little public square of Arles which somehow quite misses its effect. As
a city, indeed, Arles quite misses its effect in every way; and if it is
a charming place, as