第59章

Beside the barrel is a large caldron lined with copper,with a rim of brass.The way these things are painted brings tears to the eyes;but they give the measure of the Musee Fabre,where two specimens of Teniers and a Gerard Dow are the jewels.The Italian pictures are of small value;but there is a work by Sir Joshua Reynolds,said to be the only one in France,an infant Samuel in prayer,apparently a repetition of the picture in England which inspired the little plaster image,disseminated in Protestant lands,that we used to admire in our childhood.Sir Joshua,somehow,was an eminently Protestant painter;no one can forget that,who in the National Gallery in London has looked at the picture in which he represents several young ladies as nymphs,voluminously draped,hanging garlands over a statue,a picture suffused indefinably with the Anglican spirit,and exasperating to a member of one of the Latin races.It is an odd chance,therefore,that has led him into that part of France where Protestants have been least bien vus.This is the country of the dragonnades of Louis XIV.and of the pastors of the desert.From the garden of the Peyrou,at Montpellier,you may see the hills of the Cevennes,to which they of the religion fled for safety,and out of which they were hunted and harried.

I have only to add,in regard to the Musee Fabre,that it contains the portrait of its founder,a little,pursy,fatfaced,elderly man,whose countenance contains few indications of the power that makes distinguished victims.He is,however,just such a personage as the mind's eye sees walking on the terrace of the Peyrou of an October afternoon in the early years of the century;a plump figure in a chocolatecolored coat and a culotte that exhibits a good leg,a culotte provided with a watchfob from which a heavy seal is suspended.This Peyrou (to come to it at last)is a wonderful place,especially to be found in a little provincial city.France is certainly the country of towns that aim at completeness;more than in other lands,they contain stately features as a matter of course.We should never have ceased to hear about the Peyrou,if fortune had placed it at a Shrewsbury or a Buffalo.It is true that the place enjoys a certain celebrity at home,which it amply deserves,moreover;for nothing could be more impressive and monumental.It consists of an "elevated platform,"as Murray says,an immense terrace,laid out,in the highest part of the town,as a garden,and commanding in all directions a view which in clear weather must be of the finest.I strolled there in the intervals of showers,and saw only the nearer beauties,a great pompous arch of triumph in honor of Louis XIV.(which is not,properly speaking,in the garden,but faces it,straddling across the placeby which you approach it from the town),an equestrian statue of that monarch set aloft in the middle of the terrace,and a very exalted and complicated fountain,which forms a background to the picture.This fountain gushes from a kind of hydraulic temple,or chateau d'eau,to which you ascend by broad flights of steps,and which is fed by a splendid aqueduct,stretched in the most ornamental and unexpected manner across the neighboring valley.All this work dates from the middle of the last century.The combination of features the triumphal arch,or gate;the wide,fair terrace,with its beautiful view;the statue of the grand monarch;the big architectural fountain,which would not surprise one at Rome,but goes surprise one at Montpellier;and to complete the effect,the extraordinary aqueduct,charmingly foreshortened,all this is worthy of a capital,of a little courtcity.

The whole place,with its repeated steps,its balustrades,its massive and plentiful stonework,is full of the air of the last century,sent bien son dixhuitieme siecle;none the less so,I am afraid,that,as I read in my faithful Murray,after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,the block,the stake,the wheel,had been erected here for the benefit of the desperate Camisards.