thorns, bygone days of chivalry and song grow present
and seem to live again.

Aix, however, is a shadow in the picture. A hundred
years ago Charles de Brosses called it the prettiest city in
France after Paris; but Victor Hugo, for all his genius,
could find only this to say: "It has two clochers; one is
merely a square tower, the other a fifteenth-century spire of
quite good style." France has moved, but Aix has not.

It is a city of country nobility, landed proprietors living
on the rents of to-day and the traditions of a century ago,
epicurean but sad. Behind the solemn façades are great
staircases made for the robes of Presidents of the Parlia-
ment, and salons with enormous antechambers once peo-
pled with lackeys. Perhaps in the corners there are
lingering echoes of the "finesse and caustic wit" that
Thiers thought characteristic of the people; but to the
stranger it seems half dead, and the greedy, light of Pro-
vence, devouring all the color, has left everything grayish.

The only live people seem to be the small tradesmen,
and they live only once a week. Every one has a bastide,
a garden in the suburbs, and he may always be found there
on Sunday. In the shade of his arbor he drains a flagon
of good wine, expands his chest, bandies mocking pleas-
antries, sings out the old songs of Provence, and with a
turn of the eye repeats its old proverbs: "A man's
shadow is worth a hundred women"; "To lie well is a
talent, to lie ill a vice"; "One half of the world laughs at
the other half"; "Praise the sea, but stay on dry land";
"Water spoils wine, carts spoil roads, women spoil men."

We look in vain for the monuments of a long, historic
past. As Governor Pownall observed in his calm fashion,
"Aix, although the first settlement and town the Romans
had in Gaul, although it was for some time the principal
and always a considerable place, exhibits in these latter

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