第64章

After this I was free to look about me at Nimes,and I did so with such attention as the place appeared to require.At the risk of seeming too easily and too frequently disappointed,I will say that it required rather less than I had been prepared to give.It is a town of three or four fine features,rather than a town with,as I may say,a general figure.In general,Nimes is poor;its only treasures are its Roman remains,which are of the first order.The new French fashions prevail in many of its streets;the old houses are paltry,and the good houses are new;while beside my hotel rose a big spickandspan church,which had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland.It is true that this church looked out on a square completely French,a square of a fine modern disposition,flanked on one side by a classical palais de justice embellished with trees and parapets,and occupied in the centre with a group of allegorical statues,such as one encounters only in the cities of France,the chief of these being a colossal figure by Pradier,representing Nimes.An English,an American,town which should have such a monument,such a square,as this,would be a place of great pretensions;but like so many little villes de province in the country of which I write,Nimes is easily ornamental.What nobler ornament can there be than the Roman baths at the foot of Mont Cavalier,and the delightful old garden that surrounds them?

All that quarter of Nimes has every reason to be proud of itself;it has been revealed to the world at large by copious photography.A clear,abundant stream gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered with trees and laid out in paths),and is distributed into basins which sufficiently refer themselves to the period that gave them birth,the period that has left its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we admired at Montpellier.Here are the same terraces and steps and balustrades,and a system of waterworks less impressive,perhaps,but very ingenious and charming.The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French eighteenth century;for the remains of the antique baths are in a measure incorporated in the modern fountains.In a corner of this umbrageous precinct stands a small Roman ruin,which is known as a temple of Diana,but was more apparently a nymphaeum,and appears to have had a graceful connection with the adjacent baths.I learn from Murray that this little temple,of the period of Augustus,"was reduced to its present state of ruin in 1577;"the moment at which the townspeople,threatened with a siege by the troops of the crown,partly demolished it,lest it should serve as a cover to the enemy.The remains are very fragmentary,but they serve to show that the place was lovely.I spent half an hour in it on a perfect Sunday morning (it is enclosed by a high grille,carefully tended,and has a warden of its own),and with the help of my imagination tried to reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the GalloRoman days.I do wrong,perhaps,to say that 1tried;from a flight so deliberate I should have shrunk.But there was a certain contagion of antiquity in the air;and among the ruins of baths and temples,in the very spot where the aqueduct that crosses the Gardon in the wondrous manner I had seen discharged itself,the picture of a splendid paganism seemed vaguely to glow.Roman baths,Roman baths;those words alone were a scene.Everything was changed:I was strolling in a jardin francais;the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain),hanging over the place,is crowned with a shapeless tower,which is as likely to be of mediaeval as of antique origin;and yet,as I leaned on the parapet of one of the fountains,where a flight of curved steps (a hemicycle,as the French say)descended into a basin full of dark,cool recesses,where the slabs of the Roman foundations gleam through the clear green water,as in this attitude I surrendered myself to contemplation and reverie,it seemed to me that Itouched for a moment the ancient world.Such moments are illuminating,and the light of this one mingles,in my memory,with the dusky greenness of the Jardin de la Fontaine.