A Book of The Riviera

Romeo produced his accounts before the prince, showing that he had not betrayed his trust to the value of a denier; and then, resuming his pilgrim’s habit, resumed also his wanderings. Finally he retired to the castle of Vence, where he died. His will was dated December 18th, 1250. Dante places him in Paradise: —

“Within the pearl, that now encloseth us
Shines Romeo’s light, whose goodly deeds and fair
Met ill receptance. But the Provençals,
That were his foes, have little cause for mirth.
Ill shapes that man his course, who makes his wrong
Of other’s worth. Four daughters were there born
To Raymond Berenger; and every one
Became a queen; and this for him did Romeo,
Though of mean state, and from a foreign land,
Yet envious tongues incited him to ask
A reckoning of that just one, who return’d
Twelve-fold to him for ten. Aged and poor
He parted thence; and if the world did know
The heart he had, begging his life by morsels,
’Twould deem the praise it yields him, scantly dealt.”

    (Par. vi. 131-44).
Charles of Anjou was at all points opposite to his brother Louis IX. – the Saint. The latter was true to his word, just, merciful, and devoid of personal ambition. But Charles was rapacious, cruel, and of a vehement character. His young wife, moreover, the sister of three queens, excited him to aspire after a crown; and he saw in the county of Provence only a stepping-stone towards a throne. He hoped to acquire that of Constantinople, and he supposed that he was on his way thereto when he listened to the summons of the Pope to dispossess Manfred of the Sicilies. This disastrous resolve decided the fate of Provence, and was the prime cause of its ruin. If in the Count of Anjou there had been a glimmer of political sense, he would have seen how precarious a matter it was to accept a sovereignty as a feudatory of the Holy See, and to become the sport of circumstances ever shifting. He would have perceived how fatal it would be to his fortunes to oscillate between two centres; to exhaust the sources of his real strength in Provence to maintain himself in Naples. The nobility of Provence shared in his infatuation and eagerly joined in the undertaking. At the accession of Charles under the wise government of Raymond Berenger, and the judicious husbanding of its resources by Romeo de Villeneuve, Provence was at its acme of prosperity. Charles brought it to ruin. After the execution of Conradin, he rode roughshod over the people of Naples and Sicily. To his exactions there was no end. The great fiefs were seized and granted to Provençal or Angevin favourites; the foreign soldiers lived at free quarters, and treated the people with the utmost barbarity. There ensued an iron reign of force without justice, without law, without humanity, without mercy.

Conradin, from the scaffold, had cast his glove among the crowd, and called on Peter of Aragon, husband of Constance, daughter of the noble Manfred, to avenge him, and assume his inheritance. In Sicily, where the exactions, the tyranny of the French were most intolerable, a secret correspondence was kept up with Peter of Aragon, and he was entreated to deliver the island from its French masters. But before he was ready, an outbreak of the populace precipitated matters. On Easter Tuesday the inhabitants of Palermo had gone forth in pilgrimage to a church outside the town to vespers. French soldiers, mingling with the people, began to assault the young women. The Sicilians, the fathers, brothers, lovers, remonstrated, and bade the French keep away from the festival. The French gathered together and laid their hands on their swords. At this juncture a beautiful girl, with her betrothed, approached the church. A Frenchman, named Drouet, in wantonness of insult, went up to her and thrust his hand into her bosom. The girl fainted in her bridegroom’s arms. A cry was raised of “Death to the Frenchmen!” and a youth started forward and stabbed Drouet to the heart.

This was the signal for a general insurrection. The cry spread to the city: every house was searched, and every person whose dress, speech, appearance, proclaimed him a Frenchman was massacred without mercy. Neither old age, nor sex, nor infancy, was spared. And in those Sicilian vespers, over two thousand of the Provençal and Angevin nobles and their wives perished under the knives of the justly incensed Sicilians.

When Charles heard of the massacre he burst into paroxysms of wrath. He is described as next having sat silent, gnawing the top of his sceptre, and then breaking forth into the most horrible vows of revenge.

Nor was the Pope behindhand in threats. It was to the Pope that Naples and Sicily owed the incubus of Charles and his Provençals. Clement IV. indeed was dead; Martin IV. now sat in his chair; but though there was a change in the person of the Chief Pontiff, there was no change of mind and policy.

The Palermitans sent an embassy to the Pope to deprecate his wrath, addressing him: “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us!” But even this adulation could not abate his rage. He proclaimed a crusade against the Sicilians. Heaven was promised to those who should draw the sword against them. Anathema was proclaimed against all who took their side.

But Peter of Aragon was indifferent to this ecclesiastical bluster, and the Sicilians were desperate. In spite of the blessings and promises of the Pope, Charles encountered only disaster. His fleet was destroyed, his son, Charles of Salerno, was captured; his treasury was exhausted, and the principal nobility of Anjou and Provence had been decimated in the Sicilian vespers. He sank into despondency and died, 1285.

Eventually, at the intercession of King Edward I. of England, the young prince, Charles the Lame, was released. He swore to pay 20,000 marks, and surrender his two sons as hostages till the sum was paid, and allow the claim to the Two Sicilies to drop. But no sooner was he freed than Pope Nicolas IV. annulled the treaty, released Charles of his oaths, and crowned him with his own hands. Charles did not surrender his sons, nor pay his ransom.

“This decree of Nicolas,” says Dean Milman, “was the most monstrous exercise of the absolving power which had ever been advanced in the face of Christendom: it struck at the root of all chivalrous honour, at the faith of all treaties.”

But Charles was fain to content himself with his counties of Provence and Anjou, and not allow himself to be drawn or impelled into wars by the Pope. In Provence he found wounds to staunch, ruins to repair.

It is highly to his credit that he frankly accepted this difficult and not very brilliant part. He avoided war, paid his father’s debts, re-established his finances, and acquired in return the nickname of Charles the Miserly. After a reign of twenty-four years he died in 1309.

Grasse had been in the diocese of Antibes, but in 1243 Pope Innocent IV. transferred the seat of the bishop from Antibes to Grasse, on account of the unhealthiness of the former, and its liability to be plundered by the Moorish corsairs.

The bishops of Grasse were not in general men of great mark. Perhaps the least insignificant of them was Godeau.

Antoine Godeau, born at Dreux in 1605, lived in Paris with a kinsman named Couart; and as he thought he had the poetic afflatus, he composed verses and read them to his kinsman. Couart took the lyrics to some literary friends, and they were appreciated. Godeau went on writing, and a little coterie was formed for listening to his compositions; and this was the nucleus out of which grew the Academie Française. Couart introduced Godeau to Mlle. de Rambouillet, and he became her devoted admirer, and a frequenter of her social gatherings. The lady says, in one of her letters to Voiture: “There is here a man smaller than yourself by a cubit, and, I protest, a thousand times more gallant.” Godeau, who entered holy orders and became an abbé, through his devotion to Mlle. de Rambouillet, obtained the nickname of “Julie’s Dwarf.” Voiture was jealous of him, begrudged the favour of the lady who dispensed the literary reputations of the day, and he addressed a rondeau to Godeau: —

“Quittez l’amour, ce n’est votre métier,
Faites des vers, traduisez le psautier;
Votre façon d’écrire est fort jolie;
Mais gardez-vous de faire folie,
Ou je saurais, ma foi, vous châtier
Comme un galant.”

Godeau lived at a time when dancers about the saloons of the toasts and blue stockings of Paris were rewarded with spoils from the Church; and Godeau, when aged only thirty, was offered and accepted the united dioceses of Grasse and Vence. He was consecrated, and went to Grasse. Thence he wrote to Julie: —

“Dans ce désert où je suis retourné,
Mon cœur languit, à souffrir destiné,
Et mon esprit plein de mélancolie
Ne pense plus qu’à la belle Julie.

****

J’aimerai mieux être aux fers condamné
Dans le dur froid de l’âpre Corilie.
O Rambouillet! O nymphe si jolie,
Souffrirez vous que je sois confiné
Dans ce désert?”

However, Godeau did his duty at Grasse. Indeed, eventually, wearied with squabbles with his chapter there, he threw up Grasse and retained only Vence, the poorest of all the sees in France.

Godeau was a voluminous writer, theological, historical, and poetic; and excelled in none of these lines. In fact, all his works have been consigned to the literary dust heap. His appointment to Grasse had followed on his presentation of a paraphrase of the Benedicite to Richelieu. The Cardinal said, “Sir, you have given me Benedicite. I in return render you Grasse (Grâce).”

The Cathedral of Grasse is of singularly uncouth Gothic, of the twelfth century, with huge drums of pillars, and the crudest of vaulting without any moulding being afforded to the ribs. Grasse possessed formerly a very curious feature, shared with Vence, of having the choir for bishop and chapter in the west gallery, over the porch. As this was so exceptional, and as the early apse would not admit of seats for the chapter, a late bishop built out a hideous structure behind the high altar to accommodate himself and the clergy. But at Vence the arrangement remains intact. That church of Vence is of very early architecture, I am afraid of stating how early. It consists of a nave with double aisles on each side, and the double aisles are carried round at the west end. Each of the aisles on both sides of the nave is stone-floored and vaulted underneath, forming a gallery. At the west end, both aisles are so floored, and here, above the narthex or porch, is the choir, with most beautifully carved stalls, bishop’s throne at the extreme west end; and in the middle of this odd little upstairs choir is the lectern with its vellum MS. book of antiphons left as last used. The date of the stalls is 1455-1460, and the lectern is but little later.

According to tradition the church was built in the sixth century, on the site of a Pagan temple, and an image of an idol was buried under the foundations of each of the pillars. What is certain is that into two of the piers are inserted figures in alabaster from a Roman monument, and that numerous votive tablets and inscriptions are walled into the church. The beautiful woodwork of the western choir escaped being blown to splinters by a happy accident in 1596.

On Sunday, the Feast of S. Michael, the bishop occupied his throne at mass. When he stood up for the Gospel, his foot broke through the floor of his stall. He drew his foot out, and after the conclusion of the Creed proceeded to the pulpit to preach. Whilst he was away a choir boy looked into the hole made by the bishop’s foot, thrust in an arm and drew out his hand full of a black powder, which he showed to an officer standing by, who at once recognised that this was gunpowder. A search was made, and it was found that enough gunpowder had been rammed in under the throne to blow bishop and chapter up, and wreck the church. A fuse had been inserted through a hole bored in the woodwork, and it was supposed that the purpose was to light this when the bishop returned from the pulpit. A messenger was at once sent to him, but he refused to desist from his sermon, calmly proceeding with it to the conclusion, although the congregation, who had received wind of the attempt, had begun to clear out of the church. He returned to his throne and remained there to the end of the service. It was never ascertained by whom the plot was arranged, whether by Huguenots, or whether it was due to private malice.

A corner house looking out on the Cours at Grasse, between the rue du Cours and the Passage Mirabeau, is the old town residence of the family of Cabris. The noblesse of the neighbourhood had their town residence at Grasse, and there spent the winter in such gaieties as could be got up between them.

In this house, No. 2 and 4 of the street, lived Louise, Marchioness de Grasse-Cabris, the youngest and most beautiful of the sisters of the famous Mirabeau. She had been married when quite young to the Marquis, who was a prey to ungovernable fits of temper, and was considerably her senior. But there was an excuse for his violence in the dissipated conduct of his wife.

The Mirabeaus were an old Provençal family which had migrated from Florence through some of the civic broils in the twelfth century. The patronymic was Arrigheti, which got by degrees Frenchified into Riquetti. The estate and title of Mirabeau were only acquired in 1568, by Jean Riquetti, who was first consul of Marseilles.

The Mirabeaus were a race of men singularly energetic, independent, and audacious. They boasted that they were all hewn out of one block, without joints. They were proud, rude, with original and strongly marked features, free-and-easy morals, and violent tempers. Jean Antoine de Riquetti, Marquis de Mirabeau, brigadier of infantry, was wounded in defending a bridge in the battle of Cassans. He fell, and all the hostile army passed over him. His old sergeant, seeing him down, put an iron pot over his master’s head, and fled. This pot saved Mirabeau’s life, but his right arm was broken, and he was so damaged that he was obliged to wear a silver collar to keep his head upright. He was presented by the Duke de Vendôme, under whom he had fought, to Louis XIV., who received him with some commonplace remark; to which the old crippled soldier replied rudely, “If in quitting the Colours he had come to Court payer quelque catin he would have received more honour and less words.” Vendôme was so scared at his audacity, that he said, “Henceforth, Riquetti, I will present you to the enemy, and never again to the king.”

The son of this man was Victor de Riquetti, who called himself “l’Ami des Hommes,” a fantastic hodge-podge of contradictions. He was a philanthropist and a despot, a feudalist, but also a reformer, a professed friend of mankind, but a tyrant in his own family. He hated superstition, but scoffed at “la canaille philosophique.” Separated from his wife, he was engaged in lawsuits with her for years, which published to all Provence the scandals of the domestic hearth of the House of Mirabeau. The eldest son of this man was Gabriel Honoré, the great orator, and the youngest daughter was Louise, Marchioness de Grasse-Cabris. The feudal castle of the Cabris is on the way to Draguignan. Cabris occupies a conical hill in a dreary limestone district, where the soil is so sparse that even the olive cannot flourish there – it exists, that is all. The place is supplied with water from cisterns that receive the rain from the roofs. Honoré was disfigured by smallpox at the age of three, and he retained thenceforth an extraordinary hideousness of aspect which struck his contemporaries, but which does not seem in the slightest to have impeded his success with women. His father declared that physically and morally he was a monster. The romance of his life begins when he was aged seventeen, when, owing to a love intrigue, and to debts, his father obtained a lettre de cachet and had him imprisoned in the isle of Ré. From that time ensued a pitiless struggle, a veritable duel, between the imperious father and the ungovernable son. In 1772 Honoré married Emilie de Marignane at Aix; she was a wealthy heiress, but he speedily dissipated her fortune. His father obtained an order that he should be interned at Manosque. But he broke bounds and came to Grasse to visit his sister. Two days later an indecent pasquinade appeared placarded over the walls of Grasse, containing aspersions on the characters of the principal ladies of rank who spent the winter there.

It was at once bruited abroad that Mirabeau and his sister, Mme. de Cabris, had concocted the lampoon between them. Mirabeau was incensed. He was too much of a gentleman thus to defame ladies; and he hunted out M. de Villeneuve-Mouans as the author of this report. He went after him one day, when this old gentleman was walking on the road bare-headed, with an umbrella spread, horsewhipped him, and broke the umbrella over his shoulders.

The consequence was that a lettre de cachet was taken out against Louise; but on investigation it turned out that it was the Marquis de Grasse-Cabris, the husband of Louise, who was the author of the scurrilous lampoon, and that Honoré had known nothing about it.

When the Revolution broke out, the Marquis fled. The Castle of Cabris was sacked by the mob, and Louise and her husband lived for ten years in great poverty as emigrés.

When, finally, she returned to Provence it was to ruined Mirabeau. The castle had been wrecked, but she contrived to have a cottage built out of the ruins for herself and for her husband, who had sunk into dotage.

The brother of the great orator and of Louise de Cabris was André Boniface, Deputy to the Estates-General for the nobility of Limoges. His excesses at table, and his corpulence, procured for him the nickname of Mirabeau Tonneau. Gabriel Honoré reprimanded him for ascending the tribune when he was drunk. “Why,” he replied, “you have monopolised all the vices of the family, and have left but this one to me.” “In any other family but ours,” he said, “I would pass as a disgrace. In mine, I am its most respectable member.” He emigrated to Germany. An epigram was composed on him: —