ich
I

[Illustration: NIMES--THE AMPHITHEATRE]

spoke of as wanting. The exquisite at Nimes is mainly represented by the
famous Maison Carree. The first impression you receive from this
delicate little building, as you stand before it, is that you have
already seen it many times. Photographs, engravings, models, medals,
have placed it definitely in your eye, so that from the sentiment with
which you regard it curiosity and surprise are almost completely, and
perhaps deplorably, absent. Admiration remains, however--admiration of a
familiar and even slightly patronising kind. The Maison Carree does not
overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great
sensations of antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite
of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvellously
preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming
compactness, seem to bring one nearer to the century that built it than
the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest
that vibrates from one age to another when the note of taste is struck.
If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy
production, the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard
that conducts to it, adorned with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops.
Here, in a respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations and with
the theatre, of a classic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square
house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it
first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if
it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of
a playing-card, and he expresses his admiration for it by the singular
wish that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris. He even goes
so far as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been
rendered to its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than
to "have" in that city "le Pantheon de Rome, quelques temples de Grece."
Stendhal found it amusing to write in the character of a
_commis-voyageur_, and sometimes it occurs to his reader that he really
was one.

[Illustration]

Chapter xxix

[Tarascon]

On my way from Nimes to Arles I spent three hours at Tarascon; chiefly
for the love of Alphonse Daudet, who has written nothing more genial
than "Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin," and the story of the
"siege" of the bright, dead little town (