Day Six–already!

There was a strange sound in Provence today: silence. The crazy wind that had vexed us the past days is gone, replaced with a calm as beautiful as the blue skies and morning warmth. We started out this morning at Les Antiques, the sublime monuments marking the entry to Roman Glanum. The triumphal arch commemorates Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.

More mysterious is the mausoleum, a strange tower whose parts–to my unpracticed eye–have never seemed to fit together.

The battle scenes of the lowest story, though, are spectacularly vivid, even two thousand years later, and they’d be worth seeing even in a museum–and so much the more impressive in situ.

Right across the road is the hospital of St-Paul de Mausole, built around a twelfth-century church and cloister.

Van Gogh lived and painted here near the end of his life, and thanks to him, the views of fields, olive groves, and limestone hills are startlingly familiar at every turn.

The church is an example of the Romanesque at its plainest and loveliest; next time I need to go away “for a rest,” I hope they’ll send me here, too.

The cloister is a jewel: tiny, beautifully cared for, with elegantly carved arcades.

Most of the capitals are simply foliate; a few include figures, among them a  centaur (a beast we’ve already encountered at St-Gilles and at St-Trophime).

We didn’t forget, of course that, this is a birds and art tour. Common Chaffinches and a Common Redstart were singing noisily from the trees, and we had our first looks at Crested Tits feeding from the gutters of the hospital buildings. We saw more Crested Tits at the Barrage des Peiroou, as pretty as it is unspellable.

European Robins added their voices to the mix here, with Western Jackdaws providing the diapason. One of the local Common Ravens gave us a quick look; Short-toed Treecreeper remained, unfortunately, just a lisping song in the trees. Our best sighting was not feathered but scaled, a largish Grass Snake on the road on our way out, the first snake of the tour and one of just a few I’d ever seen in France.

Lunch was in St-Rémy, hardly a mile north of the reservoir.

This is a beautiful town, still relatively free of tourists and noise (we’re tourists, but we’re quiet!). My favorite corner–everyone’s favorite corner–is dominated by the city palaces built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the local aristocracy, among them the family Sade.

And even here there are birds: Great Tits, Common Swifts, and that scratchy-voiced ornament of the rooftops, Black Redstart.