Chapter III

Of all the rivers which, being navigable, do serious work in the world the Rhone is the most devil-may-care and light-hearted. In its five hundred mile dash down hill from the Lake of Geneva to the Mediterraenean its only purpose--other than that of doing all the mischief possible--seems to be frolic fun. And yet for more than two thousand years this apparently frivolous, and frequently malevolent, river has been very usefully employed in the service of mankind.

In the misty barbaric ages before history fairly began, and in the early times of the Roman domination, the Rhone was the sole highway into northern Gaul from the Mediterraenean; later, when the Gallic system of Roman roads had been constructed, it held its own fairly well against the two roads which paralleled it--that on the east bank throughout almost its entire length, and that on the west bank from Lyons southward to a point about opposite to the present Montelimar; in the semi-barbarous Middle Ages--when the excitements of travel were increased by the presence of a robber-count at every ford and in every mountain-pass--it became again more important than the parallel highways on land; and in our own day the conditions of Roman times, relatively speaking, are restored once more by steamboats on the river and railways on the lines of the ancient roads. And so, having served these several masters, the Rhone valley of the present day is stored everywhere with remnants of the barbarism, of the civilization, and of the semi-barbarism which successively have been ploughed under its surface before what we have the temerity to call our own civilization began. Keltic flints and pottery underlie Roman ruins; just beneath the soil, or still surviving above it, are remains of Roman magnificence; and on almost all the hill-tops still stand the broken strongholds of the robber nobles who maintained their nobility upon what they were lucky enough to be able to steal. Naturally--those ruined castles, and the still-existent towns of the same period, being so conspicuously in evidence--the flavour of the river is most distinctly Mediaeval; but a journey in this region, with eyes open to perceive as well as to see, is a veritable descent into the depths of the ancient past.

Indeed, the _Gladiateur_ had but little more than swung clear from Lyons--around the long curve where the Saone and the Rhone are united and the stream suddenly is doubled in size--than we were carried back to the very dawn of historic times. Before us, stretching away to the eastward, was the broad plain of Saint-Fons--once covered with an oak forest to which Druid priests bearing golden sickles came from the Ile Barbe at Yule-tide to gather mistletoe for the great Pagan feast; later, a battle-field where Clodius Albinus and Septimius Severus came to a definite understanding in regard to the rulership of Gaul; later still, the site of a pleasure castle of the Archbishops of Lyons, and of the Villa Longchene to which light-hearted Lyons' nobles came. Palace and Villa still are there--the one a Dominican school, the other a hospital endowed by the Empress Eugenie: but the oaks and the Druids and the battle are only faint legends now.

I am forced to admit that never a thought was given to that aggregation of antiquities by the too-frivolous passengers aboard the _Gladiateur_. At the very moment when we were steaming through those Gallo-Roman and Mediaeval latitudes there was a burst of music from the piano that fired our light-headed company as a spark fires a mine. The music was the air of "La Coupe," the Felibrien Anthem, and instantly a hundred voices took up the song. When this rite was ended, the music shifted to a livelier key and straightway a farandole was formed. On the whole, a long and narrow steamboat is not an especially good place for a farandole; but the leader of that one--a young person from the Odeon, whose hair came down repeatedly but whose exceptionally high spirits never came down at all--was not one of the sort whom difficulties deter. At the head of the long line of dancers--a living chain held together by clasped hands--she caracoled and curveted up and down the narrow passes of the boat; and after her, also caracoling and curveting, came the chain: that each moment grew in length as volunteers joined it, or (in keeping with farandole customs) as the less vivacious members of the party were seized upon and forcibly impressed into its ranks. And so we farandoled clear away to Givors.

It took the place of a master of ceremonies, our farandole, and acted as an excellent solvent of formalities. Yet even without it there would have been none of the stiffness and reserve which would have chilled a company assembled under like conditions in English-speaking lands. Friendliness and courtesy are characteristics of the French in general; and especially did our American contingent profit by those amiable traits that day on the Rhone. Save for a slight correspondence with a single member of the party, all aboard the boat were strangers to us; but in that kindly atmosphere, before we had time to fancy that we were outsiders, we found ourselves among friends.

Givors slipped by almost unnoticed in the thick of the farandole: a little town hung out to sun in long strips upon terraces rising from the water-side; the walls and tiled roofs making a general effect of warm greys and yellows dashed with the bright greens of shrubs and trees and gardens and the yellow green of vines. 'Tis a town of some commercial pretensions: the gateway of a canal a dozen miles long leading up through the valley of the little river Gier to iron-works and coke-works and glass-works tucked away in the hills. The canal was projected almost a century and a half ago as a connecting channel between the Rhone and the Loire, and so between the Atlantic and the Mediterraenean; wherefore the Canal of the Two Oceans was, and I suppose continues to be, its high-sounding name. But the Revolution came, and the digging never extended beyond that first dozen miles; and thus it is that the Canal of the Two Oceans, as such, is a delusion, and that the golden future which once lay ahead of Givors now lies a long way astern. Yet the town has an easy and contented look: as though it had saved enough from the wreck of its magnificent destiny to leave it still comfortably well to do.

Before we fairly had passed it, and while the farandole was dying out slowly, there crashed down upon us a thunderous outburst of song: as though an exceptionally large-lunged seraph were afloat immediately above us in the open regions of the air. Yet the song was of a gayer sort than seraphs, presumably, are wont to sing; and its method, distinctly, was that of the modern operatic stage. In point of fact, the singer was not a seraph, but an eminent professor in a great institution of learning and a literary authority of the first rank--whose critical summary of French literature is a standard, and whose studies of Beaumarchais and Le Sage have been crowned by the Academy. In sheer joyousness of spirit that eminent personage had betaken himself to the top of the port paddle-box, and thence was suffering his mountain-cleaving voice to go at large: so quickening was the company in which he found himself; so stimulating was the racy fervour of his own Southern sun!