Chapter 28 - Page 2

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 en-
closed by a high _grille_, carefully tended, and has a
warden of its own), and with the help of my imagina-
tion tried to reconstruct a little the aspect of things
in the Gallo-Roman days. I do wrong, perhaps, to
say that 1 _tried_; 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. Every-
thing 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 I
touched for a moment the ancient world. Such mo-
ments are illuminating, and the light of this one mingles,
in my memory, with the dusky greenness of the Jardin
de la Fontaine.

The fountain proper - the source of all these dis-
tributed waters - is the prettiest thing in the world, a
reduced copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up at the foot
of the Mont Cavalier, at a point where that eminence
rises with a certain cliff-like effect, and, like other
springs in the same circumstances, appears to issue
from the rock with a sort of quivering stillness. I
trudged up the Mont Cavalier, - it is a matter of five
minutes, - and having committed this cockneyism en-
hanced it presently by another. I ascended the stupid
Tour Magne, the mysterious structure I mentioned a
moment ago. The only feature of this dateless tube,
except the inevitable collection of photographs to
which you are introduced by the door-keeper, is the
view you enjoy from its summit. This view is, of
course, remarkably fine, but I am ashamed to say I
have not the smallest recollection of it; for while I
looked into the brilliant spaces of the air I seemed
still to see only what I saw in the depths of the Roman
baths, - the image, disastrously confused and vague, of
a vanished world. This world, however, has left at