thick walls.
The main portal consists of a set of massive iron-clamped doors whose rusty teeth fold in upon each other – or once did, for nobody in living memory has ever seen them closed. Now they always stood open and the whole courtyard had the placid look of a place given over to peaceful husbandry. Chickens and ducks have taken possession of it, they wander about gossiping; a venerable goat, untethered, meditates in one corner. From the stables come the stamp of horses and the roars and sighs of cattle, or perhaps the mewing of quail in their wicker cages. An army of pigeons skirmishes impertinently about in all this with the noise of wet linen flapping in the wind. Their own headquarters is the squat bell tower, now transformed into a dove-cot, with the Roman hour-glass fixed to it.
Everything gravitates towards or away from this central court with its well – though its presiding goddess is not, as so often here, a Roman nymph, but merely an old blindfold horse which is started up each morning like a clock and then left to its own devices. Slowly and painstakingly it covers the trodden circle of its duty, and slowly through the hours the cold well-water is dispersed along a chain of stone troughs.
There were in fact several wells – one indeed in the main barn–which cater nowadays for both cattle and men by courtesy of a brisk electric motor. But the slow overflow from the ancient well, splashing into its basin, is channelled away, and conducted to the salad garden to irrigate the plants there. It is through this little garden with its kitchen herbs that one can reach the more extensive formal gardens of the chateau – for so long fallen into disrepair. They decline southward and westward and are well sheltered from the sudden inclemencies of the Provençal weather. It is difficult to imagine how they must have looked in their heyday. Ever since I knew them they have remained overgrown and unweeded, full of the romantic melancholy of desuetude. Rob used to say, “Very bad for my poetry this; it makes it all crumbly.” None of us shared his feelings when we walked here, either by dawn or by moonlight. No; these gardens abounded in balustraded terraces and ornate stone benches perched at strategic points. Here and there you could happen upon a marble nymph or two in a debased and old-fashioned style, though now made really charming because overgrown by ivy or rambler roses. Here were many sheltered corners which one watched covetously for the first violets or the tender spring flowers; while along their length the beehives stood in rows.
Once all this was a profitable and lovely demesne and in the time of Piers’ parents its yield represented a very great fortune. But when they died the two children did not know how to make it work and the whole enterprise became moribund from lack of effective management. It was not their fault – they had both pursued their studies in Paris and London, and for them Verfeuille represented simply a divine haven for summer holidays, nothing more. The decline was gradual but sure. Its great army of retainers began to drift slowly away to more lucrative work; war intervened, then the vine plague, phylloxera, and then a malignant drought one summer. Much of the land was sold off, and some mortgaged; the wood was sacrificed in a bad year, bringing in very little. A succession of small shortsighted follies sapped the economy of the great farm and nibbled away at its yield.
Nevertheless the estate, despite all these limitations, remained a very large one, and perhaps more beautiful because of the neglect, though no farmer would have said so. The country was marvellous, for it lay upon the flanks of the Alpilles and extended outwards from the foothills of the range pointing towards the level region where the Rhône valley widens and begins to merge into the valley of the Durance.
On the higher slopes of the land are straggling groups of self-seeded almond trees – what puffs of
The main portal consists of a set of massive iron-clamped doors whose rusty teeth fold in upon each other – or once did, for nobody in living memory has ever seen them closed. Now they always stood open and the whole courtyard had the placid look of a place given over to peaceful husbandry. Chickens and ducks have taken possession of it, they wander about gossiping; a venerable goat, untethered, meditates in one corner. From the stables come the stamp of horses and the roars and sighs of cattle, or perhaps the mewing of quail in their wicker cages. An army of pigeons skirmishes impertinently about in all this with the noise of wet linen flapping in the wind. Their own headquarters is the squat bell tower, now transformed into a dove-cot, with the Roman hour-glass fixed to it.
Everything gravitates towards or away from this central court with its well – though its presiding goddess is not, as so often here, a Roman nymph, but merely an old blindfold horse which is started up each morning like a clock and then left to its own devices. Slowly and painstakingly it covers the trodden circle of its duty, and slowly through the hours the cold well-water is dispersed along a chain of stone troughs.
There were in fact several wells – one indeed in the main barn–which cater nowadays for both cattle and men by courtesy of a brisk electric motor. But the slow overflow from the ancient well, splashing into its basin, is channelled away, and conducted to the salad garden to irrigate the plants there. It is through this little garden with its kitchen herbs that one can reach the more extensive formal gardens of the chateau – for so long fallen into disrepair. They decline southward and westward and are well sheltered from the sudden inclemencies of the Provençal weather. It is difficult to imagine how they must have looked in their heyday. Ever since I knew them they have remained overgrown and unweeded, full of the romantic melancholy of desuetude. Rob used to say, “Very bad for my poetry this; it makes it all crumbly.” None of us shared his feelings when we walked here, either by dawn or by moonlight. No; these gardens abounded in balustraded terraces and ornate stone benches perched at strategic points. Here and there you could happen upon a marble nymph or two in a debased and old-fashioned style, though now made really charming because overgrown by ivy or rambler roses. Here were many sheltered corners which one watched covetously for the first violets or the tender spring flowers; while along their length the beehives stood in rows.
Once all this was a profitable and lovely demesne and in the time of Piers’ parents its yield represented a very great fortune. But when they died the two children did not know how to make it work and the whole enterprise became moribund from lack of effective management. It was not their fault – they had both pursued their studies in Paris and London, and for them Verfeuille represented simply a divine haven for summer holidays, nothing more. The decline was gradual but sure. Its great army of retainers began to drift slowly away to more lucrative work; war intervened, then the vine plague, phylloxera, and then a malignant drought one summer. Much of the land was sold off, and some mortgaged; the wood was sacrificed in a bad year, bringing in very little. A succession of small shortsighted follies sapped the economy of the great farm and nibbled away at its yield.
Nevertheless the estate, despite all these limitations, remained a very large one, and perhaps more beautiful because of the neglect, though no farmer would have said so. The country was marvellous, for it lay upon the flanks of the Alpilles and extended outwards from the foothills of the range pointing towards the level region where the Rhône valley widens and begins to merge into the valley of the Durance.
On the higher slopes of the land are straggling groups of self-seeded almond trees – what puffs of
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