An English,
An American, Town Which Should Have Such A Monu-
Ment, Such A Square, As This, Would Be A Place Of
Great Pretensions; But Like So Many Little _Villes De
Province_ In The Country Of Which I Write, Nimes Is
Easily Ornamental.
What nobler ornament can there
be than the Roman baths at the foot of Mont Cavalier,
and the delightful old garden that surrounds them?
All that quarter of Nimes has every reason to be
proud of itself; it has been revealed to the world at
large by copious photography.
A clear, abundant
stream gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered
with trees and laid out in paths), and is distributed
into basins which sufficiently refer themselves to the
period that gave them birth, - the period that has
left its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we ad-
mired at Montpellier. Here are the same terraces and
steps and balustrades, and a system of water-works
less impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious and charm-
ing. The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and
of the French eighteenth century; for the remains of
the antique baths are in a measure incorporated in
the modern fountains. In a corner of this umbrageous
precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known
as a temple of Diana, but was more apparently a
_nymphaeum_, and appears to have had a graceful con-
nection with the adjacent baths. I learn from Murray
that this little temple, of the period of Augustus,
"was reduced to its present state of ruin in 1577;"
the moment at which the townspeople, threatened
with a siege by the troops of the crown, partly
demolished it, lest it 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.
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