At that time of year, however, the Durance usually looks peaceable and harmless enough; half its great bed is dry and pebbly, and the water that rushes under the big arches of the bridge is not great in volume. But the size and strength of the bridge itself and certain huge rocks, placed for a long distance on either side of the road, are significant of floods and of the spring awakening of the monstrous river that, like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has two lives. [Illustration: "SAINT-MARTIN-DE-BROMES WITH ITS HIGH, SLIM TOWER."] [Illustration: "THE FORTIFIED MONASTERY OF THE TEMPLARS."--(NEAR GREOUX).] The road wound about the low hills of the Alps, past a massive, fortified monastery of the Templars whose windows gape in ruin; past Saint-Martin-de-Bromes with its high, slim, crenellated watch-tower; past many quiet little villages where in the old times, Taine says, "Good people lived as in an eagle's nest, happy as long as they were not slain--that was the luxury of the feudal times." Between these villages lay vast groves of the grey-green olive-trees, large flourishing farms, and, further still, the bleak mountains of the Lower Alps. It was toward them the driver was turning, for rising above a smiling little valley, surrounded by fields of ripened grain, lay Riez. A donjon stands above a broken wall, on the hillside houses cluster around a church's spire, and alone, on the top of the hill, stands the little Chapel of Saint-Maxime, the only relic of the Great Seminary that was destroyed by the Revolutionists of '89. Here, after the destruction of one of the several Cathedrals of Riez, the Bishop celebrated Masses, but the little chapel was never consecrated a Cathedral. It has been recently restored and re-built in an uninteresting style,--the exterior is bare to ugliness, the interior so painted that the six old Roman columns which support the choir are overwhelmed by the banality of their surroundings. The plateau on which the chapel is built is now almost bare; olive-trees grow to its edges and there is no trace of the Seminary that was once so full of active life. The traveller, sitting in the shade of the few pine-trees, looked over the broad view toward the peaks whose bare rocks rise with awful sternness, and the little hills that stand between them and the valley, till finally his eyes wandered to the town beneath, and the firm, broad roads which approach it from every direction. For Riez, although in the lost depths of Provence, far from railways and tourists, is a bee-hive of industry, largely supplying the necessities of these secluded little towns. Its hat-making, rope factories, and tanneries are quite important; the shops of its main streets are not without a tempting attractiveness, and there is all the provincial stateliness of Saint-Remy with much less stagnancy.