The troubadours and the “courts of love” have gone the way of all mediæval institutions and nothing has quite come up to take their place, but the memory of all the literary history of the old province is so plentifully bestrewn through the pages of modern writers of history and romance that no spot in the known world is more prolific in reminders of those idyllic times than this none too well known and travelled part of old France. If the spirit of old romance is so dead or latent in the modern traveller by automobile or the railway that he does not care to go back to mediæval times, he can still turn to the pages of Daudet and find portraiture which is so characteristic of Tarascon and the country round about to-day that it may be recognized even by the stranger, though the inhabitant of that most interesting Rhône-side city denies that there is the slightest resemblance. Then there is Felix Gras’s “Rouges du Midi,” first written in the Provençal tongue. One must not call the tongue a patois, for the Provençal will tell you emphatically that his is a real and pure tongue, and that it is the Breton who speaks a patois. From the Provençal this famous tale of Felix Gras was translated into French and speedily became a classic. It is romance, if you like, but most truthful, if only because it proves Carlyle and his estimates of the celebrated “Marseilles Battalion” entirely wrong. Even in the English translation the tale loses but little of its originality and colour, and it remains a wonderful epitome of the traits and characters of the Provençaux. Dumas himself, in that time-tried (but not time-worn) romance of “Monte Cristo,” rises to heights of topographical description and portrait delineations which he scarcely ever excelled. Every one has read, and supposedly has at his finger-tips, the pages of this thrilling romance, but if he is journeying through Provence, let him read it all again, and he will find passages of a directness and truthfulness that have often been denied this author--by critics who have taken only an arbitrary and prejudiced view-point. Marseilles, the scene of the early career of Dantes and the lovely Mercédès, stands out perhaps most clearly, but there is a wonderful chapter which deals with the Pays d’Arles, and is as good topographical portraiture to-day as when it was written. Here are some lines of Dumas which no traveller down the Rhône valley should neglect to take as his guide and mentor if he “stops off”--as he most certainly should--at Tarascon, and makes the round of Tarascon, Beaucaire, Bellegarde, and the Pont du Gard. “Such of my readers as may have made a pedestrian journey to the south of France may perhaps have noticed, midway between the town of Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde, a small roadside inn, from the front of which hung, creaking and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a rude representation of the ancient Pont du Gard.”