BULL-BAITING AT ARLES.
Arles is a town of departed greatness. It contains memorials of the civilisation of imperial Rome—a civilisation, if less complete, yet far more splendid and magnificent than our own. It was the seat of a mediæval kingdom, ruled over by a line of fifteen independent sovereigns, reaching from the time of Charles the Bald to the end of the twelfth century. It was the see of an archbishopric almost too ancient to be called mediæval. The Archbishop of Arles, St. Virgilius, consecrated Austin, the first missionary of Latin Christianity who landed on our shores. The old basilica, in which the consecration took place, still remains in a state of astonishingly good preservation, in the environs of the city. King Réné of Naples, le bon roi as he was fondly called by the people of Arles and Tarascon, was a great patron of Arlesian progress in the fifteenth century. He established two large fairs, and raised a fort in aid of the defensive measures against the pirates from the Mediterranean. To revert for a moment to more remote times, the vast amphitheatre of which we are about to speak was, in all probability, founded by the father of the Emperor Tiberius, and Constantius, the son of Constantine the Great, gave a series of splendid games within its walls about the middle of the fourth century. Constantine himself was warmly attached to Arles. Along the left bank of the wide and rushing Rhone, where the present city stands, he built an extensive palace, of which the sole remnant that now strikes the eye is a stout bastion, chiefly built of brick, and bearing the name of the Wine-press Tower (Tour de la Trouille). Some few hundred yards down the stream, from the point where this bastion stands, was once a superb bridge, which led the Aurelian Way across the river—that truly Roman line of road which long maintained uninterrupted communication between the metropolis of the empire and Cadiz. The bridge has long been swept away, and its place is now supplied by a planked crossing, supported on a dozen heavy barges, of a build peculiar to this region of the Rhone, strongly moored at both ends. Constantine also built a new town on the right bank, where the straggling faubourg of Trinquetaille now stands; hence the old Latin name of “duplex Arelas,” “Arles the double,” from its skirting the river on either side. In the fourth century, and long afterwards, the city bore the high-sounding title of “metropolis of all the Gallias.”
But Arles is now sadly degraded from the regal and vice-regal state of other days. She ranks simply as capital of an arrondissement in the department of Bouches du Rhone, and Tarascon takes, municipally, precedence of the older city. Still there is an air of busy life about the narrow, quaint, and most intricate streets. If Arles had been constructed with the express purpose of deluding the stranger, a more effectual labyrinth could hardly have been produced. A gift of “locality” far beyond the common would be required, in order to make one's way from the station to the Place du Forum, without inquiries, any time during the first week of sojourn. The Place du Forum, in the centre of the town, contains the two principal hotels, the only ones indeed to which an Englishman would be well advised to go. For a town which still numbers more than 20,000 people, this square is certainly somewhat limited. But it is a pleasant-looking place notwithstanding, and two Corinthian pillars, with part of their pediment let into a wall at the upper end, give an air of quaint antiquity to the whole.
On one Sunday morning in July, 1863, we were awakened shortly after six o'clock by a busy hum in the little “Forum,” which was completely commanded from the balcony in front of our bed-room window. Finding the hum of voices increase, rather than diminish, as one quarter of an hour succeeded another in that dreamy state of indecision in which one debates with the utmost refinements of casuistry the question, “Shall I get up now, or not?” we at length resolved on action, so far as was involved in going to the window and looking through the Venetian blinds. What was our astonishment to see the “forum” half full of serious, businesslike tillers of the soil, some evidently substantial farmers, and the rest of the crowd principally labouring men, bargaining about wages and conditions. Every now and then a little group, consisting of a farmer, followed by a labourer with his wife and son, would step across to the Hôtel du Forum or the almost contiguous Hôtel du Nord, and, calling for pen and ink, would complete an arrangement exactly as it may be seen done in the commercial-room of the “George” or the “White Hart” on an English market-day. It was easy enough to make out that Sunday was the chief market-day in Arles, which, by the way, is praiseworthily given to improved systems of tillage, and has an agricultural society on foot, as well as a “Consultative Chamber of Manufactures.” Still, the crowd seemed to be so decidedly larger than one would have encountered in a similar town on a similar day at home, that we resolved on a heroic abandonment of repose, and soon afterwards started from the hotel on a voyage of discovery.
It was not long before we became aware that there is a very fair gathering in the “Forum” on every Sunday all the year round, but that this crowd was fuller than ordinary on account of the “grande course des taureaux” which was to take place in the afternoon. Going on a little further, and reaching the breezy quays along the Rhone, one of the very few places in this or any other town in France where the affixing of handbills is not strictly “defended,” we were greeted by a large yellow placard containing the whole programme of the intended bull-baiting. “Bull-fight” we cannot call it, as the reader will allow, if he is good-natured enough to peruse the description given a little below. Occasionally, when a stray group of Spanish matadors and taureadors happen to visit the town, a special treat of actual bull-killing is afforded; but on ordinary occasions, and with only the amateur performers of the country, the bulls are simply, though very pertinaciously and effectively, baited; that is, bothered out of the few senses which they originally possess. The placard was headed by a spirited