The church of this convent is evidently very ancient. It is attributed to St. Virgil, Archbishop of Arles, in the seventh century, and it has been ruined in the most picturesque manner.
A. B. Clayton del. from Sketches by J. Woods. Edwards. Sculp.
At some distance is another convent, of which the ruins appear yet more considerable; and both for form and situation, are of great value in the landscape.
Arles is in an unwholesome situation. It rained almost all the time we were there, with a suffocating south wind; I do not know whether it was owing to this, or to the bad cookery at the Lion d’Or, (the Hotel du Nord was full) that my health suffered, and I became very impatient to get away. This was attended with some difficulty, as there is no post road to the place. The soil is clayey, and the ways are almost impassable in wet weather; it is true there are rocky limestone hills at a little distance, but nobody thinks of mending the road with these materials. At last we procured a cart, and placing a mattress in it, proceeded at a foot pace to Tarrascon, and thence to St. Remi, where a fine air and wholesome food soon restored me. We do not find our hosts very complaisant or obliging in this part of France; they give us what they please, when they please, and how they please; and if you don’t like it, you may let it alone. However, since we cannot bend them to our ways, we endeavour to accommodate ourselves to theirs, and do not experience any essential inconvenience.
The monuments of St. Remi are about a mile from the modern town. They occupy a delightful situation at the foot of some fine limestone rocks of the principality of Baux, and the ground slopes from them into a fertile plain, which the eye entirely commands. They consist of two distinct objects, entirely unencumbered by any neighbouring building, and with a few trees about them which afford some degree of shade. The first is an arch, supposed to be of the same date with that of Orange, and according to some French antiquaries, erected on the same occasion; but there is no other authority for this than a supposed similarity in the architecture. All the upper part is gone, and we have neither capitals nor entablature. There has been but a single arch, and that remains nearly entire, with the lower part of two columns on each side, and their bases and pedestals. The bases are of the Roman, not of the Greek, Attic; and though in other respects there is some similarity to the arch at Orange, yet it is hardly enough to prove that they were productions of the same period. The archivolt in both is in one face, entirely filled with a sculpture of leaves and fruit; two gigantic figures occupy the space between the columns on each side, and there are slight indications of a victory on each spandril. These are all the figures that remain.