From Trets I went on by train to Gardanne, watching the evening lights die upon the silver-grey precipices of Mont Victoire. At Gardanne I had to change, and kick my heels for two hours. Gardanne is a picturesque little town, built on a hill round a castle in ruins and a church very much restored. So restored did the church seem to be from the bottom of the hill that I doubted whether it would be worth a visit. Gardanne is surrounded by broad boulevards planted with trees. Now, no sooner has one passed inward, from this boulevard, than one finds a condition of affairs only a little less dreadful than that at Trets.
Gardanne was a walled town, but all the walls have been transformed into the faces of houses, inns and cafés, plastered and painted and so disguised as not to reveal their origin till one passes behind them. Then one is involved in a labyrinth of narrow, dark lanes scrambling up the hill, running in and out among the houses, paved with cobble stones in some places, in others resolving themselves into flights of broken steps.
On scrambling to the terrace on which the church stands on the apex of the hill, I saw that it was of very remarkable width, all under one low gable--certainly extraordinarily ugly, and newly plastered, marked out in sham blocks of stone, and made as hideous as the ingenuity of man could well achieve. However, I entered the west door, and passed into almost complete darkness, only relieved by the paschal candle that was burning at a side altar and the red lamp in the choir.
As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I discovered to my surprise that I had entered a very interesting eleventh-century church, of five aisles, all under one roof, without clerestory. But the evening light through the small stained windows did not suffer me to make out any details. The east end of the church rises from the crag on which it is built, without any window in it.
On leaving the top of the hill and descending into the town I met my fate in the form of a woman who was playing a hurdy-gurdy, and singing to its strains a Provençal ballad. I stopped at once, and asked her to let me investigate the instrument. I have a fancy for ancient musical instruments. A handle is turned that grates on one catgut string, and the fingers of the left hand, passed under the hurdy-gurdy, touch notes that stop the string at various lengths, and so vary the tone.