Irresistible Aix

As anyone lucky enough to have attended the Aix Lyric Festival knows, it can be pure enchantment. Walking into the open-air theater in the courtyard of the 17th-century episcopal palace as twilight cools the soft summer air, checking the single slender tree stage right to gauge the wind, folding jacket or shawl into a cushion for the hard wooden seat and feeling the excitement as the music begins, sometimes in competition with chirping cicadas.

During the 60 years since its founding in 1948, the Lyric Festival of Aix-en-Provence has had its ups and downs, from the simple one-opera summer show of its early days, when Mozart was the only famous name on the program, to the international glamour of its current Wagner Ring Cycle-Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle, new indoor Grand Théâtre de Provence and all. But through good times and lean, one of the major attractions of the Festival d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence-now known simply as the Festival d’Aix-has always been the city itself.

Elegant, aristocratic, sophisticated, a spirited beauty with a sunny southern accent and a racy past-it would take a hard heart and a dim eye to resist the charms of Aix, Festival or no.

Start with the Cours Mirabeau, for instance, a broad thoroughfare beneath a dappled tunnel of stately plane trees, generally considered the most beautiful street in Provence. Early in the morning, when the air is fresh, businessfolk and students-Aix’s universities count some 40,000 of them-en route to work or school buy their newspapers and sip coffee on the café terraces that line the avenue’s sunny side. By midday it’s thronged with lunchers and bookstore browsers, and tourists with guidebooks in hand. In the afternoon, nannies are out with baby carriages and kids, at sundown it’s time for pastis, and as night falls the restaurant and café tables spill over, teenagers rollerblade, diners linger and the promenade continues long after dark.

It isn’t perfect, mind you. A few fast-food outlets and tourist traps are tucked into the lineup of terraces; the saplings that recently replaced a handful of diseased plane trees haven’t yet grown enough to fill the gaps in the canopy; and purists will argue that the well-intentioned effort to reduce traffic a few years ago, by widening the already broad sidewalks and squeezing automobiles into a narrow file, actually played havoc with the avenue’s once-exquisite 17th-century proportions. But those are just quibbles in the grander scheme of gorgeous Aix.

If Arles represents Roman Provence, and Avignon the medieval, Aix is the quintessence of the 17th and 18th centuries, when the newly rich of the prosperous town built their mansions of glowing golden stone and spared no expense on the exuberant details. Aix was designed to delight, and everywhere you look there are squares and fountains, carved wooden doors and stone portals, muscular atlantes and graceful caryatids shouldering elegant wrought-iron balconies tipped with gold.

North of the Cours Mirabeau the old town center is a rabbit warren of curving and cobbled shopping streets in which, even armed with a map, it’s a cinch to get lost. Turn a corner here and you’re in the Place d’Albertas, a cobbled square with a circular fountain surrounded by houses in surprising disrepair, a square so exquisite it stops you in your tracks. Farther along there’s the Place Richelme, the daily farmers’ marketplace, with stands of fruits and vegetables spread out under the trees. Three days a week, a flower market fills the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, beneath an ancient clock tower with a bell delicately caged, Provençal-style, in lacy wrought iron. Even the Post Office in Aix is beautiful, installed in the 18th-century Grain Hall, its facade adorned with figures of abundance and feminine allegories of the Rhône and Durance rivers (the Durance tends to overflow, the excellent Tourist Office guide will tell you, so Damsel Durance here has one leg dangling over the parapet). Just beyond the bell tower, the Forum des Cardeurs is an Italianate quadrangle filled with café tables under plane trees, a little gem of 1960s urban renewal that replaced a former slum block.

All of these squares have fountains, of course. There are some 40 public fountains in Aix, although no one seems absolutely sure of their number. In the sprawling 15th-century Place des Prêcheurs, site of the big Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday food market, water-spouting lions guard an obelisk with an eagle nesting atop. Dolphins play on a pillar in the Place des Quatre Dauphins, and chubby angels ride trumpeting swans on the grand fountain of La Rotonde, the gateway to the Cours Mirabeau.

The moss-covered fountain in the center of the Cours is fed by springs already known to the ancient Gauls. In the 2nd century BC, the area belonged to the Salyens, a Gallic tribe whose women ritually bathed in the springs, believed to be a source of fertility. Salyen warriors were renowned for displaying the severed heads of their enemies-strung around their horses’ necks, proudly nailed on posts, carved in effigy on stone walls and amulets. Fascinating statues in the Musée Granet depict kneeling Salyen warriors holding as many as five or six enemy heads. (In fact, you suddenly notice, there are carved heads all over Aix, on facades, fountains, cornices and doors.)

In 124 BC, the Roman consul Caius Sextius destroyed the Salyen settlement of Entremont just to the north-now an archaeological site-and founded a new city near the thermal springs where his troops bathed their wounds. As a peace offering he included the conquered locals in the new town’s name, along with his own: Aquae Sextius Saluviorum. Over the centuries, that tongue-twister was reduced to Aix.

Little remains of Gallo-Roman Aix except the artifacts in the Granet Museum and fragments of the thermal baths within the modern Thermes Sextius spa. The baptistry of Saint Sauveur cathedral dates to the late 4th century, but its imposing marble columns are almost surely from an earlier Roman temple on the site. The cathedral is, in fact, a mosaic of the city’s history: the Merovingian baptistry has a Renaissance cupola, the three naves are Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque, there’s a 12th-century cloister, a 13th-century choir, a 14th-century bell tower, 16th-century choir stalls and tapestries (originally woven for Canterbury Cathedral) and a massive organ installed in 1746.

As if that telescoped history weren’t enough, the cathedral also houses two late medieval masterpieces. Hidden behind panels that must be opened by the sacristan (inquire at his office), the church’s massive 1505 polished-walnut Gothic doors are ornately carved in high relief, depicting four Old Testament prophets and twelve sibyls-all the work of one 25-year-old artist, Jean Guiramond. After several years of restoration, the cathedral’s second masterpiece, Nicolas Froment’s suberp 1476 triptych of The Burning Bush, is back  in place, and it’s a marvelous sight to behold.

Another famous medieval painting, an Annunciation attributed to Barthélemy d’Eyck, is currently displayed in the Saint Esprit church while its usual home, the church of Sainte Marie Madeleine, is being renovated. It’s a beautiful picture, but full of malevolent symbols. In the arches above the angel’s head are a dragon and a bat; the angel’s wings are owl-like, a monkey dances on the prayer book lectern and a vase holds digitalis, belladonna and basil-sorcerer’s plants, all three. According to legend, the evil elements were inserted in revenge for equally evil elements found in the altarpiece of a chapel in the cathedral-both works commissioned by rival families of the day, taking potshots at one another in paintings.

For a time The Burning Bush was attributed to Good King René, an early Renaissance man-musician, painter and poet, accomplished in languages, mathematics, astrology and geology. René had a string of titles, but the only function he actually exercised was that of Count of Provence, with Aix as his capital. Beloved by his subjects and a renowned bon vivant, he brought artists and scholars to his court, provided public doctors and street cleaners, worked in his own vineyards and introduced Muscat wine to the region-his statue on the Cours Mirabeau, by David d’Angers, shows him holding aloft a bunch of Muscat grapes.

The Cours, on the site of King René’s ramparts, was named for Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Count of Mirabeau. Although Mirabeau roughly means “beautiful sight”, and the avenue certainly is one, the count was anything but. Famously ugly, he was a dissolute scoundrel who spent much time in jail, mostly for debauchery and unpaid debts. At 23 he seduced Mademoiselle de Marignane, brazenly leaving his carriage in front of her family’s mansion to prove he had stayed the night, and then, having ruined her reputation, he married her for her money. In prison again, he wrote an Essay on Despotism. Pardoned as usual because of his noble standing, he turned to politics and gained everlasting fame as the greatest orator of the French Revolution. He died in 1791, aged 40.

The most famous café-restaurant on the Cours Mirabeau, Les Deux Garçons, opened a year later, in 1792. The restaurant was named after the two waiters who founded it, but two other young men were its most famous customers: in the 1850s school friends Paul Cézanne and Emile Zola used to spend afternoons on the terrace, before they went to Paris in search of fame and fortune. Today you can sit on their terrace and admire the magnificent mansions of the Cours, each with its own tale to tell-in no. 10, Angélique de Castellane was murdered by her husband; the Cézanne family home and hatter’s shop was at no. 55.

Scene of the Mirabeau seduction, the Marignane mansion sits just beyond the Cours in the Mazarin quarter, a grid of narrow streets and stately mansions created in the 1640s by Archbishop Michel Mazarin, brother of the famous Cardinal. There you’ll find the former priory of the Knights of Malta, now the Granet Museum-newly renovated and greatly expanded-where Cézanne took his first drawing classes. The museum’s impressive collection includes Provençal primitives, Le Nain, Van Loo, Ingres, Géricault, David, Rubens and a handful of Cézannes.

Cézanne never stayed away for long, returning constantly to Aix and Mont Saint-Victoire, the jagged mountain east of town that became his artistic obsession. In 1897 he built a studio on a hill at the city’s edge, where he painted many Baigneuses, bathers gathered at pastoral springs, like the Salyen women of yore. One Grandes Baigneuses was so big he had to cut a floor-to-ceiling hole in the studio wall to get it out. The hole is still there, along with drawings and sketches, his easel, smock, palette and pipe, just as they were left at his death in 1906.

 

AIX EN PROVENCE NOTEBOOK:

Festival d’Aix website

HOTELS

Villa Gallici 18 bis ave de la Violette, 04.42.23.29.23. Exquisite rooms and total luxury in a hillside garden setting.

Aquabella 2 rue des Etuves, 04.42.99.15.00. A modern hotel with spacious rooms, adjacent to the Thermes Sextius spa.

Hôtel des Augustins 3 rue de la Masse, 04.42.27.28.59. A charming old hotel in a former 15th-century convent.

Hôtel Cardinal 24 rue Cardinal, 04.42.38.32.30. Small and comfortable, in the Mazarin quarter. One of the ground floor rooms in the annex has a small private garden.

Hôtel Les Quatre Dauphins 24 rue Roux Alphéran, 04.42.38.16.39. In the Mazarin quarter, very small but reasonably priced.

RESTAURANTS

Le Clos de la Violette 10 ave Violette, 04.42.23.30.71. The city’s long-time one-star restaurant, set in a small garden. Expensive.

Chez Féraud 8 rue du Puits Juifs, 04.42.63.07.27. A delightful small family-run restaurant serving traditional Provençal cuisine.

Le Passage 10 rue Villars, 04.42.37.09.00. A modern café-restaurant-bar-tea salon in a converted factory, run by Reine Sammut, chef of the one-star Auberge La Fenière in Lourmarin.

Les Deux Garcons 53 cours Mirabeau, 04.42.26.00.51. Aix’s most famous café-restaurant-terrific terrace, beautiful decor, okay food, high prices, serves all day.

 

Originally published in the June 2008 issue of France Today; updated October 2010