Grove Koger

In my post for April 26, 2021, I described a visit that Maggie and I made to the site of the Pont du Gard in 2008. We were staying in Avignon, and had booked a short tour that would take us to the hilltop towns of Gordes and Les Baux as well as the famous Roman aqueduct bridge. I try to avoid tours, as they tend to pre-package your experiences for you, but unless you’re willing to rent a car or puzzle out the eccentricities of local bus schedules, they may be your only choice.

The Pont, which stands 155 feet high, was part of a long aqueduct that channeled water over the Gard River to Nemausus (today’s Nîmes) from the Eure springs near Uzès. It was constructed (without mortar!) by the Romans in the early decades of the current era, and, although the actual distance from the water’s source to Nîmes is only 12 miles, the aqueduct itself stretches along a course of some 31 miles in order to allow the water level to drop gradually (a total of only 41 feet) until it reaches its destination.

Moving forward nearly two millennia, the 1891 edition of Baedeker’s Southern France has this to say: “The Pont du Gard, spanning the Gard or Gardon at a bend of the valley… , is one of the most imposing monuments of the Romans which remain to us.… The bridge is about 880 ft. long …, and is composed of three tiers of arches, each less wide than the one below.… The whole is admirably constructed of large stones, and no cement has been used except for the canal on the top.” And so on, in the guide’s informative but scrupulously dry prose.

For a livelier look, I’ve turned to Henry James and his Litle Tour in France, which was originally published, just a few years before, in 1884. “I gave all my attention,” wrote James, “to that great structure. You are very near it before you see it; the ravine it spans suddenly opens and exhibits the picture.…The ravine is the valley of the Gardon, which the road from Nimes has followed some time without taking account of it, but which, exactly at the right distance from the aqueduct, deepens and expands, and puts on those characteristics which are best suited to give it effect. The gorge becomes romantic, still, and solitary, and, with its white rocks and wild shrubbery, hangs over the clear, colored river, in whose slow course there is here and there a deeper pool. Over the valley, from side to side, and ever so high in the air, stretch the three tiers of the tremendous bridge. They are unspeakably imposing, and nothing could well be more Roman. The hugeness, the solidity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude of the whole thing leave you nothing to say—at the time—and make you stand gazing. You simply feel that it is noble and perfect, that it has the quality of greatness.”

James admits, however, that, “at the same time” he “discovered in [the Pont] a certain stupidity, a vague brutality. That element is rarely absent from great Roman work.”  

I sensed nothing of the stupidity that James mentions, and I don’t believe that Maggie did either. After all, the heaviest sandstone blocks in the Pont weigh 6 tons, and, given such enormous weights, I’m willing to allow quite a bit of “vague brutality.” In any case, our time at the Pont was short and another destination (or was it two?) awaited us. Our driver had been amiable enough, and there was another lazy June evening back in Avignon to look forward to. We were, after all, in Provence, “the land,” as James put it, “where the silver-gray earth is impregnated with the light of the sky.”  

Who could ask for more?

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