The next night we were in Arles, in the département called, appropriately, the Bouches-du-Rhône. Putting aside warnings from the guidebooks that in Arles we would fall prey to mosquitos from the nearby Camargue, the wet region of the Rhône delta, we chose Arles because it had more to offer than the alternative—Languedoc's major city, Montpelier. Specifically, in Arles we could find traces of Van Gogh's last years and we would be close to the cloisters of the Abbey of Montmajour, which looked very scenic in photos. Getting there had required only a half-hour bus ride (by chance we caught the express bus, via the autoroute, which cut the travel time in half). But finding lodging was, for the first time, a bit of a challenge.

Arles combines elements of cities we had already seen. Like Avignon, it had a fortified inner city, although sections of the wall remain only on one corner. (That happened to be the corner where we chose to disembark from the bus, realizing that its course had turned away from the city center and toward the station north of town.) Like Nîmes, Arles has a Roman amphitheater called les Arènes, although its top section is missing, the stones probably having been harvested for building materials when those security-minded people of the Middle Ages filled the interior of les Arènes with houses. Since the medieval dwellings were removed (at a relatively late date in the beginning of the 19th century, if I interpret one post card correctly), the amphitheater has retained a shaved or surgically altered look, as if its skullcap was severed just above the eyebrow ridges suggested by its upper arches. But more so than Avignon and Nîmes, the narrow streets at the center of Arles isolate you from a sense of heavy traffic. The building façades may have been a bit better renovated than those of the other towns, but I say this only in retrospect; Arles certainly had its share of dilapidated structures. The guidebooks gave no more strict warnings about reserving ahead in Arles than in the other places, so how were we to have known?

But two looks at the hotel interiors behind the weathered façades—and at the prices they charged—made it clear that this was the most touristique of the places we had chosen to stay. At our first choice, Calendal (“Generous rooms overlooking a garden in a quiet square near the Arènes”), the woman at the desk replied to my inquiry-in-French with a reply in American English, “No, I'm sorry, we're all booked up. You should always call ahead.” She called the Hôtel Mireille, just across the river (“luxurious rooms overlooking a swimming pool”), but Maryl and I were sure we could find something in the centre at less than the 350FF asking price. But after a stop on a featureless street at the Hôtel Diderot, and a look into a small ground-floor room, which offered little light and no view but was similarly priced, our expectations began to change. Fortunately, we moved on and happened upon the Hôtel de la Muette, which, as well as living up to the “very pleasant and welcoming” assessment, had a tightly coiled spiral staircase (carpeted and decorated with colorful painted landscapes), which took us two floors up to a compact, well-lighted room that suggested to me a modern rendition of the Van Gogh's room at St-Rémy, cane chair and all. As this was the third price over 300FF, we figured we would not do better elsewhere.

In Arles we saw many signs that life imitates art—and history—more so than preserving it. On second thought, it was mostly commerce doing the imitating. One of our first sights in the city, close to where we walked off the bus, was the Hôtel Jules Cesar. It is a four-star hotel, perhaps the type where a modern Caesar and people of his ilk might choose to stay, but we wouldn't have considered it. At the tourist office we picked up a brochure that featured several self-guiding walking tours, focusing on different aspects of the city's history—ancient, medieval, recent. One tour, “in the footsteps of Vincent Van Gogh,” led us to a few locations loosely connected with paintings produced by the artist during his time in Arles (1888-1889). But unlike the still lovely gardens and lily ponds of Giverny where Maryl and I once toured Monet's estate, the city of Arles carries only a pale shadow of the vivid sights captured by Van Gogh. Maryl and I stood between the rows of sarcophagi at les Alyscamps. This ancient Roman cemetery wasinteresting for its ancient historical context, but the stones, earth, cypress trees were rendered by bright sunlight only in shades of gray. None of the brilliant swirling color of autumn leaves that Vincent had seen. Two other supposed Van Gogh scenes were rather comical. The proprietors of one café on the square where Vincent lived have capitalized on his fame by naming their establishment after his work Le Café La Nuit and even painted its façade a dappled yellow/green to resemble the effect that Van Gogh used to represent the evening light. And because the original yellow house depicted in La Maison Jaune was destroyed during World War II, the owner of a souvenir shop near the amphitheater appropriated that name and also painted his building to resemble the artwork.

Nonetheless, it was with an aperitif of pastis at the Café La Nuit on the broad, tree-shaded Place du Forum that Maryl and I chose to begin our first evening in Arles. Fortunately, our good luck streak with food in Nîmes continued with dinner in Arles. Beginning the search close to our hotel, we were lured in by the menu of La Gueule de Loup. I had no clue about the meaning or the pronunciation of gueule, but sketches of a ravenous cartoon carnivore on the menu confirmed that the loup in question was a wolf, rather than the loup we had seen on seafood menus (which is seabass). Maryl's hypothesis that the mystery word was related to gullet was right on the mark. Still, it did not occur to me until much later that in selecting a main dish of magret de canard I was perhaps fulfilling the wolf's desire of gobbling down the duck. It was served au miel des Alpilles (harvested in the nearby range of hills) et vinaigre de Xérês, a sauce that the wolf might have found a bit too sweet, but which I enjoyed. Reading over the prix fixe menu I sensed that this restaurant was closer to the realm of Parisian cuisine than others we had seen, because many of the terms were indecipherable, even with the aid of the table of food terms. Maryl felt adventurous and, rather than asking, went with her hunch about encornets farcis en Crepinette, sauce persil. Clearly there would be parsley sauce, but what were these encornets? (They're not even in my Larousse.) Did farci indicate that they would be served Persian style, or that they spoke Persian? No, the list tells me that means “stuffed.” And what was stuffed became clear enough when a plate with two pig ears was set before Maryl. From the fact that a carving knife had been set out before me, for the duck, while Maryl was given only a scooping utensil, we both deduced that she would not be required to eat the ears themselves. Her sauce persil was tasty, but the stuffing was a kind of coarse hash, probably pork-based—not especially appetizing. Maryl made up for it by going with a rich chocolate dessert, while I, electing to go with some framboises, was not quite satisfied.