Fontaine de Vaucluse is a spring and literary landscape that gathers several strands of the novel’s treatment of place: physical nature, poetic inheritance, remembered journeys, and stories told aloud. In Randolph and Ellen Ash’s 1848 visit, the spring becomes the setting for a gesture of marital affection that answers Petrarch’s idealized, distant love; in Sabine’s account of Breton storytelling, a related fountain belongs to a place whose many names resist being fixed on a map or page.

Setting and the Ashes’ Visit

Randolph and Ellen Ash visited Fontaine de Vaucluse during their wedding journey in the summer of 1848. After travelling from Paris to Lyon by railway and descending the Rhône by boat, they made excursions from Aix-en-Provence. The spring was the culminating visit. Mortimer Cropper later retraced their route and drew on that journey in his biography of Randolph, The Great Ventriloquist.

The spring rises in a cavern that shelters the source of the Sorgue. Its water is fed by an underground river and rainfall gathered across the Vaucluse plateau and the rocky slopes of Mont Ventoux, which Randolph called Petrarch’s Windy Mount. White rocks stand amid the fast-flowing water; fig trees and exposed roots fringe the cavern, and green weeds stream with the current. The site is not merely a picturesque backdrop: its powerful, moving water supplies the physical terms through which the narrative connects landscape, poetic memory, and feeling.

Petrarch, Poetry, and Embodied Love

The account places the Ashes’ visit beside the story of Petrarch, who lived in solitude at the spring for sixteen years while contemplating his ideal love for Laure de Sade. Randolph and Ellen arrive at a place already charged with the poet’s devotion and with the knowledge of Laure’s death. Yet their situation differs sharply from Petrarch’s: Ellen is Randolph’s new wife, not a distant beloved.

Randolph carries Ellen across the water and sets her on a white stone in the stream, where she appears like a presiding mermaid or water-goddess. The gesture makes the landscape part of their shared life, turning the stone into a temporary seat and the crossing into an intimate act. The contrast is pointed: the earlier poet’s long devotion remains unfulfilled, while Randolph can hold the woman he had loved for years. The spring thus joins literary idealization to embodied affection rather than allowing love to remain an abstract poetic figure.

Randolph’s understanding of poetry supports this emphasis. He maintained that Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice, along with other celebrated objects of courtly love, had been real women loved in life, not allegories of politics, the Church, or the poets’ own souls. In arguing for the human and mortal basis of poetic love, he described poetic truth as belonging to individual embodied lives. Fontaine de Vaucluse gives that conviction a setting: a remembered literary landscape becomes newly meaningful through the particular people who visit it.

The Breton Fountain and Oral Tradition

A different fountain, Fontaine Baratoun, appears in Sabine de Kercoz’s account of winter storytelling in Brittany. The family tradition begins at Toussaint and continues through the two Black Months toward Christmas, alongside the village gatherings around the shoemaker’s workbench or the smith’s forge. Sabine’s father tells the tale of Fontaine Baratoun, also called Fontaine des Fées, in the magical forest of Brocéliande.

The place is introduced through a succession of names: Breselianda, Bercillant, Brucellier, Berthelieu, Berceliande, Brecheliant, Brecelieu, Brecilieu, and Brocéliande. Sabine’s father treats this shifting nomenclature as part of the place’s character: its borders, paths, and invisible inhabitants cannot be pinned down, though the place remains present through its changing names. The fountain therefore echoes the novel’s broader interest in how landscape persists through memory and language without becoming fully fixed or possessed.

Storytelling, Transcription, and the Page

Sabine distinguishes the living performance of a tale from its written record. Her father has tried to transcribe Gode’s stories verbatim, preserving their rhythms and neither adding nor removing material, but Sabine observes that the life goes out of Gode’s words on the page. She recalls her own effort to record what she heard and her decision to stop, out of courtesy and because the act of writing altered her listening. The journal remains private, a means for her to write through pain and discover what she has seen, rather than a transparent substitute for the spoken tale.

The fireside setting explains what transcription cannot readily preserve. In the Black Month, the bare hall becomes intimate around the fire: family and listeners work by its moving light while Gode tells stories with gestures that animate the shadows. Her performance draws together voice, movement, firelight, and audience. Sabine admits that her written retelling of one tale has acquired a literary prettiness absent from Gode’s telling, a difference she compares with the distance between the Brothers Grimm and La Motte Fouqué’s Undine. The fountain motif consequently belongs not only to a named landscape but to a changing process of transmission: place and story live differently in performance, recollection, and writing.

Narrative Significance

The two fountains are not the same location, but their appearances resonate. Fontaine de Vaucluse is encountered as a material source whose water, rocks, and history invite reflection; Fontaine Baratoun is reached through names and a tale passed on in a seasonal community. One scene places a married couple within the landscape of a famous poet’s longing, while the other examines how a place and its lore escape definitive capture by either map or transcript.

Together, these episodes make landscape an active medium of literary memory. Water carries the suggestion of poetic inheritance and living affection at Fontaine de Vaucluse; at Fontaine Baratoun, the fountain’s changing names expose the limits of written fixation. Both settings resist being reduced to an idea alone: their meaning depends on physical presence, particular voices, and the human encounters through which a place becomes memorable.