Life & Wisdom Quote by Marguerite Gardiner

Arles arrives here as a double exposure: ruins in the foreground, living people in the background, both treated as spectacles for an outsider’s eye. Gardiner’s sentence is politely upholstered with 19th-century good manners, but its engine is appetite - the traveler’s hunger for difference. She praises “objects of antiquity” in one breath and, in the next, lumps the town’s residents into the same category of attractions: “primitive manners,” alongside “picturesque appearance.” The grammar does a lot of quiet work, turning culture into scenery.

That word “primitive” is the tell. It carries the period’s confidence that modernity has a direction, and that some places - conveniently the ones visited on a tour - can be read as earlier chapters in a civilizational story. Gardiner is not necessarily sneering; she’s participating in a fashionable way of seeing, where authenticity is measured by how untouched a community seems by the observer’s own world. The “picturesque,” too, is an aesthetic regime, not a neutral adjective: it values irregularity, texture, and quaintness because they photograph well in the mind. Arles becomes a curated view, not a complicated town.

Context matters: Gardiner writes from Britain’s travel-writing culture, when the South of France was both classical treasure-house and romantic “other,” a place where Rome’s debris and local custom could be consumed in the same itinerary. The intent is appreciation, but the subtext is power: she gets to define what counts as interesting, and to whom it belongs.