The Big Read: Starry, starry nights

Elizabeth Sleith follows a path of genius and madness on a five-star river cruise in the South of France

WHEN the failing artist Vincent Van Gogh moved from Paris to the South of France in February 1888, he'd been lured by light. After years of toiling in drab and dreary tones, he told his brother, Theo, he was "looking for a different light [and] a brighter sky". And Arles, the last city on the Rhone before the river reaches the Mediterranean, with 300 days of summer a year, would be his sparkling salvation.

Here, in fields framed by cypresses and washed with wheat, his own work would burst into colour. In 15 fertile months he would make more than 200 paintings; sow the first of those convulsive brush strokes into sunflowers and starbursts; and dream of making an Eden for artists in the house he painted yellow.

But, when the dream faded, it was in the same Yellow House that he would commit his second-most savage act of self-mutilation: the hacking of his ear on December 23 1888.

On a sun-splashed day in July 2014, in Arles, I am tip-toeing on the edge of that madness. As a passenger on a river cruise, I have joined a guided amble through this Unesco-stamped town, past Roman monuments dating back to 1BC; and the 12th-century Church of St Trophime, where a leather-skinned gipsy sits begging on the steps under the white-stone cataracts of Romanesque sculptures.

But Arles's most famous son echoes everywhere. Though the Yellow House of his painting is gone - vanished by an Allied bomb in 1944 - one can still find its neighbour in the Place Lamartine, while nearby, on the Place de Forum, tourists dine under yellow awnings at the Café la Nuit, a copy of his immortal Café Terrace at Night. And at the hospital where he went after his mind became unmoored, now a visitors' centre, the melancholy garden he painted is awash with blue irises and forget-me-nots.

There are more Van Gogh memories on the outskirts of town and more Roman ruins, but the sun is setting. And on the same river Van Gogh gave us mirroring the night sky, our ship must part the stars he painted.

The SS Catherine, my magnificent home for seven nights, follows a languid route up the Rhone through Provence and Burgundy. Sailing in the evenings, we dine on local specialities so delectable, with fine French wines poured by sommeliers, that her five-star grading doesn't seem fair. By moonlight, we sip cocktails on the balcony and thrill to the captain's skill at guiding her 443 feet (135m) through the nightly parade of giant locks, her edges sometimes a lemon wedge from the wall. And every morning, we open our curtains on another charming village, where the buildings crowd against each other like old man's tainted teeth, and take another guided stroll down cobbled alleys into centuries past.

There are truffles and cherries in market squares. A bus ride to fields of lavender. There are plane trees, planted in abundance here for the shade of their colossal leaves; there are vineyards, churches and chocolate. And at every step, there is that same buttery light that so intoxicated Van Gogh's skies, and more manifestations of its magic and madness.

Inside the medieval walls of Avignon, we visit a monument to a much grander heaven. Amid a feud between the Catholic Church and the French crown, the papacy left Rome for Avignon in 1309. Ultimately, nine pontiffs would live here but history remembers seven "real" popes and two "anti-popes." Tellingly, no pope in the almost 650 years since has ever set foot in Avignon. But the Palace of the Popes, a fortress built between 1335 and 1364 and the largest Gothic palace in the world, echoes with the politics of piety. From their private apartments to the halls used for conclaves, visitors cross the same stone floors once glanced by great men's robes and stand in the gaze of the very same artworks that they did - spectacularly well preserved frescoes, painted in the mid-1300s, still bursting with brightness.

After a gripping visit, we shake off the drama by wandering in the Old Town. We lick lemon gelato, watch a carousel, and smile at the sight of a modern insanity: French women wobbling over cobblestones in their ludicrously high shoes.

Another sunrise brings us to another walled city, Viviers. Dating back to the 5th century, it has miraculously survived centuries of tempestuous history - the religious wars of the 16th century, the French Revolution, two world wars and a German occupation - essentially intact.

With a population of less than 4000 and an old city with streets too narrow for cars, it is today a city of cats, which we find curled up under window boxes and padding down deserted lanes. Here, two more artists are waiting for us. In the 12th-century Saint-Vincent de Viviers, the smallest cathedral in France, sitting under tapestries gifted by Napoleon, we drift while an organist plays us a private concert, then crowd inside a local potter's workshop to watch him at the wheel.

But it is at Tournon the following day that we meet the most delightful madman. In the early 2000s, Eric Le Longue made a lunatic decision: to abandon his corporate success for art - only a ramshackle garden would be his canvas and flowers would be his paint. The land, climbing into the steep hills behind Tournon's Renaissance ramparts, was home to a monastery from 1654 and a nunnery from the early 19th century. But when Le Longue bought it in 2008 it had grown wild for 60 years. Today it is Le Jardin d'Eden, a terraced wonderland of honeysuckle, jasmine and oleander; wrought-iron fences, ponds and fountains. There is a 450-year-old olive tree and a 550-year-old maple. Le Longue himself leads us through this lovely labyrinth to heavenly heights. At the top, we peer through roses down on Tournon's 10th-century castle and the Côtes du Rhône vineyards, growing their own little tastes of heaven, beyond.

Our last stop, Lyon, is something of a culture shock after all those tiny medieval towns. The third largest city in France, it is vibrant and eclectic, with wide boulevards and bicycle lanes, modern sculptures and museums. High on a hill over the city is its grand Basilica, built between 1872 and 1884, and a mini Eiffel Tower, in fact a replica of the third level of the Paris landmark.

Lyon's Old Town is a living museum of Renaissance days. The narrow buildings, built high to escape the flooding whims of the Rhone, were restored after World War 2 in ochres, oranges, umbers to reflect the influence of northern Italians who travelled here as bankers and merchants in the early 16th century.

The city claims a proud history of inventors and innovators whose quirky cast includes Little Prince author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Élisabeth Thible, the first woman to ride in a hot air balloon in 1784. But two of its brightest were surely the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, whose surname in French actually means "light". Their father, Antoine, was a pioneer in personal cameras and colour photography and his sons grew up in a house of invention.

Now their former family home is a marvellous museum, which in part catalogues the development of photography. Here, tourists aim their long lenses at clever exhibits that trace their history, including a collection of the earliest devices and the grainy, dream-like images they produced.

But perhaps the brothers' most incandescent achievement was in "animated photos" - they patented the cinematograph and in 1894 used it to make the world's first motion picture: 46 seconds of workers pouring out of their family factory in Lyon. They were also responsible for the first commercial public screening on December 28 1895, when a handful of punters at the Grand Café in Paris paid to watch 10 films, all about 50 seconds long. The museum has all their films on display, including Arrival of a Train at a Station - the one most modern movie-goers have seen incorporated into other films, showing audiences shrieking as the train barrels in, threatening to leap off the screen. At the very spot where their Workers Leaving the Factory was shot, just across from the museum, giant panels bear the phantasmal images of those long-dead faces, the first to live forever on film.

And so, as it ends, we have sailed a constellation, from Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone to the ghosts of the world's first movie stars.

While living in Arles, Van Gogh wrote: "The sight of the stars always makes me dream". For my part, I imagine the stars may always make me dream of old movies and madmen, and of a five-star ship in France, floating in moonlight and under splendid yellow suns.

Sleith was a guest of Uniworld Boutique River Cruises