bare mass, without ornament, without grace, despoiled of its battlements
and defaced with sordid modern windows, covering the Rocher des Doms and
looking down over the Rhone and the broken bridge of Saint-Bénazet
(which stops in such a sketchable manner in mid-stream), and across at
the lonely tower of Philippe le Bel and the ruined wall of Villeneuve,
makes at a distance, in spite of its poverty, a great figure, the effect
of which is carried out by the tower of the church beside it (crowned
though the latter be, in a top-heavy fashion, with an immense modern
image of the Virgin) and by the thick, dark foliage of the garden laid
out on a still higher portion of the eminence. This garden recalls
faintly and a trifle perversely the grounds of the Pincian at Rome. I
know not whether it is the shadow of the Papal name, present in both
places, combined with a vague analogy between the churches--which,
approached in each case by a flight of steps, seemed to defend the
precinct--but each time I have seen the Promenade des Doms it has
carried my thoughts to the wider and loftier terrace from which you look
away at the Tiber and Saint Peter's.
As you stand before the Papal palace, and especially as you enter it,
you are struck with its being a very dull monument. History enough was
enacted here: the great schism lasted from 1305 to 1370, during which
seven Popes, all Frenchmen, carried on the court of Avignon on
principles that have not commended themselves to the esteem of
posterity. But history has been whitewashed away, and the scandals of
that period have mingled with the dust of dilapidations and repairs. The
building has for many years been occupied as a barrack for regiments of
the line, and the main characteristics of a barrack--an extreme nudity
and a very queer smell--prevail throughout its endless compartments.
Nothing could have been more cruelly dismal than the appearance it
presented at the time of this third visit of mine. A regiment, changing
quarters, had departed the day before, and another was expected to
arrive (from Algeria) on the morrow. The place had been left in the
befouled and belittered condition which marks the passage of the
military after they have broken camp, and it would offer but a
melancholy welcome to the regiment that was about to take possession.
Enormous windows had been left carelessly open all over the building,
and the rain and wind were beating into empty rooms and passages, making
draughts which purified, perhaps, but which scarcely cheered. For an
arrival it was horrible. A handful of soldiers had remained behind. In
one of the big vaulted rooms several of them were lying on their
wretched beds, in the dim light, in the cold, in the damp, with the
bleak bare walls before them and their overcoats, spread over them,
pulled up to their noses. I pitied them immensely, though they may have
felt less wretched than they looked. I thought not of the old
profligacies and crimes, not of the funnel-shaped torture-chamber
(which, after exciting the shudder of generations, has been ascertained
now, I believe, to have been a mediæval bakehouse), not of the tower of
the _glacière_ and the horrors perpetrated here in the Revolution, but
of the military burden of young France. One wonders how young France
endures it, and one is forced to believe that the French conscript has,
in addition to his notorious good-humour, greater toughness than is
commonly supposed by those who consider only the more relaxing
influences of French civilisation. I hope he finds occasional
compensation for such moments as I saw those damp young peasants passing
on the mattresses of their hideous barrack, without anything around to
remind them that they were in the most civilised of countries. The only
traces of former splendour now visible in the Papal pile are the walls
and vaults of two small chapels, painted in fresco, so battered and
effaced as to be scarcely distinguishable, by Simone Memmi. It offers of
course a peculiarly good field for restoration, and I believe the
Government intend to take it in hand. I mention this fact without a
sigh, for they cannot well make it less interesting than it is at
present.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxiv
[Villeneuve-lès-Avignon]
Fortunately it did not rain every day (though I believe it was raining
everywhere else in the department); otherwise I should not have been
able to go to Villeneuve and to Vaucluse. The afternoon indeed was
lovely when I walked over the interminable bridge that spans the two
arms of the Rhone, divided here by a considerable island, and directed
my course, like a solitary horseman--on foot, to the lonely tower which
forms one of the outworks of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The picturesque,
half-deserted little town lies a couple of miles farther up the river.
The immense round towers of its old citadel and the long stretches of
ruined wall covering the slope on which it lies are the most striking
features of the nearer view, as you look from Avignon across the Rhone.
I spent a couple of hours in visiting these objects, and there was a
kind of pictorial sweetness in the episode; but I have not many details
to relate. The isolated tower I just mentioned has much in common with
the detached donjon of Montmajour, which I had looked at in going to Les
Baux and to which I paid my respects in speaking of that excursion.
Also the work of Philippe le Bel (built in 1307), it is amazingly big
and stubborn, and formed the opposite limit of the broken bridge whose
first arches (on the side of Avignon) alone remain to give a measure of
the occasional volume of the Rhone. Half an hour's walk brought me to
Villeneuve, which lies away from the river, looking like a big village
half depopulated and occupied for the most part by dogs and cats, old
women and small children; these last, in general, remarkably pretty, in
the manner of the children of Provence. You pass through the place,
which seems in a singular degree vague and unconscious, and come to the
rounded hill on which the ruined abbey lifts its yellow walls--the
Benedictine abbey of Saint-André, at once a church, a monastery, and a
fortress. A large part of the crumbling enceinte disposes itself over
the hill; but for the rest, all that has preserved any traceable
cohesion is a considerable portion of the citadel. The defence of the
place appears to have been entrusted largely to the huge round towers
that flank the old gate; one of which, the more complete, the ancient
warden (having first inducted me into his own dusky little apartment and
presented me with a great bunch of lavender) enabled me to examine in
detail. I would almost have dispensed with the privilege, for I think I
have already mentioned that an acquaintance with many feudal interiors
has wrought a sad confusion in my mind. The image of the outside always
remains distinct; I keep it apart from other images of the same sort; it
makes, a picture sufficiently ineffaceable. But the guard-rooms, winding
staircases, loopholes, prisons, repeat themselves and intermingle; they
have a wearisome family likeness. There are always black passages and
corners, and walls twenty feet thick; and there is always some high
place to climb up to for the sake of a "magnificent" view. The views,
too, are apt to run together. These dense gate-towers of Philippe le Bel
struck me, however, as peculiarly wicked and grim. Their capacity is of
the largest, and they contain ever so many devilish little dungeons,
lighted by the narrowest slit in the prodigious wall, where it comes
over one with a good deal of vividness and still more horror that
wretched human beings once lay there rotting in the dark. The dungeons
of Villeneuve made a particular impression on me--greater than any
except those of Loches, which must surely be the most gruesome in
Europe. I hasten to add that every dark hole at Villeneuve is called a
dungeon; and I believe it is well established that in this manner, in
almost all old castles and towers, the sensibilities of the modern
tourist are unscrupulously played upon. There were plenty of black holes
in the Middle Ages that were not dungeons, but household receptacles of
various kinds; and many a tear dropped in pity for the groaning captive
has really been addressed to the spirits of the larder and the
faggot-nook. For all this, there are some very bad corners in the towers
of Villeneuve, so that I was not wide of the mark when I began to think
again, as I had often thought before, of the stoutness of the human
composition in the Middle Ages and the tranquillity of nerve of people
to whom the groaning captive and the blackness of a "living tomb" were
familiar ideas which did not at all interfere with their happiness or
their sanity. Our modern nerves, our irritable sympathies, our easy
discomforts and fears, make one think (in some relations) less
respectfully of human nature. Unless indeed it be true, as I have heard
it maintained, that in the Middle Ages every one did go mad--every one
_was_ mad. The theory that this was a period of general dementia is not
altogether untenable.
Within the old walls of its immense abbey the town of Villeneuve has
built itself a rough faubourg; the fragments with which the soil was
covered having been, i suppose, a quarry of material. There are no
streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random
over the uneven ground. The only important feature is a convent of
cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls)
behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down into,
or down at simply, from the battlements of the citadel. One or two of
the nuns were passing in and out of the house; they wore grey robes with
a bright red cape. I thought their situation most provincial. I came
away and wandered a little over the base of the hill, outside the walls.
Small white stones cropped through the grass, over which low olive-trees
were scattered. The afternoon had a yellow brightness. I sat down under
one of the little trees, on the grass--the delicate grey branches were
not much above my head--and rested and looked at Avignon across the
Rhone. It was very soft, very still and pleasant, though I am not sure
it was all I once should have expected of that combination of elements:
an old city wall for a background, a canopy of olives, and for a couch
the soil of Provence. When I came back to Avignon the twilight was
already thick, but I walked up to the Rocher des Doms. Here I again had
the benefit of that amiable moon which had already lighted up for me so
many romantic scenes. She was full, and she rose over the Rhone and made
it look in the distance like a silver serpent. I remember saying to
myself at this moment that it would be a beautiful evening to walk
round the walls of Avignon--the remarkable walls which challenge
comparison with those of Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, and which it was
my duty, as an observer of the picturesque, to examine with some
attention. Presenting themselves to that silver sheen, they could not
fail to be impressive. So, at least, I said to myself; but unfortunately
I did not believe what I said. It is a melancholy fact that the walls of
Avignon had never impressed me at all, and I had never taken the trouble
to make the circuit. They are continuous and complete, but for some
mysterious reason they fail of their effect. This is partly because they
are very low, in some places almost absurdly so, being buried in new
accumulations of soil and by the filling in of the moat up to their
middle. Then they have been too well tended; they not only look at
present very new, but look as if they had never been old. The fact that
their extent is very much greater makes them more of a curiosity than
those of Carcassonne; but this is exactly, at the same time, what is
fatal to their pictorial unity. With their thirty-seven towers and seven
gates, they lose themselves too much to make a picture that will compare
with the admirable little vignette of Carcassonne. I may mention, now
that I am speaking of the general mass of Avignon, that nothing is more
curious than the way in which, viewed from a distance, it is all reduced
to naught by the vast bulk of the palace of the Popes. From across the
Rhone, or from the train as you leave the place, this great grey block
is all Avignon; it seems to occupy the whole city, extensive, with its
shrunken population, as the city is.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxxv
[Vaucluse]
It was the morning after this, I think (a certain Saturday), that when I
came out of the Hôtel de l'Europe, which lies in shallow concavity just
within the city gate that opens on the Rhone--came out to look at the
sky from the little _place_ before the inn and see how the weather
promised for the obligatory excursion to Vaucluse--I found the whole
town in a terrible taking. I say the whole town advisedly, for every
inhabitant appeared to have taken up a position on the bank of the
river, or on the uppermost parts of the promenade of the Doms, where a
view of its course was to be obtained. It had risen surprisingly in the
night, and the good people of Avignon had reason to know what a rise of
the Rhone might signify. The town, in its lower portions, is quite at
the mercy of the swollen waters; and it was mentioned to me that in 1856
the Hôtel de l'Europe, in its convenient hollow, was flooded up to
within a few feet of the ceiling of the dining-room, where the long
board which had served for so many a table d'hôte floated disreputably,
with its legs in the air. On the present occasion the mountains of the
Ardêche, where it had been raining for a month, had sent down torrents
which, all that fine Friday night, by the light of the innocent-looking
moon, poured themselves into the Rhone and its tributary the Durance.
The river was enormous and continued to rise, and the sight was
beautiful and horrible. The water in many places was already at the base
of the city walls, the quay, with its parapet just emerging, being
already covered. The country, seen from the Plateau des Doms, resembled
a vast lake, with protrusions of trees, houses, bridges, gates. The
people looked at it in silence, as I had seen people before--on the
occasion of a rise of the Arno, at Pisa--appear to consider the prospect
of an inundation. "Il monte; il monte toujours"--there was not much said
but that. It was a general holiday, and there was an air of wishing to
profit, for sociability's sake, by any interruption of the commonplace
(the popular mind likes "a change," and the element of change mitigates
the sense of disaster); but the affair was not otherwise a holiday.
Suspense and anxiety were in the air, and it never is pleasant to be
reminded of the helplessness of man. In the presence of a loosened
river, with its ravaging, unconquerable volume, this impression is as
strong as possible; and as I looked at the deluge which threatened to
make an island of the Papal palace I perceived that the scourge of water
is greater than the scourge of fire. A blaze may be quenched, but where
could the flame be kindled that would arrest the quadrupled Rhone? For
the population of Avignon a good deal was at stake, and I am almost
ashamed to confess that in the midst of the public alarm I considered
the situation from the point of view of the little projects of a
sentimental tourist. Would the prospective inundation interfere with my
visit to Vaucluse, or make it imprudent to linger twenty-four hours
longer at Avignon? I must add that the tourist was not perhaps, after
all, so sentimental. I have spoken of the pilgrimage to the shrine of
Petrarch as obligatory, and that was, in fact, the light in which it
presented itself to me; all the more that I had been twice at Avignon
without undertaking it. This is why I was vexed at the Rhone.--if vexed
I was--for representing as impracticable an excursion which I cared
nothing about. How little I cared was manifest from my inaction on
former occasions. I had a prejudice against Vaucluse, against Petrarch,
even against the incomparable Laura. I was sure that the place was
cockneyfied and threadbare, and I had never been able to take an
interest in the poet and the lady. I was sure that I had known many
women as charming and as handsome as she, about whom much less noise had
been made; and I was convinced that her singer was factitious and
literary, and that there are half a dozen stanzas in Wordsworth that
speak more to the soul than the whole collection of his _fioriture_.
This was the crude state of mind in which I determined to go, at any
risk, to Vaucluse. Now that I think it over, I seem to remember that I
had hoped, after all, that the submersion of the roads would forbid it.
Since morning the clouds had gathered again, and by noon they were so
heavy that there was every prospect of a torrent. It appeared absurd to
choose such a time as this to visit a fountain--a fountain which would
be indistinguishable in the general cataract. Nevertheless I took a
vow, that if at noon the rain should not have begun to descend upon
Avignon I would repair to the head-spring of the Sorgues. When the
critical moment arrived the clouds were hanging over Avignon like
distended water-bags, which only needed a prick to empty themselves. The
prick was not given, however; all nature was too much occupied in
following the aberrations of the Rhone to think of playing tricks
elsewhere. Accordingly I started for the station in a spirit which, for
a tourist who sometimes had prided himself on his unfailing supply of
sentiment, was shockingly perfunctory.
"For tasks in hours of insight willed
May be in hours of gloom fulfilled."
I remembered these lines of Matthew Arnold (written, apparently, in an
hour of gloom), and carried out the idea, as I went, by hoping that with
the return of insight I should be glad to have seen Vaucluse. Light has
descended upon me since then, and I declare that the excursion is in
every way to be recommended. The place makes a great impression, quite
apart from Petrarch and Laura.
There was no rain; there was only, all the afternoon, a mild, moist wind
and a sky magnificently black; which made a _repoussoir_ for the paler
cliffs of the fountain. The road, by train, crosses a flat,
expressionless country, towards the range of arid hills which lie to the
east of Avignon, and which spring (says Murray) from the mass of the
Mont-Ventoux. At Isle-sur-Sorgues, at the end of about an hour, the
foreground becomes much more animated and the distance much more (or
perhaps I should say much less) actual. I descended from the train and
ascended to the top of an omnibus which was to convey me into the
recesses of the hills. It had not been among my previsions that I
should be indebted to a vehicle of that kind for an opportunity to
commune with the spirit of Petrarch; and I had to borrow what
consolation I could from the fact that at least I had the omnibus to
myself. I was the only passenger; every one else was at Avignon watching
the Rhone. I lost no time in perceiving that I could not have come to
Vaucluse at a better moment. The Sorgues was almost as full as the
Rhone, and of a colour much more romantic. Rushing along its narrowed
channel under an avenue of fine _platanes_ (it is confined between solid
little embankments of stone), with the good wives of the village, on the
brink, washing their linen in its contemptuous flood, it gave promise of
high entertainment farther on.
The drive to Vaucluse is of about three-quarters of an hour; and though
the river, as I say, was promising, the big pale hills, as the road
winds into them, did not look as if their slopes of stone and shrub were
a nestling-place for superior scenery. It is a part of the merit of
Vaucluse indeed that it is as much as possible a surprise. The place has
a right to its name, for the valley appears impenetrable until you get
fairly into it. One perverse twist follows another until the omnibus
suddenly deposits you in front of the "cabinet" of Petrarch. After that
you have only to walk along the left bank of the river. The cabinet of
Petrarch is to-day a hideous little _café_, bedizened, like a signboard,
with extracts from the ingenious "Rime." The poet and his lady are of
course the stock-in-trade of the little village, which has had for
several generations the privilege of attracting young couples engaged in
their wedding-tour and other votaries of the tender passion. The place
has long been familiar, on festal Sundays, to the swains of Avignon and
their attendant nymphs. The little fish of the Sorgues are much
esteemed, and, eaten on the spot, they constitute, for the children of
the once Papal city, the classic suburban dinner. Vaucluse has been
turned to account, however, not only by sentiment, but by industry; the
banks of the stream being disfigured by a pair of hideous mills for the
manufacture of paper and of wool. In an enterprising and economical age
the water-power of the Sorgues was too obvious a motive; and I must say
that, as the torrent rushed past them, the wheels of the dirty little
factories appeared to turn merrily enough. The footpath on the left
bank, of which I just spoke, carries one fortunately quite out of sight
of them, and out of sound as well, inasmuch as on the day of my visit
the stream itself, which was in tremendous force, tended more and more,
as one approached the fountain, to fill the valley with its own echoes.
Its colour was magnificent, and the whole spectacle more like a corner
of Switzerland than a nook in Provence. The protrusions of the mountain
shut it in, and you penetrate to the bottom of the recess which they
form. The Sorgues rushes and rushes; it is almost like Niagara after the
jump of the cataract. There are dreadful little booths beside the path,
for the sale of photographs and _immortelles_--I don't know what one is
to do with the immortelles--where you are offered a brush dipped in tar
to write your name withal on the rocks. Thousands of vulgar persons, of
both sexes, and exclusively, it appeared, of the French nationality, had
availed themselves of this implement, for every square inch of
accessible stone was scored over with some human appellation. It is not
only we in America, therefore, who besmirch our scenery; the practice
[Illustration: VAUCLUSE--RUINS OF CASTLE]
exists, in a more organised form (like everything else in France), in
the country of good taste. You leave the little booths and stalls
behind; but the bescribbled crag, bristling with human vanity, keeps you
company even when you stand face to face with the fountain. This happens
when you find yourself at the foot of the enormous straight cliff out of
which the river gushes. It rears itself to an extraordinary height--a
huge forehead of bare stone--looking as if it were the half of a
tremendous mound split open by volcanic action. The little valley,
seeing it there, at a bend, stops suddenly and receives in its arms the
magical spring. I call it magical on account of the mysterious manner in
which it comes into the world, with the huge shoulder of the mountain
rising over it as if to protect the secret. From under the mountain it
silently rises, without visible movement, filling a small natural basin
with the stillest blue water. The contrast between the stillness of this
basin and the agitation of the water directly after it has overflowed,
constitutes half the charm of Vaucluse. The violence of the stream when
once it has been set loose on the rocks is as fascinating and
indescribable as that of other cataracts; and the rocks in the bed of
the Sorgues have been arranged by a master-hand. The setting of the
phenomenon struck me as so simple and so fine--the vast sad cliff,
covered with the afternoon light, still and solid for ever, while the
liquid element rages and roars at its base--that I had no difficulty in
understanding the celebrity of Vaucluse. I understood it, but I will not
say that I understood Petrarch. He must have been very self-supporting,
and Madonna Laura must indeed have been much to him.