Avignon is surrounded by walls, as are most of the cities of France, and
of the countries of the continent: a very great evil and inconvenience.
These walls hinder the influx of fresh air from the country, and thus
make the cities more unhealthy; give to those who want to enter or go
out of the town the trouble of going first to a gate; and crowd and
embarrass the inlets and outlets, by diminishing their number. Indeed,
after sunset, this number, in order to save porters, is reduced to two;
the two principal gates only, at opposite sides of the town, being
attended by their guardians to watch and ward during the night. Often
have I been obliged, at Avignon and at Florence, to shorten my evening
walk, for the sake of arriving at the nearest gate before the Ave Maria
of the evening. If I still continued without the walls, I was obliged to
perform a circuit, first along a dusty road to a distant gate; and then,
accompanied, it may be, by the females of my family, through the main
street to my own habitation, more distant from this gate than from that
by which I had gone out.
All this mischief, all this restraint, is endured, because, instead of a
tax on the houses in which food is consumed, a duty is levied, at the
gates, on the food itself; a duty, partial, because not paid by the
inhabitants of the country; vexatious, because descending to so many and
so minute objects; and expensive in its collection, because requiring
perpetual superintendence. It is to be hoped the Chamber of Deputies of
France will take some lessons, on the art of taxing, from the House of
Commons, by whom that art has been so long and so successfully
practised. Part of these tolls defray municipal expenses.
The walls of Avignon are about three miles in circumference. A good
road, bordered by trees, goes round the town; and, on the western side,
is a public walk near the Rhone. The river is here divided into two
branches by a long, narrow island: over each branch is carried a bridge
on wooden piers, with a causeway across the island, uniting the two
bridges into one road from bank to bank. The tolls, on this bridge, are
let, by the city, at about fifty thousand francs a year; a large sum,
and indicating an active intercourse in the direction of Bordeaux and
Toulouse. There is a barrier at each end of the bridge, and the
passengers pay on setting foot upon it, but go off from it scot-free.
Why there are two receivers of one toll I know not, except that one may
be a check on the other; but, as every "receiver is as bad as a thief,"
this expedient amounts only to "setting a thief to watch a thief."
That in the twelfth century,--an age of Cimmerian darkness, according to
the Protestants,--a poor shepherd should have conceived the project of
building a bridge over the Rhone; that he should have been prompted to
this undertaking by motives of Christian charity, on observing how many
were drowned in attempting the passage by boats; that he should have
devoted his life to the collection of alms for his purpose;--all this
might procure for St. Benezet more favour than he will ever meet with in
our _dis_-enlightened country. I leave it to my reader to judge of my
reasons for not saying _un_-enlightened. The mischief is, they made the
poor man a saint, instead of knighting him, like Sir Richard Arkwright.
A punster might have entitled him Pontifex Maximus; but this would have
been still worse for his reputation.
The Reverend Alban Butler, in his learned, discreet, and pious work,
"The Lives of the Saints," relates, that the building of this bridge
was attended by many miracles. Part of these may have been contrived to
encourage those to the enterprise who would not have been moved by the
single consideration of its utility; as the liberation of the Holy
Sepulchre, and "Deus vult," roused those who would never have made a
common effort to defend Christendom against the Saracen. In part also,
these miracles may have been real, notwithstanding the bold assertion
that miracles have ceased. This assertion may be easily made, while
every fact proving the contrary is rejected with supercilious
incredulity; but it is an assertion in its own nature incapable of
proof: the denial of the possibility of miracles would be inconsequent
in the mouths of those who, by affirming them to have ceased, admit them
to have existed. These men are not Deo a secretis.
Butler tells us also that, on occasion of part of the bridge falling
down by the impetuosity of the waters, in 1669, nearly five hundred
years after the death of St. Benezet, his body, which had been buried in
a little chapel on the bridge, was taken up, and found entire, without
the least sign of corruption: even the bowels were sound, and the colour
of the eyes lively and sprightly, though the bars of iron around the
coffin were much corroded by rust, on account of the dampness of the
situation. Butler did not know that animal muscle is changed by moisture
into a substance resembling spermaceti, as proved by the experiments of
Lavoisier, and Sir George Gibbes. The substance is called by the French
chymists _adipocire_. The philosopher will, I hope, allow his obligation
to me for having attempted to account for one miracle in a natural
manner. Let him say, "The man is reasonable, _quand meme_."[37]
The remains of the bridge of St. Benezet still bestride the eastern
branch of the Rhone, and are an object of great picturesque beauty. The
arches are very lofty: under the first of them, the great public road is
now carried; a circumstance which seems to show that the river has
formed for itself a narrower, it may be, a deeper bed. Inundations
however are not unfrequent, particularly in the beginning of summer, on
the melting of the snows of the Alps; and I am told at this time,
December 1825, that there has lately been five feet depth of water in
the town of Avignon. I have seen the water wash the walls of the city.
The Rock, as it is called, of Avignon, has every appearance of having
been separated by the Rhone from the hills on the other side of the
river. How or when this separation was effected, is a question that
might puzzle a writer of theories on the formation of the earth. If we
can believe, what philosophers would readily enough believe were not the
fact asserted in the Bible,--that the earth was at one time covered with
water, even the tops of the mountains,--and if we can suppose also that
currents existed in this deluge;--then, on the subsiding of the waters,
these currents might meet with the summits and ridges of hills, and work
and wear for themselves a passage, the waters of the deluge gradually
retiring, but, in the mean time, sustaining the currents at the
requisite height. But humility in Scriptural interpretation is
recommended by the remark, that the very first word of Scripture, "In
the beginning," is incomprehensible and inexplicable.
On the southern slope of this rock is built the Palace of the Popes; as
its roof is continued in one horizontal line, the height of the building
at the southern extremity is enormous: its principal front is towards
the west, overlooking a part of the city and the hills of Languedoc: it
is now in a ruined and neglected state, as far as a building can be so
which is still in use: part of it serves for a prison: another part is
a caserne, of which the pope's chapel is the dormitory. Close upon the
northern end of the palace is the cathedral; a church which, at the
beginning of the revolution, was plundered of an immense quantity of
silver and some gold plate, which was sent off to the national crucible
at Paris; amongst other treasures was a silver bell of no very
diminutive size. The tombs even were ransacked; a skull was brought to
my house by my children's drawing-master, from which my younger son
designed an admirable and edifying death's head. The model, I was
assured, had been the cranium of a pope. They were beginning to repair
this church, with the purpose of restoring it to its former destination.
On one side of it is a little chapel with a dome, which served as the
model for the dome of Ste. Genevieve. The copy is sufficiently exact.
Behind the palace, on the east, rises a tower, which, from having been
used as an ice-house, was called the _glaciere_; and the glaciere of
Avignon is a name ever memorable in the annals of horror. From the top
of this tower five hundred, according to those who exaggerate; thirty,
according to those who extenuate,--of the principal inhabitants of the
city, after receiving a stunning blow on the head, were thrown down on
the ice within, and their bodies immediately covered with quick lime.
Such was the vengeance of the people on those who, without trial, from
the notoriety of the fact, were convicted of the crime of aristocracy.
The Revolution had been quietly accomplished: the people declared that
it was their will to unite themselves to France; sent a deputation to
the national assembly; and cried "Vive le Roi." The vice-legate, who
governed the city for the pope, addressed the people from his balcony;
told them he had no force to oppose this their movement, that they had
his prayers for their happiness, and that he would retire. This was all
on his part. The national assembly accorded to the Avignonais their
wish; and formed of this papal territory and that of Orange, (formerly a
patrimony of the princes of that house,) the department of Vaucluse.
The summit of the rock commands a very beautiful view. The eye traverses
a fertile plain, bounded by the hills of the Venaissin, among which are
distinguished those of the vallis clausa, where the far-famed fountain
has its source: between the trees are caught glimpses of the Durance,
which throws itself into the Rhone two miles below; almost under your
feet, are seen the windings of the Rhone with its islands: on the
opposite bank rises the chateau and little town of Villeneuve,
surmounted by hills covered with the vine and the olive: immediately
beneath, to the south, and west, lies Avignon, with its population of
five and twenty thousand souls, which number still remained to it after
massacres, confiscations, and proscriptions. By these revolutionary
measures, it had suffered more perhaps than any other city in France
except Lyons, the "ville affranchie" of the Convention. "How would you
have us be gay?" said a noble to me: "we see every day, we live in the
midst of the assassins of our relations, and the possessors of our
property." Virgil describes his Jove as viewing, from Olympus' height,
the earth, "hominumque labores:" the rock of Avignon is but one of many
elevated spots from which we look down on the bounty of Providence and
on the misery of man.
The city contains a great many handsome hotels or family houses, but is
not generally well-built; the streets, all but one,--the Rue
Calade,--are narrow: the pavement is of small sharp-pointed pebbles.
Here is a public library, formed out of the libraries of the suppressed
convents; a Museum, in which, among other objects, a valuable
collection of coins deserves particular mention, as containing some very
rare specimens of the coins of the Greek cities anciently founded in
this part of France. There is also annexed to the Museum a small
botanical garden. Here is a good infirmary or hospital for the sick. A
large convent has been turned into a _succursal_ or subsidiary house to
the invalids at Paris, insufficient to receive the increased number of
disabled soldiers. The seven parishes of Avignon have been
revolutionized into four, with churches not large enough for the
congregations. I entered a fine Pantheon-like building, and found it to
be a church, with vast Ionic columns supporting large galleries; the
whole capable of containing two thousand people: it was used as a
manufactory of saltpetre. The Jesuits' college is become a _college
royal_: thus it retains its destination as a place of instruction; but
its handsome church has been spoiled by laying a floor across it at
mid-height: for this there was no reason, but that an administrator
thought, as my informant said, that it was a clever thing to cheat the
Almighty of a church, _escamoter une eglise au bon Dieu_.
The walls of the town are particularly well-built and handsome, if
walls can ever be handsome: they are of the same sort of stone as the
palace, and it is said that each contains precisely the same quantity of
stone. They both date from the fourteenth century, when the popes sat,
as the phrase is, at Avignon.