AVIGNON
"Sur le pont d'Avignon,
On y danse, on y danse!"
"Avenio ventosa, sine vento
Venenosa, cum vento fastidiosa."
LATIN PROVERB.
"Parlement mistral et Durance
Sont les trois fleaux de Provence."
OLD SAYING.
How the sun does pour down on to the great esplanade before the Palace
of the Popes! It is as warm as a June day in England and twice as light.
That astounding building towers into the blue, bare and creamy white,
every stern, simple line of it ascending swift and clear, in repeated
strokes, rhythmically grand, like some fine piece of blank verse.
The parapet alone shows broken surfaces. Neither cornice nor corbel
nor window pediment; scarcely a window to interrupt the mass of
splendid masonry, only recurrent shafts of stone (continuing from the
machicolations above) which shoot straight and slim from base to summit of
the fortress, to meet there at intervals, as if a line of tall poplars,
two by two, had bent their heads together to form this succession of
sharply-pointed arches.
The arrangement of massive wall and slender arch gives to the building
a singular effect of strength and eternity combined with a severe sort
of grace.
[Illustration: PONT DE ST. BENÉZET, AVIGNON.
_By E. M. Synge._]
It stands there enormous, calm, yet with a delicacy of bearing belonging
surely to no other edifice of that impregnable strength and vast bulk. The
genius of the architect has expressed in these sixteen-feet walls some
of the spirit of the palace as well as the rudeness of the stronghold,
and has given a subtle hint of the painted halls and galleries wherein
half the potentates of Europe were magnificently entertained, where
Petrarch dreamed and Rabelais jested.... And that hint seems to lie in
the general relations of mass to mass, and especially in the shallow
projection and towering height of that endless line of delicate arches.
Burke, in his sublime way, assures us that sublimity is the result
of monotonous repetition, and this surprising achievement of Papal
magnificence certainly bears out the theory.
The palace shows no more signs of age upon it than the glowing tint
of the walls through the beating of the sun upon them for hundreds of
brilliant years. How brilliant they must have been! What warmth, what
light! That is what astonishes Barbara: the light. She cannot get over
it. We seem to have awakened into a world woven out of radiance.
Not but that it is a very real and solid world, this sun-created realm
of rambling terraces and upward-trending pathways. Rich stone-pines
follow the slant of the road, as it mounts the famous Rocher du Dom in
easy zig-zags till it reaches the plateau at the summit, where once upon
a time, tradition says, all the witches and wizards of the country-side
used to celebrate their unholy rites. And thereby hangs a tale--perhaps
to be told later in the day.
Half-way up the rock, on a little platform of its own, stands a small
Romanesque Cathedral, singularly fine in style, and characteristic of
the architecture of the South of France. Creepers are hanging recklessly,
alluringly over the walls and parapets of the hill above. On the top there
is a little garden, with seats and shrubs and a pond inhabited by ornate,
self-conscious kinds of birds. We learn this in later explorations. Just
now the instinctive human desire to reach the highest point achievable
is half quieted by the warm comfort of this placid spot below, and we
turn our backs on the aspiring Mount.
There are sun-warmed stone benches under the young, sparsely-covered
plane-trees (no town in Provence ever dreamt of trying to exist without
plane-trees), and here we establish ourselves and watch the little events
of the square: the soldiers coming and going up the steps of the Papal
Palace (now a barracks); the three recruits being frantically drilled
(there is always an element of frenzy in French military exercises);
the slow moving of the shadows which rudely caricature the huge stone
garland on the Papal Mint, a design in Michael Angelo's most opulent
manner; the stray cats on the prowl from neighbouring kitchens; the
cheerful dog trotting across the square, tail in air, ready to answer
to a friendly word with which we detain him from more important affairs.
Ancient as is this city of the Popes, there are no weather-stains, as
we northerners understand them, only marks of the sun and wind. A good
friend this fierce, cleansing sun, and the wind from Mont Ventoux must
sweep away all impurities from the narrow streets, and--_il y en a!_
Away across the parapet a mass of roofs fills the slope to the river
bank--most wonderful of rivers!--and to the south there are hills
and bright distances: Provençal hills, distances of the land of "joy,
young-heartedness and love." And that makes the thought that we are in
Provence wake up with a cry that rings in the heart like a _reveillé_.
And on its heels comes a strange, secret rebound of sadness, keen as the
cut of a knife. As for the cause? Who can say exactly what home-sickness,
what vast longing it is that wakens thus when the beauty and greatness
of the world and the narrowness of individual possibilities point too
clearly their eternal contrast?
[Illustration: PALACE OF THE POPES AND CATHEDRAL.
_By E. M. Synge._]
"I can't get over that _light_," Barbara exclaims, in renewed
astonishment. "I don't feel as if I ever wanted to move from this bench."
And we let the sun make a considerable portion of his daily journey
across the palace walls before we move. Already the influence of the
South is in our veins. It makes one better understand the genius of this
"Rome transportée dans les Gaules." It must have been, in some sort,
the capital of Europe, when for sixty years or so the Papal Court drew
the great and the famous from the ends of the earth to the gay, corrupt
little city.
Seven Popes reigned here, but of the life at the Palace during that time
there is singularly little record. Instinctively one tries to recapture
misty reminiscences of schoolroom lore, for now the dry facts begin to
glow with the splendour and the pathos of real life, as one realises that
just on this very spot, in sight of these sunny hills and this rushing
river, those ancient things took place.
"Oh! Barbara, how magnificently learned I should be if only I possessed
all the information that I have forgotten!"
"What have you forgotten?" Barbara inquires soothingly.
Heavens! What with forgetting and never having known, one felt as arid
and futile as an extinct volcano. Had one but enjoyed the privileges
accorded to the characters of ancient drama, one would have stretched
forth hands in invocation to the mysterious eventful city.
"O city, O immortal city of the Rhone, lift but for one moment the veil
that hides from us those tremendous secrets which fill the air with
dreams and presences even to this hour!"
Perhaps the appeal was not altogether in vain, for a few isolated facts
began to drift, ghost-like, into view. They were images imprinted in
childish days while Avignon was nothing but a name, and so the ill-guided
imagination had placed the city on the plain; a bare, arid group of
houses surrounding a vague, vast structure, against which clouds of dust
were continually being driven.
It was curious and interesting to compare this long-cherished picture
with the reality. In connection with it was another painted in richer
tones. The subject was the journey of Philip of Valois through his
kingdom with the kings of Navarre and Bohemia in his train. After passing
through Burgundy--broad and spacious Burgundy, with its straggling, brown
villages--he arrives here at Avignon, where other kings have hurried to
meet him, and is magnificently received by the Pope. Which of the seven
Popes was it? Alas! memory failed, but King Philip was lodged over there
across the river at Villeneuve-les-Avignon.
"Beyond the island where the huge castle is on the hill?" Barbara
inquired. "What a shabby sort of place to put a king."
My idea, too, of Villeneuve, till I saw it, had been a brilliant little
pleasure-city, full of splendid cardinals' palaces.
"Let's go and see the town," said Barbara; "perhaps the palaces are
still there."
We decided to go that very day. A place is twice seen that is seen at
once. Some discerning person had read me Froissart's account of the
scene, and I had never forgotten it; the feastings and festivals that
burst forth all over the city, till Lent came; and then the thrilling
news that went flying through the country that the Saracens were marching
against the Holy Land. This was a threat to all Christendom. It was
difficult to imagine what it must have been to fear a possible invasion
of those terrible enemies.
But the city was spared. The Pope preached a great sermon to his
congregation of kings, exhorting them to take the cross. They all obeyed.
And then the visionary pictures became a procession: the King of France
with his retinue journeying westward into Languedoc----
"Languedoc?" questioned Barbara.
It was just before us across the Rhone; lovely brown hills on the horizon.
And so the royal company moved in picturesque progress through the
provinces of France: Auvergne, Berry, Beauce, and so on, till they
reached Paris.
"I should like to have seen it," said Barbara. "I wonder if they wore
long robes and ermine."
"Perhaps not quite so beautiful a garb as that, but, thank Heaven, we
know they didn't wear tweed suits! When the human race took to doing
that they bid goodbye to the charm and romance of life for ever."
"But I think men look quite nice in tweed suits," said Barbara. "I am
sure they would look ridiculous now in mantles and ermine."
"Oh, that's another matter. There is always something a little ridiculous
about civilised man, 'rough hew him how you may'; but nothing brings it
out so fatally as tweed."
Barbara remonstrated, and then wanted to know if I could remember any more.
I could remember nothing about Avignon, but between us we recollected
incidents about the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, which took
place just at this time. It was a luckless day for France and England
when Edward III. was so ill-inspired as to assert his roundabout claim
to the throne of France! The fair country became the scene of raids and
sieges, ravaging of provinces, taking and retaking of towns and castles,
battle and murder and sudden death.
Of this there are of course endless chronicles; of all the moil and toil
of war and rapine, of the clash of rival interests, of mad ambitions
which, once gratified, left their victims only more wild and craving
than before.
If the annals of the Middle Ages have a moral it is this: Fling away
ambition. Fling away this crude passion of kings and captains which seems
to drive a man like a fury through his untasted life, never giving him
pause to possess what he has won or even to realise the triumph of his
achievement.
"Tell me more," demanded Barbara.
But the pictures were at an end. Quite capriciously it seemed,
certain scenes had painted themselves on the mind, but what followed
chronologically had made no special impression, perhaps because there
was a general confusion of wars and tumults, till suddenly we emerge on
familiar ground at the battles of Creçy and Poitiers.
We had grown tired of trying to realise the things of the past, and
strolled down to the river, to the long suspension bridge, where, as
every French child knows, "on y danse, on y danse." And here one has a
fine view of Villeneuve, across the Rhone, and looking back, of Avignon.
From this point its walls are strikingly picturesque, ramparts of the
fourteenth century, built by Clement VI. and described by a modern
author as a "remarkably beautiful specimen of mediæval masonry, with
a battlemented wall for projecting machicolations on finely moulded
corbels"--corbels of four or five courses, which give an appearance
almost Eastern to these splendid walls and gateways.
"The intensest life of the fourteenth century," says the same writer,
"passed through the Gothic portal over which the portcullis hung in its
chamber ever ready to drop with a thundering crash, and fix its iron
teeth in the ground."
Barbara asked a great many searching questions about times and manners.
But here I began to experience what some discriminating person has
called a "reaction against the despotism of facts." I did not know any
more. I began to repent of having excited this inordinate thirst for
information. However, very little is needed to enable one to achieve a
general impression of France in the fourteenth century. One has merely
to think of the fair land under the horrors of sack and siege, burning
towns, starving people, all the agonies of chronic warfare. What is
more difficult is to descend from the general to the particular, and
to imagine what sort of life that must have been for the mortal who was
neither a King nor a Pope, nor a plundering freebooter, but only a human
being with a life to ruin and a heart to break.
* * * * *
Even while one is dreaming of other things, that wonderful Palace is
impressing itself upon the sentiment with steady power. It stands there
in the blaze of light, tremendous, inevitable, like a fact of nature.
One can scarcely think it away. It resists even that mighty force, the
human imagination.
Avignon! the Roman _Avenio_; a place of many events, many influences,
which have helped to make our present life what it is--we are really
there, absurdly improbable as it seems; we, with our modern minds, modern
speech, modern preconceptions, in the bright land of the troubadours;
and, stranger still, in the land where the Phœnicians traded, the Greeks
colonised, the Romans built their inevitable baths and amphitheatres;
where the ancient Ligurians lived their lives on peaked hilltops, and
race fought race and tribe fought tribe, when there was neither Pope
in Avignon nor King in France, but only wild gods and wilder chieftains
ruling in the lawless, beautiful land.
From the height of the Rocher du Dom (we climb there at last by the
zig-zag pine-shadowed road) the whole country bursts upon us, blue, wide,
mountain-encircled, radiant; with the Rhone winding across the plain,
dreaming of mysterious things. The great river has a personality of its
own as strong as that of the palace. It sweeps to the foot of our cliff
and takes a splendid curve round the south side of the town, past the
ruined bridge of St. Benézet, with its romantic chapel poised midway
above the rush and flurry of the river.
Every year, on Christmas Eve, Mass used to be celebrated in this little
chapel of the Rhone, and strange must it have been when the yellow lights
glowed--just once of all the nights of the long year--on its lonely
altar, and the chanting of priests rose and fell above the sound of the
marauding waters. But for their aggressions, the grand old bridge would
still be carrying passengers from the Papal city across the two branches
of the river and the island of St. Barthelasse to the foot of the tower
of Philippe le Bel.
This old tower is, perhaps, the most striking building--except the
great castle--in the decaying town of Villeneuve where the Cardinals
built so many palaces. Here it was, in that forgotten little haunt of
pleasure, that the guests of the Pope were once so gloriously lodged
and entertained. And now--sad beyond all telling is the little town!
Ardouin-Dumazet, the author of "Un Voyage en France," seems to have been
impressed by its forlornness as much as we were, for he writes of it in
words that evoke the very spirit of the place:--
"Amas de toits audessus desquels surgissent des eglises rongées par
le temps, des edifices à physiognomie triste et vague--La ville est
d'apparence morne. Elle dut être splendide jadis: de grands hotels, des
maisons de noble ordonnance, des voies bordées d'arcades indiquent un
passé prosperé. Les moindres détails: ferrurues de portes et de balcon,
corbeaux, statuettes d'angle sont d'un art tres pur. Aujourd'hui on
rencontre surtout des chiens et des chats--On pourrait se croire dans
une ville morte--On va errer par les lamentables et pittoresques débris
de la Chartreuse du Val-de-Bénédiction où sont encore de merveilles
architecturales."
Everywhere, indeed, as one wanders, one comes upon these "architectural
marvels." A fine doorway giving entrance to a wheelwright's yard; delicate
pieces of iron-work on the balcony of a barber's shop; a scrap of stone
carving; a noble block of buildings in some ill-kept street.
The symphonic beauty of such relics of the Renaissance which are found in
almost every town of the South of France, bears in upon the imagination
the truth of the saying of the great architect Alberti that a slight
alteration in the curves of his design for San Francesco at Rimini would
"spoil his music."
The traveller who climbs the hill to the vast fortress of St. André--with
its battlements of the fourteenth century--enters a scene even more
eloquent of desolation. But splendid it must have been in the days of
its glory!
[Illustration: CHARTREUSE DU VAL-DE-BÉNÉDICTION, VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON.
_By E. M. Synge._]
The huge drum towers of the entrance gate recall old dreams of romantic
adventure. But for the strange silence of the place, it might almost
excite expectations of clattering cavalcades, and one knows not what
medley of bright figures in harmony with the mediæval background. But
the silence broods on, unbroken. A black kitten is the only living thing
that meets the view as we pass through the shadows of the gateway. A
dishevelled grey village has grown up within the walls, its steep street
climbing upward to the summit of the hill, while a cypress-guarded
convent stands within its own high walls. Here the sisters pass their
lives, doubly immured. If some unhappy nun tried to escape, she would
not only have to penetrate the stern boundaries of her retreat, but
to scale the ramparts of the fortress into the bargain; the engines
of State and Religion arrayed against her; of this world and the next.
It prompted one to carry the significant symbol further afield, and to
follow in imagination the fortunes not only of the fugitive nun but of
the escaping woman!
As we begin the ascent of the desolate street, the black kitten slips
coquettishly across the way, at a slant, her tail high in the air,
like a ruler, as the School-Board essayist happily puts it. We hail her
as alluringly as may be, but she is away beyond our reach up a little
outside staircase leading to the doorway of one of the few habitable
houses. From this eminence she looks down upon us mockingly, clearly
enjoying our disadvantage. This piques us and we engage in pursuit. The
imp finally vanishes into the doorway, and presently a miserably clad,
dejected-looking woman emerges. Evidently the kitten had announced to her
the advent of visitors. She leads the way, a huge bunch of keys in her
hand, the kitten following in a self-willed, flighty sort of fashion.
While we are trifling with ancient walls and gruesome dungeons, the
kitten is busy catching phantom mice among the heaps of fallen masonry
that encumber the grassy hill-top, forlorn remains, indeed, of human
habitations.
[Illustration: CASTLE OF ST. ANDRÉ, VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON.
_By E. M. Synge._]
The little chapel of the convent strikes with a chill as we enter--surely
it is something more than a chill; a sense of something deathly. In
a flash comes the horrified sense of the death-in-life that is hidden
behind these mysterious walls. One needs no detail, no assurance; the
whole beats in upon the consciousness, steals in like an atmosphere, as
we stand in the shadow looking at the little flower-decked altar, musty
and tawdry with its artificial flowers and flounced draperies.
"Of what Order are the Sisters?" we inquire, in undertones, after a long
silence.
"Sh--h," warns a reproving voice from a hidden part of the chapel, which
had been so arranged as to leave the west-end of it invisible to all
but the inmates of the convent.
"C'est une des soeurs," whispered our guide, and we turned and left the
devotee to her prayers.
A truly amazing thing the human spirit! There are times when one feels
entirely divorced from it, as if one were studying its manifestations
from the point of view of an alien race. And there is no epoch so
baffling to the modern mind as the mediæval. The ancients seem normal,
straight-going, and eminently human as compared with the men and women
of the Middle Ages.
We are taken to the dungeons in the entrance towers where our feudal
forefathers inflicted one dares not think what agonies, and without
a pang of remorse; rather with a sense of right and heaven-inspired
justice. It was within the walls of this fortress, probably in a cell
of the Convent, that the Man in the Iron Mask passed the dreadful days
and nights of his life.
The sentiment of the unimaginative ruffian who could condemn a
fellow-creature to this living grave is probably beyond the understanding
of a modern--short of a criminal lunatic. We are glad to hurry out again
into the light, oppressed by the shadow of misery and wickedness that
seems to hang about the place to this hour.
There are many who hold that the world has made no real progress except
in material civilisation. That is a subject that might best be studied
in some mouldering dungeon, which, be it remembered, was just as much a
"necessary part" of the mediæval castle as the kitchen or pantry is of
its descendant, the country-house of to-day.
If such strongholds were either let or sold in the feudal era, they were
doubtless recommended to intending purchasers as having well-appointed
torture-chambers, fitted with all the latest improvements in racks
and thumb-screws. Without venturing to claim too much for the average
modern, he may be said to have advanced a little beyond the stage when
the thumb-screw was an instrument that no gentleman's house should be
without. As the change of ideals to which this improvement is due may
be said to have taken place in Provence, fostered and impelled, paradox
as it seems, within the precincts of the feudal castle itself with its
chains and oubliettes, those sighing ruins become strangely moving and
significant.
Our poor, half-starved guide, however, looks as if she thought them
anything but significant as she leads us up and down the fallen masonry,
the kitten following always, and often springing to her shoulders and
curving its lithe little body round her neck.
"Il est comme notre enfant," she says, half apologetically. "Nous n'en
avons pas, des enfants." And the kitten swirls its tail in her face
as if to assure her that it could well fill the place of any number of
children. The faithful little acolyte had to be left outside the door
leading to the dungeons, for she used to get lost in the passages and
the turret staircase. But there she waited, mewing at intervals, till
we re-emerged, and then she sprang with a little purring cry on to her
mistress's shoulder.
We were at the entrance gate, and the round of the fortress was finished.
We bade goodbye to the woman, who pocketed her "tip" and hastened back
with her attendant sprite to the little grey, half-ruined house where
she passes her grey, unimaginable life!