CHAPTER II

AVIGNON

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.

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?

"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 Phoenicians 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!

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.

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!