The Palace of the Popes

"No one who did not see Avignon in the time of the Popes has seen anything. For gaiety, life, animation and one fÊte after the other, there was never a town like it. From morning till night there were processions, pilgrimages, streets strewn with flowers and hung with stuffs, disembarkings of cardinals from the RhÔne, banners flying, galleys gay with flags, the soldiers of the Pope singing Latin in the squares, the begging friars swinging their rattles. And from top to bottom of the houses that pressed humming round the great papal palace, like bees round their hive, there was the tic-tac of the lace-makers' bobbins, the flying shuttles that wove cloth of gold for the chasubles, the little hammers of the metal-workers who made the chalices, the sound-boards being adjusted by the lute-makers, the songs sung over the looms; and above it all the pealing of the bells, and always the beating of tambourines down by the bridge. For with us, when people are happy they must dance, they must dance; and as in those times the streets of the town were too narrow for the farandole, fifes and tambourines posted themselves sur le pont d'Avignon, in the fresh air of the RhÔne, and day and night l'on y dansait, l'on y dansait.

"Ah, happy time! happy town! Halberds without an edge; state prisons in which wine was kept to cool! Never any scarcity; never any fighting! That was how the Popes of the Comtat knew how to rule their people; and that is why their people have missed them so much."

Thus Alphonse Daudet, a true son of Provence, draws his picture of papal Avignon, in that delicious story of his, "La Mule du Pape." As for the freedom of Avignon from war, during the seventy years that the Popes had their seat there, history would hardly justify the people of Avignon in regretting them on that account; nor probably were the dungeons of the papal palace lacking in tenants even at the best of times, for it was a cruel age, and the pleasures of the best of Popes would not have been greatly disturbed by the thought of men rotting in misery beneath the hall in which he was feasting. But the experience of all times of strife is that life goes on side by side with fear and danger, and merrily enough when the weight is lifted ever so little. Very likely Daudet's picture of Avignon enjoying itself is true enough. Clement VI, to whose time his story would refer, if it were intended to refer to any particular pontificate, was not much like the kindly old man who fed his mule with spiced wine, and advanced the adventurer who admired her, but neither was he like what a Pope would have to be nowadays.

"Generous and open-handed," writes Mr. Okey, "a thousand hungry clerics are said to have crowded into Avignon seeking preferment, none of whom went empty away; for no suitor should leave a prince's court, said he, unsatisfied. Exquisitely polite and courteous, Clement had a gracious amenity of manner. Accustomed to the society of noble ladies, his court was crowded with fair dames and gallant knights; his stables were filled with beautiful horses; his hospitality was regal and his table loaded with rich viands and rare wines. The fair Countess of Turenne, his constant companion, disposed of benefices and preferments, and her favour was the surest avenue to fortune. No sovereign of his time kept so brilliant and expensive a court, and when one of the cardinals remonstrated and recalled the examples of Benedict and John, he replied magnificently: 'Ah! my predecessors never knew how to be a pope.' Clement relaxed the rigid constitution of Gregory X, Ubi magis, for the government of conclaves, made in 1274, and ordered that the cardinals might have curtains to their cells, to be drawn when they rested or slept; they might have two servants, lay or cleric, as they pleased, and after the lapse of three days, in addition to their bread and wine, they might have fruit, cheese, and an electuary, and one dish of meat or fish at dinner, and another at supper."[15]

It was in 1309, for reasons that we need not go into, that Clement V set up his court at Avignon in the papal county of Venaissan. "This was a man," wrote Villani, "most greedy for money and a simoniac. Every benefice was sold in his court for money, and he was so lustful that he openly kept a most beautiful woman, the Countess of Perigord, for his mistress." But he was also a great lover of the arts, as is shown by "the vast treasure of gold and silver vessels, gems, antiques and manuscripts seized by his nephew at his death." He died five years later, when there was an interregnum for two years. Then the Bishop of Avignon was elected Pope under the title of John XXII.

He was a small, wiry, learned and subtle old man of seventy-one, the son of a cobbler, and he lived to be nearly ninety. The conclave took place at Lyons, and he is said to have compassed his election by a promise to the Roman cardinals that he would not mount horse or mule except to go to Rome. So he got into a boat, and dropped down the RhÔne to Avignon, "entered the papal palace on foot, and never left it again save to cross to the cathedral."[16]

His palace was the old bishop's palace that stood where the mighty mass of the Pope's Palace stands now, but the cathedral was the same, although it has been very much altered.

It stands very nobly, high above the place, and towering above the palace itself, which it adjoins. Its square tower is surmounted by a colossal gilt statue of the Virgin, which was put there in 1859, and bears that appearance. The cathedral dates from the eleventh century, but was rebuilt in the twelfth. The west porch with its Corinthian architecture was long thought to be of Roman construction, but it was probably erected rather later than the first rebuildings, and owes its classical appearance to the influence that Roman work had upon the ProvenÇal architects, who had before them many fine buildings to study. It was once decorated with frescoes by Simone Memmi, who was brought to Avignon from Siena in the fourteenth century and did some beautiful work there, some of which we shall see later in the Popes' Palace. His paintings in the cathedral have unfortunately disappeared, all but a few fragments, which, however, include a figure in a green gown, kneeling, which is said to be a portrait of Petrarch's Laura. Simone did meet Laura in Avignon and painted her portrait, for which Petrarch paid him in two sonnets that "brought more fame to the poor life of Master Simone," says Vasari, "than all his works have brought him or will bring."

194a

195a

The great west doors of the cathedral stand open, and its floor is wholly bare. It is much more effective so, but it makes the church look smaller than it is. Indeed, when you consider that you are standing in what was, during the seventy years of the "Babylonian Captivity," the first church in Christendom, you must be struck by its smallness. But the Popes of Avignon gave most of their attention to their palace, and not much was done for the cathedral.

The main plan is a high nave, lighted, from an octagonal lantern in the last bay, and a semi-circular apse. The chapels came later. So did the elaborately carved marble gallery and tribunes on either side of the nave.

One of the two chapels first to be built contains the remains of the beautiful tomb of Pope John XXII and his nephew. It has been much mutilated and much restored. The recumbent figure is not that of the Pope whose effigy first lay there, and of the sixty marble statues that adorned its niches none remain, though it is possible that one or two of those on the pulpit of St. Pierre, which we have already seen, may have been taken from the tomb. It must have been a glorious monument when it was first erected, and is even now a thing to see. What is called the tomb of Benedict XII in another chapel is a pure "make-up," much of it of the nineteenth century. There was a beautiful monument to this great pope, but in the eighteenth century all that was left of it was moved. It stood in the chapel of the Tailors' Guild, and they wanted the space for a monument to a tailor.

The Revolution created great havoc in the cathedral. The cloisters and chapter-house that stood to the east of it were swept away, and all their treasures and those of the cathedral looted, or else broken up. For some reason the old papal throne was spared, and stands in the choir—a plain chair of white marble, with the lion of St. Mark and the ox of St. Luke carved upon it.

It was John XXII who really fixed upon Avignon as the papal city—Clement V had thought of transferring his seat to Bordeaux—and he soon set about housing himself in a manner worthy of a pope. He bought land, and began to build splendidly, not only a palace for himself, but one for his nephew, who had been presented with the bishopric. It still stands on the north side of the place, a comfortable and roomy house enough, though nothing beside the vast pile upon which it looks. He also built himself splendid country houses, one of them at ChÂteauneuf, where were the famous papal vineyards, and from which still comes a famous wine.

Experts have pointed out some traces of Pope John's work, as well as of the small palace which he replaced; but the great fortified pile in which these were incorporated dates from the next reign—that of Benedict XII. The necessity there was for building a fortress is rather curious. Pope John had amassed a treasure so vast that his successor had to take exceptional steps to guard it.

"According to Villani—who makes the statement on the authority of his brother, who was the representative at Avignon of the great Florentine banking house of the Bardi, of which they were members—eighteen millions of gold florins were found in the papal treasury at John's death; and gold and silver vessels, crosses, mitres, jewels and precious stones to the value of seven millions more. And this prodigious wealth, adds the historian, was amassed by his industry and sagacity and the system of the reservation of all the collegiate benefices in Christendom on the plea of preventing simony."[17]

Mr. Okey goes into an elaborate and interesting discussion as to the present-day value of this vast sum, and puts "the approximate value of the papal treasure at John's death, according to Villani's statement, at the incredible figure of one hundred million pounds sterling." No wonder the walls of the palace were built to stand!

Benedict XII was the third French Pope, and in spite of remonstrances decided to stay on at Avignon. Indeed, Rome was impossible at this time. Civil strife raged there; and "so neglected and ruinous and overgrown with weeds were the churches, that cattle browsed up to the altars in St. Peter's and the Lateran, and a papal legate offered the marbles of the Coliseum for lime-burning."

Sometimes, in all that welter of crime and piety, squalor and luxury, cruelty and sentiment, of the Middle Ages, there stands out the figure of a man whom we seem to recognize as something nearer to ourselves than most of them. Our religion—even the religion of Catholic countries—is so different in spirit from the religion of those days that it is difficult to account for the actions of one after another of the great churchmen, except under the supposition that they were a set of greedy, bloodthirsty hypocrites, which probably most of them were not. But through it all there were constantly arising men and women who were actuated by much the same ideas as we should recognize as holy and righteous if we contemplated them in a living person. The greatest of these saints, we know, helped to fix the standard of goodness that is generally held today. They were men and women of genius, and we understand them as well as they were understood in their own day or perhaps better.

But it is something a good deal less than genius that brings that sense of recognition in the case of a character like that of Benedict XII. He was a large, red-faced man, who was said by his detractors to love coarse jokes and to drink heavily; but his detractors were the clergy from whom he insisted upon behaviour much more in accordance with modern ideas than with those of his own age, and they could not forgive him. "He was a man," wrote one of them, "hard, obstinate, avaricious; he loved the good overmuch, and hated the bad; he was remiss in granting favours, and negligent in providing for the services of the church; more addicted to unseemly jests than to honest conversation; he was a mighty toper, and 'Bibamus papaliter—let us drink like a pope'—became a proverb of the day."

The indictment contains more than a touch of spite. It is not to be supposed that a man who drank mightily, if he really did so, or laughed at a broad story, would have been thought deserving of much censure in those days, especially by one who felt no incongruity in accusing him of loving the good overmuch or setting his face against nepotism. Those were virtues that were hated in that society, so crooked in its views that it could even brand them openly as faults without fear of reproach.

This bluff, honest man built the greater part of the palace, "which," wrote one of his chroniclers, "with its walls and towers of immense strength stands like himself, four-square and mighty." About half as much again, however, was added in later pontificates, and Benedict's building was a good deal altered; but the four great fortified towers are his, and the buildings in between, which include his chapel. These are used now for the storing of archives, and other similar purposes, and are not shown to the public, but one or two of the towers can be ascended and magnificent views obtained from them.

Of the massive walls little has been destroyed either by time or by the many vicissitudes through which the great building has passed. Of all the architecture that one sees in this country the Popes' Palace is the most like those huge, enduring, almost brutally strong, buildings that the Romans left behind them. An ineffaceable impression is gained of it as one walks up the narrow, winding Rue de la Peyrolie which leads from the lower parts of the town on the east to the Place du Palais. Part of the street has been cut out of the naked rock, and far overhead towers the south wall of the building, looking no less solid and permanent than the rock itself. It is like a gigantic cliff rearing its bulk above one, and that impression as of something vaster and stronger than mere human building is never quite absent from the whole mass, on whatever point of view it obtrudes itself.

The enormous Court of Honour, which is the first thing you see after passing in, is undergoing repair, as, fortunately, is the whole of the building. It badly needed it, for until seven or eight years ago the greater part of the palace was used as a military barracks, and not only was the noble Hall of Justice divided up into three floors, and other parts ruthlessly adapted, but great Gothic windows were destroyed to give place to commonplace square openings, and in fact no beauty was spared where it might interfere with convenience. The restoration has been in hand for over seven years and is expected to take about as long again before the palace is put back into something like its original state. The work is being done with the utmost care, as all such things are done in France, but in many details the damage done has been irreparable.

The great Salle du Conclave has been cleared of its rubbish and the tall Gothic windows restored. It is huge and bare. There are no more than the worn remains of the frescoes with which Clement VI caused its walls to be covered, either by Simone Memmi himself, or by some one of his school. Some effort was made nearly a hundred years ago to induce the military authorities to look after their preservation; but "the Commandant of the Engineers replied that he did not share the commissioners' views with regard to the frescoes; they were of little artistic interest and not worth preserving; in fact they were not consonant with the spirit of a military establishment."

It was in this hall that Queen Joan of Naples defended herself from the charge of being privy to the murder of her first husband, and won the day by her eloquence and beauty. Avignon was hers, and she sold it for 80,000 golden florins to Clement VI, who thus made an excellent bargain for the papacy.

By a broad staircase one mounts to the fine doorway leading to the "new" chapel. It contains two doors, and the part on the left has been barbarously mutilated, but the whole is now carefully restored, as well as the beautiful chapel itself.

You pass through numerous chambers and corridors, some of them restored to what they were, others in the hands of the work-people, and some still showing the hideous wreck that the adaptations to military use made everywhere of the interior of the palace. There is a room with charming fourteenth century frescoes of country scenes as pleasant as anything of the sort I know of. There is a garden with a fish pond and people preparing to take the disturbed-looking fish out of it; nymphs bathing; boys getting fruit from a tree; sportsmen rabbiting with ferrets; others hunting with falcons. The walls are covered with a realistic and most decorative groundwork of foliage and grass, in which you can pick out all sorts of trees, flowers, fruits, birds and little animals. Fortunately the greater part of these delightful paintings are intact, and a great deal of skill has been shown in restoring them to something of their pristine state.

The more famous frescoes of Simone Memmi in the chapel of St. John the Baptist, and those of Matteo di Viterbo in that of St. Martial above it have not escaped so well.

"In 1816 a Corsican regiment being quartered in the Palace, some of the soldiers (who as Italians knew the value to collectors of the St. Jean frescoes) began the exploitation of the neglected chapel and established a lucrative industry in the corps. Special tools were fashioned for the work; the men became experts in the art of detaching the thin layer of plaster whereon the heads were painted, which they sold to amateurs and dealers."[18]

So in these beautiful New Testament scenes which cover roof and walls there are many unsightly white patches which sadly lessen the effect of the whole. But I cannot help thinking that the soldiers must have been stopped in their depredations, for very much more is left than has been taken away.

I forget in which of these two chapels it was that I noticed on a patch of white wall names scribbled, with dates, quite in the modern tourist's fashion, and as fresh as if they had been written yesterday. But the script was "German," and the dates of three hundred or so years ago. So little do habits change!

The rest of the palace that one is allowed to see has left no very definite impression on my mind, except that of vast space, and, where it has not yet been cleared of its barrack adaptations, of miserable degradation. One sees the funnel chimney in the middle of the great kitchen which was for so long said to have been the torture chamber of the Inquisition; one gets beautiful views from the higher chambers and windows and from the towers; and here and there one looks down on to a neglected space that was once a trim garden.

If one cannot picture the old popes and cardinals walking in the beautiful garden from which we now look down to the RhÔne and across to Villeneuve and the purple country beyond, they were not without such pleasures, although it never occurred to any of them to make a garden just there.

"Among the amenities of the old palace were the spacious and lovely gardens on the east, with their clipped hedges, avenues of trees, flower-beds and covered and frescoed walls, all kept fresh and green by channels of water. John XXII maintained a menagerie of lions and other wild and strange beasts; stately peacocks swept proudly along the green swards,—for the inventory of 1369 specifies seventeen peacocks, some old and some young, whereof six are white."[19]

Even when the restoration is finished it will need a strong effort of imagination to recall the scenes that were witnessed by these gigantic walls. They tell of the strength of the place and of the necessity for that strength. One can imagine the fighting, but it will all be too much swept and garnished to call up the scenes of splendour and luxury that were piled one upon another even in times of misery—of war and of flood and of plague.

The luxury was like nothing that we know of except that of some of the Roman Imperial courts. Mr. Okey has collected many extraordinary details, from which I take as an example the account of the banquet given by two cardinals to Pope Clement V.

"Clement, as he descended from his litter, was received by his hosts and twenty chaplains, who conducted him to a chamber hung with richest tapestries from floor to ceiling; he trod on velvet carpet of triple pile; his state-bed was draped with fine crimson velvet, lined with white ermine; the sheets of silk were embroidered with silver and gold. The table was served by four papal knights and twelve squires, who each received silver girdles and purses filled with gold from the hosts; fifty cardinals' squires assisted them in serving the banquet, which consisted of nine courses of three plates each—twenty-seven dishes in all. The meats were built up in fantastic form: castles, gigantic stags, boars, horses, &c. After the fourth service, the cardinals offered his holiness a milk-white steed worth 400 florins; two gold rings, jewelled with an enormous sapphire and a no less enormous topaz; and a bowl, worth 100 florins; sixteen cardinal guests and twenty prelates were given rings and jewels, and twelve young clerks of the papal house and twenty-four sergeants-at-arms received purses filled with florins. After the fifth service, a great tower with a fount whence gushed forth five sorts of choicest wines was carried in; and a tourney was run during the interval between the seventh and eighth courses. Then followed a concert of sweetest music, and dessert was furnished by two trees—one of silver, bearing rarest fruits of all kinds, and the other loaded with sugared fruits of many colours. Various wines were then served, whereupon the master cooks, with thirty assistants, executed dances before the guests. Clement, by this time, having had enough, retired to his chamber, where, lest he might faint for lack of refreshment during the night, wine and spices were brought to him; the entertainment ended with dances and distractions of many kinds."[20]

The luxury has gone, and so has the terror. The thick-barred windows of the towers speak of the many who were immured there in pain and misery; if the kitchen was not a torture-chamber, such a chamber was certainly to be found elsewhere; somewhere on the walls is the hook from which was suspended the iron cage in which a cardinal who had offended the pope was hung up for months in the sight of all. The times needed a good deal of gilding.