The Complete Works of Henry James, page 561
XXXIII.
I had been twice at Avignon before, and yet I was not satisfied. I probably am satisfied now; neverthe- less, I enjoyed my third visit. I shall not soon forget the first, on which a particular emotion set indelible stamp. I was travelling northward, in 1870, after four months spent, for the first time, in Italy. It was the middle of January, and I had found myself, unexpected- ly, forced to return to England for the rest of the winter. It was an insufferable disappointment; I was wretched and broken-hearted. Italy appeared to me at that time so much better than anything else in the world, that to rise from table in the middle of the feast was a prospect of being hungry for the rest of my days. I had heard a great deal of praise of the south of France; but the south of France was a poor consolation. In this state of mind I arrived at Avignon, which under a bright, hard winter sun was tingling - fairly spinning - with the mistral. I find in my journal of the other day a reference to the acuteness of my reluctance in January, 1870. France, after Italy, ap- peared, in the language of the latter country, poco sim- patica; and I thought it necessary, for reasons now in- conceivable, to read the “Figaro,” which was filled with descriptions of the horrible Troppmann, the mur- derer of the famille Kink. Troppmann, Kink, le crime do Pantin, very names that figured in this episode seemed to wave me back. Had I abandoned the so- norous south to associate with vocables so base?
It was very cold, the other day, at Avignon; for though there was no mistral, it was raining as it rains in Provence, and the dampness had a terrible chill in it. As I sat by my fire, late at night - for in genial Avignon, in October, I had to have a fire - it came back to me that eleven years before I had at that same hour sat by a fire in that same room, and, writ- ing to a friend to whom I was not afraid to appear extravagant, had made a vow that at some happier period of the future I would avenge myself on the ci- devant city of the Popes by taking it in a contrary sense. I suppose that I redeemed my vow on the oc- casion of my second visit better than on my third; for then I was on my way to Italy, and that vengeance, of course, was complete. The only drawback was that I was in such a hurry to get to Ventimiglia (where the Italian custom-house was to be the sign of my triumph), that I scarcely took time to make it clear to myself at Avignon that this was better than reading the “Figaro.” I hurried on almost too fast to enjoy the consciousness of moving southward. On this last occasion I was un- fortunately destitute of that happy faith. Avignon was my southernmost limit; after which I was to turn round and proceed back to England. But in the interval I had been a great deal in Italy, and that made all the difference.
I had plenty of time to think of this, for the rain kept me practically housed for the first twenty-four hours. It had been raining in, these regions for a month, and people had begun to look askance at the Rhone, though as yet the volume of the river was not exorbitant. The only excursion possible, while the torrent descended, was a kind of horizontal dive, ac- companied with infinite splashing, to the little musee of the town, which is within a moderate walk of the hotel. I had a memory of it from my first visit; it had appeared to me more pictorial than its pictures. I found that recollection had flattered it a little, and that it is neither better nor worse than most provincial museums. It has the usual musty chill in the air, the usual grass-grown fore-court, in which a few lumpish Roman fragments are disposed, the usual red tiles on the floor, and the usual specimens of the more livid schools on the walls. I rang up the gardien, who ar- rived with a bunch of keys, wiping his mouth; he un- locked doors for me, opened shutters, and while (to my distress, as if the things had been worth lingering over) he shuffled about after me, he announced the names of the pictures before which I stopped, in a voice that reverberated through the melancholy halls, and seemed to make the authorship shameful when it was obscure, and grotesque when it pretended to be great. Then there were intervals of silence, while I stared absent-mindedly, at hap-hazard, at some indis- tinguishable canvas, and the only sound was the down- pour of the rain on the skylights. The museum of Avignon derives a certain dignity from its Roman frag- ments. The town has no Roman monuments to show; in this respect, beside its brilliant neighbors, Arles and Nimes, it is a blank. But a great many small objects have been found in its soil, - pottery, glass, bronzes, lamps, vessels and ornaments of gold and silver. The glass is especially chaming, - small vessels of the most delicate shape and substance, many of them perfectly preserved. These diminutive, intimate things bring one near to the old Roman life; they seem like pearls strung upon the slender thread that swings across the gulf of time. A little glass cup that Roman lips have touched says more to us than the great vessel of an arena. There are two small silver casseroles, with chi- selled handles, in the museum of Avignon, that struck me as among the most charming survivals of anti- quity.
I did wrong just above, to speak of my attack on this establishment as the only recreation I took that first wet day; for I remember a terribly moist visit to the former palace of the Popes, which could have taken place only in the same tempestuous hours. It is true that I scarcely know why I should have gone out to see the Papal palace in the rain, for I had been over it twice before, and even then had not found the interest of the place so complete as it ought to be; the fact, nevertheless, remains that this last occasion is much associated with an umbrella, which was not superfluous even in some of the chambers and cor- ridors of the gigantic pile. It had already seemed to me the dreariest of all historical buildings, and my final visit confirmed the impression. The place is as intricate as it is vast, and as desolate as it is dirty. The imagination has, for some reason or other, to make more than the effort usual in such cases to re- store and repeople it. The fact, indeed, is simply that the palace has been so incalculably abused and altered. The alterations have been so numerous that, though I have duly conned the enumerations, supplied in guide- books, of the principal perversions, I do not pretend to carry any of them in my head. The huge 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-Benazet (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 dis- tance, in spite of its poverty, a great figure, the effect of which is carried out by the tower of the church be- side 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 espe- cially 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, dur- ing which seven Popes, all Frenchmen, carried on the court of Avignon on principles that have not com- mended themselves to the esteem of posterity. But history has been whitewashed away, and the scandals of that period have mingled with the dust of dilapi- dations 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 carnp, and it would offer but a me- lancholy 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 mediaeval bakehouse), not of the tower of the glaciere and the horrors perpetrated here in the Revolution, but of the military burden of young France. One wonders how young France en- dures it, and one is forced to believe that the French conscript has, in addition to his notorious good-humor, greater toughness than is commonly supposed by those who consider only the more relaxing influences of French civilization. I hope he finds occasional com- pensation 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 civilized of countries. The only traces of former splendor 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.
XXXIV.
Fortunately, it did not rain every day (though I believe it was raining everywhere else in the depart- ment); 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-les- Avignon. The picturesque, half-deserted little town lies a couple of miles further up the river. The im- mense 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 oc- casional 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, re- markably 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- Andre, 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 intrusted 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 privi- lege, for I think I have already mentioned that an ac- quaintance 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, loop-holes, 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 get muddled. 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 over so many devilish little dungeons, lighted by the narrowest slit in the pro- digious wall, where it comes over one with a good deal of vividness and still more horror that wretched human beings ever 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 grewsome 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 un- scrupulously 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 sym- pathies, 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 main- tained, that in the Middle Ages every one did go mad, - every one was mad. The theory that this was a period of general insanity is not altogether indefensible.
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 im- portant 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 gray robes, with a bright red cape. I thought their situation most pro- vincial. 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 bright- ness. I sat down under one of the little trees, on the grass, - the delicate gray 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 mo- ment, 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 at- tention. 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 Carcas- sonne; but this is exactly, as 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 ad- mirable 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 nought 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 gray block is all Avignon; it seems to occupy the whole city, extensive, with its shrunken population, as the city is.
