Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (683 page)

Beneath our feet was the gray, ugly old palace, and its many courts, just as void of system and as inconceivable as when we were burrowing through its bewildering passages. No end of historical romances might be made out of this castle of the popes; and there ought to be a ghost in every room, and droves of them in some of the rooms; for there have been murders here in the gross and in detail, as well hundreds of years ago, as no longer back than the French Revolution, when there was a great massacre in one of the courts. Traces of this bloody business were visible in actual stains on the wall only a few years ago.

Returning to the room of the concierge, who, being a little stiff with age, had sent an attendant round with us, instead of accompanying us in person, he showed us a picture of Rienzi, the last of the Roman tribunes, who was once a prisoner here. On a table, beneath the picture, stood a little vase of earthenware containing some silver coin. We took it as a hint, in the customary style of French elegance, that a fee should be deposited here, instead of being put into the hand of the concierge; so the French gentleman deposited half a franc, and I, in my magnificence, twice as much.

Hotel de l'Europe, June 6th. — We are still here. . . . I have been daily to the Rocher des Dons, and have grown familiar with the old church on its declivity. I think I might become attached to it by seeing it often. A sombre old interior, with its heavy arches, and its roof vaulted like the top of a trunk; its stone gallery, with ponderous adornments, running round three sides. I observe that it is a daily custom of the old women to say their prayers in concert, sometimes making a pilgrimage, as it were, from chapel to chapel. The voice of one of them is heard running through the series of petitions, and at intervals the voices of the others join and swell into a chorus, so that it is like a river connecting a series of lakes; or, not to use so gigantic a simile, the one voice is like a thread, on which the beads of a rosary are strung.

One day two priests came and sat down beside these prayerful women, and joined in their petitions. I am inclined to hope that there is something genuine in the devotion of these old women.

The view from the top of the Rocker des Dons (a contraction of Dominis) grows upon me, and is truly magnificent; a vast mountain-girdled plain, illuminated by the far windings and reaches of the Rhone. The river is here almost as turbid as the Tiber itself; but, I remember, in the upper part of its course the waters are beautifully transparent. A powerful rush is indicated by the swirls and eddies of its broad surface.

Yesterday was a race day at Avignon, and apparently almost the whole population and a great many strangers streamed out of the city gate nearest our hotel, on their way to the race-course. There were many noticeable figures that might come well into a French picture or description; but only one remains in my memory, — a young man with a wooden leg, setting off for the course — a walk of several miles, I believe — with prodigious courage and alacrity, flourishing his wooden leg with an air and grace that seemed to render it positively flexible. The crowd returned towards sunset, and almost all night long, the streets and the whole air of the old town were full of song and merriment. There was a ball in a temporary structure, covered with an awning, in the Place d'Horloge, and a showman has erected his tent and spread forth his great painted canvases, announcing an anaconda and a sea-tiger to be seen. J —
 
— - paid four sous for admittance, and found that the sea-tiger was nothing but a large seal, and the anaconda altogether a myth.

I have rambled a good deal about the town. Its streets are crooked and perplexing, and paved with round pebbles for the most part, which afford more uncomfortable pedestrianism than the pavement of Rome itself. It is an ancient-looking place, with some large old mansions, but few that are individually impressive; though here and there one sees an antique entrance, a corner tower, or other bit of antiquity, that throws a venerable effect over the gray commonplace of past centuries. The town is not overclean, and often there is a kennel of unhappy odor. There appear to have been many more churches and devotional establishments under the ancient dominion of the popes than have been kept intact in subsequent ages; the tower and facade of a church, for instance, form the front of a carpenter's shop, or some such plebeian place. The church where Laura lay has quite disappeared, and her tomb along with it. The town reminds me of Chester, though it does not in the least resemble it, and is not nearly so picturesque. Like Chester, it is entirely surrounded by a wall; and that of Avignon — though it has no delightful promenade on its top, as the wall of Chester has — is the more perfectly preserved in its mediaeval form, and the more picturesque of the two. J —
 
— - and I have once or twice walked nearly round it, commencing from the gate of Ouelle, which is very near our hotel. From this point it stretches for a considerable distance along by the river, and here there is a broad promenade, with trees, and blocks of stone for seats; on one side “the arrowy Rhone,” generally carrying a cooling breeze along with it; on the other, the gray wall, with its battlements and machicolations, impending over what was once the moat, but which is now full of careless and untrained shrubbery. At intervals there are round towers swelling out from the wall, and rising a little above it. After about half a mile along the river-side the wall turns at nearly right angles, and still there is a wide road, a shaded walk, a boulevard; and at short distances are cafes, with their little round tables before the door, or small shady nooks of shrubbery. So numerous are these retreats and pleasaunces that I do not see how the little old town can support them all, especially as there are a great many cafes within the walls. I do not remember seeing any soldiers on guard at the numerous city gates, but there is an office in the side of each gate for levying the octroi, and old women are sometimes on guard there.

This morning, after breakfast, J —
 
— - and I crossed the suspension-bridge close by the gate nearest our hotel, and walked to the ancient town of Villeneuve, on the other side of the Rhone. The first bridge leads to an island, from the farther side of which another very long one, with a timber foundation, accomplishes the passage of the other branch of the Rhone. There was a good breeze on the river, but after crossing it we found the rest of the walk excessively hot. This town of Villeneuve is of very ancient origin, and owes its existence, it is said, to the famous holiness of a female saint, which gathered round her abode and burial-place a great many habitations of people who reverenced her. She was the daughter of the King of Saragossa, and I presume she chose this site because it was so rocky and desolate. Afterwards it had a long mediaeval history; and in the time of the Avignon popes, the cardinals, regretful of their abandoned Roman villas, built pleasure-houses here, so that the town was called Villa Nueva. After they had done their best, it must have seemed to these poor cardinals but a rude and sad exchange for the Borghese, the Albani, the Pamfili Doria, and those other perfectest results of man's luxurious art. And probably the tradition of the Roman villas had really been kept alive, and extant examples of them all the way downward from the times of the empire. But this Villeneuve is the stoniest, roughest town that can be imagined. There are a few large old houses, to be sure, but built on a line with shabby village dwellings and barns, and so presenting little but samples of magnificent shabbiness. Perhaps I might have found traces of old splendor if I had sought for them; but, not having the history of the place in my mind, I passed through its scrambling streets without imagining that Princes of the Church had once made their abode here. The inhabitants now are peasants, or chiefly such; though, for aught I know, some of the French noblesse may burrow in these palaces that look so like hovels.

A large church, with a massive tower, stands near the centre of the town; and, of course, I did not fail to enter its arched door, — a pointed arch, with many frames and mouldings, one within another. An old woman was at her devotions, and several others came in and knelt during my stay there. It was quite an interesting interior; a long nave, with six pointed arches on each side, beneath which were as many chapels. The walls were rich with pictures, not only in the chapels, but up and down the nave, above the arches. There were gilded virgins, too, and much other quaint device that produced an effect that I rather liked than otherwise. At the end of the church, farthest from the high altar, there were four columns of exceedingly rich marble, and a good deal more of such precious material was wrought into the chapels and altars. There was an old stone seat, also, of some former pope or prelate. The church was dim enough to cause the lamps in the shrines to become points of vivid light, and, looking from end to end, it was a long, venerable, tarnished, Old World vista, not at all tampered with by modern taste.

We now went on our way through the village, and, emerging from a gate, went clambering towards the castle of St. Andre, which stands, perhaps, a quarter of a mile beyond it. This castle was built by Philip le Bel, as a restraint to the people of Avignon in extending their power on this side of the Rhone. We happened not to take the most direct way, and so approached the castle on the farther side and were obliged to go nearly round the hill on which it stands, before striking into the path which leads to its gate. It crowns a very bold and difficult hill, directly above the Rhone, opposite to Avignon, — which is so far off that objects are not minutely distinguishable, — and looking down upon the long, straggling town of Villeneuve. It must have been a place of mighty strength, in its day. Its ramparts seem still almost entire, as looked upon from without, and when, at length, we climbed the rough, rocky pathway to the entrance, we found the two vast round towers, with their battlemented summits and arched gateway between them, just as perfect as they could have been five hundred or more years ago. Some external defences are now, however, in a state of ruin; and there are only the remains of a tower, that once arose between the two round towers, and was apparently much more elevated than they. A little in front of the gate was a monumental cross of stone; and in the arch, between the two round towers, were two little boys at play; and an old woman soon showed herself, but took no notice of us. Casting our eyes within the gateway, we saw what looked a rough village street, betwixt old houses built ponderously of stone, but having far more the aspect of huts than of castle-hails. They were evidently the dwellings of peasantry, and people engaged in rustic labor; and no doubt they have burrowed into the primitive structures of the castle, and, as they found convenient, have taken their crumbling materials to build barns and farm-houses. There was space and accommodation for a very considerable population; but the men were probably at work in the fields, and the only persons visible were the children aforesaid, and one or two old women bearing bundles of twigs on their backs. They showed no curiosity respecting us, and though the wide space included within the castle-rampart seemed almost full of habitations ruinous or otherwise, I never found such a solitude in any ruin before. It contrasts very favorably in this particular with English castles, where, though you do not find rustic villages within the warlike enclosure, there is always a padlocked gate, always a guide, and generally half a dozen idle tourists. But here was only antiquity, with merely the natural growth of fungous human life upon it.

We went to the end of the castle court and sat down, for lack of other shade, among some inhospitable nettles that grew close to the wall. Close by us was a great gap in the ramparts, — it may have been a breach which was once stormed through; and it now afforded us an airy and sunny glimpse of distant hills. . . . J —
 
— - sketched part of the broken wall, which, by the by, did not seem to me nearly so thick as the walls of English castles. Then we returned through the gate, and I stopped, rather impatiently, under the hot sun, while J —
 
— - drew the outline of the two round towers. This done, we resumed our way homeward, after drinking from a very deep well close by the square tower of Philip le Bel. Thence we went melting through the sunshine, which beat upward as pitilessly from the white road as it blazed downwards from the sky. . . .

GENEVA.

Hotel d'Angleterre, June 11th. — We left Avignon on Tuesday, 7th, and took the rail to Valence, where we arrived between four and five, and put up at the Hotel de la Poste, an ancient house, with dirty floors and dirt generally, but otherwise comfortable enough. . . . Valence is a stately old town, full of tall houses and irregular streets. We found a cathedral there, not very large, but with a high and venerable interior, a nave supported by tall pillars, from the height of which spring arches. This loftiness is characteristic of French churches, as distinguished from those of Italy. . . . We likewise saw, close by the cathedral, a large monument with four arched entrances meeting beneath a vaulted roof; but, on inquiry of an old priest and other persons, we could get no account of it, except that it was a tomb, and of unknown antiquity. The architecture seemed classic, and yet it had some Gothic peculiarities, and it was a reverend and beautiful object. Had I written up my journal while the town was fresh in my remembrance, I might have found much to describe; but a succession of other objects have obliterated most of the impressions I have received here. Our railway ride to Valence was intolerably hot. I have felt nothing like it since leaving America, and that is so long ago that the terrible discomfort was just as good as new. . . .