Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on, into a vaulted chamber, now used as a store-room; once the Chapel of the Holy Office. The place where the tribunal sat, was plain. The platform might have been removed but yesterday. Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan having been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition chambers! But it was, and may be traced there yet.

High up in the wall, are niches where the faltering replies of the accused were heard and noted down. Many of them had been brought out of the very cell we had just looked into, so awfully; along the same stone passage. We had trodden in their very footsteps.

I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place inspires, when Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger, but the handle of a key, upon her lip. She invites me, with a jerk, to follow her. I do so. She leads me out into a room adjoining—a rugged room, with a funnel- shaped, contracting roof, open at the top, to the bright day, I ask her what it is. She folds her arms,, leers hideously, and stares. I ask again. She glances round, to see that all the little company are there; sits down upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms, and yells out, like a fiend, "La Salle de la Question!"

The Chamber of Torture! And the roof was made of that shape to stifle the victim's cries! Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us think of this awhile, in silence. Peace, Goblin! Sit with your short arms crossed on your short legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five minutes, and then flame out again.... A cold air, with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of Monsieur; for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the wall. Monsieur looks in. Downward to the bottom, upward to the top, of a steep, dark lofty tower; very dismal, very dark, very cold. The Executioner of the Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also, flung those who were past all further torturing, down here. "But look! does Monsieur see the black stains on the wall?" A glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin's keen eye, shows Monsieur—and would without the aid of the directing-key—where they are. "What are they?" "Blood!"

In October, 1791, when Revolution was at its height here, sixty persons; men and women ("and priests," says Goblin, "priests"); were murdered, and hurled, the dying and the dead, into this dreadful pit, where a quantity of quicklime was tumbled down upon their bodies. Those ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no more; but while one stone of the strong building in which the deed was done, remains upon another, there they will lie in the memories of men, as plain to see as the splashing of their blood upon the wall is now.... Goblin's finger is lifted; and she steals out again, into the Chapel of the Holy Office. She stops at a certain part of the flooring. Her great effect is at hand. She waits for the rest. She darts at the brave courier, who is explaining something; hits him a sounding rap on the hat with the largest key; and bids him be silent. She assembles us all, round a little trap-door in the floor, as round as grave.

"Voil!" she darts down at the ring, and flings the door open with a crash, in her goblin energy, tho it is no light weight. "Voil les oubliettes! Voil les oubliettes! Subterranean! Frightful! Black! Terrible! Deadly! Les oubliettes de l'Inquisition!"

My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into the vaults, where these forgotten creatures, with recollections of the world outside—of wives, friends, children, brothers—starved to death, and made the stones ring with their unavailing groans. But, the thrill I felt on seeing the accurst wall below, decayed and broken through, and the sun shining in through its gaping wounds, was like a sense of victory and triumph.

I felt exalted with the proud delight of living, in these degenerate times, to see it. As if I were the hero of some high achievement! The light in the doleful vaults was typical of the light that has streamed in, on all persecution in God's name, but which is not yet at its noon! It can not look more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight, than to a traveler who sees it, calmly and majestically, treading down the darkness of that Infernal Well.

Goblin, having shown les oubliettes, felt that her great coup was struck. She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon it with her arms a-kimbo, sniffing prodigiously.

When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house, under the outer gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history of the building. Her cabaret, a dark low room, lighted by small windows, sunk in the thick wall—in the softened light, and with its forge-like chimney; its little counter by the door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it; its household implements are scraps of dress against the wall; and a sober looking woman (she must have a congenial life of it, with Goblin) knitting at the door— looked exactly like a picture by Ostade.

I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and yet with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which the light, down in the vaults, had given, me the assurance. The immense thickness and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the massive towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions, frowning aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and wonder.

The recollection of its opposite old uses; an impregnable fortress, a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the Inquisition; at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting, religion, and blood, gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful interest, and imparts new meaning to its incongruities. I could think of little, however, then, or long afterward, but the sun in the dungeons.

The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of noisy soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk and common oaths, and to have their garments fluttering from its dirty windows, was some reduction of its state, and something to rejoice at; but the day in its cells, and the sky for the roof of its chambers of cruelty—that was its desolation and defeat! If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart, I should have felt that not that light, nor all the light in all the fire that burns, could waste it, like the sunbeams in its secret council-chamber and its prisons.



The Building of the Great Palace

By Thomas Oakey

[Footnote: From "The Story of Avignon." Published by E.P. Dutton & Co.]



It will now be convenient briefly to trace the growth of that remarkable edifice, at once a castle and a cloister, a palace and a prison, which constitutes the chief attraction of Avignon to-day, and which, altho defaced by time and by modern restorers, remains in its massive grandeur a fitting memorial of the great line of pontiffs who have made that little city famous in the annals of Christendom.

We have seen that Pope John XXII., having allotted a piece of land to his nephew, Arnaud de Via, for the erection of a new episcopal palace, was content to modify and enlarge the old one for pontifical uses, and that Benedict XII., with characteristic straightforwardness, purchased the new fabric from Arnaud's heirs and, having handed it over to the diocesan authorities, proceeded to transform the old building into a stately and spacious apostolic palace for the head of Christendom.

He was moved to this purchase after mature reflection, for it was a matter of urgent importance that the pontiff of the church of Rome should possess a palace of his own at Avignon as long as it might be necessary for him to remain there. The relation between Curia and Episcopate being thus clearly defined, Benedict appointed a compatriot, Pierre Poisson de Mirepoix, master of the works, and, since about two-thirds of the existing palace dates from Benedict's reign, Pierre Poisson may be regarded as its first architect.

More, probably, is known of the construction of the papal palace of Avignon than of any other relic of medieval architecture. Thanks to the researches of Father Ehrle, Prefect of the Vatican Library, and other scholars, the sums paid to the contractors, their names, the estimates of quantities, the wages of the chief workmen, and the price of materials, are before us, and we can trace day by day and month by month the progress of the great pile. The whole of the craftsmen, with the exception of the later master painters from Italy and some northern sculptors, were either Avignonais, Gascons or Provenals.

The first work undertaken by Pierre was the enlargement of the papal chapel of John XXII. This was doubled in length, and the lavish decorations executed by John's master painter, Friar Pierre Dupuy, were continued on the walls of the added portion; payments for white, green, indigo, vermilion, carmine and other pigments, and for colored tiles, testify to the brilliancy of its interior.

Meanwhile work was proceeding on the massy new tower, the Turris Magna, now known as the Tour des Anges, the best preserved of all the old towers. The foundations were laid on April 3, 1335, and it was roofed with lead on March 18, 1337. The basement formed the papal wine-cellar; the ground floor was the treasury, or strong room, where the specie, the jewels, the precious vessels of gold and silver and other valuables were stored; many payments are recorded for locks and bars and bolts for their safe-keeping within the ten-feet-thick walls of the tower.

The next great work put in hand was the east wing, which was raised on a space left by John's demolished, or partially demolished, structure. On November 20, 1337, two masons (lapiscidarios), Pierre Folcaud and Jean Chapelier, and a carpenter, Jacques Beyran, all of Avignon, contracted to carry out the plans of a new architect, Bernard Canello, for the completion of Benedict's private apartments, and on the same day Lambert Fabre and Martin Guinaud, housewreckers, were paid eighty-three gold florins on account, for the demolition of the old buildings. This wing, since wholly remodeled by the legates and the modern corps of engineers, comprised the papal Garde Robe, the Garde Meuble, the private kitchen and offices and, on the floor above, the papal dining-room, study and private oratory. The walls were, of course, embattlemented, and in 1337 the most exposed portions of the new buildings were defended by a stout rampart....

The whole ground floor, 110 feet by 33, was occupied by a great reception hall (Camera Paramenti), where distinguished visitors were accorded a first welcome before being admitted to a private audience, or accorded a solemn state reception in consistory, as the import of their embassy demanded. The popes were also used to receive the cardinals there, and two doorkeepers were appointed who must be faithful, virtuous and honest men and sleep in the hall; their office being one of great trust, was highly paid, and they were generally laymen. It was probably in this hall that St. Catherine was received by Clement VI. The Avignon conclaves were held there, for on December 31, 1352, four hundred and fifteen days' and nights' labor were employed in breaking down the walls between the dining- hall and the Camera Paramenti, clearing away the stones and making secret chambers for the lord cardinals, in which chambers were twenty-eight cells....

On September 5, 1339, John's old belfry was pulled down and Jean Mauser de Carnot, who asserted he had excavated 11,300 basketfuls of rubbish, was paid at the rate of twelve deniers the hundred for the work. Evidently these were good times for the basket makers as well as builders. December 22, 1340, three contractors, Isnard and Raymond Durand and Jacques Gasquet, received 1,273 florins for the completed new tower, with its barbicans, battlements and machicoulis, which was on the site and which retained the appellation of the Tour de la Campane, or Bell Tower. The embattlemented and machicolated summit, but not the chastelet, of this mighty tower has recently been restored; its walls are nearly twelve feet thick....

Benedict's last undertaking was the erection of the Tour de Trouillas, next the Tour des Latrines, and on April 20, 1341, sixteen rubbish baskets were bought for the "Saracens that excavated the foundations of the turris nova." The Tour de Trouillas, tallest and stoutest of the keeps of the mighty fortress, is 175 feet high as compared with the 150 feet of the Tour de la Campane, and its walls fifteen feet thick as compared with twelve feet. It should be noted, however, that the latter tower appears the taller owing to the elevated ground whereon, it stands....

Having bought, by private agreement or by arbitration, all the houses adjacent to the palace on the south side, Clement next proceeded to demolish them and on the site to raise the noblest and most beautiful wing of the great palace. This edifice, known to contemporaries as the great new palace, comprised a spacious Chapel and Hall of Justice; and in August 9, 1344, contracts were made for cutting away and leveling the rock above the present Rue Peyrolerie, whereon, by October 21, 1351, the masons had raised their beautiful building.

On that day, by order of our lord the pope, one hundred florins were handed over by the papal chamber to Master John of Loubires to distribute among the masters to celebrate the placing of the keystone in the vaulting of the new chapel of the palace and the completion of the said chapel. On All Saints' Day of that same year Clement recited (a month before his death) the first solemn mass in his great new chapel and preached a most eloquent sermon, praising God for the completion of his life's work. The lower hall, most famous of judicial chambers in Christendom and final Court of Appeal in all questions of international and ecclesiastical law, was later in opening.

Among the amenities of the old palace were the spacious and lovely gardens on the east, with their clipt hedges, avenues of trees, flower-beds and covered and frescoed walls, all kept fresh and green by channels of water. John 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 were white.

* * * * *

But we have as yet dealt chiefly with the external shell of this mass of architecture which, tall and mighty, raises its once impregnable walls and towers against the sky. The beauty of its interior remains briefly to be touched upon, for the fortress palace had, as Clement left it, some analogy with the great Moorish palace of the Alhambra in that it stood outwardly grim and strong, while within it was a shrine of exquisite and luxurious art.

The austere Benedict, who, his biographer tells us, left the walls of the consistory naked, appears to have expended little on the pictorial decorations of the halls and chambers erected during his pontificate; but with the elevation of the luxurious and art-loving Clement VI., a new spirit breathes over the fabric. The stern simplicity and noble strength of his predecessor's work assume an internal vesture of richness and beauty; the walls glow with azure and gold; a legion of Gallic sculptors and Italian painters lavish their art on the embellishment of the palace....

Such, in brief outline, was the progress of the mighty fabric and its internal decoration which the great popes of Avignon raised to be their dwelling-place, their fortress, and the ecclesiastical center of Christendom. Tho shorn of all its pristine beauty and robbed of much of its symmetry, it stands to-day in bulk and majesty, much as it stood at the end of Clement VI.'s reign, when a contemporary writer describes it as a quadrangular edifice, enclosed within high walls and towers and constructed in most noble style, and tho it was all most beautiful to look upon, there were three parts of transcendent beauty: the Audientia, the Capella major, and the terraces: and these were so admirably planned and contrived that peradventure no palace comparable to it was to be found in the whole world. The terraces referred to were those raised over the great chapel, and were formed of stone, bedded in asphalt and laid on a staging of stout oak joists; the view from the terraces was unparalleled for range and beauty.

The glowing splendor of frescoed walls was enhanced by gorgeous hangings and tapestries and by the magnificent robes and jewels of popes and cardinals. Crowds of goldsmiths—forty were employed at the papal court— embroiderers and silk mercers, made Avignon famous thoughout Europe. In 1337, 318 florins were paid for eight Paris carpets; in 1343 Clement VI. paid 213 florins for green silk hangings, and 254 florins for carpets adorned with roses; in 1348, 400 gold and silver vessels turned the scales at 862 marks, 5 ounces; in the inventory of 1369, despite the fact that the most precious had been sent to Rome, the gold vessels were weighed out at 1,434 marks, 1 ounce; the silver at 5,525 marks 7 ounces.

A cardinal's hat cost from 15 to 40 florins, and in 1348, 150 florins were paid for one piece of scarlet for the pope, and 75 to 100 florins for the garniture of a riding cloak. Clement VI. spent 1,278 florins in the purchase of cloth of gold, woven by the Saracens of Damascus; one payment to Jacopo Malabayla of Arti for summer and winter clothing for the papal household amounted to 6,510 florins, and the same obviously Hebrew merchant received 10,652 florins in 1341 for cloth and ermine and beaver; in 1347 Clement's furrier received 1,080 ermine skins, whereof 430 were used in one cloak, 310 for a mantle, 150 for two hoods, and 88 for nine birettas; in 1351, 2,258 florins went to Tuscany for silk, and 385 for brocade to Venice.

The richness of the papal utensils beggars description; jeweled cups, flagons of gold, knife handles of jasper and ivory, forks of mother-of- pearl and gold. A goldsmith in 1382 was paid 14 florins for repairing two of the last-named implements. The flabelli, or processional feather fans, cost 14 florins; Benedict XIII., paid 300 florins for an enameled silver bit; the Golden Roses cost from 100 to 300 florins. Presents of jewels were costly and frequent. Gregory XI. gave 168 pearls, value 179 francs, to the citizens of Avellino; Clement VII. presented the Duke of Burgundy with a ring of gold, worth 335 florins; an aguire of gold and pearls, valued at 1,000 florins, and two tables each over 200 florins. Richer gifts were lavished on sovereign princes. Reliquaries were of prodigious value; the gold cross containing a piece of the true cross at the Clestins weighed fifteen pounds. In 1375 a silver arm for the image of St. Andrew cost over 2,566 florins.

The cardinals were equally munificent. The most striking example of lavish splendor is afforded by the State banquet given to Clement V., by the Cardinals Arnaud de Palegrue and Pierre Taillefer in May, 1308. 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, etc. After the fourth service, the cardinal offered his holiness a milk-white steed worth 400 florins; two gold rings, jeweled 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 font 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 colors. 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.

There is no reason to believe that the Avignon popes, either in their household expenditure or in their personal luxury, were more extravagant than their Roman predecessors or successors. Yet amid all this luxury, strange defects of comfort appear to the modern sense. Windows, as we have seen, were generally covered with wax cloth or linen, carpets were rare, and rushes were strewn on the floors of most of the rooms. From May to November, 1349, more than 300 loads of rushes were supplied for use in the dining-rooms and chambers of the apostolic palace. Subsequently mats were introduced, and in 1352 Pierre de Glotos, mat-maker to the palace of our lord and pope, was paid for 275 cannae of matting for the palace of Avignon and for the palace beyond the Rhone and the new chapel.



The Walls of Avignon

By Thomas Oakey

[Footnote: From "The Story of Avignon." Published by E.P. Dutton & Co.]



Intimately associated with the history of the palace of the Popes of Avignon is that of the unparalleled circuit of walls and towers which defended the city from the scourge of organized robber bands during the fourteenth century. The earliest quadrilateral fortifications embraced a relatively small area consisting of the Rocher des Doms and the parishes of St. Agricol, St. Didier, and St. Pierre; these walls, demolished and rebuilt on a more extensive scale in the twelfth century, embraced an area easily traceable on the modern map, from the Porte du Rhone, round the Rues du Limas, Joseph Vernet, des Lices, Philonarde, Campane, Trois Colombes, to the Rocher.

It was these fortifications that the Cardinal St. Angelo forced the citizens to raze in 1227. Until the acquisition of Avignon by Clement VI., the city was an open one and only defended by a double fosse. The origin of the papal walls has already been traced, and their subsequent fate may now be briefly given. The assaults of the Rhone proved more destructive than human artillery. The walls and towers having been hastily raised, towers fell by reason of bad foundation, and the upkeep of the fortifications was a continual drain on papal and communal finances.

In 1362 an irresistible flood of waters overthrew the Fortes St. Michel and Limbert, and large breaches were often made by these recurring inundations. Moreover, the expansion of the city of old and the need of access to the suburbs involved frequent displacement and opening of new gates. In 1482 the whole system of the defensive works was modified to meet the new situation caused by the introduction of gunpowder. The gates most exposed to attack were further defended by outworks, that of St. Lazare having been fortified during the rule of Giuliano della Rovere by the addition of a powerful bastide, with three round towers, a drawbridge, a new fosse which communicated with the great fosse before the main walls. Other modifications took place during the Huguenot wars.

Notwithstanding many repairs during the intervening centuries, the fortifications had, under the second Empire, suffered sad degradation, and at length Viollet-le-Duc was entrusted with their restoration. The famous architect set to work on their southern side and had completed about one- third of the restoration when the disastrous issue of the Franco-Prussian war arrested all further progress until the Third Republic feebly resumed the task. The walls along the Rhone, especially useful in time of flood, were backed with stone, their battlements and machicoulis renewed. The visitor, however, will need no reminder that the present passive aspect of the ramparts conveys but a faint impression of their former state, when a broad and deep fosse, seven feet by twelve, washed their bases, above which they raised their once impregnable curtains full thirty feet.

Two of the old gates have been demolished—the Porte de Limbert in 1896, and the Porte de l'Oulle in 1900—the former, many times repaired, was the only existing example of the external aspect of a medieval gate, the latter had been rebuilt in 1786 in the Doric style. A new gate, the Porte Ptrarque, now the Porte de la Rpublique, was erected by Viollet-le-Duc when the walls were pierced for the new street; the Porte St. Dominique is also new. These noble mural defenses, three miles in circuit, twice narrowly escaped demolition—at the construction of the railway, when they were saved by a vigorous protest of Prosper Mrime, and in 1902, when, on the pretext that they blocked the development of the city, the municipality decided to demolish the unrestored portions. Luckily the intervention of a public-spirited Prefect of Vaucluse proved successful, and they were again rescued from the housewrecker's pick. No visitor to Avignon should omit to walk or drive round the famous ramparts.

Their stones have been subjected to careful scrutiny by antiquarians and the masons' marks (tacherons)—about 4,500—carefully examined and reduced to about four hundred and fifty types. Opinions differ as to the meaning of these curious signs, but there is little doubt that M. Maire's suggestion is the correct one—the workmen were paid by the piece, and each had his own private mark which he cut on the stones he laid and thus enabled the foreman to check his work.

We begin at the Porte du Rhne, and skirt the older part of the walls on the northwest with their different style of corbels and machicoulis. M. Maire has no hesitation in assigning this portion to the time of Clement VI., by reason of the coarser nature of the masons' marks. Turning southwards, we pass the Porte St. Dominique, and reach the Porte St. Roch (formerly the Porte du Chamfleury, and only opened at plague times) and the Porte de la Rpublique. We soon note the unrestored portions, the site of the old Porte Limbert, and turn northward to the Porte St. Lazare.

Before we reach this gate we may fitly make a digression, and in pious memory of a great Englishman, fare along the Avenue du Cimetire to the grave of John Stuart Mill, who with his wife lies buried within the cemetery under an elder-tree on the right and toward the end of Avenue 2. A plain stone slab bears the well-known inscription to Mrs. Mill's memory —the noblest and most eloquent epitaph ever composed by man for woman. It is pleasant to remember that Mill has left golden opinions of his gentleness and generosity behind him at Avignon. His house, a charming little hermitage approached by an avenue of plane trees not far from the cemetery, was sold in 1905, and a few relics were bought and still are cherished by the rare friends the somewhat self-centered philosopher made in the city. The present owner has preserved the library and study, where the "Essay on Liberty" was written, much as it was in Mill's days.

To the peasants who met the tall, bent, spare figure, musing and botanizing along the country lanes and fields, he was known as "Monsieur mile." Before he left the city on his periodical visits to England, Mill was wont to leave 300 francs with M. Rey, pastor of the Protestant Church in Avignon: two hundred for expenses of public worship; one hundred for the poor, always charging M. Rey to write to England if any further need arose.

Mill, a great Englishman of European fame, to the amazement of his French friends, was followed to his last resting-place by no more than five mourners. As we write news comes that the civic authorities have decided to recall to posterity the association of the great thinker with Avignon by giving the name of Stuart Mill to a new boulevard, and that a bust has been unveiled to his memory near the pleasant city he loved so well. Mill was much gratified that his pamphlet on "The Subjection of Women" converted Mistral to the movement for their enfranchisement, and their legal equality with men.



Villeneuve and the Broken Bridge

By Thomas Oakey

[Footnote: From "The Story of Avignon." Published by E.P. Dutton & Co.]



The royal city of Villeneuve, altho geographically and politically sundered from Avignon and the County Venaissin, was socially and economically bound up with the papal city. The same reason that to-day impels the rich citizens of Avignon to dot the hills of Languedoc with their summer villas was operative in papal times, and popes and cardinals and prelates loved to build their summer places on the opposite bank of the Rhone.

How silent and neglected are the streets of this once wealthy and important city! How degraded its monuments, how faded its glory! In the hot, dusty afternoon, as the cranky old omnibus rattles along the narrow High Street, it appears to awaken echoes in a city of the dead.

Making our way northward, we pass the restored seventeenth-century portal of the palace of the sainted Cardinal of Luxembourg; the weather-worn, neglected, late Renaissance portal of the so-called Htel de Conti; the ruined Gothic portal of the palace of Cardinal Pierre de Thury, through which we pass to the old court-yard and a chapel subsequently restored and now used as the chapel of the Grey Penitents.

We pass many another relic of departed grandeur, and beyond the Place Neuve on our right come upon a great portal which opens on a vaulted passage leading to one of the most bewildering and extraordinary congeries of ruined monastic buildings in France, now inhabited by a population of poor folk—two hundred families, it is said—who, since the Revolution, have settled in the vast buildings of the once famous and opulent Charterhouse of Villeneuve. Founded by Innocent VI., three years after his elevation to the papal chair, and enriched by subsequent endownments, the Charterhouse of the Val de Bndiction, the second in importance of the Order, grew in wealth and importance during the centuries until it was sacked and sold in small lots during the Revolution to the ancestors of the present occupants.

The circuit of its walls was a mile in extent; its artistic treasures were prodigious. The Coronation of the Virgin came thence; the Piet of Villeneuve, now in the Louvre; the founder's tomb; the high altar of Notre Dame at Villeneuve, and a few other relics, alone survive of its vast possessions. The scene resembles nothing so much as a city ruined by bombardment or earthquake, but how long the wreck will remain in its present picturesque and melancholy condition is difficult to forecast. The state is slowly buying out the owners, and doubtless ere many years are passed the more valuable artistic remains will have been swept and garnished and restored.

As we return from the Chartreuse we turn left along the Place Neuve, and climb to the mighty fort of St. Andr, which occupies the most venerable site in the royal new city, for on the hill where it stands tradition relates that St. Cesarie, Bishop of Arles, was buried, and that there, in the sixth century, the first Benedictines settled. The primitive settlement, destroyed in the ninth century, was extensively rebuilt in 980, and within its walls, churches were dedicated to St. Andrew, St. Michael, and St. Martin. In the twelfth century the rich and powerful monastery, a strongly fortified, self-sufficing community, was held under the counts of Toulouse, and from their overlordship it was subsequently admitted by the counts to be within the territory of the republic of Avignon, whose consuls in 1210 compelled the abbot to demolish his walls and promise never to rebuild them.

In 1292 Philip the Fair was permitted to settle a small community there, to whom he accorded in 1293 valuable privileges and the same protection he granted to his good city of Paris. Philip, to whom the position was valuable as a frontier post, erected a castle there, maintained a royal garrison, and the new settlement became known as the New Town (Villeneuve). The walls and towers then raised were rebuilt in 1352 by John the Good, who exacted a toll, known as St. Andrew's penny, for maintenance on all merchandise that passes through the Senechausse of Beaucaire.

Of these majestic ruins, restored in the sixteenth century and again in recent times, the Tour des Masques at the west angle with its simple battlements is the oldest portion, the massive machicolated towers that frown over the main entrance having been raised by John the Good. The ruined ravelin dates back to the seventeenth century. We enter and stroll about the desolate interior, crowned by a tiny Romanesque chapel of the twelfth century, that well deserves its name of Our Lady of the Fair View (Notre Dame de Belvzt), with a graceful apse (restored). From its summit, or from the tall old watch-tower of the monastery, a marvelous view is obtained of the gaping ruins of the Charterhouse of Avignon, the County Venaissin, the Cvennes, Mount Ventoux, and the distant Alps.

In the later years of the monarchy a post of artillery was stationed in the fort, and it was from the fire of a battery planted there that a young captain of artillery, one Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1793, overawed the city of Avignon, which was occupied by the Marseillais federalists who had declared against the Convention; and it was with the cannon seized at St. Andr that Bonaparte marched to Toulon and expelled the English from its harbor.

The papal soldiery were ever objects of scorn to the royalists of Villeneuve, who dubbed them "patachines" ("pestacchina," Ital. for slipper), and taunted them with drilling under parasols—a pleasantry repaid by the Italians who hurled the epithet "luzers" (lizards) against the royalists, who were said to pass their time sunning themselves against the hot rocks of Villeneuve.

Descending the stately stairway that leads to the foot of the Rocher des Doms, and turning to the left, we soon reach the house of the "gardien du pont," who will admit us to all that remains of the miraculous pontifical structure of the twelfth century. The destructive hand of man and the assaults of the Rhone have dealt hardly with St. Benezet's work. Ruined during the siege of 1226, it was repaired in 1234-37, and in 1349 knit to the papal fortress at the Avignon end. In 1352, when Clement VI. rebuilt four of the arches, it is described as of stone and wood; it was cut during the siege of Benedict XIII., and repaired, or rebuilt, in 1418 and 1430; in 1602 three arches collapsed; in 1633 two more fell, and in 1650 the gaps were bridged by wooden struts and planks, which were carried away in 1670 by ice-floes.

Owing to the interminable dispute between the monarchy and the papacy as to liability for its repair, each power claiming jurisdiction over the Rhone, all attempts to preserve it from ruin were abandoned in 1680, when Louis XIV. refused either to allow the legates to take toll for the necesary repairs, or to undertake them himself.

Little is known of the original bridge, which consisted of twenty-two semi-circular arches (Viollet-le-Duc gives eighteen), much lower than the present elliptic ones, which date back to the thirteenth century, according to Labaude—or to the fifteenth century, acording to other authorities—when the bridge, having proved too low-pitched, was raised to its present level, and the flood arches over the piles were built. The four subsisting arches were, with the bridge chapel, restored during the last century. The old bridge formed an elbow upstream on the Villeneuve branch of the Rhone.

The chapel of St. Nicholas, too, has suffered many vicissitudes. The primitive Romanesque building was raised to the level of the new footway by dividing the nave into two floors and building a flight of steps, supported on a squinch arch, down to what then became the lower chapel. Much battered during the sieges of the palace, it was restored and reconsecrated in 1411 and a century later the Gothic upper apse was added, whose external walls overtop the old nave. In consequence of these modifications the lower chapel has a Gothic nave and a Romanesque apse, whereas the upper chapel has a Gothic apse and a Romanesque nave.

The "Pont d'Avignon" is known to every French-speaking child, and with many variants the old "ronde" is sung and danced from the remotest plains of Canada to the valleys of the Swiss Alps. The good folk of Avignon, however, protest that their "rondes" were not danced perilously on the narrow Pont St. Benezet, but under its arches on the green meadows of the Isle de la Barthelasse, and that "Sur" in lieu of "Sous" is due to northern misunderstanding of their sweet Provenal tongue.



Orange

By Henry James

[Footnote: From "A Little Tour In France." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884.]



I alighted at Orange to visit a collection of eminently civil monuments. The collection consists of but two objects, but these objects are so fine that I will let the word pass. One of them is a triumphal arch, supposedly of the period of Marcus Aurelius; the other is a fragment, magnificent in its ruin, of a Roman theater. But for these fine Roman remains and for its name, Orange is a perfectly featureless little town, without the Rhone— which, as I have mentioned, is several miles distant—to help it to a physiognomy. It seems one of the oddest things that this obscure French borough—obscure, I mean, in our modern era, for the Gallo-Roman Arausio must have been, judging it by its arches and theater, a place of some importance—should have given its name to the heirs apparent of the throne of Holland, and been borne by a king of England who had sovereign rights over it. During the Middle Ages it formed part of an independent principality; but in 1531 it fell, by the marriage of one of its princesses, who had inherited it, into the family of Nassau. I read in my indispensable Murray that it was made over to France by the treaty of Utrecht.

The arch of triumph, which stands a little way out of the town, is rather a pretty than an imposing vestige of the Romans. If it had greater purity of style, one might say of it that it belonged to the same family of monuments as the Maison Care at Nmes. It has three passages—the middle much higher than the others—and a very elevated attic. The vaults of the passages are richly sculptured, and the whole monument is covered with friezes and military trophies. This sculpture is rather mixed; much of it is broken and defaced, and the rest seemed to me ugly, tho its workmanship is praised. The arch is at once well preserved and much injured. Its general mass is there, and as Roman monuments go it is remarkably perfect; but it has suffered, in patches, from the extremity of restoration. It is not, on the whole, of absorbing interest.

It has a charm, nevertheless, which comes partly from its soft, bright yellow color, partly from a certain elegance of shape, of expression; and on that well-washed Sunday morning, with its brilliant tone, surrounded by its circle of thin poplars, with the green country lying beyond it and a low blue horizon showing through its empty portals, it made, very sufficiently, a picture that hangs itself to one of the lateral hooks of the memory. I can take down the modest composition, and place it before me as I write. I see the shallow, shining puddles in the hard, fair French road; the pale blue sky, diluted by days of rain; the disgarnished autumnal fields; the mild sparkle of the low horizon; the solitary figure in sabots, with a bundle under its arm, advancing along the "chausse;" and in the middle I see the little ochre-colored monument, which, in spite of its antiquity, looks bright and gay, as everything must look in France of a fresh Sunday morning.

It is true that this was not exactly the appearance of the Roman theater, which lies on the other side of the town; a fact that did not prevent me from making my way to it in less than five minutes, through a succession of little streets concerning which I have no observations to record. None of the Roman remains in the south of France are more impressive than this stupendous fragment. An enormous mound rises above the place, which was formerly occupied—I quote from Murray—first by a citadel of the Romans, then by a castle of the princes of Nassau, razed by Louis XIV.

Facing this hill a mighty wall erects itself, thirty-six meters high, and composed of massive blocks of dark brown stone, simply laid one on the other; the whole naked, rugged surface of which suggests a natural cliff (say of the Vaucluse order) rather than an effort of human, or even of Roman labor. It is the biggest thing at Orange—it is bigger than all Orange put together—and its permanent massiveness makes light of the shrunken city. The face it presents to the town—the top of it garnished with two rows of brackets, perforated with holes to receive the staves of the "velarium"—bears the traces of more than one tier of ornamental arches; tho how these flat arches were applied, or incrusted, upon the wall, I do not profess to explain.

You pass through a diminutive postern—which seems in proportion about as high as the entrance of a rabbit-hutch—into the lodge of the custodian, who introduces you to the interior of the theater. Here the mass of the hill affronts you, which the ingenious Romans treated simply as the material of their auditorium. They inserted their stone seats, in a semicircle, in the slope of the hill, and planted their colossal wall opposite to it. This wall, from the inside, is, if possible, even more imposing. It formed the back of the stage, the permanent scene, and its enormous face was coated with marble. It contains three doors, the middle one being the highest, and having above it, far aloft, a deep niche, apparently intended for an imperial statue. A few of the benches remain on the hillside, which, however, is mainly a confusion of fragments. There is part of a corridor built into the hill, high up, and on the crest are the remnants of the demolished castle.

The whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the back of the scene, the space left between it and the chord of the semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather less than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very shallow, and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers standing in a line, like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent skeleton, however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and wonder about as by what it tells you. It has not the sweetness, the softness of melancholy, of the theater at Arles; but it is more extraordinary, and one can imagine only tremendous tragedies being enacted there—

"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."

At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing—immense in height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the other dimensions are not remarkable. The division to the right, as you face the stage, is pointed out as the green-room; its portentous altitude and the open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The compartment on the left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the traces of other chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to the theater. Various fragments are visible which refer themselves plausibly to such an establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome would appear to have been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is all I saw, and all there was to see, of Orange, which had a very rustic, bucolic aspect, and where I was not even called upon to demand breakfast at the hotel. The entrance of this resort might have been that of a stable of the Roman days.



Vaucluse

By Bayard Taylor

[Footnote: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]



This district borders on the desert of the Crau, a vast plain of stones reaching to the mouth of the Rhone and almost entirely uninhabited. We caught occasional glimpses of its sealike waste between the summits of the hills. At length, after threading a high ascent, we saw the valley of the Durance suddenly below us. The sun, breaking through the clouds, shone on the mountain-wall which stood on the opposite side, touching with his glow the bare and rocky precipices that frowned far above the stream. Descending to the valley, we followed its course toward the Rhone with the ruins of feudal "bourgs" crowning the crags above us.

It was dusk when we reached the village of Senas tired with the day's march. A landlord standing in his door, on the lookout for customers, invited us to enter in a manner so polite and pressing we could not choose but do so. This is a universal custom with the country innkeepers. In a little village which we passed toward evening there was a tavern with the sign "The Mother of Soldiers." A portly woman whose face beamed with kindness and cheerfulness stood in the door and invited us to stop there for the night. "No, mother," I answered; "we must go much farther to-day." "Go, then," said she, "with good luck, my children! A pleasant journey!"

On entering the inn at Senas two or three bronzed soldiers were sitting by the table. My French vocabulary happening to give out in the middle of a consultation about eggs and onion-soup, one of them came to my assistance and addrest me in German. He was from Fulda, in Hesse-Cassel, and had served fifteen years in Africa....

Leaving next morning at daybreak, we walked on before breakfast to Orgon, a little village in a corner of the cliffs which border the Durance, and crossed the muddy river by a suspension bridge a short distance below, to Cavaillon, where the country-people were holding a great market. From this place a road led across the meadow-land to L'Isle, six miles distant. This little town is so named because it is situated on an island formed by the crystal Sorgues, which flows from the fountains of Vaucluse.

It is a very picturesque and pretty place. Great mill-wheels, turning slowly and constantly, stand at intervals in the stream, whose grassy banks are now as green as in springtime. We walked along the Sorgues— which is quite as beautiful and worthy to be sung as the Clitumnus—to the end of the village to take the road to Vaucluse. Beside its banks stands the "Htel de Petrarque et Laure." Alas that names of the most romantic and impassioned lovers of all history should be desecrated to a sign-post to allure gormandizing tourists!

The bare mountain in whose heart lies the poet's solitude now rose before us at the foot of the lofty Mount Ventoux, whose summit of snows extended beyond. We left the river and walked over a barren plain across which the wind blew most drearily. The sky was rainy and dark, and completed the desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined the Sorgues and entered a little green valley running up into the mountain. The narrowness of the entrance entirely shut out the wind, and, except the rolling of the waters over their pebbly bed, all was still and lonely and beautiful. The sides of the dell were covered with olive trees, and a narrow strip of emerald meadow lay at the bottom.

It grew more hidden and sequestered as we approached the little village of Vaucluse. Here the mountain towers far above, and precipices of gray rock many hundred feet high hang over the narrowing glen. On a crag over the village are the remains of a castle; the slope below this, now rugged and stony, was once graced by the cottage and garden of Petrarch. All traces of them have long since vanished, but a simple column bearing the inscription. "A Petrarque" stands beside the Sorgues.

We ascended into the defile by a path among the rocks, overshadowed by olives and wild fig-trees, to the celebrated fountains of Vaucluse. The glen seems as if stuck into the mountain's depths by one blow of the enchanter's wand, and just at the end, where the rod might have rested in its downward sweep, is the fathomless well whose over-brimming fulness gives birth to the Sorgues. We climbed up over the mossy rocks and sat down in the grotto beside the dark, still pool. It was the most absolute solitude.

The rocks towered above and over us to the height of six hundred feet, and the gray walls of the wild glen below shut out all appearance of life. I leaned over the rock and drank of the blue crystal that grew gradually darker toward the center till it became a mirror and gave back a perfect reflection of the crags above it. There was no bubbling, no gushing up from its deep bosom, but the wealth of sparkling waters continually welled over as from a too-full goblet.

It was with actual sorrow that I turned away from the silent spot. I never visited a place to which the fancy clung more suddenly and fondly. There is something holy in its solitude, making one envy Petrarch the years of calm and unsullied enjoyment which blest him there. As some persons whom we pass as strangers strike a hidden chord in our spirits, compelling a silent sympathy with them, so some landscapes have a character of beauty which harmonizes thrillingly with the mood in which we look upon them, till we forget admiration in the glow of spontaneous attachment. They seem like abodes of the beautiful which the soul in its wanderings long ago visited and now recognizes and loves as the home of a forgotten dream. It was thus I felt by the fountains of Vaucluse; sadly and with weary steps I turned away, leaving its loneliness unbroken as before.

We returned over the plain in the wind, under the gloomy sky, passed L'Isle at dusk, and after walking an hour with a rain following close behind us stopt at an auberge in Le Thor, where we rested our tired frames and broke our long day's fasting. We were greeted in the morning with a dismal rain and wet roads as we began the march. After a time, however, it poured down in such torrents that we were obliged to take shelter in a remise by the roadside, where a good woman who addrest us in the unintelligible Provenal kindled up a blazing fire. On climbing a long hill when the storm had abated, we experienced a delightful surprise. Below us lay the broad valley of the Rhone, with its meadows looking fresh and spring-like after the rain. The clouds were breaking away; clear blue sky was visible over Avignon, and a belt of sunlight lay warmly along the mountains of Languedoc. Many villages with their tall picturesque towers dotted the landscape, and the groves of green olive enlivened the barrenness of winter.



The Pont du Gard—Aigues-Mortes-Nmes

By Henry James

[Footnote: From "A Little Tour in France." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884.]



It was a pleasure to feel one's self in Provence again—the land where the silver-gray earth is impregnated with the light of the sky. To celebrate the event, as soon as I arrived at Nmes I engaged a calche to convey me to the Pont du Gard. The day was yet young, and it was perfectly fair; it appeared well, for a longish drive, to take advantage, without delay, of such security. After I had left the town I became more intimate with that Provenal charm which I had already enjoyed from the window of the train, and which glowed in the sweet sunshine and the white rocks, and lurked in the smoke-puffs of the little olives.

The olive-trees in Provence are half the landscape. They are neither so tall, so stout, nor so richly contorted as I have seen them beyond the Alps; but this mild colorless bloom seems the very texture of the country. The road from Nmes, for a distance of fifteen miles, is superb; broad enough for an army, and as white and firm as a dinner-table. It stretches away over undulations which suggest a kind of harmony; and in the curves it makes through the wide, free country, where there is never a hedge or a wall, and the detail is always exquisite, there is something majestic, almost processional. You are very near (the Pont du Gard) before you see it; the ravine it spans suddenly opens and exhibits the picture. The scene at this point grows extremely beautiful. The ravine is the valley of the Garden, which the road from Nmes has followed some time without taking account of it, but which, exactly at the right distance from the aqueduct, deepens and expands, and puts on those characteristics which are best suited to give it effect. The gorge becomes romantic, still, and solitary, and, with its white rocks and wild shrubbery, hangs over the clear, colored river, in whose slow course there is here and there a deeper pool. Over the valley, from side to side, and ever so high in the air, stretch the three tiers of the tremendous bridge. They are unspeakably imposing, and nothing could well be more Roman.

The hugeness, the solidity, the unexpectedness, the monumental rectitude of the whole thing leave you nothing to say—at the time—and make you stand gazing. You simply feel that it is noble and perfect, that it has the quality of greatness. A road, branching from the highway, descends to the level of the river and passes under one of the arches. This road has a wide margin of grass and loose stones, which slopes upward into the bank of the ravine. You may sit here as long as you please, staring up at the light, strong piers; the spot is extremely natural, tho two or three stone benches have been erected on it.

I remained there an hour and got a complete impression; the place was perfectly soundless, and for the time, at least, lonely; the splendid afternoon had begun to fade, and there was a fascination in the object I had come to see. It came to pass that at the same time I discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality. That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in the nice adaption of the means to the end. The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great. Of this Roman rigidity the Pont du Gard is an admirable example.

It would be a great injustice, however, not to insist upon its beauty—a kind of manly beauty, that of an object constructed not to please but to serve, and impressive simply from the scale on which it carries out this intention. The number of arches in each tier is different; they are smaller and more numerous as they ascend. The preservation of the thing is extraordinary; nothing has crumbled or collapsed; every feature remains; and the huge blocks of stone, of a brownish-yellow (as if they had been baked by the Provenal sun for eighteen centuries), pile themselves, without mortar or cement, as evenly as the day they were laid together.

All this to carry the water of a couple of springs to a little provincial city! The conduit on the top has retained its shape and traces of the cement with which it was lined. When the vague twilight began to gather, the lonely valley seemed to fill itself with the shadow of the Roman name, as if the mighty empire were still as erect as the support of the aqueduct; and it was open to a solitary tourist, sitting there sentimental, to believe that no people has ever been, or will ever be, as great as that, measured, as we measure the greatness of an individual, by the push they gave to what they undertook. The Pont du Gard is one of the three or four deepest impressions they have left; it speaks of them in a manner with which they might have been satisfied....

On my way back to the little inn where I had left my vehicle, I passed the Pont du Gard, and took another look at it. Its great arches made windows for the evening sky, and the rocky ravine, with its dusky cedars and shining river, was lonelier than before. At the inn I swallowed, or tried to swallow, a glass of horrible wine with my coachman; after which, with my team, I drove back to Nmes in the moonlight. It only added a more solitary whiteness to the constant sheen of the Provenal landscape.

* * * * *

The weather the next day was equally fair, so that it seemed an imprudence not to make sure of Aigues-Mortes. Nmes itself could wait; at a pinch, I could attend to Nmes in the rain. It was my belief that Aigues-Mortes was a little gem, and it is natural to desire that gems should have an opportunity to sparkle. This is an excursion of but a few hours, and there is a little friendly, familiar, dawdling train that will convey you, in time for a noonday breakfast, to the small dead town where the blest Saint Louis twice embarked for the crusades. You may get back to Nmes for dinner; the run is of about an hour.

I found the little journey charming, and looked out of the carriage window, on my right, at the distant Cvennes, covered with tones of amber and blue, and, all around, at vineyards red with the touch of October. The grapes were gone, but the plants had a color of their own. Within a certain distance of Aigues-Mortes they give place to wide salt-marshes, traversed by two canals; and over this expanse the train rumbles slowly upon a narrow causeway, failing for some time, tho you know you are near the object of your curiosity, to bring you to sight of anything but the horizon. Suddenly it appears, the towered and embattled mass, lying so low that the crest of its defences seems to rise straight out of the ground; and it is not till the train stops, close before them that you are able to take the full measure of its walls.

Aigues-Mortes stands on the edge of a wide tang, or shallow inlet of the sea, the further side of which is divided by a narrow band of coast from the Gulf of Lyons. Next after Carcassonne, to which it forms an admirable pendant, it is the most perfect thing of the kind in France. It has a rival in the person of Avignon, but the ramparts of Avignon are much less effective. Like Carcassonne, it is completely surrounded with its old fortifications; and if they are far simpler in character (there is but one circle), they are quite as well preserved. The moat has been filled up, and the site of the town might be figured by a billiard-table without pockets. On this absolute level, covered with coarse grass, Aigues-Mortes presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a school-boy draws upon his slate, or that we see in the background of early Flemish pictures—a simple parallelogram, of a contour almost absurdly bare, broken at intervals by angular towers and square holes.

Such, literally speaking, is this delightful little city, which needs to be seen to tell its full story. It is extraordinarily pictorial, and if it is a very small sister of Carcassonne, it has at least the essential features of the family. Indeed, it is even more like an image and less like a reality than Carcassonne; for by position and prospect it seems even more detached from the life of the present day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a canal beside it, and which carry their cargo into actual places. But nothing could well be more drowsy and desultory than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two or three brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier who strolled on the little quay beneath the western wall. "C'est bien plaisant, c'est bien paisible," said this worthy man, with whom I had some conversation; and pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed, tho the former of these epithets may suggest an element of gayety in which Aigues-Mortes is deficient.

The sand, the salt, the dull sea-view, surround it with a bright, quiet melancholy. There are fifteen towers and nine gates, five of which are on the southern side, overlooking the water. I walked all round the place three times (it doesn't take long), but lingered most under the southern wall, where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat down on an old stone, and looked away to the desolate salt-marshes and still, shining surface of the tang; and, as I did so, reflected that this was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took place, in 1538, between Francis I. and Charles V. It was also not easy to perceive how Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the Holy Land, set his army afloat in such very undeveloped channels.

An hour later I purchased in the town a little pamphlet by M. Marius Topin, who undertakes to explain this latter anomaly, and to show that there is water enough in the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have sustained a fleet of crusaders. I was unable to trace the channel that he points out, but was glad to believe that, as he contends, the sea has not retreated from the town since the thirteenth century. It was comfortable to think that things are not so changed as that. M. Topin indicates that the other French ports of the Mediterranean were not then "disponibles," and that Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible spot for an embarkation.

Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not crumbled, like the Cit of Carcassonne. It can hardly be said to be alive; but if it is dead it has been very neatly embalmed. The hand of the restorer rests on it constantly; but this artist has not, as at Carcassonne, had miracles to accomplish. The interior is very still and empty, with small stony, whitewashed streets, tenanted by a stray dog, a stray cat, a stray old woman. In the middle is a little place, with two or three cafs decorated by wide awnings—a little place of which the principal feature is a very bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by Pradier. It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that bears the name of that pious monarch.

You may walk round the enceinte of Aigues-Mortes, both outside and in; but you may not, as at Carcassonne, make a portion of this circuit on the chemin de ronde, the little projecting footway attached to the inner face of the battlements. This footway, wide enough only for a single pedestrian, is in the best order, and near each of the gates a flight of steps leads up to it; but a locked gate, at the top of the steps, makes access impossible, or at least unlawful. Aigues-Mortes, however, has its citadel, an immense tower, larger than any of the others, a little detached, and standing at the northwest angle of the town. I called upon the casernier—the custodian of the walls—and in his absence I was conducted through this big Tour de Constance by his wife, a very mild, meek woman, yellow with the traces of fever and ague—a scourge which, as might be expected in a town whose name denotes "dead waters," enters freely at the nine gates.

The Tour de Constance is of extraordinary girth and solidity, divided into three superposed circular chambers, with very fine vaults, which are lighted by embrasures of prodigious depth, converging to windows little larger than loop-holes. The place served for years as a prison to many of the Protestants of the south whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had exposed to atrocious penalties, and the annals of these dreadful chambers during the first half of the last century were written in tears and blood. Some of the record cases of long confinement there make one marvel afresh at what man has inflicted and endured. In a country in which a policy of extermination was to be put into practise this horrible tower was an obvious resource. From the battlements at the top, which is surmounted by an old disused lighthouse, you see the little compact rectangular town, which looks hardly bigger than a garden-patch, mapped out beneath you, and follow the plain configuration of its defenses. You take possession of it, and you feel that you will remember it always.

* * * * *

In general Nmes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman remains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland....

What nobler ornament can there be than the Roman baths at the foot of Mont Cavalier, and the delightful old garden that surrounds them? All that quarter of Nmes has every reason to be proud of itself; it has been revealed to the world at large by copious photography. A clear, abundant stream gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered with trees and laid out in paths), and is distributed into basins which sufficiently refer themselves to the period that gave them birth—the period that has left its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we admired at Montpellier. Here are the same terraces and steps and balustrades, and a system of water-works less impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious and charming.

The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French eighteenth century; for the remains of the antique baths are in a measure incorporated in the modern fountains. In a corner of this umbrageous precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known as a temple of Diana, but was more apparently a nymphaeum, and appears to have had a graceful connection with the adjacent baths. I learn from Murray that this little temple, of the period of Augustus, "was reduced to its present state of ruin in 1577;" the moment at which the towns-people, threatened with a siege by the troops of the crown, partly demolished it, lest it should serve as a cover to the enemy. The remains are very fragmentary, but they serve to show that the place was lovely. I spent half an hour in it on a perfect Sunday morning (it is enclosed by a high grille, carefully tended, and has a warden of its own), and with the help of my imagination tried to reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the Gallo-Roman days.

I do wrong, perhaps, to say that I tried; from a flight so deliberate I should have shrunk. But there was a certain contagion of antiquity in the air; and among the ruins of baths and temples, in the very spot where the aqueduct that crosses the Garden in the wondrous manner I had seen discharged itself, the picture of a splendid paganism seemed vaguely to glow. Roman baths—Roman baths; those words alone were a scene.

Everything was changed; I was strolling in a jardin franais; the bosky slope of the Mont Cavalier (a very modest mountain), hanging over the place, is crowded with a shapeless tower, which is as likely to be of medieval as of antique origin; and yet, as I leaned on the parapet of one of the fountains, where a flight of curved steps (a hemicycle, as the French say) descended into a basin full of dark, cool recesses, where the slabs of the Roman foundations gleam through the clear green water—as in this attitude I surrendered myself to contemplation and reverie, it seemed to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world. Such moments are illuminating, and the light of this one mingles, in my memory, with the dusky greenness of the Jardin de la Fontaine.

The fountain proper—the source of all these distributed waters—is the prettiest thing in the world, a reduced copy of Vaucluse. It gushes up at the foot of the Mont Cavalier, at a point where that eminence rises with a certain cliff-like effect, and, like other springs in the same circumstances, appears to issue from the rock with a sort of quivering stillness. I trudge up the Mont Cavalier,—it is a matter of five minutes,—and having committed this cockneyism enhanced it presently by another. I ascended the stupid Tour Magne, the mysterious structure I mentioned a moment ago. The only feature of this dateless tube, except the inevitable collection of photographs to which you are introduced by the doorkeeper, is the view you enjoy from its summit. This view is, of course, remarkably fine but I am ashamed to say I have not the smallest recollection of it; for while I looked into the brilliant spaces of the air I seemed still to see only what I saw in the depths of the Roman baths—the image, disastrously confused and vague, of a vanished world. This world, however, has left at Nmes a far more considerable memento than a few old stones covered with water-moss.

The Roman arena is the rival of those of Verona and of Arles; at a respectful distance it emulates the Colosseum. It is a small Colosseum, if I may be allowed the expression, and is in a much better preservation than the great circus at Rome. This is especially true of the external walls, with their arches, pillars, cornices. I must add that one should not speak of preservation, in regard to the arena at Nmes, without speaking also of repair. After the great ruin ceased to be despoiled, it began to be protected, and most of its wounds have been drest with new material. These matters concern the archeologist; and I felt here, as I felt afterward at Arles, that one of the profane, in the presence of such a monument, can only admire and hold his tongue. The great impression, on the whole, is an impression of wonder that so much should have survived. What remains at Nmes, after all dilapidation is estimated, is astounding.

I spent an hour in the Arnes on that same sweet Sunday morning, as I came back from the Roman baths, and saw that the corridors, the vaults, the staircases, the external casing, are still virtually there. Many of these parts are wanting in the Colosseum, whose sublimity of size, however, can afford to dispense with detail. The seats at Nmes, like those at Verona, have been largely renewed; not that this mattered much, as I lounged on the cool surface of one of them, and admired the mighty concavity of the place and the elliptical sky-line, broken by uneven blocks and forming the rim of the monstrous cup—a cup that had been filled with horrors, and yet I made my reflections; I said to myself that tho a Roman arena is one of the most impressive of the works of man, it has a touch of that same stupidity which I ventured to discover in the Pont du Gard. It is brutal; it is monotonous; it is not at all exquisite.

The Arnes at Nmes were arranged for a bull-fight—a form of recreation that, as I was informed, is much dans les habitudes Nmoises and very common throughout Provence, where (still according to my information) it is the usual pastime of a Sunday afternoon. At Arles and Nmes it has a characteristic setting, but in the villages the patrons of the game make a circle of carts and barrels, on which the spectators perch themselves. I was surprised at the prevalence, in mild Provence, of the Iberian vice, and hardly know whether it makes the custom more respectable that at Nmes and Arles the thing is shabbily and imperfectly done. The bulls are rarely killed, and indeed often are bulls only in the Irish sense of the term— being domestic and motherly cows. Such an entertainment of course does not supply to the arena that element of the exquisite which I spoke of as wanting.

The exquisite at Nmes is mainly represented by the famous Maison Carre. The first impression you receive from this delicate little building, as you stand before it, is that you have already seen it many times. Photographs, engravings, models, medals, have placed it definitely in your eye, so that from the sentiment with which you regard it curiosity and surprise are almost completely, and perhaps deplorably absent. Admiration remains however—admiration of a familiar and even slightly patronizing kind. The Maison Carre does not overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great sensations of antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvelously preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming compactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest that vibrates from one age to another when the note of taste is struck.

If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy production, the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard that conducts to it, adorned with inferior cafs and tobacco-shops. Here, in a respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations, and with the theater, of a classic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of a playing-card, and he expresses his admiration for it by the singular wish that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris. He even goes as far as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been rendered to its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to "have" in that city "le Panthon de Rome, quelques temples de Grce." Stendhal found it amusing to write in the character of a commis-voyageur, and sometimes it occurs to his reader that he really was one.



Arles and Les Baux

By Henry James

[Footnote: From "A Little Tour in France." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884.]



There are two shabby old inns at Arles, which compete closely for your custom. I mean by this that if you elect to go to the Htel du Forum, the Htel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it (at a right angle), watches your arrival with ill-concealed disapproval; and if you take the chances of its neighbor, the Htel du Forum seems to glare at you invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that it had been the other.

The two stand together on the Place des Hommes, a little public square of Arles, which somehow quite misses its effect. As a city, indeed, Arles quite misses its effect in every way; and if it is a charming place, as I think it is, I can hardly tell the reason why. The straight-nosed Arlsiennes account for it in some degree; and the remainder may be charged to the ruins of the arena and the theater. Beyond this, I remember with affection the ill-proportioned little Place des Hommes; not at all monumental, and given over to puddles and to shabby cafs. I recall with tenderness the tortuous and featureless streets, which looked like the streets of a village, and were paved with villainous little sharp stones, making all exercise penitential.

Consecrated by association is even a tiresome walk that I took the evening I arrived, with the purpose of obtaining a view of the Rhone. I had been to Arles before, years ago, and it seemed to me that I remembered finding on the banks of the stream some sort of picture. I think that on the evening of which I speak there was a watery moon, which it seemed to me would light up the past as well as the present. But I found no picture, and I scarcely found the Rhone at all. I lost my way, and there was not a creature in the streets to whom I could appeal. Nothing could be more provincial than the situation of Arles at ten o'clock at night. At last I arrived at a kind of embankment, where I could see the great mud-colored stream slipping along in the soundless darkness. It had come on to rain, I know not what had happened to the moon, and the whole place was anything but gay. It was not what I had looked for; what I had looked for was in the irrecoverable past. I groped my way back to the inn over the infernal cailloux, feeling like a discomfited Dogberry.

I remember now that this hotel was the one (whichever that may be) which has the fragment of a Gallo-Roman portico inserted into one of its angles. I had chosen it for the sake of this exceptional ornament. It was damp and dark, and the floors felt gritty to the feet; it was an establishment at which the dreadful "gras-double" might have appeared at the table d'hte, as it had done at Narbonne. Nevertheless, I was glad to get back to it; and nevertheless, too—and this is the moral of my simple anecdote—my pointless little walk (I don't speak of the pavement) suffuses itself, as I look back upon it, with a romantic tone. And in relation to the inn, I suppose I had better mention that I am well aware of the inconsistency of a person who dislikes the modern caravansary, and yet grumbles when he finds a hotel of the superannuated sort, one ought to choose, it would seem, and make the best of either alternative. The two old taverns at Arles are quite unimproved; such as they must have been in the infancy of the modern world, when Stendhal passed that way, and the lumbering diligence deposited him in the Place des Hommes, such in every detail they are to-day. Vieilles auberges de France, one ought to enjoy their gritty floors and greasy windowpanes. Let it be put on record, therefore, that I have been, I won't say less comfortable, but at least less happy, at better inns.

To be really historic, I should have mentioned that before going to look for the Rhone I had spent part of the evening on the opposite side of the little place, and that I indulged in this recreation for two definite reasons. One of these was that I had an opportunity of conversing at a caf with an attractive young Englishman, whom I had met in the afternoon at Tarascon, and more remotely, in other years, in London; the other was that there sat enthroned behind the counter a splendid mature Arlsienne, whom my companion and I agreed that it was a rare privilege to comtemplate.

There is no rule of good manners or morals which makes it improper, at a caf to fix one's eyes upon the dame de comptoir; the lady is, in the nature of things, a part of your "consommation." We were therefore free to admire without restriction the handsomest person I had ever seen give change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully rich and robust, and full of a certain physical nobleness. Tho she was not really old, she was antique, and she was very grave, even a little sad. She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Caesar.

I have seen washerwomen in the Trastevere who were perhaps as handsome as she; but even the head-dress of the Roman contadina contributes less to the dignity of the person born to wear it than the sweet and stately Arlesian cap, which sits at once aloft and on the back of the head; which is accompanied with a wide black bow covering a considerable part of the crown; and which, finally, accomodates itself indescribably well to the manner in which the tresses of the front are pushed behind the ears.

This admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar has distracted me a little; for I am still not sufficiently historical. Before going to the caf I had dined, and before dining I had found time to go and look at the arena. Then it was that I discovered that Arles has no general physiognomy, and, except the delightful little church of Saint Trophimus, no architecture, and that the rugosities of its dirty lanes affect the feet like knife- blades. It was not then, on the other hand, that I saw the arena best. The second day of my stay at Arles I devoted to a pilgrimage to the strange old hill town of Les Baux, the medieval Pompeii, of which I shall give myself the pleasure of speaking.

The evening of that day, however (my friend and I returned in time for a late dinner), I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon, and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow. The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic; but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity, the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens, in order to let us look at things comfortably. The effect was admirable; it brought back the impression of the way, in Rome itself, on evenings like that, the moonshine rests upon broken shafts and slabs of antique pavement. As we sat in the theater, looking at the two lone columns that survive—part of the decoration of the back of the stage—and at the fragments of ruin around them, we might have been in the Roman forum.

The arena at Arles, with its great magnitude, is less complete than that at Nmes; it has suffered even more the assaults of time and of the children of time, and it has been less repaired. The seats are almost wholly wanting; but the external walls, minus the topmost tier of arches, are massively, ruggedly complete; and the vaulted corridors seem as solid as the day they were built. The whole thing is superbly vast, and as monumental, for a place of light amusement—what is called in America a "variety-show"—as it entered only into the Roman mind to make such establishments. The podium is much higher than at Nmes, and many of the great white slabs that faced it have been recovered and put into their places. The proconsular box has been more or less reconstructed, and the great converging passages of approach to it are still majestically distinct; so that, as I sat there in the moon-charm stillness, leaning my elbows on the battered parapet of the ring, it was not impossible to listen to the murmurs and shudders, the thick voice of the circus, that died away fifteen hundred years ago.

The theater has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with a different music. The Roman theater at Arles seemed to me one of the most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton—the arena may be called a skeleton; for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the row of columns which formed the scene—the permanent back-scene—remain; two marble pillars—I just mentioned them—are upright, with a fragment of their entablature. Before them is the vacant space which was filled by the stage, with the line of the proscenium distinct, marked by a deep groove, imprest upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a high screen had been intended to fit into it. The semicircle formed by the seats—half a cup—rises opposite; some of the rows are distinctly marked. The floor, from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by slabs of colored marble—red, yellow, and green—which, tho terribly battered and cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the interior.

Everything shows that it was on a great scale: the large sweep of its enclosing walls, the massive corridors that passed behind the auditorium, and of which we can still perfectly take the measure. The way in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the architects of our epoch, as also the immense size of the place is a proof of extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors. It was after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena that we came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin. The principal entrance was locked, but we effected an easy escalade, scaled a low parapet, and descended into the place behind the scenes.

It was as light as day, and the solitude was complete. The two slim columns, as we sat on the broken benches, stood there like a pair of silent actors. What I called touching, just now was the thought that here the human voice, the utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven armor, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short, one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems no profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of Arles, who use it to pass, by no means, in great numbers, from one part of the town to the other; treading the old marble floor, and brushing, if need be, the empty benches. This familiarity does not kill the place again; it makes it, on the contrary, live a little—makes the present and the past touch each other.

If I called Les Baux a city, it was not that I was stretching a point in favor of the small spot which to-day contains but a few dozen inhabitants. The history of the place is as extraodinary as its situation. It was not only a city, but a state; not only a state; but an empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself sovereign of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties, with which its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid them homage.

The chronicle of this old Provenal house has been written, in a style somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge. I purchased the little book—a modest pamphlet—at the establishment of the good sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest part of Les Baux. The sisters have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom I heard piping their lessons, while I waited in the cold parlor for one of the ladies to come and speak to me. Nothing could have been more perfect than the manner of this excellent woman when she arrived; yet her small religious house seemed a very out-of-the-way corner of the world. It was spotlessly neat, and the rooms looked as if they had lately been papered and painted; in this respect, at the medieval Pompeii, they were rather a discord. They were, at any rate, the newest, freshest thing at Les Baux.

I remember going round to the church, after I had left the good sisters, and to a little quiet terrace, which stands in front of it, ornamented with a few small trees and bordered with a wall, breast-high, over which you look down steep hillsides, off into the air and all about the neighboring country. I remember saying to myself that this little terrace was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist of taste keeps in his mind as a picture. The church was small and brown and dark, with a certain rustic richness. All this however, is no general description of Les Baux.

I am unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple reason that it is a mere confusion of ruin. It has not been preserved in lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and castle, have become fragmentary, not through the sudden destruction, but through the gradual withdrawal, of a population. It is not an extinguished, but a deserted city; more deserted far than even Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, where I found so much entertainment in the grass-grown element.

It is of very small extent, and even in the days of its greatness, when its lords entitled themselves counts of Cephalonia and Neophantis, kings of Arles and Vienne, princes of Achaia, and emperors of Constantinople— even at this flourishing period, when, as M. Jules Canonge remarks, "they were able to depress the balance in which the fate of peoples and kings is weighed," the plucky little city contained at the most no more than thirty-six hundred souls. Yet its lords (who, however, as I have said, were able to present a long list of subject towns, most of them, tho a few are renowned, unknown to fame) were seneschals and captains-general of Piedmont and Lombardy, grand admirals of the kingdom of Naples, and its ladies were sought in marriage by half the first princes in Europe.

A considerable part of the little narrative of M. Canonge is taken up with the great alliances of the House of Baux, whose fortunes, matrimonial and other, he traces from the eleventh century down to the sixteenth. The empty shells of a considerable number of old houses, many of which must have been superb, the lines of certain steep little streets, the foundations of a castle, and ever so many splendid views, are all that remains to-day of these great titles.

To such a list I may add a dozen very polite and sympathetic people, who emerged from the interstices of the desultory little town to gaze at the two foreigners who had driven over from Arles, and whose horses were being baited at the modest inn. The resources of this establishment we did not venture otherwise to test, in spite of the seductive fact that the sign over the door was in the Provenal tongue. This little group included the baker, a rather melancholy young man, in high boots and a cloak, with whom and his companions we had a good deal of conversation.

The Baussenques of to-day struck me as a very mild and agreeable race, with a good deal of the natural amenity which, on occasions like this one, the traveler, who is waiting for his horses to be put in or his dinner to be prepared, observes in the charming people who lend themselves to conversation in the hilltowns of Tuscany. The spot where our entertainers at Les Baux congregated was naturally the most inhabited portion of the town; as I say, there were at least a dozen human figures within sight. Presently we wandered away from them, scaled the higher places, seated ourselves among the ruins of the castle, and looked down from the cliff overhanging that portion of the road which I have mentioned as approaching Les Baux from behind.

I was unable to trace the configuration of the castle as plainly as the writers who have described it in the guide-books, and I am ashamed to say that I did not even perceive the three great figures of stone (the three Marys, as they are called; the two Marys of Scripture, with Martha), which constitute one of the curiosities of the place, and of which M. Jules Canonge speaks with almost hyperbolical admiration. A brisk shower, lasting some ten minutes, led us to take refuge in a cavity, of mysterious origin, where the melancholy baker presently discovered us, having had the bonne pense of coming up for us with an umbrella which certainly belonged, in former ages, to one of the Stphanettes or Berangres commemorated by M. Canonge. His oven, I am afraid, was cold so long as our visit lasted.

When the rain was over we wandered down to the little disencumbered space before the inn, through a small labyrinth of obliterated things. They took the form of narrow, precipitous streets, bordered by empty houses, with gaping windows and absent doors, through which we had glimpses of sculptured chimney-pieces and fragments of stately arch and vault. Some of the houses are still inhabited; but most of them are open to the air and weather. Some of them have completely collapsed; others present to the street a front which enables one to judge of the physiognomy of Les Baux in the days of its importance. This importance had pretty well passed away in the early part of the sixteenth century, when the place ceased to be an independent principality, It became—by request of one of its lords, Bernardin des Baux, a great captain of his time—part of the appanage of the kings of France, by whom it was placed under the protection of Arles, which had formerly occupied with regard to it a different position. I know not whether the Arlesians neglected their trust; but the extinction of the sturdy little stronghold is too complete not to have begun long ago. Its memories are buried under its ponderous stones.

As ve drove away from it in the gloaming, my friend and I agreed that the two or three hours we had spent there were among the happiest impressions of a pair of tourists very curious in the picturesque. We almost forgot that we were bound to regret that the shortened day left us no time to drive five miles further, above a pass in the little mountains—it had beckoned to us in the morning, when we came in sight of it, almost irresistibly—to see the Roman arch and mausoleum of Saint Remy. To compass this larger excursion (including the visit to Les Baux) you must start from Arles very early in the morning; but I can imagine no more delightful day.



IV

Cathedrals and Chateaux



Amiens

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

[Footnote: From "French and Italian Note Books." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1871, 1883, 1889.]



The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway affording admission into a central court-yard; a public square, with a statue in the middle, and another statue in a neighboring street. We met priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and knee-breeches; also soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children, clattering over the pavements in wooden shoes.

It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to dull my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As it was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy the Cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of English cathedrals.

It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a high-shouldered look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of England, which cover a great space of ground in proportion to their height. The impression the latter give is of magnitude and mass; this French Cathedral strikes one as lofty. The exterior is venerable, tho but little time-worn by the action of the atmosphere; and statues still keep their places in numerous niches, almost as perfect as when first placed there in the thirteenth century. The principal doors are deep, elaborately wrought, pointed arches; and the interior seemed to us, at the moment, as grand as any that we had seen, and to afford as vast an idea of included space; it being of such an airy height, and with no screen between the chancel and nave, as in all the English cathedrals.

We saw the differences, too, betwixt a church in which the same form of worship for which it was originally built is still kept up, and those of England, where it has been superseded for centuries; for here, in the recess of every arch of the side-aisles, beneath each lofty window, there was a chapel dedicated to some saint, and adorned with great marble sculptures of the crucifixion, and with pictures, execrably bad, in all cases, and various kinds of gilding and ornamentation. Immensely tall wax candles stand upon the altars of these chapels, and before one sat a woman, with a great supply of tapers, one of which was burning. I suppose these were to be lighted as offerings to the saints, by the true believers. Artificial flowers were hung at some of the shrines, or placed under glass.