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At Orange we passed under a triumphal arch, called of Caius Marius, much finer and better preserved than any edifice of the same kind at Rome. Here are also the remains of an amphitheatre encumbered with buildings. Here we saw the process of winding the silk from the worm: the cocon or egg is thrown into boiling water to dissolve the gum. At Skegness, on the Lincolnshire coast, I have seen panier-fulls of living shrimps treated in the same manner.

CHAP. VIII

The entrance into Avignon prepossesses a stranger in its favour: he passes through a gate of modern construction into a square in which are several well-grown trees; in front is the theatre, on each side a large inn and other houses: this is called the Place de la Comédie. We were set down at the Palais Royal, where we found good chambers and beds. Hot baths, à l'instar de Paris, as the sign expressed it, were opposite our inn, and the next morning some of the family took advantage of them. I paid Louis, my coachman, the balance of his account, for I had advanced him money on the road; and gave him such a generous bonne main, that he was, I saw, ashamed of having once or twice made us fare ill on the road. The sum of the expenses of my journey from Paris, not including the bonne main, was a little more than sixteen hundred francs.

A banker, or dealer in money only, is not to be found, except in the largest commercial towns of France, and provincial notes are unknown. The Parisian banker had referred me to a négociant and manufacturer of silk, who, during my stay at Avignon, supplied the absence of a regular priest of Plutus; loading me, at my pleasure, with heavy five-franc pieces, for which he required only good bills on Paris, or on London, where also he had a correspondence. I am obliged to call him a négociant, as marchand means a shop-keeper; nay, a dealer in the pettiest wares is called a merchant: a seller of milk is a marchand de lait. As for shops, they have disappeared: every shop is a magasin, so that France is not a nation boutiquière, whatever England may be. I called on my banker this morning, and consulted him on my establishment.

We retired to rest early in the evening, but were soon after disturbed by the noise of loud voices below: it ceased after a short hubbub. On inquiring the cause next day, the waiter told us that the English prince had descended at the Palais Royal, but that the authorities had presented themselves, and had engaged him to pass to the Hôtel d'Europe, where they had prepared for his reception; and that the noise was caused by the passage of the prince and his suite, attended by the authorities.

This was a very prudent, but rather an imperfect statement: it was the truth, but not the whole truth. The fact was that the Duke of Gloucester, in his tour through France, arrived at Avignon: he had sent forward a courier, who had given orders for his reception at our inn, where he was set down; but, while he was taking tea, the prefect of the department and the mayor of the city waited on him to request that he would accept of the hospitality of the town, and representing that preparations had been made accordingly at the Hôtel d'Europe. His Royal Highness thought proper to accede to this polite invitation. Madame Moulin, the mistress of our inn, enraged at the loss of the honour and profit of the prince's company, and transported beyond the bounds of discretion, broke out into violent invectives against M. le Préfet and M. le Maire, who, to punish an insult offered to them in the presence of the English prince, committed Madame Moulin to prison. Moulin told me this story, adding, "Ma femme est très sensible."³⁵ If her sensibility provoked her to make all the clamour we heard at ten o'clock the evening before, she certainly merited, and was probably benefited by, the restraint imposed on her, which, by the intercession of the prince, lasted only twenty hours.

Moulin has as much the appearance of a bon vivant as if he were an English landlord, but with a cast of French manners. A very pretty young English lady (so she was described to me,) admired his great Newfoundland dog, but said, "M. Moulin, I am afraid of him: will he bite me?" – "Non, Mademoiselle; mon chien ne vous mordera pas: fût il un tigre, il lêcheroit une si belle main."³⁶

I called on the Préfet, who received me with much politeness; and, when I announced my intention of settling at Avignon, felicitated the city on the acquisition it was about to make. It is regulated that no one shall be prefect of a department of which he is a native, or to which his family belongs. This rule proceeds on the principle, recognised amongst us by the circuits of the twelve judges, which supposes that justice will be more impartially administered by strangers than by those who may be liable to the influence of local connexions. The prefect of Vaucluse was of the department of the Rhone, and member of the chamber of Deputies for that department.

I called on the Mayor, and was much surprised to find, invested with that office, not a man resembling an English alderman or a good bourgeois, but a meagre, old noble, adorned with the croix de St. Louis, and with the manners of his caste. In the American war he had been captain of a ship of the line; he had emigrated, and been despoiled of his property during the revolution; had passed three years of his emigration in London, where he had learned to admire tea and tost. On his return, he had married a rich wife who had just left him a widower; he showed me the weepers on his coat sleeves as an excuse for not returning my visit. He had recovered some of the wrecks of his fortune, and had repurchased his house; part of which had been pulled down by him who had bought it as national property, that, when compelled to restitution, as was expected, on the return of the king, he might secure at least the price of the materials. M. le Maire had built a house for himself on the ruins of the part pulled down: of the part left standing he had already made a detached house, which he offered to me. I promised to look at it.

And now began my search for a house, which I conducted according to my English notions and prepossessions. In the south of France, or in Italy, a man of twenty thousand francs a year lives in a larger house than a man of an income of as many pounds sterling inhabits in London. In England, a nine months winter, an enormous tax on windows, a duty on bricks, timber, and glass, reduce us to content ourselves with small houses; but in these countries, large rooms, lofty ceilings, wide staircases, are required by the climate, and by no means astonish the minds of those who are used to them. Things on this scale of vastness I had frequently seen in England, particularly in country-houses, but had not been, as yet, familiarized with them.

I visited an hotel in which Charles IV. of Spain had been lodged on his journey from Paris to Rome, after his abdication at Bayonne. I was desired, by the man of affairs, to determine what apartments I should want, and then the rent might be fixed. The house was an agreeable one, but appeared in too grand a style for me: I told the man of business it might do very well for a prince, or, par occasion, for a king of Spain, and declined all further treaty. I have no doubt, I might have been as cheaply lodged here as I was in the house I afterwards rented. There occurred besides another English prejudice: I was to have but a part of the house: who might they be who should inhabit the other part? An Englishman likes to have his house to himself; it is his castle: a privilege, by the by, which the present chancellor of the exchequer has restored to him, by taking off the tax on internal windows. Another apartment I visited; but here the proprietor, who lived on the rez-de-chaussée, or ground floor, had, as well as myself, a family of young children: besides, he refused me the privilege of walking in his garden. From this refusal, and from the intercourse of the children, I anticipated future misunderstandings. The use of a garden in this climate is, that, in the shade, or after sunset, it serves as an additional room, loftier than any in the house. In winter, a town garden, surrounded by high walls, or houses, is absolutely useless.

At length I took the house of M. le Maire. It consisted of a vestibule, a small dining-room, servants hall, kitchen, and offices: on the first floor was a salon, twenty-four feet square; on one side of this salon was a space partitioned off, about six feet wide: at half the height of this room, a floor had been laid, and thus two cabinets were procured: there was a second salon twenty-one feet by fifteen; there were three chambers with two cabinets, three servants rooms, and on the second floor two chambers for my sons. I had besides a small stable, and coach-house for a cabriolet, but no garden. The house was built on three sides of a small court. My lease was for four years, at a thousand francs a year, determinable by me at the end of each year on two months notice, determinable also on payment of a quarter's rent in case of war, or any event of a public nature that might affect my personal security. This last clause I copied from a lease I had seen at Paris; a prudent, and, at that time, no one could say, a superfluous caution. I paid no taxes.

This house I furnished, as one furnishes a house which he is to quit in three or four years. It was curious to observe how, from want of money or of confidence, some of the tradesmen followed their goods to my house, and required payment on delivery. I had even a sort of run upon me one morning, performed by some one who had not taken the above-mentioned precaution. The run was probably caused by some silly report. I have known a run on a country bank to originate with a farmer's declaration that such run existed; the question then being only who should run fastest. I dissipated the alarm by giving, with great tranquillity, bons on my banker: yet some tradesmen were careful to give a receipt, not for the amount of the bill, but for the bon: this, indeed, I suggested.

Seven years later, I have found the merchants of a provincial town, in which I am utterly unknown, ready to give me credit for my orders without the least symptom of suspicion or anxiety. In seven years I believe the wealth of France to have increased by one half; in seven years, the funds have risen from sixty-five to ninety-five: money might have been invested in land, seven years ago, at four and a half per cent; now, not more than three, or three and a half, can be obtained: but I am going beyond the limits of my four years residence.

CHAP. IX

Avignon is surrounded by walls, as are most of the cities of France, and of the countries of the continent: a very great evil and inconvenience. These walls hinder the influx of fresh air from the country, and thus make the cities more unhealthy; give to those who want to enter or go out of the town the trouble of going first to a gate; and crowd and embarrass the inlets and outlets, by diminishing their number. Indeed, after sunset, this number, in order to save porters, is reduced to two; the two principal gates only, at opposite sides of the town, being attended by their guardians to watch and ward during the night. Often have I been obliged, at Avignon and at Florence, to shorten my evening walk, for the sake of arriving at the nearest gate before the Ave Maria of the evening. If I still continued without the walls, I was obliged to perform a circuit, first along a dusty road to a distant gate; and then, accompanied, it may be, by the females of my family, through the main street to my own habitation, more distant from this gate than from that by which I had gone out.

All this mischief, all this restraint, is endured, because, instead of a tax on the houses in which food is consumed, a duty is levied, at the gates, on the food itself; a duty, partial, because not paid by the inhabitants of the country; vexatious, because descending to so many and so minute objects; and expensive in its collection, because requiring perpetual superintendence. It is to be hoped the Chamber of Deputies of France will take some lessons, on the art of taxing, from the House of Commons, by whom that art has been so long and so successfully practised. Part of these tolls defray municipal expenses.

The walls of Avignon are about three miles in circumference. A good road, bordered by trees, goes round the town; and, on the western side, is a public walk near the Rhone. The river is here divided into two branches by a long, narrow island: over each branch is carried a bridge on wooden piers, with a causeway across the island, uniting the two bridges into one road from bank to bank. The tolls, on this bridge, are let, by the city, at about fifty thousand francs a year; a large sum, and indicating an active intercourse in the direction of Bordeaux and Toulouse. There is a barrier at each end of the bridge, and the passengers pay on setting foot upon it, but go off from it scot-free. Why there are two receivers of one toll I know not, except that one may be a check on the other; but, as every "receiver is as bad as a thief," this expedient amounts only to "setting a thief to watch a thief."

That in the twelfth century, – an age of Cimmerian darkness, according to the Protestants, – a poor shepherd should have conceived the project of building a bridge over the Rhone; that he should have been prompted to this undertaking by motives of Christian charity, on observing how many were drowned in attempting the passage by boats; that he should have devoted his life to the collection of alms for his purpose; – all this might procure for St. Benezet more favour than he will ever meet with in our dis-enlightened country. I leave it to my reader to judge of my reasons for not saying un-enlightened. The mischief is, they made the poor man a saint, instead of knighting him, like Sir Richard Arkwright. A punster might have entitled him Pontifex Maximus; but this would have been still worse for his reputation.

The Reverend Alban Butler, in his learned, discreet, and pious work, "The Lives of the Saints," relates, that the building of this bridge was attended by many miracles. Part of these may have been contrived to encourage those to the enterprise who would not have been moved by the single consideration of its utility; as the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre, and "Deus vult," roused those who would never have made a common effort to defend Christendom against the Saracen. In part also, these miracles may have been real, notwithstanding the bold assertion that miracles have ceased. This assertion may be easily made, while every fact proving the contrary is rejected with supercilious incredulity; but it is an assertion in its own nature incapable of proof: the denial of the possibility of miracles would be inconsequent in the mouths of those who, by affirming them to have ceased, admit them to have existed. These men are not Deo a secretis.

Butler tells us also that, on occasion of part of the bridge falling down by the impetuosity of the waters, in 1669, nearly five hundred years after the death of St. Benezet, his body, which had been buried in a little chapel on the bridge, was taken up, and found entire, without the least sign of corruption: even the bowels were sound, and the colour of the eyes lively and sprightly, though the bars of iron around the coffin were much corroded by rust, on account of the dampness of the situation. Butler did not know that animal muscle is changed by moisture into a substance resembling spermaceti, as proved by the experiments of Lavoisier, and Sir George Gibbes. The substance is called by the French chymists adipocire. The philosopher will, I hope, allow his obligation to me for having attempted to account for one miracle in a natural manner. Let him say, "The man is reasonable, quand même."³⁷

The remains of the bridge of St. Benezet still bestride the eastern branch of the Rhone, and are an object of great picturesque beauty. The arches are very lofty: under the first of them, the great public road is now carried; a circumstance which seems to show that the river has formed for itself a narrower, it may be, a deeper bed. Inundations however are not unfrequent, particularly in the beginning of summer, on the melting of the snows of the Alps; and I am told at this time, December 1825, that there has lately been five feet depth of water in the town of Avignon. I have seen the water wash the walls of the city.

The Rock, as it is called, of Avignon, has every appearance of having been separated by the Rhone from the hills on the other side of the river. How or when this separation was effected, is a question that might puzzle a writer of theories on the formation of the earth. If we can believe, what philosophers would readily enough believe were not the fact asserted in the Bible, – that the earth was at one time covered with water, even the tops of the mountains, – and if we can suppose also that currents existed in this deluge; – then, on the subsiding of the waters, these currents might meet with the summits and ridges of hills, and work and wear for themselves a passage, the waters of the deluge gradually retiring, but, in the mean time, sustaining the currents at the requisite height. But humility in Scriptural interpretation is recommended by the remark, that the very first word of Scripture, "In the beginning," is incomprehensible and inexplicable.

On the southern slope of this rock is built the Palace of the Popes; as its roof is continued in one horizontal line, the height of the building at the southern extremity is enormous: its principal front is towards the west, overlooking a part of the city and the hills of Languedoc: it is now in a ruined and neglected state, as far as a building can be so which is still in use: part of it serves for a prison: another part is a caserne, of which the pope's chapel is the dormitory. Close upon the northern end of the palace is the cathedral; a church which, at the beginning of the revolution, was plundered of an immense quantity of silver and some gold plate, which was sent off to the national crucible at Paris; amongst other treasures was a silver bell of no very diminutive size. The tombs even were ransacked; a skull was brought to my house by my children's drawing-master, from which my younger son designed an admirable and edifying death's head. The model, I was assured, had been the cranium of a pope. They were beginning to repair this church, with the purpose of restoring it to its former destination. On one side of it is a little chapel with a dome, which served as the model for the dome of Ste. Geneviève. The copy is sufficiently exact.

Behind the palace, on the east, rises a tower, which, from having been used as an ice-house, was called the glacière; and the glacière of Avignon is a name ever memorable in the annals of horror. From the top of this tower five hundred, according to those who exaggerate; thirty, according to those who extenuate, – of the principal inhabitants of the city, after receiving a stunning blow on the head, were thrown down on the ice within, and their bodies immediately covered with quick lime.

Such was the vengeance of the people on those who, without trial, from the notoriety of the fact, were convicted of the crime of aristocracy. The Revolution had been quietly accomplished: the people declared that it was their will to unite themselves to France; sent a deputation to the national assembly; and cried "Vive le Roi." The vice-legate, who governed the city for the pope, addressed the people from his balcony; told them he had no force to oppose this their movement, that they had his prayers for their happiness, and that he would retire. This was all on his part. The national assembly accorded to the Avignonais their wish; and formed of this papal territory and that of Orange, (formerly a patrimony of the princes of that house,) the department of Vaucluse.

The summit of the rock commands a very beautiful view. The eye traverses a fertile plain, bounded by the hills of the Venaissin, among which are distinguished those of the vallis clausa, where the far-famed fountain has its source: between the trees are caught glimpses of the Durance, which throws itself into the Rhone two miles below; almost under your feet, are seen the windings of the Rhone with its islands: on the opposite bank rises the château and little town of Villeneuve, surmounted by hills covered with the vine and the olive: immediately beneath, to the south, and west, lies Avignon, with its population of five and twenty thousand souls, which number still remained to it after massacres, confiscations, and proscriptions. By these revolutionary measures, it had suffered more perhaps than any other city in France except Lyons, the "ville affranchie" of the Convention. "How would you have us be gay?" said a noble to me: "we see every day, we live in the midst of the assassins of our relations, and the possessors of our property." Virgil describes his Jove as viewing, from Olympus' height, the earth, "hominumque labores: " the rock of Avignon is but one of many elevated spots from which we look down on the bounty of Providence and on the misery of man.

The city contains a great many handsome hotels or family houses, but is not generally well-built; the streets, all but one, – the Rue Calade, – are narrow: the pavement is of small sharp-pointed pebbles. Here is a public library, formed out of the libraries of the suppressed convents; a Museum, in which, among other objects, a valuable collection of coins deserves particular mention, as containing some very rare specimens of the coins of the Greek cities anciently founded in this part of France. There is also annexed to the Museum a small botanical garden. Here is a good infirmary or hospital for the sick. A large convent has been turned into a succursal or subsidiary house to the invalids at Paris, insufficient to receive the increased number of disabled soldiers. The seven parishes of Avignon have been revolutionized into four, with churches not large enough for the congregations. I entered a fine Pantheon-like building, and found it to be a church, with vast Ionic columns supporting large galleries; the whole capable of containing two thousand people: it was used as a manufactory of saltpetre. The Jesuits' college is become a collège royal: thus it retains its destination as a place of instruction; but its handsome church has been spoiled by laying a floor across it at mid-height: for this there was no reason, but that an administrator thought, as my informant said, that it was a clever thing to cheat the Almighty of a church, escamoter une église au bon Dieu.

The walls of the town are particularly well-built and handsome, if walls can ever be handsome: they are of the same sort of stone as the palace, and it is said that each contains precisely the same quantity of stone. They both date from the fourteenth century, when the popes sat, as the phrase is, at Avignon.