“THE OLD ROUND ARCH OF THE BISHOP'S PALACE.”—VENCE.[To List]
In the side wall there is a low portal of a late, decadent style, which opens on the little square, but there is no real façade; and to see the church, the traveller passed under the old round arch of the Bishop's Palace, through a small, damp street to another tinier square where the apse and tower stand. The little Cathedral-churches of Provence are always simply built, but here a rectangle, a low gabled roof, a small, round-headed window in the wall, would have been architectural bareness if a high, straight tower had not crowned it all. This crenellated tower is a truetype of its time, square, yet slim and strong, and crudely graceful as some tall young poplar of the plains beneath. In the XI and XII centuries, its early days, it was the city's lookout. Families lived high up in its walls, and the traveller could imagine, in this little old, deserted square, the crowds who gathered round the tower's base, and called for news of enemies and battle as moderns gather about the more prosaic bulletin of printed news. He could see them surging, peering up; and from above he almost heard the watcher's cry, “They're coming on,”—with the great answering howl beneath, and the rush to arms. Or, “They pass us by,” and then what breaking into little laughing groups, what joy, what dancing, and what praying, that lasted far into the evening hours.
“THE LOW, BROAD ARCHES AND THE GREAT, SUPPORTING PILLARS.”—VENCE.[To List]
The traveller came back in thought to modern times and went into the church, that church of five low naves and many restorations, that product of most diverse fancies. It is painted in lugubrious white, and its pillars have false bases in a palpable imitation of veined red marble. Its pure and early form, the Latin cross, is gone, its fine old stalls are hidden in a gallery, and at the altar Corinthian columns desecrate its ancient Romanesque. Yet in spite of the incongruities the atmosphere of the church is truly that of its dim past. There are the low broad arches, the great, supporting pillars that are massive buttresses; there is the simple practicality of a style that aimed at a protecting strength rather than at any art of beauty; there is the semi-darkness of the small, safe windows, and the little, guarded space where the praying few increased a thousand-fold in times of danger. This is, in spite of all defects, the small Provençal church where in days of peace cloudy incense slowly circled round the shadowy forms of chanting priests, and where in times of war a crowd of frightened women and their children prayed in safety for the men who sallied forth to fight in their defence.
Grasse.
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He who is unloving of the past may well rush by its treasures in a puffing automobile, he who is bored by olden thoughts can hurry on by rail, but the man who wishes to know the old hill-towns of France, to see them as they seemed to theirmakers, and realise their one-time magnificence and strength, must walk from one town to the next, and climb their steep heights; must see great towers rise before him, great walls loom above him, and realise how grandly strong these places were when it was man to man and sword to sword, strength against strength. He must arrive, dust-covered, at the cities' gates or drive into their narrow streets on the small coach which still passes through,—for they are of the times when great men rode and peasants walked and steam was all unknown. Then he will realise how very large the world once was, how far from town to town; and once within those high, protecting walls, he will understand why the citizen of mediæval days found in his town a world sufficient to itself, and why he was so often well content to spend his life at home.
The power and the force of an isolated, self-concentrated interest is well illustrated in the history of the free cities of the Middle Ages, and Grasse may be counted one of these. Counts she had in name; but the Bérengers and Queen Jeanne had granted her charters which she had the power to keep; she was once wealthy enough to declare war with Pisa, and in the XII century the leaders of her self-government were “Consuls by the grace of God alone.” Therefore when Antibes continued to be greatly menaced by blasphemous pirates, the Bishopric was removed to Grasse, rich, strong, and safe behind the hills, where it endured from 1244, through all the perils of the centuries, until by a pen-stroke Napoleon wiped it out in 1801.
“HIGHER THAN THEM ALL STANDS THE CATHEDRAL.”—GRASSE.[To List]
To come to Grasse on foot or in the stage, will well repay the traveller of old-fashioned moods and fancies. Afar, her houses seem to crowd together, as they used to crowd within the walls, her red roofs rise fantastically one above the other, and higher than them all stands the Cathedral with its firm, square tower. Such must have been old Grasse, perched on the summit of her hill. But once inside the town, these illusions cease. Here are the hotels and the Casino of a thermal station, and the factories of a new world. The traveller finds that the broad upper boulevards are filled with tourists and smart English visitors; and in the narrow streets pert factory-hands come noisily from work. Still he climbs on toward the Cathedral,through tortuous streets and little alley-ways. And in the gloomiest of them all there is no odour of a stale antiquity, but the perfume of a garden-full of roses, of a thousand orange-blossoms, and of locusts, honey-sweet, and he begins to think himself enchanted. He feels the dark, old houses are unreal, as if, instead of cobble-stones beneath his feet, there must be the soft and tender grass of Araby the Blest. Such is the magic of a trade, the perfume industry of Grasse that for so many hundreds of years has made her meanest streets full of refreshing fragrance.
Breathless from the climb, the traveller stepped at length into the little square, before a most ungainly Cathedral. “Chiefly built in the XII century,” it may have been, but so bedizened by the Renaissance that its heavy old Provençal walls and massive pillars seem to exist merely as supports for additions or unreasonable decorations of a poor Italian style. A certain Monseigneur of the XVII century re-built the choir in a deep, rectangular form; another prelate enlarged the church proper and ruined it by constructing a tribune over the aisles, and desiring the revenues of a new burial-place, he ordered Vauban to accomplish the daring construction of a crypt. Still another Bishop with like architectural tastes built a large new chapel which opens from the south aisle; and with these additions and XVIII century changes in the façade, the original style of the church was obscured. In spite of the pitiful remains of dignity which its three aisles, its firm old pillars, and its height still give to the interior, it is as a whole so mean a building that it has fittingly lost the title of Cathedral.
THE “PONT D'AVIGNON.”[To List]
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Avignon.
Everything which surrounds the Cathedral of Avignon, its situation, its city, its history, is so full of romance and glamour that it is only after very sober second thought one realises that the church itself is the least of the papal buildings which majestically overtower the Rhone, or of those royal ruins which face them as proudly on the opposite bank of the river. Yet no church in Provence is richer in tradition, and in history more romantic than tradition.
The foundation of this church goes back to the first Avignon, a small colony of river-fishermen which gave way before the Romans, who established a city, Avernio, on the great rocky hill two hundred feet above the Rhone. Some hundreds of years later the first Christian missionaries to Gaul landed near the mouth of this river,—Mary the mother of James, Saint Sara the patron of gypsies, Lazarus, his sister Martha, and Saint Maximin. Before these storm-tossed Saints lay the fair and pagan country of Provence, the scene of their future mission; and if tradition is to be further believed, each went his way, to work mightily for the sacred cause. Maximin lived in the town that bears his name, Lazarus became the first Bishop of Marseilles, and Saint Martha ascended the Rhone as far as Avignonand built near the site of the present Cathedral an oratory in honour of the Virgin “then living on the earth.” Two early churches, of which this chapel was perhaps a part, were destroyed in the Saracenic sieges of the VIII century; an inscription in the porch of the present Cathedral records the very interesting mediæval account of its re-building and re-consecration nearly a hundred years later. It was, so runs the tale, the habit of a devout woman to pray in the church every night; and after the Cathedral had been finished by the generous aid of Charlemagne, she happened there at midnight, and witnessed the descent of Christ in wondrous, shining light. There at the High Altar, surrounded by ministering angels, he dedicated the Cathedral to His Mother, Our Lady of Cathedrals; and so it has been called to the present day. If it is an impossible and ungrateful task to disprove that the re-construction, or at least the re-founding of this Cathedral was the work of Charlemagne, so munificent a patron and dutiful a son of the Church, to prove it is equally impossible. A martyrology of the XI century speaks of a dedication in 1069, but as this ceremony had been preceded by another extensive re-building, and was followed by many other changes, the oldest portions of the present church are to be most accurately ascribed to the XI, XII, and XIV centuries. The additions of the centuries following the papal return to Rome have greatly changed the appearance of the church. A large chapel, built in 1506, gives almost a northern nave. In 1671, Archbishop Ariosto thought the interior would be gracefully improved by a Renaissance gallery which shouldencircle the entire nave from one end of the choir to the other. To accomplish this new work, the old main piers below the gallery were cut away, the wall arches were changed, and columns and piers, almost entirely new, arose to support a shallow, gracefully balustraded balcony and its bases of massive carving. Nine years later a new Archbishop added to the north side a square XVII century chapel, richly ornamental in itself, but entirely out of harmony with the fundamental style of the church. Other chapels, less distinguished, which have been added from time to time, line the nave both north and south, and all are excrescent to the original plan. Of the exterior, only the façade retains its primitive character. The side-walls, “entirely featureless,” as has been well said, “reflect only the various periods of the chapels which have been added to the Cathedral,” and the apse was re-built in 1671, in a heavy, uninteresting form.
“THE INTERIOR HAS A SHALLOW, GRACEFULLY BALUSTRADED BALCONY.”—AVIGNON.[To List]
These additions, superimposed ornamentations, and rebuildings, together with the very substantial substructure of the primitive Cathedral, form to-day a small church of unimpressive, conglomerate style, and except for its history, unnoteworthy. It is therefore a church whose interest is almost wholly of the past; and the traveller goes back in imagination, century after century, to the era of Papal residency, when the Cathedral was not only ecclesiastically important, but architecturally in its best and purest form. This church, which Clement V found on his removal to Avignon, and which may still be easily traced, was of the simple, primitive Provençal style. No dates of that periodare sufficiently accurate to rely upon; but its interest lies not so much in chronology as in its portrayal of the general type. The interior is the usual little hall church of the XI century, with its aisle-less nave of five bays, and plain piers supporting a tunnelled roof, with double vault arches. Beyond the last bay, over the choir, is the Cathedral's octagonal dome, and from the rounded windows of its lantern comes much of the light of the interior, which is sombre and without other windows of importance.
The façade is architecturally one of the most significant parts of the church. Above the portal the wall is supported on either side by plain heavy buttresses, and directly continued by the solid bulk of the tower. In 1431 this tower replaced the original one which fell in the earthquake of 1405. It is conjecturally similar, a heavy rectangle which quite overweighs the church; plain, with its stiff pilasters and two stories of rounded windows; without grace or proper proportion, but pleasing by the unblemished severity of its lines. Above the balustrade with which the tower may be properly said to terminate, the religious art of the XIX century has erected as its contribution to the Cathedral a series of steps, an octagon, and a colossal, mal-proportioned statue of the Virgin. These additions are inharmonious; and the finest part of the façade is the porch, so classic in detail that it was formerly supposed to be Roman, a work of the Emperor Constantine. Like the rest of the church, its general structure is plain and somewhat severe, with small, richly carved details, in this instance closely Corinthian. The rounded portal of entranceis an entablature, enclosed as it were by two supporting columns; and above, in the pointed pediment, is a circular opening curiously foreshadowing that magnificent development of the North—the rose-window. Passing through the vestibule, whose tunnel-vault supports the tower, the minor portal appears, almost a replica of the outer door, and the whole forms an unusual mode of entrance, graceful in detail, ponderous in general effect. Far behind the tower of the façade rises the last significant feature of the exterior, the little lantern. It is an octagon with Doric and Corinthian motifs, continuing the essential characteristics of the interior, and exceedingly typical of Provence.
“THE PORCH SO CLASSIC IN DETAIL.”—AVIGNON.From an old print[To List]
Into this church, with its few, unusually classic details,its Provençal simplicity, its very modest size and plainness, the munificence of papal pomp was introduced. This was in 1308, an era of papal storm and stress. Not ten years before, Boniface VIII, with the tradition of Canossa spurring his haughty ambitions, had launched a bull against Philip III, whom he knew to be a bad king and whom he was to find an equally bad, rebellious Christian. “God,” said the Prelate, from Rome, “has constituted us, though unworthy, above kings and kingdoms, to seize, destroy, disperse, build, and plant in His name and by His doctrine. Therefore, do not persuade thyself that thou hast no superior, and that thou art not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; he who thinks thus is insensate, he who maintains it is infidel.”
Past indeed was the time of Henry of Germany, long past the proud day when a Pope received an Emperor who knelt and waited in the snow. Philip burned the Bull; and to prevent other like fulminations, sent an agent into Italy. Gathering a band, he found the aged Pontiff at Anagni, his birthplace, seated on a throne, crowned with the triple crown, the Cross in one hand and in the other Saint Peter's Keys, the terrible Keys of Heaven and Hell. They called on him to abdicate, but Boniface thought of Christ his Lord, and cried out in defiant answer, “Here is my neck, here is my head. Betrayed like Jesus Christ, if I must die like him, I will at least die Pope.” For reply, Sciarra Colonna, one of his own Roman Counts, struck him in the face. Buffeted by a noble, and openly defied by a king, Boniface died “of shame and anger.” A month later, this same kingrejoiced, if nothing more, at the death of the Pope's successor; and in the dark forests of Saint-Jean-d'Angély, Philip bargained and sold the great Tiara to a Gascon Archbishop who, if Villani speaks truly, “threw himself at the royal feet, saying, 'It is for thee to command and for me to obey; such will ever be my disposition!'” As was not unnatural, the will of the French king was that the Pope should remain within the zone of royal influence. So Clement lived at Bordeaux and at Poitiers, and finally retired to the County of Venaissin which the Holy See possessed by right, and established the pontifical court at Avignon.
This transfer of the papal residence to Avignon has left many and deep traces on the history of French Catholicism. The Holy See was no longer far remote; the French ecclesiastic desirous of promotion had no dangerous mountains to traverse, no strange city to enter, no foreign Pontiff to besiege, ignorant or indifferent to his claims. The next successor of Saint Peter would logically be a Frenchman, and there was not only a possibility, but a probability for every man of note, that he might be either the occupant of the Sacred Chair or its favoured supporter. So Avignon became a city of priests as Rome had been before her; and as France was the richest country in Europe and the Church regally wealthy, splendour, luxury, and constant religious spectacles rejoiced the city, and Bishop, Archbishop, and Abbot, brazenly neglecting the duties of their Sees, lived here and were seldom “in residence.” Every one had a secret ambition. Of such a situation, the Popeswere not slow to reap the benefits. Difference of wealth, which brought difference of position, counted much and was keenly felt. Abbots of smaller monasteries found themselves inferior to Bishops, especially in freedom from papal interference; while from the inherent wealth and power of their foundations, the heads of the great monasteries ranked sometimes with Archbishops, sometimes even with Cardinals. The Pope had the right to elevate an Abbey or a Priory into a Bishopric, and those who could offer the “gratification” or the “provocative,” might reasonably hope for the desired elevation which at once increased their local importance, belittled a neighbouring diocese, and freed them to some extent from the direct intermeddling of the Pope. The applications for such an increase of power became numerous, and by 1320 a number of Benedictine Abbeys had been made Bishoprics. Their creation greatly decreased the direct and intimate power of the Papacy, but temporarily increased the papal treasury; and John XXII, who left ten million pieces of silver and fifteen million in gold with his Florentine bankers, seems to have thought philosophically, “After us, the deluge.”
NOTRE-DAME-DES-DOMS.—AVIGNON[To List]
Another favourite diplomatic and financial device, which was invented by these famous Popes of Avignon, was the system of the “Commende,” which enabled relatives of nobles and all those whom it was desirable to placate, not alone ecclesiastics, but mere laymen and bloody barons, to become “Commendatory Abbots” or “Commendatory Priors,” and to receive at least one-third of the monastery's revenues, without being in any way responsible for themonastery's welfare. This care was left to a Prior or a Sub-prior, a sort of clerical administrator who, crippled in means and in influence, was sometimes unable, sometimes unwilling, to carry out the duties and beneficences of past ages, and who was always the victim of a great injustice. The depths of uselessness to which this infamous practice reduced monastic establishments may be inferred, when it is remembered that before the XVIII century the famous Abbey of La Baume had had thirteen Commendatory Abbots, and that the bastards of Louis XIV were Commendatory Priors in their infancy.
The Popes found the Commende useful, not only as a means of income, but as a method—at once secure and lucrative—of gaining to their cause the great feudal lords of France, and making the power of these lords an added buffer, as it were, between Avignon and the grasping might of the French Kings. For although the Popes were under “the special protection” of the Kings, it was as sheep under the special protection of a shearer, and they found that they must protect themselves against a too “special” and royal fleecing. For they did not always agree that—
“'Tis as goodly a match as match can beTo marry the Church and the fleur-de-lisShould either mate a-straying go,Then each—too late—will own 'twas so.'”
“'Tis as goodly a match as match can beTo marry the Church and the fleur-de-lisShould either mate a-straying go,Then each—too late—will own 'twas so.'”
“'Tis as goodly a match as match can beTo marry the Church and the fleur-de-lisShould either mate a-straying go,Then each—too late—will own 'twas so.'”
“THE TOWER OF PHILIP THE FAIR.”—VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON.[To List]
Haunted by the humiliation of their heaven-sent power, caged in “Babylonish captivity,” it is conceivable that the Popes were too occupied or, perhaps too distracted, to objectto the unsuitable modesty of Notre-Dame-des-Doms. When a Pope swept forth from his Cathedral, new-crowned, to give “urbis et orbi” his first pontifical benediction, his eye glanced, it is true, on the crowds prostrate before him, before the church, awed and breathless; but it fell lingeringly—it was irresistibly drawn—across the swift Rhone to the town of the kings who had defied his power, to the royal city of Villeneuve, and to the strong tower of Philip the Fair, standing proudly in the sunlight. Would it be thought strange if their thoughts wandered, or if the portraits of the “French Popes” which hang about the Cathedralwalls at Avignon, show more worldly preoccupation than is becoming to the successors of Saint Peter and Vicars of Christ?
Little indeed in the days of their residency did the Popes add to Notre-Dame-des-Doms. A fragile, slender marvel of Gothic architecture, the tomb of John XXII, was placed in the nave before the altar; and a monument to Benedict XII was raised in the church. But their Holinesses incited others in Avignon to good works so successfully that Rabelais laughingly called it the “Ringing city” of churches, convents, and monasteries. The bells of Saint-Pierre, Saint-Symphorien, Saint-Agricol, Sainte-Claire, and Saint-Didier chimed with those of chapels and religious foundations; the Grey Penitents, Black Penitents, and White Penitents, priests, and nuns walked the streets, and Avignon grew truly papal. Clement V and his successors proceeded to the safeguarding of their temporal welfare in truly noble fashion; and scarcely fifty years later they had become so well pleased with their new residence that the magnificent Clement VI refused to leave in spite of the supplications of Petrarch and Rienzi and a whole deputation of Romans.
During the reign of this Pontiff, the Papal Court became one of the gayest in Christendom. Clement was frankly, joyously voluptuous; and his life seems one moving pageant in which luxurious banquets, beautiful women, and ecclesiastical pomps succeeded each other. The lovely Countess of Turenne sold his preferments and benefices, the immense treasure of John XXII was his, and he showered such benefitson a grateful family that of the five Cardinals who accompanied his corpse from Avignon, one was his brother, one his cousin, and three his nephews; and that the Huguenots who violated his tomb at La-Chaise-Dieu, should have used his skull as a wine-cup, seems an horrible, but not an unfitting mockery. It was in vain that Petrarch hotly wrote, “the Pope keeps the Church of Jesus Christ in shameful exile.” The desire for return to Rome had passed.
Avignon was not an original nor a plenary possession of the Holy Fathers, but “the fairest inheritance of the Bérengers,” and it was from that family that half of the city had to be wrested—or obtained. Now the lords of Provence were Kings of Naples and Sicily, and therefore vassals of the Holy See. For when the Normans took these Southern states from the Greeks and thereby incurred the jealousy of all Italy, they had warily placed themselves under the protection of the Pope and agreed to hold their new possessions as a papal investiture. It happened at this time that the vassal of the Pope in Naples and in Sicily was the beauteous “Reino Joanno,” the heiress of Provence. What she was no writer could describe in better words than these, “with extreme beauty, with youth that does not fade, red hair that holds the sunlight in its tangles, a sweet voice, poetic gifts, regal peremptoriness, a Gallic wit, genuine magnanimity, and rhapsodical piety, with strange indecorum and bluntness of feeling under the extremes of splendour and misery, just such a lovely, perverse, bewildering woman was she, great granddaughterof Raymond-Bérenger, fourth Count of Provence,—the pupil of Boccaccio, the friend of Petrarch, the enemy of Saint Catherine of Siena, the most dangerous and most dazzling woman of the XIV century. So typically Provençal was this Queen's nature, that had she lived some centuries later, she might have been Mirabeau's sister. The same 'terrible gift of familiarity,' the same talent of finding favour and swaying popular assemblages, the same sensuousness, bold courage, and great generosity were found in this early orphaned, thrice widowed heiress of Provence. To this day, the memory of the Reino Joanno lives in her native land, associated with numbers of towers and fortresses, the style of whose architecture attests their origin under her reign. It says much for her personal fascinations that far from being either cursed or blamed she is still remembered and praised. The ruins of Gremaud, Tour Drainmont, of Guillaumes, and a castle near Roccaspervera, all bear her name: at Draguignan and Flagose, they tell you her canal has supplied the town with water for generations: in the Esterels, the peasants who got free grants of land, still invoke their benefactress. At Saint-Vallier, she is blessed because she protected the hamlet near the Siagne from the oppression of the Chapters of Grasse and Lérins. At Aix and Avignon her fame is undying because she dispelled some robber-bands; at Marseilles she is popular because she modified and settled the jurisdiction of Viscounts and Bishops. Go up to Grasse and in the big square where the trees throw a flickering shadow over the street-traders, you will see built in a vaulted passage a flightof stone steps, steps which every barefoot child will tell you belong to the palace of 'La Reino Joanno.' Walls have been altered, gates have disappeared, but down those time-worn steps once paced the liege lady of Provence, the incomparable 'fair mischief' whose guilt ... must ever remain one of the enigmas of history.” This “enigma” has strange analogies to one which has puzzled and impassioned the writers of many generations, the mystery of that other “fair mischief” of a later century, Mary Queen of Scots. Like Mary, Jeanne was accused of the murder of her young husband, and being pressed by the vengeance of his brother—no less a person than the King of Hungary,—she decided to retreat to her native Provence and appeal to the Pope, her gallant and not over-scrupulous suzerain. “Jeanne landed at Ponchettes,” continues the writer who has so happily described her, “and the consuls came to assure her of their devotion. 'I come,' replied the heiress, whose wit always suggested a happy phrase, 'to ask for your hearts and nothing but your hearts.' As she did not allude to her debts, the populace threw up their caps; the Prince de Monaco, just cured of his wound at Crécy, placed his sword at her service; and the Baron de Bénil, red-handed from a cruel murder, besought her patronage which, perhaps from a fellow-feeling, she promised with great alacrity. At Grasse she won all hearts and made many more promises, and finally, arriving at Avignon, she found Clement covetous of the city and well-disposed to her. Yet morality obliged him to ask an explanation of her recent change of husbands, and before three Cardinals,whom he appointed to be her judges, the Queen pleaded her own cause. Not a blush tinged her cheek, no tremor altered her melodious voice as she stood before the red-robed Princes of the Church and narrated, in fluent Latin, the story of the assassination of Andrew, the death of her child, and her marriage with the murderer, Louis of Tarento, who stood by her side. The wily Pope noted behind her the proud Provençal nobles, the Villeneuves and d'Agoults, the de Baux and the Lescaris, who brought the fealty of the hill-country, and who did not know that, having already sold her jewels to the Jews, their fair Queen was covenanting with the Pope for Avignon. The formal trial ended, the Pontiff solemnly declared the Queen to be guiltless,—and she granted him the city for eighty thousand pieces of gold.”
“THE GREAT PALACE.”—AVIGNON.[To List]
Clement enjoyed ownership in the same agreeable manner as his predecessors, “without the untying of purse-strings.”Perhaps he used the purse's contents for the more pressing claim of the great Palace of which he built so large a part; perhaps he handed it, still filled, to Innocent VI who built the famous fortifications of Avignon and protected himself against the marauding “White Companies,” perhaps it was still untouched when Bertrand du Guesclin and his Grand Company stood before the gate and demanded “benediction, absolution, and two hundred thousand pounds.” “What!” the Pope is said to have cried, “must we give absolution, which here in Avignon is paid for, and then give money too—it is contrary to reason!” Du Guesclin replied to the bearer of these words, “Here are many who care little for absolution, and much for money,”—and Urban yielded.
Gregory XI, the last of the “French Popes,” returned to Rome, and at his death the “Great Schism” followed;—Clement VII, in Avignon, was recognised by France, Spain, Scotland, Sicily, and Cyprus; Urban VI, in Rome, by Italy, Austria, and England. The County Venaissin was ravaged by wars and the pests that come in their train. At length the Avignonnais, who had not enjoyed greater peace under their anointed rulers than under worldling Counts, rose against Pierre de Luna, the “Anti-pope” Benedict XIII, who fled. From that time no Pontiff entered the gates, and the city was administered by papal legates. In later days, in spite of the sacred character of its rulers and his own undoubted orthodoxy, Louis XIV seized Avignon several times; and Louis XV, in unfilial vengeance for the excommunication of the Duke of Parma, took possessionof the city. But it was not until after the beginning of the French Revolution, in 1791, that the Avignonnais themselves arose, chased the Vice-Legate of the Pope from the city, and appealed for union with France; and it was at this period that the Chapel of Sainte-Marthe, the Cloister, and the Chapter House were swept away. Thus ended the temporal power of the Papacy in France, planned for worldly profit and carried out with many sordid compromises;—a residency unnoted for great deeds or noble intentions and whose close marked the “Great Schism.”
To-day papal Avignon is become French Avignon, a pleasant city where the Provençal sun is hot and where the Mistral whistles merrily. Above the banks of the Rhone the simple Cathedral stands, with its priests still garbed in papal red, its Host still carried under the white papal panoply. Here also is the great Palace of the Popes, “which is indeed,” says Froissart, “the strongest and most magnificent house in the world.” And yet its grim walls suggest neither peace nor rest; and to him who recalls, this great, impressive pile tells neither of glories nor of triumphs. Bands of unbelieving Pastoureaux marched toward it; soldiers of the “White Companies” and soldiers of du Guesclin gazed mockingly at it; it was the prison of Rienzi, and the home of the harassed Popes who had ever before them, just across the river, the menacing tower of that “fair king” who had led them into “Babylonish captivity.”
Vaison.
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On the banks of a pleasant little river among the Provençal hills is Vaison, one of the ancient Gallic towns which became entirely romanised; and many illustrious families of the Empire had summer villas there as at Arles and Orange. Barbarians of one epoch or another have devastated Vaison of all her antique treasures, except the remains of an Amphitheatre on the Puymin Hill. Germanic tribes who swooped down in early centuries destroyed her villas and her greater buildings; and vandals of a later day have scattered her sculptures and her tablets here and there. Some are in the galleries of Avignon; a Belus, the only one found in France, was sent to the Museum of Saint-Germain; and in the multitude of treasures in the British Museum, the most beautiful of all her statues, a Diadumenus, is artistically lost. In the days when it still adorned the city, during the reign of the Emperor Gallienus, Vaison was christianised by Saint Ruf, her Bishopric was founded, and in 337 the first General Council of the Church held in Gaul assembled here. Another Council in the V century, and still another in the VI, are proof of her continued importance.
“ON THE BANKS OF A PLEASANT LITTLE RIVER IS VAISON.”[To List]
“THE RUINED CASTLE OF THE COUNTS OF TOULOUSE.”—VAISON.[To List]
Among the first of Gallo-Roman cities, she was also among the first to suffer. Chrocus and his horde who sacked Orange, seized her Bishop and murdered him; and Alains, Vandals, and Burgundians, following in their wake, brought disaster after disaster to the cities lying near the Rhone. Vaison, by miracle, did not lose her prestige. In the X and XI centuries she built her fine Cathedral with its Cloisters, and in 1179 she was still great enough to excite the covetousness of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse. This magnificent and ambitious prince built a castle on a height above the city, and as he had before terrorised my Lord Bishop of Carpentras, so now he seized the anointed person of Bérenger de Reilhane, who was not only Vaison's Bishop, but her temporal prince as well. Bérenger was a sufficiently powerful personage to make an outcry whichre-echoed throughout Christendom; the Pope and the Emperor came to his aid; and in the Abbey Church of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, Raymond VI did solemn penance, and, before receiving absolution, was publicly struck by the Papal Legate with a bundle of birch rods. Above the Bishop's Palace the great castle still loomed in menace, but on that day Bérenger de Reilhane triumphed and Vaison was at peace.
It was a peace which presaged her quiet, uneventful downfall. For other interests were growing stronger in the country, other cities grew where she stood still, and in the XIV century, when Avignon became the seat of papal power, Vaison had passed from the world's history. Her Bishopric endured till 1801, but her doings are worthy only of provincial chronicles and to-day she is but a little country town, served by the stage-coach. She still lies on both banks of the river; the “high city,” with long rows of deserted houses, climbs the side of the steep hill and is dominated by the ruins of the great castle, which Richelieu destroyed. The “lower city,” which is the busier of the two, lies on the opposite bank; and on its outskirts, in a little garden-close, almost surrounded by the fields, is the Cathedral,—solitary, lonely, and old.
“THE WHOLE APSE-END.”—VAISON.[To List]
The decoration of the exterior is slight, a dentiled cornice and a graceful foliated frieze extend along the top of the side-walls, which although most plainly built, are far from being severely angular or gaunt and have a quaint and pleasing harmony of line. The west front is so featureless that it scarcely deserves the title of façade. The south wall, which is clearly seen from the road, has a small portal and plain buttresses that slope at the top. The central apse is rectangular and heavy, the little southern apse is short and round, and that of the north is tall and thin as a pepper-box. Behind them rise the pointed roof of the nave and the heavy tower. The whole apse-end is constructed in most picturesque irregularity, and the new redof the roof-tiles and sombre grey of the old stone add greatly to its charm.
“THE SOUTH WALL WHICH IS CLEARLY SEEN FROM THE ROAD.”—VAISON.[To List]
Unlike many churches of its period Notre-Dame of Vaison is three-aisled. Slender, narrow naves, whose tunnel vaults are not extremely lofty, end in small circular apses. The nave is a short one of three irregular bays, and over the last, which precedes the choir, is the little eight-sided dome, which instead of projecting above the roof is curiously placed a little lower than the tunnel vaulting of the other bays. The High Altar, which originally belonged to an older church, is well placed in the simple choir; for it belongs in style, if not in actual fact, to the first centuries of the Faith; and in the semi-darkness behind the altar, the old episcopal throne still stands against the apse's wall, in memory of the custom of the Church's early days. The low arches of the aisles, the dim lighting of the church, its simple ornaments of classic bands and little capitals, its slight irregularities of form and carvings, make an interior of fine and strong antique simplicity.
A little door in the north wall leads to the Cloisters, which are happily in a state of complete restoration, and not as a modern writer has described them, “practically a ruin.” The wall which overlooks them has an inscription that adjures the Canons to “bear with patience the north aspect of their cells.” The short walks have tunnel vaults with cross-vaults in the corners and in parts of the north aisle. Great piers and small, firm columns support the outer arches; and on the exterior of the Cloister the little arches of the columns are enclosed in a large round arch. Many of the capitals are uncarved, some of the piers have applied columns, but many are ornamented in straight cut lines. On one side, two bays open to the ground, forming an entrance-way into the pretty close, where the bushy tops of a few tall trees cast flickering shadows on the surrounding walls and the little grassy square.
“TWO BAYS OPEN TO THE GROUND.”—VAISON.[To List]
The Cloister is small and simple in its rather heavy grace. Noise and unrest seem far from it, and underneath its solid rounded vault is peace and shelter from the world. And in its firm solidity of architecture there is the spirit of a perfect quiet, a tranquil charm which must insensibly have calmed many a restless spirit that chafed beneath thechurchly frock, and fled within its walls for refuge and for helpful meditation.