citizens for taking liberties with a young maiden of good family belonging to the town. Whichever version is correct, the name has stuck tenaciously to this chamber. There is another tragedy associated with this Palace which is famous for evermore. The massacre, which took place in the Glacière, or Ice Tower, one awful night in the middle of November 1791, at the outbreak of the Revolution, set a fiendish example to the lawless brutality which, in 1793, expressed itself in a similar way in the Abbaye Prison in Paris. Jourdain Coupetête, a fierce revolutionary, had earned his nickname two years previously by decapitating the corpses of the two Body-guards in the Marble Court of the Palace at Versailles, at the “insurrection of women.” In June 1791 he was leading a body of nearly 15,000 men, who called themselves the Brigands of Avignon. Jourdain had dubbed himself “General,” and with his associates was the terror of the Royalists.
L’Escuyer, one of the Patriot leaders, accompanied by the crowd, entered the Church of the Cordeliers to hear Mass, or to mock at it. The aristocratic Papists (the Church and Royalist faction) resented this, and their hot southern blood being roused, the two parties came to blows. In the mêlée L’Escuyer was killed, and this roused the Patriots to demand an inquest. Impatient of delay, the Brigands under Jourdain took possession of the Papal Palace, and there imprisoned some hundred and thirty persons—men, women, and children—in the dungeons of the Glacière Tower.
Then establishing themselves into a court-martial, with Jourdain as the judge, these Brigands very quickly disposed of all the prisoners with the naked sword—a most ghastly slaughter that makes the blood run cold.
When the troops under General Choisi came to the rescue, Jourdain could not hold the castle, but was forced to take flight, escaping through the secret passages as Pierre de Luna had done four hundred years previously.
If Avignon were to be deprived of her grand Papal Palace, she would still have enough churches and monasteries left to give evidence either of the great popularity her church enjoyed, or of the power wielded in the Middle Ages by the religious orders.
Churches and monasteries are scattered lavishly through the town, and from the rich stores of relics still possessed by them, some slight idea may be gleaned of the wealth they possessed before the terrible Revolution. Everywhere the stranger goes the story is the same. Vergers and guides tell of the past glories of this town: this stood here and that there; here was a monument, there a shrine; but—they vanished in the Revolution.
Terrible were these revolutionists of the South; they gathered their harvests of rich plunder from the Church’s hand with as little concern as a farmer gathers his corn, or as a beggar his rags. Nothing was sacred from their vandal hands, and the tables were turned upon the Church, which in the centuries long gone had taken its heavy toll from all the country round.
What a grotesque picture the Revolution presents! Grim satire on the vanity of riches, the pomp of ceremony and fleetingness of power, and the emptiness of rank. Riches took wings, or rather were carried off on donkeys’ backs to be melted down into coin and turned into bread for hungry mouths. Ceremonies, even the most sacred, were mocked at, and burlesque processions of ecclesiastical pageants excited the ribald laughter of the crowd. The powerful were humbled to the dust, and rank lost its head under the cruel slicing invention of Dr. Guillotin.