“Windy Avignon, liable to plague when it has not the wind and plagued with the wind when it has it,”
still applies, if the plague is interpreted to mean dust.
The inhabitants have been easily moulded by the influence of modernity, and their principal street boasts of electric light and trams. Fashion finds ardent devotees in the provincial town, who worship at her shrine with as much, if not greater, zeal than her votaries in Paris, London, or New York. The café and the restaurant are held in high esteem, and, as in all French towns, occupy an important place in the civil life. The hour ’twixt sundown and the most important of the day, when all Avignon sits around the well-spread dinner tables, is devoted to the cafés; and these clubs of the people, deserted and idle at some hours, are full of joyful life.
On winter evenings the temporary stoves that stand prominently in the middle of these salons are surrounded by cold-footed mortals, who rest their extremities upon the encircling fenders. Friends meet, and seated around marble tables consume café, beer, bright-coloured syrups, and absinthe according to their fancy. Absinthe is still a popular drink throughout Provence, in spite of reasoned appeals from the medical fraternity for its discontinuance. Respectable womenfolk frequent the cafés with their male relatives and friends, and sip sweet sickly syrups with the rest. Excess is rare, almost unheard of. Cards are played, the stakes usually being the cost of the entertainment. During the hour or so before dinner the café is supreme.
The old folk in Avignon are all happy-looking; the men especially are a jolly set of fellows, and although the snow of years falls on their heads and never melts, their hearts are young and warm, secure from Time’s blighting frosts. They have studied the art of living, under their blue skies, and have mastered the difficult business.
The girls and women are particularly well favoured, dark, as becomes their Southern origin, well featured, favouring the Grecian rather than the Roman type. They have less of the imperious self-conscious dignity of their sisters in Spain and other Latin countries, and seem frank and more human and in touch with the life around them. The Church finds in them its chief adherents, faithful still in a country where once everybody believed and few inquired, and now, where few believe and all ask questions. New vistas of thought were opened up in Provence during the Revolution epoch, and ever since the view has widened. In the churches nearly all the little brass plates on the prie-dieu chairs have the prefix Mme. or Mlle. engraved upon them. One seldom comes across Monsieur.
In summer, when the heat of the brilliant day gives place to the lovely glow of the Provençal evening, all Avignon sits outside around the tables that trespass in careless fashion upon the pavements. The gossip of the day goes round amidst unrestrained laughter and merriment. The café on the pavement is as truly a Gallic institution as the “Bullring” is Spanish. Spain carried her “institution” to her remotest colonies, and France has done the same with the café.
The scene on a summer evening in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in Avignon is but a repetition on a smaller scale of what may be seen on any evening from one year’s end to the other in the Cannebière at Marseilles, or farther distant still, across the Mediterranean in the Place du Gouvernement in the French city of Algiers.
