The venerable heavy doors that lead into these gloomy chambers groan with age each time they turn upon their well-worn hinges; rusty iron bolts creak out the same melancholy discords that many years ago fell upon strained ears and sinking hearts.
The twin towers of the Fortress of St. André remain a most imposing memorial of fourteenth-century military architecture. Standing on a rock, that at one time was an island of the Rhone, the fort commanded the surrounding country to an extent that made its presence a
menace to the neighbourhood. The walls enclose a site upon which a town nestled in calm security, and near by the Monastery or Abbey of St. André, sheltered further by a great belt of pines, rises upon the site of a still more ancient building now passed out of memory.
Its career has been a chequered one, for it has changed owners with a bewildering frequency. After the Revolution it was turned into a military hospital; later it came into the possession of private persons; and in the second decade of the last century it again became a convent, inhabited by nuns. Now, unoccupied, it awaits some fresh development, but who dare prophesy what destiny has in store for it?
The little town beside it is fast tumbling to decay; its dilapidated walls and roofs straggling in irregular confusion up the rocky hillside. Higher up, on one of the topmost knolls of the enclosure, a small ancient chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of Belvezet, stands erect and stern in its simplicity, forsaken and exposed to the mistral’s greatest violence and the sun’s fiercest bleaching rays.
The town of Villeneuve, that lies below the fortress, sadly belies its name, for a more concentrated collection of crumbling ruins could hardly be imagined. The Monastery of the Chartreuse, founded by Innocent VI. in the middle of the fourteenth century (1352), was for more than four hundred years one of the most important and prosperous in Languedoc. The walls enclosing it measure nearly a mile in circumference, and now its ruins form a squalid little town inhabited by over five hundred human beings, to say nothing of the domestic animals.
The walls of its crumbling church are fast disappearing, the roof lets more than daylight in, and what little of it remains affords but a poor shelter for a few rickety, cumbrous, mud-stained carts and piles of faggots stored for winter use.