But this legend has been proved to be as unreliable as so many other ecclesiastical traditions of mediæval times. The porch has also been the subject of controversy. The pillars with their beautiful Corinthian capitals are either the remains of some more ancient building, probably a classic temple, or perhaps mediæval copies of the antique. Above the door are the faded and damp-stained remains of a fresco of the fourteenth century. The figures of God the Father and two supporting angels can be made out, and bear strong traces of Byzantine mannerisms. If they are, as has been suggested, the work of Simone Martini of Siena, he displays in this work little of the genius of his great contemporaries in art.
And here it must be said that Avignon is not so rich in early paintings or frescoes of the first order as one would expect so mediæval a town to be.
The church is lit entirely from the dome, and the light that streams down from the eight windows above the choir is hardly sufficient to penetrate into the five deep vaulted bays of the nave. The style of the whole interior, for want of a better name, is called Romanesque, a style of the transition period between the rigid simplicity of the Roman times and the flowing ornamentation of the Middle Ages. Many of the most cherished monuments of the Cathedral were desecrated, pillaged, and destroyed during the Revolution, Spanish prisoners were lodged in it, and generally it was about as badly used as any of the religious buildings in Provence.
It, however, still retains the fine marble chair which is assumed to be the ancient Papal throne, with the lion of St. Mark and the ox of St. Luke carved in deep relief on either side of it.
In the small chapel to the right of the choir stands the lovely tomb of Pope John XXII., an excellent piece of fourteenth-century pointed Gothic work which suffered much mutilation during the Revolution, when it was dislodged from its place and the statue of its occupant stolen together with the statuettes that adorned the niches round its base. The tomb was restored in the middle of the last century, and is now at rest in its original position within the little chapel founded by John XXII. himself. It is a work of great beauty, of slender spires and delicate mouldings, of pillared niches with finely pierced canopies, of tapering columns and richly crocketed and perforated gables: a monument all too elegant for the mentally and physically deformed Pontiff to whose memory it is erected.
John XXII. was a man of humblest origin, Jacques d’Euse by name, born in 1244 at Euse. Son of a shoemaker, he rose to the most elevated position of his time; his talents, opportunities, and craftiness combining to bring about his elevation to the Papal Chair. Superstitious and cruel, he stooped to methods of revenge that match in diabolic ferocity the most sanguinary reprisals of the buccaneers. One of his clergy, a bishop, was by his command flayed alive and torn to pieces by wild horses.
In his later years John got into sore trouble with the theological authorities by promulgating the heretical doctrine “that the Saints at death fell asleep and did not enjoy the beatific vision till after the resurrection.” Whether this was a genuine conviction with him or no, he was forced by the religious opinion of his contemporaries to make a semblance of retracting it, but his monument seems to suggest that he believed it was to be his only resting-place until the last great day. His religious intolerance brought the Papacy into grave disrepute, but his grasping avarice greatly benefited its treasury, for at his death it was found that he had amassed for it eighteen millions of gold florins in bullion and about seven millions in plate and jewels.
From the garden of the Rocher des Doms, which rises abruptly to a height of three hundred feet above the river and looks across the island of Barthelasse to the town of Villeneuve, there stretches far into the distance a landscape which excites the imagination of the romantic poet, delights the eye of the artist, and even moves the prosaic to express themselves in superlatives.
The old bridge of St. Benezet, or, to be more exact, the three arches that remain of it, is a distinguished relic of
