There was the papal city, with its magnificent papal palace, its hundred churches, each more splendid than the other, and its innumerable bells, always ready to sound the tocsin of incendiarism or the knell of murder.
The French city, with its Rhone, its silk manufactories, and its crossroads going from north to south, from east to west, from Lyons to Marseilles, from Nîmes to Turin—the French city, the accursed city, longing for a king, jealous of its liberties, shuddering beneath the yoke of vassalage, a vassalage with the clergy for its lord.
The clergy—not the clergy as it has been from all times in the Gallican church, and such as we see it to-day, pious, tolerantly austere in its duties, living in the world to console and edify it, without mingling in its passions and its joys; but the clergy such as cupidity and intrigue had made it, with its court abbés, rivalling the Roman abbé's, idle, elegant, licentious, kings of fashion, autocrats of the salon, frequenters of houses of ill-fame. Do you want a type of these abbés? Take the Abbé Maury, proud as a duke, insolent as a lackey, son of a shoemaker, more aristocratic than the son of a great lord.
We have said, Avignon, Roman city; let us add, Avignon, city of hatreds. The heart of the child, born elsewhere free from the taint of hate, came into the world in the midst of hereditary hatred, bequeathed from father to son, and from son to son in turn, a diabolical inheritance for his children. In such a city every one was forced to make definite choice, and act a part in accordance with the importance of his position.
The Comte de Fargas had been a royalist before coming to Avignon. When he settled there, in order to meet his equals he was forced to become a fanatic. From that time he was looked upon as one of the royalist leaders and one of the standard-bearers of religion.
The time of which we are speaking was, as we have said, the year '87, the dawn of our independence. And so, at the first cry of liberty which was uttered in France, the French city rose full of joy and hope. The moment had come for her to contest aloud the concession made by a young queen under age, of a city, a province, and half a million souls, in order to atone for her crimes. By what right had she sold these souls forever to a foreign master?
All France hastened to the Champ de Mars, to meet in the fraternal embrace of the Federation. All Paris had labored to prepare that immense piece of ground; where sixty-seven years after the time of this fraternal embrace it was to invite all Europe to the Universal Exposition—the triumph of peace and industry over war. Avignon alone was excluded from this great love-feast; Avignon alone had no part in this universal communion. Was not Avignon, then, a part of France?
Avignon named deputies who went to the papal legate and gave him twenty-four hours in which to leave the city. During the night the Roman party, with the Comte de Fargas at its head, by way of revenge, amused itself by hanging a manikin wearing the tri-colored cockade.
It is possible to direct the course of the Rhone, to canal the Durance, to dam up the fierce torrents which, on the melting of the winter's snow, precipitate themselves in liquid avalanches from the peaks of Mont Ventoux; but this terrible living flood, this human torrent which rushed through the steep incline of the streets of Avignon, when once loosed, once launched on its way, heaven itself put forth no hand to stay its course.