CHAPTER XV
Vaucluse
It was very pleasant to get on to the road again, with my pack on my back. I was not yet tuned up to the nearly twenty mile walk between Avignon and Vaucluse, though my damaged muscles were now giving me little trouble, so I took the train to L'Isle-sur-Sorgue, which is distant from Vaucluse between four and five miles.
In 1789, Arthur Young made this pilgrimage to the shrine of Petrarch and Laura, and allowed himself to be more moved by sentimental interest than was his custom. L'Isle has changed very little since that time. It is still the bright, pleasant, well-watered little town he describes it.
"L'Isle is most agreeably situated," he wrote. "On coming to the verge of it I found fine plantations of elms, with delicious streams, bubbling over pebbles on either side; well dressed people were enjoying the evening at a spot I had conceived to be only a mountain village. It was a sort of fairy scene to me. Now, thought I, how detestable to leave this fine wood and water, and enter a nasty, beggarly, walled, hot, stinking town; one of the contrasts most offensive to my feelings. What an agreeable surprise, to find the inn without the town, in the midst of the scenery I had admired! And more, a good and civil inn. I walked on the banks of this classic stream for an hour, with the moon gazing on the waters, that will run for ever in mellifluous poetry: retired to sup on the most exquisite trout and crawfish in the world. To-morrow to the famed origin."[21]
I do not remember the elms, but the planes were there, as usual, and fine, spreading ones they were; and what was more, they were beginning to show a delicate haze of green, which was very delightful, and what I had been looking out for ever since I had started on my expedition. During the two days I had been at Avignon the spring seemed to have taken that little definite step forward which makes all the difference. In the south, where the sun gets hot long before the trees get green, and so many flowers come forth to greet it, this longed-for arrival of the true spring is apt to be discounted, and comes with less of a thrill than is felt in the north. But the thrill is there, if one's senses are open to it; and I felt it on that morning as I walked to Vaucluse.
"I am delighted with the environs of L'Isle," Arthur Young wrote of his next morning's ride; "beautiful roads, well planted, surround and pass off in different directions, as if from a capital town, umbrageous enough to form promenades against a hot sun, and the river splits and divides into so many streams, and is conducted with so much attention that it has a delicious effect, especially to an eye that recognizes all the fertility of irrigation."
It is still a fertile, carefully cultivated country, but gets wilder as one approaches the famous spring "justly said to be as celebrated almost as that of Helicon." The river Sorgue, whose source provides the fountain, is already a full and rapid stream as one nears the village, and flows through green meadows down the valley not far from the winding road. The hills are high on either side and a great cliff looms in front of one, closing in the gorge. One's eye instinctively searches for a cleft down which the torrent must descend; but none is to be seen—only the tall rampart of rock.
The village is pleasant enough, and contains two inns, each of them quite capable of providing for a comfortable night's lodging. Too much, I think, has been written in disgust of the paper-mills, which use the power of the stream and provide the village with employment. Their buildings are old enough to make them not so very incongruous, and they are a small detail beside the huge masses of rock that enclose the village on three sides. Nor is either of them in the village itself. There is an ancient church, an old stone bridge, gardens and terraces and parapets, and much shade of trees, and the beautiful sparkling river that makes music all the time. And dominating the village on a high crag are the ruins of the Bishop of Cavaillon's castle, up to which Petrarch so often climbed to see his friend.
The fountain is some little distance beyond the village. The road, which runs by the river, passes one of the factories and then the garden of a café, where everything was being painted up and prepared for the coming influx of visitors, and "La Belle Laure," the motor-boat upon which trips can be taken on the river, was just about to be drawn from her winter quarters. With all this, and with the booths for the sale of picture-postcards and all sorts of reminiscent rubbish, most of which has nothing to do with Vaucluse, or even with Provence, the place has been cockneyfied enough, and I dare say that if I had seen it later in the year, or on a Sunday, when it is crowded with people, I should not have carried away with me the next morning such an agreeable impression. But I had it pretty well to myself, and when I had got past the last of the booths on to the rocky path above the stream it was as lonely as it must have been in Petrarch's time, six hundred years ago.