The sacristan took me over the rest of the buildings. They had all been bought a few years before by a rich priest who admirably uses them for the training of boys whom he sends out to the colonies. He has bought farms and large tracts of land all around, and the score or so of youths that he looks after work on them. I should have liked a chat with him, but he was away for the day, and I suppose the boys were all out at work, for I did not see any of them.
Some of the buildings that were used by the original monks—and I suppose also by M. Donnat—are used now; others, even of the newer ones, are empty and some of them dilapidated. I was shown the library—two big rooms fitted up with painted deal shelves from which all the books had been removed. They looked poor and desolate, and there was not a trace of architectural dignity about anything else I saw that had been built in the last century, though it was all convenient enough for its purpose.
And yet there was the old church which these aspiring religionists had left to its quiet decay while they built their vulgar modern one, the sweet little peaceful cloister, the chapel of Our Lady of Succour, which Mistral has described, with its gilded Louis XIV boiseries round the altar, from which, however, the pictures had been removed. They had models around them, if they had had the wit to use them.
I went down the expensively embanked road towards Graveson, when I had seen all that there was to see. It was lined on either side with heavily built shrines exhibiting the Stations of the Cross, which looked like the rooks of a set of clumsy chessmen. And the last thing I saw of this derelict monument of bad taste, before the windings of the road hid it, was a large cross toppling over sideways, as if even that had not been built to last.
CHAPTER XXI
Villeneuve-sur-Avignon
My walking was done. I had another day and a half for Avignon and a day and a half for Arles, and that was to be the extent of this expedition. I wish it could have included Carcassonne, which is not, however, in Provence. But neither are Nîmes nor Aigues-Mortes, nor Saintes-Maries nor Saint-Gilles, strictly speaking. The old province of Provence ended with the Rhône, and Languedoc began on the other side of it. I should have liked, too, to renew my acquaintance with Orange, and visited Montelimar, if only for the sake of its nougât, and Martigues, and half a dozen other towns. But it is not a bad thing to leave out some places in a country one loves. There is always something to come back for.
I have said nothing yet about Villeneuve, which, by the bye, is also in Languedoc; but one can never forget it in Avignon. The great fort of St. André frowns across the river on to the papal city; and the tower of Philip le Bel, at which the Pont Bénezet used to end, is a conspicuous object on the lower ground.