Pierrelatte.—A poor little town by an isolated mass of rock, from which the place gets its name.
Donzère.—A small town, with old walls, gateway, a ruined castle, and a Romanesque church.
Montélimar.—A busy modern town, famous for its almond ‘nougat’; dominating the place on the east side is the Romanesque château, now a prison; two gateways of the ramparts and two fifteenth-century houses survive.
Saulce.—A village, with a few slight Roman remains near to the Château of Freycinet.
Livron.—A little town, with walls and a ruined castle.
Town Plan No. 26.—Avignon.
It is unfortunate that Avignon has straggling suburbs outside its circle of wonderfully preserved walls, for if this new growth could be swept away there would appear on the plain a city of medieval aspect, encircled within its machicolated ramparts. Until this is done those who delight in such permanent pictures of the Middle Ages must be content with the views of the walls to be had from the fairly wide boulevards outside them and from the river side of the town. From across the Rhone the strange piled-up mass of the Papal palace shows a striking silhouette, and gives Avignon that feeling of romance so lacking in some towns whose relics of the past are more remarkable.
It was in the year 1305 that Pope Clement V. removed the headquarters of the representatives of St. Peter from Rome to Avignon, and it remained there until 1411, when what Petrarch termed ‘a shameful exile’ came to an end and the Popes returned to Rome. During the century of their residence in Avignon the Popes built the enormous pile of buildings called a palace, although it is a forbidding fortress and one of the finest examples of fourteenth-century military architecture in existence. It is, as Hare has fittingly described it, ‘rather the citadel of an Asiatic tyrant than the representative of the God of peace.’ The walls and towers encircling the town were begun by Innocent VI. (1352-1362), and finished by his successor, Urban V.