A little tour in France

by Henry James

Middle Ages every one did go mad—every one was mad. The theory that this was a period of general dementia is not altogether untenable.

Within the old walls of its immense abbey the town of Villeneuve has built itself a rough faubourg; the fragments with which the soil was covered having been, i suppose, a quarry of material. There are no streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random over the uneven ground. The only important feature is a convent of cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls) behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down into, or down at simply, from the battlements of the citadel. One or two of the nuns were passing in and out of the house; they wore grey robes with a bright red cape. I thought their situation most provincial. I came away and wandered a little over the base of the hill, outside the walls. Small white stones cropped through the grass, over which low olive-trees were scattered. The afternoon had a yellow brightness. I sat down under one of the little trees, on the grass—the delicate grey branches were not much above my head—and rested and looked at Avignon across the Rhone. It was very soft, very still and pleasant, though I am not sure it was all I once should have expected of that combination of elements: an old city wall for a background, a canopy of olives, and for a couch the soil of Provence.

WhenAvignon I came back to Avignon the twilight was already thick, but I walked up to the Rocher des Doms. Here I again had the benefit of that amiable moon which had already lighted up for me so many romantic scenes. She was full, and she rose over the Rhone and made it look in the distance like a silver serpent. I remember saying to myself at this moment that it would be a beautiful evening to walk round the walls of Avignon—the remarkable walls which challenge comparison with those of Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes, and which it was my duty, as an observer of the picturesque, to examine with some attention. Presenting themselves to that silver sheen, they could not fail to be impressive. So, at least, I said to myself; but unfortunately I did not believe what I said. It is a melancholy fact that the walls of Avignon had never impressed me at all, and I had never taken the trouble to make the circuit. They are continuous and complete, but for some mysterious reason they fail of their effect. This is partly because they are very low, in some places almost absurdly so, being buried in new accumulations of soil and by the filling in of the moat up to their middle. Then they have been too well tended; they not only look at present very new, but look as if they had never been old. The fact that their extent is very much greater makes them more of a curiosity than those of Carcassonne; but this is exactly, at the same time, what is fatal to their pictorial unity. With their thirty-seven towers and seven gates, they lose themselves too much to make a picture that will compare with the admirable little vignette of Carcassonne. I may mention, now that I am speaking of the general mass of Avignon, that nothing is more curious than the way in which, viewed from a distance, it is all reduced to naught by the vast bulk of the palace of the Popes. From across the Rhone, or from the train as you leave the place, this great grey block is all Avignon; it seems to occupy the whole city, extensive, with its shrunken population, as the city is.

Chapter xxxv

Vaucluse

IT was the morning after this, I think (a certain Saturday), that when I came out of the Hôtel de l'Europe, which lies in shallow concavity just within the city gate that opens on the Rhone—came out to look at the sky from the little place before the inn and see how the weather promised for the obligatory excursion to Vaucluse—I found the whole town in a terrible taking. I say the whole town advisedly, for every inhabitant appeared to have taken up a position on the bank of the river, or on the uppermost parts of the promenade of the Doms, where a view of its course was to be obtained. It had risen surprisingly in the night, and the good people of Avignon had reason to know what a rise of the Rhone might signify. The town, in its lower portions, is quite at the mercy of the swollen waters; and it was mentioned to me that in 1856 the Hôtel de l'Europe, in its convenient hollow, was flooded up to within a few feet of the ceiling of the dining-room, where the long board which had served for so many a table d'hôte floated disreputably, with its legs in the air. On the present occasion the mountains of the Ardêche, where it had been raining for a month, had sent down torrents which, all that fine Friday night, by the light of the innocent-looking moon, poured themselves into the Rhone and its tributary the Durance. The river was enormous and continued to rise, and the sight was beautiful and horrible. The water in many places was already at the base of the city walls, the quay, with its parapet just emerging, being already covered. The country, seen from the Plateau des Doms, resembled a vast lake, with protrusions of trees, houses, bridges, gates. The people looked at it in silence, as I had seen people before—on the occasion of a rise of the Arno, at Pisa—appear to consider the prospect of an inundation. "Il monte; il monte toujours"—there was not much said but that. It was a general holiday, and there was an air of wishing to profit, for sociability's sake, by any interruption of the commonplace (the popular mind likes "a change," and the element of change mitigates the sense of disaster); but the affair was not otherwise a holiday. Suspense and anxiety were in the air, and it never is pleasant to be reminded of the helplessness of man. In the presence of a loosened river, with its ravaging, unconquerable volume, this impression is as strong as possible; and as I looked at the deluge which threatened to make an island of the Papal palace I perceived that the scourge of water is greater than the scourge of fire. A blaze may be quenched, but where could the flame be kindled that would arrest the quadrupled Rhone? For the population of Avignon a good deal was at stake, and I am almost ashamed to confess that in the midst of the public alarm I considered the situation from the point of view of the little projects of a sentimental tourist. Would the prospective inundation interfere with my visit to Vaucluse, or make it imprudent to linger twenty-four hours longer at Avignon? I must add that the tourist was not perhaps, after all, so sentimental. I have spoken of the pilgrimage to the shrine of Petrarch as obligatory, and that was, in fact, the light in which it presented itself to me; all the more that I had been twice at Avignon without undertaking it. This is why I was vexed at the Rhone.—if vexed I was—for representing as impracticable an excursion which I cared nothing about. How little I cared was manifest from my inaction on former occasions. I had a prejudice against Vaucluse, against Petrarch, even against the incomparable Laura. I was sure that the place was cockneyfied and threadbare, and I had never been able to take an interest in the poet and the lady. I was sure that I had known many women as charming and as handsome as she, about whom much less noise had been made; and I was convinced that her singer was factitious and literary, and that there are half a dozen stanzas in Wordsworth that speak more to the soul than the whole collection of his fioriture. This was the crude state of mind in which I determined to go, at any risk, to Vaucluse. Now that I think it over, I seem to remember that I had hoped, after all, that the submersion of the roads would forbid it. Since morning the clouds had gathered again, and by noon they were so heavy that there was every prospect of a torrent. It appeared absurd to choose such a time as this to visit a fountain—a fountain which would be indistinguishable in the general cataract.

Vaucluse

Nevertheless I took a vow, that if at noon the rain should not have begun to descend upon Avignon I would repair to the head-spring of the Sorgues. When the critical moment arrived the clouds were hanging over Avignon like distended water-bags, which only needed a prick to empty themselves. The prick was not given, however; all nature was too much occupied in following the aberrations of the Rhone to think of playing tricks elsewhere. Accordingly I started for the station in a spirit which, for a tourist who sometimes had prided himself on his unfailing supply of sentiment, was shockingly perfunctory.

"For tasks in hours of insight willed
May be in hours of gloom fulfilled."