Close by the church of Nôtre Dame de Dom are remains of the palace. It is said to have existed before the arrival of the popes, but if so, it was greatly enlarged and embellished by them. It is, or rather it has been, for great part is now in ruins, an immense, irregular pile of building, without the least pretension to beauty: one part is now become the prison of the city; another is converted into barracks; but the greater part has long ceased to be of any use. Like so many other old buildings in France, it is deeply stained with blood: the walls of the hall are still shewn where the antipope Benedict XIII. blew up his guests, and one of the towers was the scene of a still more horrible enormity, perpetrated during the bloody era of the revolution, from which it has received the name of the Tower of Massacre. No less than sixty-five persons of both sexes, accused of being aristocrats, were crowded into a little room in the upper part of it, and the ruling party amused themselves with shooting from the door amongst the prisoners. When, in this manner, all of them had been more or less disabled, the ruffians entered the room, and having made a hole in the vaulting which supported the floor, precipitated the miserable victims one by one to the bottom of the tower, a height of 80 or 100 feet; for the intermediate floors, if ever there were any, had all been destroyed. The cries of the wretched sufferers were still heard, and a quantity of quick lime was thrown down, at once to stifle them, and to destroy the bodies. The gratuitous excesses of this period make one shudder for human nature. History presents nothing to equal them; we find examples of individuals, indeed, whose highest enjoyment seems to have arisen from the sufferings of others; but here the mass of the population, a population professing itself christian, and boasting even of its high civilization, appear to have had no greater delight than to make their fellow creatures suffer; and late events shew this most execrable spirit still to exist in the south of France. The chapel of this place remains entire; it is a large, and even handsome room, of seven bays with two windows at each end.
I left Avignon on the evening of the 9th of August for Valence, where there is a very curious church, which I have already described. Close by it is a monument, which Millin says would merit an engraving; it did not strike me as particularly interesting, but the weather was so cold as to impede my drawing; an inconvenience I certainly did not expect in this latitude, at this time of year. On the 11th I again resumed my place in a diligence for Grenoble. The morning was cold, but fine, with clouds hanging over the distant mountains. The first striking object was Romans; situated in the valley of the Isere, wild and varied, but without any mixture of the terrible; in the midst of which the city occupies a charming situation. Soon after, we approach the mountains, high, broken, and savage. These and the river were on our right; on the left were high wooded hills, sometimes rocky, but not rising into mountains; and our route lay through a delightful valley well wooded, with vines on high trellises, and corn underneath them, or rather stubble, for little corn remained on the ground. Where there were no vines, we found mulberry-trees, and there is very little ground not shaded in one way or the other. Besides these, the valley produces abundance of noble walnut trees, and the woods, which are spread over the hills, contain a considerable quantity of fine timber. As for the shape of the mountains, those about Settle may give you some notion of them, only they are I suppose three times as high, and more steep and abrupt, especially about the entrance of the valley of Grenoble. The Isere there, makes a sudden bend, and the road turning with it, conducts us between two magnificent rocky masses, with a rich and fertile valley of about a mile wide between them. Grenoble stands at the edge of a plain which looks as if it had been a lake, watered by the Isere and the Drac. The former is still a considerable river, but thick and muddy. In walking about Grenoble, wherever the street has length enough in a line nearly straight to give any opening, one is sure to see a mountain or a precipice, with clouds hanging about it, or with snow lying in its hollows. The difference of vegetation, between this neighbourhood and Provence is very striking; the plants are much more like those of England, and such as I had left in seed at Nismes are here still in flower. I find again cherries and strawberries, and young peas; none of which I had seen since leaving Lyon. No figs; and though there are green-gages in the market, they are not ripe, while at Avignon they are almost over.
On the morning of the 13th I set off with a guide to the Grande Chartreuse, going by the longer and more practicable route, and proposing to return by the shorter. We passed fine cliffs and deep ravines, such as you would take a long ride to see in England; but one of the great charms of the scene arises from the noble chesnut and walnut trees which shade the sloping parts. Even to the mountain tops there is plenty of wood, and firs are seen crowning the most elevated precipices. We crossed what is called in Cumberland a hawse, but instead of finding barren moors at top, as would be the case there, we meet with farm-houses, meadows, woods, trees, hedges, and even corn-fields; the wheat, however, was far from ripe, and the oats were quite green. From the village of St. Laurent our course lies by a little mountain stream, called the Gaiers Mort. While the horses rested, I walked forward alone, coasting the stream, sometimes down on the banks, sometimes two or three hundred feet above them, and seeming to be rather in a rift in the mountain than in a valley. This opening is entered by a passage, where there is just room for the road and the river, between perpendicular rocks. An arch built across the road, marks the limit of the ancient domain of the Chartreuse. If you can figure to yourself Helkswood, at Ingleton, immensely magnified, you will have no bad idea of this pass. Similar scenery, sometimes with a little more space, sometimes with less, and varied by precipices more or less tremendously magnificent, accompanies us till nearly the end of our journey. The road descends sometimes almost to the bottom; at others, carries us on the edge of slopes, higher and steeper than the steep part of Boxhill, but always covered with wood; and sometimes we seem to look down quite perpendicularly on the noisy torrent below. At one point, a sudden turn in the road, where we cross the stream by a bridge, and begin to ascend the opposite side of the valley, presents a particularly fine assemblage of these objects. At last the scene opens, and we behold meadows, and a number of men employed in mowing them, and soon after, the Grande Chartreuse itself, an enormous, ugly pile of building, standing on the slope of a mountain, a situation unavoidable where there is no level ground. I walked round the lengthened corridors, and examined the apartments of the monks; each of which contains a sitting-room and bed-room, a light closet, places for wood, &c., and a little garden; but after the neglect of twenty-five years, every thing looks forlorn and desolate. Five old men are returned, more are expected, but the establishment is at present very poor; they hope however to receive a grant of the woods immediately about them, and to obtain some revenue from the sale of charcoal, and from that of planks, all of which must be sent on the backs of mules to find a market in the lower country.
I walked up among the woods, which are of fir and beech, but mostly of the first, to the chapel of St. Bruno, and returned to a supper on soupe maigre, an omelet, and bread and cheese. I had taken the precaution to provide a substantial meat pie at Grenoble, aware that the cheer here was not very good, but my guide had lost it, together with his own great coat, by the way. I then retired to sleep on a bag of straw between two brown blankets, for all the sheets belonging to the establishment were dirty; and the whole population being employed about the hay, there was no possibility of washing them. It appears that the climate of the Grande Chartreuse has not summer enough to ripen corn. The convent is every where surrounded by mountains and precipices. Opposite to it is a steep slope covered with wood to an immense height; in the immediate neighbourhood are meadows and pastures, rising on hills which are pretty steep, but not rocky. Indeed the soil must be good, for the vegetation is vigorous. Behind are steep woods; and above these, lofty precipices form the summit of the Granson, on which there remained a small portion of the last winter’s snow.
The next morning I returned to Grenoble, among scenery of the same character. We are so used to the barrenness of the upper parts of our own mountains, that an Englishman is astonished to observe so much good land in such elevated situations. From the vegetable productions I might very well have imagined myself in Surrey, if the occasional appearance of Pyrola secunda, Saxifraga rotundifolia, and a few other Alpine plants had not disturbed the reverie. On a more extensive view indeed the number of fir trees, mixed with the beech, gave a different character to the landscape; and towards the summit the woods were almost all of fir, with only scrubby beeches interspersed, and patches of snow were still lying among them. My guide made me observe some cattle near the summit. Here, as in other parts of France, these always have attendants to take care that they do not trespass, and to drive them home at night; even if there were hedges or other inclosures, which there are not, they could not be left out at night on account of the wolves. During winter, a dog left at night in any court or open place, among these mountains, is almost certainly destroyed before morning. The latter part of the journey I performed on foot, and was highly gratified by my walk.
The view from the descent into the vale of Grenoble is extremely fine, extending over the rich and fertile plain beneath; the cultivated hills rising around it, the woody mountains, occupying a still wider circuit, and the rocky Alps towering above all, and still retaining, and some of them always retaining, great beds of snow. It was indeed a magnificent perspective, yet not without some alloy; for the dense clouds and thick vapour very much obscured the prospect. I only saw at intervals, sometimes one, sometimes another part of the scene, and was led to imagine what the glorious whole would be in more favourable weather. The plain and the lower hills were always visible, sometimes a black mass of rocks would rise above the clouds, unconnected with any other earthly object; sometimes nothing was to be seen of a mountain but an illumined patch of snow shining through the mist. When I reached the bottom, I began to feel the weather very hot, and found they had been complaining much at Grenoble of the heat for the last two days.
Grenoble contains nothing interesting in point of architecture, but the cathedral claims our attention in another way, by preserving the tomb of Bayard, the chevalier “sans peur, et sans reproche,” a long tasteless Latin inscription records the fact; it begins,
Hic lapis superbit tumulo non titulo,
Ubi sepultus Heros maximus suo ipsemet
Sepulchro monumentum.