We did not want to do anything of the sort, we merely wanted to "do" the town, to see the tomb of Pope Jean XXII. in the cathedral, to walk, if possible, upon the part left standing of St. Benezet's old Pont d'Avignon, a memory which was burned into our minds since our schooldays, when we played and sang the French version of "London Bridge is falling down"—"Sur le pont d'Avignon."
The greatest monument of all is the magnificent Palais des Papes, its crenelated walls and battlements vying with the city walls and ramparts as a splendid example of mediæval architecture. We saw all these things and the museum with its excellent collections, and the library of thirty thousand volumes and four thousand manuscripts.
One thing we nearly missed was Villeneuve-les-Avignon, a ruined wall-circled town on the opposite bank of the Rhône. Its machicolated crests glistened in the brilliant Southern sunlight like an exotic of the Saharan country. It is quite the most foreign and African-looking jumble of architectural forms to be seen in France. It took us three hours to cross the river and stroll about its debris-encumbered streets and get back again and start on our way northward, but it was worth the time and trouble.
From St. Rémy to Orange, perhaps sixty kilometres, was not a long daily run by any means, and we would not have stopped at Orange for the night except that it was imperative that we should see the fine antique theatre, the most magnificent, the largest, and the best preserved of all existing Roman theatres.
We saw it, and seeing it wondered, though, when one tries to project the mind back into the past and picture the scenes which once went on upon its boards, the task were seemingly impossible.
The Roman Arc de Triomphe, too, at Orange, which spans the roadway to the North—the same great natural road which all its length froth Paris to Antibes is known as the Route d'Italie—is a monument more splendid, as to its preservation, than anything of the kind outside Italy itself.
There is ample and excellent accommodation for the automobilist at Orange, at the Hôtel des Princes, which sounds good and is good. They have even a writing-room in the hotel, a silly, stuffy little room which no one with any sense ever enters. One simply follows a well-fed commis-voyageur to the nearest popular café and writes his letters there, as a well-habituated traveller should do.
Once on the road again we passed Montelimar—"le pays du nougât et de M. l'ex-President Loubet," we were told by the octroi official who held us up at the barrier of this self-sufficient, dead-and-alive, pompous little town. We didn't know M. Loubet and we didn't like nougât, so we did not stop, but pushed on for Tournon. There, at the little Hôtel de la Poste, beneath the donjon tower of the old château, we ate the most marvellously concocted déjeuner we had struck for a long time. There's no use describing it; it won't be the same the next time; though no doubt it will be as excellent. It cost but two francs fifty centimes, including vin du St. Peray, the rich red wine of the Rhône, a rival to the wines of Burgundy.
We might have done a good deal worse had we stopped at progressive, up-to-date Valence, where automobile tourists usually do stop, but we took the offering of the small town instead of the large one, and found it, as usual, very good.