"'The grave of Laura!' said I. 'Indeed, my dear sir, I am obliged to you for having mentioned it,'" were the words with which the local bookseller was addressed by an eighteenth-century traveller. "'Otherwise one might have gone away, to their everlasting sorrow and shame, without having seen this curiosity of your city.'"
The same record of travel describes the guardian of this shrine as "a converted Jew, who, from one year's end to another, has but two duties to perform, which he most punctually attends to. The one to take care of the grave of Laura, and to show it to strangers, the other to give them information respecting all the curiosities. Before his conversion, he stood at the corner by the Hôtel de Ville offering lottery tickets to passers-by, and asking, till he was hoarse, if they had anything to sell. Not a soul took the least notice of him. His beard proved a detriment in all his speculations. Now that he has become a Christian, it is wonderful how everything thrives with him."
At the very end of the Rue des Lices will be found the last remains of the Église des Cordeliers—reduced at the Revolution to a mere tower and its walls. Here may be seen the spot where was the tomb of Laura de Sade. Arthur Young, writing just before the Revolution, described it as below; though since that time still other changes have taken place, with the result that "Laura's Grave" is little more than a memory to-day, and a vague one at that.
"The grave is nothing but a stone in the pavement, with a figure engraved on it already partly effaced, surrounded by an inscription in Gothic letters, and another on the wall adjoining, with the armorial bearings of the De Sade family."
To-day nothing but the site—the location—of the tomb is still there, the before-mentioned details having entirely disappeared. The vault was apparently broken open at the Revolution, and its ashes scattered. It was here at Avignon, in the Église de St. Claire, as Petrarch himself has recorded, that he first met Laura de Sade.
The present mood is an appropriate one in which to continue the Petrarchian pilgrimage countryward—to the famous Vaucluse. Here Petrarch came as a boy, in 1313, and, if one chooses, he may have his déjeuner at the Hôtel Pétrarque et Laure; not the same, of course, of which Petrarch wrote in praise of its fish of Sorgues; but you will have them as a course at lunch nevertheless. Here, too, the famed Fontaine first comes to light and air; and above it hangs "Petrarch's Castle," which is not Petrarch's castle, nor ever was. It belonged originally to the bishops of Cavaillon, but it is possible that Petrarch was a guest there at various times, as we know he was at the more magnificent Palais des Papes at Avignon.
This château of the bishops hangs perilously on a brow which rises high above the torrential Fontaine, and, if sentiment will not allow of its being otherwise ignored, it is permissible to visit it, if one is so inclined. No special hardship is involved, and no great adventure is likely to result from this journey countryward. Tourists have been known to do the thing before "just to get a few snapshots of the fountain."
As to why the palace of the popes came into being at Avignon is a question which suggests the possibilities of the making of a big book.
The popes came to Avignon at the time of the Italian partition, on the strength of having acquired a grant of the city from Joanna of Naples, for which they were supposed to give eighty thousand golden crowns. They never paid the bill, however; from which fact it would appear that financial juggling was born at a much earlier period than has hitherto been supposed.
Seven popes reigned here, from 1305 to 1370; when, on the termination of the Schism, it became the residence of a papal legate. Subsequently Louis XIV. seized the city, in revenge for an alleged affront to his ambassador, and Louis XV. also held it for ten years.