CHAPTER II
AVIGNON
How the sun does pour down on to the great esplanade before the Palace of the Popes! It is as warm as a June day in England and twice as light. That astounding building towers into the blue, bare and creamy white, every stern, simple line of it ascending swift and clear, in repeated strokes, rhythmically grand, like some fine piece of blank verse.
The parapet alone shows broken surfaces. Neither cornice nor corbel nor window pediment; scarcely a window to interrupt the mass of splendid masonry, only recurrent shafts of stone (continuing from the machicolations above) which shoot straight and slim from base to summit of the fortress, to meet there at intervals, as if a line of tall poplars, two by two, had bent their heads together to form this succession of sharply-pointed arches.
The arrangement of massive wall and slender arch gives to the building a singular effect of strength and eternity combined with a severe sort of grace.
PONT DE ST. BENÉZET, AVIGNON.
By E. M. Synge.
It stands there enormous, calm, yet with a delicacy of bearing belonging surely to no other edifice of that impregnable strength and vast bulk. The genius of the architect has expressed in these sixteen-feet walls some of the spirit of the palace as well as the rudeness of the stronghold, and has given a subtle hint of the painted halls and galleries wherein half the potentates of Europe were magnificently entertained, where Petrarch dreamed and Rabelais jested.... And that hint seems to lie in the general relations of mass to mass, and especially in the shallow projection and towering height of that endless line of delicate arches. Burke, in his sublime way, assures us that sublimity is the result of monotonous repetition, and this surprising achievement of Papal magnificence certainly bears out the theory.
The palace shows no more signs of age upon it than the glowing tint of the walls through the beating of the sun upon them for hundreds of brilliant years. How brilliant they must have been! What warmth, what light! That is what astonishes Barbara: the light. She cannot get over it. We seem to have awakened into a world woven out of radiance.