I could remember nothing about Avignon, but between us we recollected incidents about the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, which took place just at this time. It was a luckless day for France and England when Edward III. was so ill-inspired as to assert his roundabout claim to the throne of France! The fair country became the scene of raids and sieges, ravaging of provinces, taking and retaking of towns and castles, battle and murder and sudden death.
Of this there are of course endless chronicles; of all the moil and toil of war and rapine, of the clash of rival interests, of mad ambitions which, once gratified, left their victims only more wild and craving than before.
If the annals of the Middle Ages have a moral it is this: Fling away ambition. Fling away this crude passion of kings and captains which seems to drive a man like a fury through his untasted life, never giving him pause to possess what he has won or even to realise the triumph of his achievement.
"Tell me more," demanded Barbara.
But the pictures were at an end. Quite capriciously it seemed, certain scenes had painted themselves on the mind, but what followed chronologically had made no special impression, perhaps because there was a general confusion of wars and tumults, till suddenly we emerge on familiar ground at the battles of Creçy and Poitiers.
We had grown tired of trying to realise the things of the past, and strolled down to the river, to the long suspension bridge, where, as every French child knows, "on y danse, on y danse." And here one has a fine view of Villeneuve, across the Rhone, and looking back, of Avignon. From this point its walls are strikingly picturesque, ramparts of the fourteenth century, built by Clement VI. and described by a modern author as a "remarkably beautiful specimen of mediæval masonry, with a battlemented wall for projecting machicolations on finely moulded corbels"—corbels of four or five courses, which give an appearance almost Eastern to these splendid walls and gateways.
"The intensest life of the fourteenth century," says the same writer, "passed through the Gothic portal over which the portcullis hung in its chamber ever ready to drop with a thundering crash, and fix its iron teeth in the ground."
Barbara asked a great many searching questions about times and manners. But here I began to experience what some discriminating person has called a "reaction against the despotism of facts." I did not know any more. I began to repent of having excited this inordinate thirst for information. However, very little is needed to enable one to achieve a general impression of France in the fourteenth century. One has merely to think of the fair land under the horrors of sack and siege, burning towns, starving people, all the agonies of chronic warfare. What is more difficult is to descend from the general to the particular, and to imagine what sort of life that must have been for the mortal who was neither a King nor a Pope, nor a plundering freebooter, but only a human being with a life to ruin and a heart to break.
Even while one is dreaming of other things, that wonderful Palace is impressing itself upon the sentiment with steady power. It stands there in the blaze of light, tremendous, inevitable, like a fact of nature. One can scarcely think it away. It resists even that mighty force, the human imagination.
Avignon! the Roman Avenio; a place of many events, many influences, which have helped to make our present life what it is—we are really there, absurdly improbable as it seems; we, with our modern minds, modern speech, modern preconceptions, in the bright land of the troubadours; and, stranger still, in the land where the Phœnicians traded, the Greeks colonised, the Romans built their inevitable baths and amphitheatres; where the ancient Ligurians lived their lives on peaked hilltops, and race fought race and tribe fought tribe, when there was neither Pope in Avignon nor King in France, but only wild gods and wilder chieftains ruling in the lawless, beautiful land.