On the opposite side of it stands an ancient but still inhabited castle belonging to the Comte des Essars (or some similar name), situated upon a sudden height or cliff and approached by a steep and shady avenue which leads to a modern garden of evergreen shrubs, all very carefully grouped and tended. At the highest point appears the great square castle, with its round tower at each corner, and crenellated walls.
The caretaker admits the visitor to a large courtyard and thence to the suites of sombre old rooms with their dark ceilings, stately mantelpieces and rich, ancient furniture, all spell-bound as if waiting for the life that has gone away. The owners only come there for about a month in the time of the grape-harvest, but the evidence of their presence in little personal belongings, such as racks full of pipes, carved sticks, riding whips, photographs, and so forth, emphasises pathetically the silence of the house, which is speckless and in perfect order, ready at any moment for habitation.
The place is well worth a visit, not merely for its rather sad charm, but because it helps the imagination to reconstruct the life and aspect of the feudal castle; for such edifices as this are generally seen in ruins, emptied of all their splendours. Here rises before one's eye the scene of mediæval romance almost precisely as in the days of the troubadours and their fascinating ladies.
It seemed a pity that our friend the critic had left Avignon without having seen this place where the little touches of the modern (especially that prosaic garden of well-groomed evergreens) would have cheered his soul and proved to him that Provence could, after all, produce something that was not either tumble-down or peeling off.
Such is the contradictoriness of human nature, that we began to regard with regret the certainty that he would not be at the table d'hôte that night to record his disappointments. It was quite interesting to watch the process by which he would throw an atmosphere of spiritual deathliness—a sort of moral incandescent gaslight—over the fascinating things of this despised country.
We realised that, in spite of his powers of disenchantment, we had found a sort of satisfaction (like the satisfaction of a discord in music) in the bleakness of our friend's outlook upon life and things.
It made one, perhaps not very relevantly, think of Madame de Sévigné's phrase:—
"Toujours soutenue de l'ignorance capable de Madame de B——"
"Ignorance capable!" We positively missed it!