"I wonder what our friend would say to this!" she exclaimed.
"Not a rag of ornament," I quoted sadly.
"Not Gothic or anything," Barbara complained.
"Wait a minute," I warned, as we entered a vast room with a vaulted ceiling, which revealed by one small corner of the huge expanse the magnificent canopy of rich frescoes that had once overhung the assemblies of the Popes. "If it is not Gothic, at least it's—anything!" I cried, with enthusiasm. And truly anything and everything that is sumptuous, mellow, exquisite in wealth and modulation of colour this great hall, with its painted vaultings, must have been. But the splendour had been desecrated by some Vandal, careless of his country's pride. Instead of leaving the great audience chamber to tell its own eloquent tale, the unpardonable one had cut it up into a couple of rooms—lofty indeed even then—by dividing its height, and now the dinners of the troops are cooked irreverently below, while the men spend their leisure in the vaulted upper half of the Hall of the Frescoes; painted, perhaps, by Giotto, if the faint tradition may be believed.[3]
The hall is filled with carpenters' benches, turning-lathes, tools which lie scattered among wood shavings, glue-pots, and various disorderly properties.
Through the enormous window at the end of this haunted chamber of history there is a dazzling view of the plain of the Rhone and the circle of mountains enclosing it, Mont Ventoux, richly blue, rising magnificently in the centre of the amphitheatre.
We thought of Petrarch's famous ascent of the mountain, and of his reflections on the vanity of all things when at last, after a hard scramble, he reached the summit.
"No doubt he was tired," said the practical Barbara.
It was just what she would have said about one of her own brothers with a similar excuse for pessimism.
Perhaps if Petrarch had had a Barbara to look after him he would not have made so many reflections about the vanity of things. She would have treated him as a charming child, whose fitful moods have to be allowed for and soothed. It is indeed a rare man whom women do not feel called upon to treat more or less in that way! However, Petrarch has the support of a modern very different from himself when he complains of the disillusions of mountain climbing. Nietzsche remarks the same thing, but he accounts for it by the fact that the whole charm and spell of the country has come from the mountain which draws one to it irresistibly, but once we are there, the sorceress is no longer visible, and so the charm disappears.