captured and fired it, left standing only its tall
square tower and some fragments of its walls. This was an unfairly lurid
ending for a castle which actually came into existence for gentle
purposes and was not steeped to its very battlements in crime; for
Chateauneuf was built purely as a pleasure-place, to which the
Popes--when weary with ruling the world and bored by their strait-laced
duties as Saint Peter's earthly representatives--might come from Avignon
with a few choice kindred spirits and refreshingly kick up their heels.
As even in Avignon, in those days, the Popes and cardinals did not keep
their heels any too fast to the ground, it is an inferential certainty
that the kicking up at Chateauneuf must have been rather prodigiously
high; but the people of the Middle Ages were too stout of stomach to be
easily scandalized, and the Pope's responsibilities in the premises were
all the lighter because the doctrine of his personal infallibility had
not then been formulated officially. And so things went along
comfortably in a cheerfully reprehensible way.

It was in those easy-going days that the vineyards were planted, on the
slopes below the castle, which were destined to make the name of
Chateauneuf-du-Pape famous the toping world over long after the New
Castle should be an old ruin and the Avignon Popes a legend of the past.
Only within the present generation did those precious vines perish,
when the phylloxera began among them its deadly work in France; and even
yet may be found, tucked away here and there in the favoured cellars of
Provence and Languedoc, a few dust-covered bottles of their rich
vintage: which has for its distinguishing taste a sublimated spiciness
due to the alternate dalliance of the bees with the grape-blossoms and
with the blossoms of the wild thyme. It is a wine of poets, this
bee-kissed Chateauneuf, and its noblest association is not with the
Popes who gave their name to it but with the seven poets--Mistral,
Roumanille, Aubanel, Matthieu, Brunet, Giera, Tavan--whose chosen drink
it was in those glorious days when they all were young together and were
founding the Felibrige: the society that was to restore the golden age
of the Troubadours and, incidentally, to decentralize France. One of the
sweetest and gentlest of the seven, Anselme Matthieu, was born here at
Chateauneuf; and here, with a tender love-song upon his lips, only the
other day he died. The vineyards have been replanted, and i