ashing
librarians who make music for you all the time. I stayed in there for
several delightful days, and after a week's searching--lying on my
back--I came up with just what I was looking for: my own version of the
mule with the famous seven year grudge. The story is charming and
simple, and I will tell it to you as I read it yesterday from a
manuscript, which had the lovely smell of dried lavender, and long
strands of maiden hair fern for bookmarks.

* * * * *

If you hadn't seen Avignon in papal times, you'd seen nothing. For
gaiety, life, vitality, and a succession of feasts, no town was its
peer. From morning till night there were processions, pilgrimages,
flower strewn streets, high-hung tapestries, cardinals' arriving on the
Rhone, buntings, galleries with flags flying, papal soldiers chanting
Latin in the squares, and brothers' rattling their collecting boxes.
There were such noises coming from the tallest to the smallest
dwelling, which crowded and buzzed all around the grand Papal Palace,
like bees round a hive. There was the click-click of the lace-makers'
machines, the to and fro of the shuttles weaving gold thread for the
chasubles, the little hammer taps of the cruet engravers, the twanging
harmonic scales of the string instrument makers, the sing-songs of the
weavers, and above all that, the peal of the bells, and the
ever-throbbing tambourines, down by the bridge. You see, here in
Provence, when people are happy, they must dance and dance. And then;
they must dance again. When the town streets proved too narrow for the
farandole, the fifers and tambourine players were placed in the cooling
breeze of the Rhone, _Sur le pont d'Avignon_, where, round the clock,
_l'on y dansait, l'on y dansait_. Oh, such happy times; such a happy
town. The halberds which have never killed anyone, the state prisons
used only to cool the wine. Never any famine. Never any war.... That's
how the Comtat Popes governed their people, and that's why their people
missed them so much....

There was one pope called Boniface who was a particularly good old
stick. Oh, how the tears flowed in Avignon when he died. He was such a
loveable, such a pleasant prince. He would laugh along with you as he
sat on his mule. And when you got near to him--were you a humble madder
plant gatherer or a great town magistrate--he blessed you just as
thoughtfully. Truly, a Pope from Yvetot, but a Provencal Yvetot, with
something joy