the year
before. The monastery was demolished during the Revolution, and it
injures a little the effect of the very much more ancient fragments that
are connected with it. The whole place is on a great scale; it was a
rich and splendid abbey. The church, a vast basilica of the eleventh
century and of the noblest proportions, is virtually intact; I mean as
regards its essentials, for the details have completely vanished. The
huge solid shell is full of expression; it looks as if it had been
hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a
cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one
meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution;
and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something
beautiful and precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must
also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! Beneath the
church of Montmajour is a most extraordinary crypt, almost as big as the
edifice above it and making a complete subterranean temple, surrounded
with a circular gallery, or deambulatory, which expands at intervals
into five square chapels. There are other things, of which I have but a
confused memory: a great fortified keep; a queer little primitive chapel
hollowed out of the rock beneath these later structures and recommended
to the visitor's attention as the confessional of Saint Trophimus, who
shares with so many worthies the glory of being the first apostle of the
Gauls. Then there is a strange, small church, of the dimmest antiquity,
standing at a distance from the other buildings. I remember that after
we had let ourselves down a good many steepish places to visit crypts
and confessionals, we walked across a field to this archaic cruciform
edifice and went thence to a point farther down the road, where our
carriage was awaiting us. The chapel of the Holy Cross, as it is called,
is classed among the historic monuments of France; and I read in a
queer, rambling, ill-written book which I picked at Avignon, and in
which the author, M. Louis de Laincel, has buried a great deal of
curious information on the subject of Provence under a style inspiring
little confidence, that the "delicieuse chapelle de Sainte-Croix" is a
"veritable bijou artistique." He speaks of "a piece of lace in stone"
which runs from one end of the building to the other, but of which I am
obliged to confess that I have no recollection. I retain, however, a
suffi