se damp young peasants passing
on the mattresses of their hideous barrack, without anything around to
remind them that they were in the most civilised of countries. The only
traces of former splendour now visible in the Papal pile are the walls
and vaults of two small chapels, painted in fresco, so battered and
effaced as to be scarcely distinguishable, by Simone Memmi. It offers of
course a peculiarly good field for restoration, and I believe the
Government intend to take it in hand. I mention this fact without a
sigh, for they cannot well make it less interesting than it is at
present.

[Illustration]

Chapter xxxiv

[Villeneuve-les-Avignon]

Fortunately it did not rain every day (though I believe it was raining
everywhere else in the department); otherwise I should not have been
able to go to Villeneuve and to Vaucluse. The afternoon indeed was
lovely when I walked over the interminable bridge that spans the two
arms of the Rhone, divided here by a considerable island, and directed
my course, like a solitary horseman--on foot, to the lonely tower which
forms one of the outworks of Villeneuve-les-Avignon. The picturesque,
half-deserted little town lies a couple of miles farther up the river.
The immense round towers of its old citadel and the long stretches of
ruined wall covering the slope on which it lies are the most striking
features of the nearer view, as you look from Avignon across the Rhone.
I spent a couple of hours in visiting these objects, and there was a
kind of pictorial sweetness in the episode; but I have not many details
to relate. The isolated tower I just mentioned has much in common with
the detached donjon of Montmajour, which I had looked at in going to Les
Baux and to which I paid my respects in speaking of that excursion.
Also the work of Philippe le Bel (built in 1307), it is amazingly big
and stubborn, and formed the opposite limit of the broken bridge whose
first arches (on the side of Avignon) alone remain to give a measure of
the occasional volume of the Rhone. Half an hour's walk brought me to
Villeneuve, which lies away from the river, looking like a big village
half depopulated and occupied for the most part by dogs and cats, old
women and small children; these last, in general, remarkably pretty, in
the manner of the children of Provence. You pass through the place,
which seems in a singular degree vague and unconscious, and come to the
rounded hill on which the ruined abb