t of the ceiling of the dining-room, where the long
board which had served for so many a table d'hote floated disreputably,
with its legs in the air. On the present occasion the mountains of the
Ardeche, where it had been raining for a month, had sent down torrents
which, all that fine Friday night, by the light of the innocent-looking
moon, poured themselves into the Rhone and its tributary the Durance.
The river was enormous and continued to rise, and the sight was
beautiful and horrible. The water in many places was already at the base
of the city walls, the quay, with its parapet just emerging, being
already covered. The country, seen from the Plateau des Doms, resembled
a vast lake, with protrusions of trees, houses, bridges, gates. The
people looked at it in silence, as I had seen people before--on the
occasion of a rise of the Arno, at Pisa--appear to consider the prospect
of an inundation. "Il monte; il monte toujours"--there was not much said
but that. It was a general holiday, and there was an air of wishing to
profit, for sociability's sake, by any interruption of the commonplace
(the popular mind likes "a change," and the element of change mitigates
the sense of disaster); but the affair was not otherwise a holiday.
Suspense and anxiety were in the air, and it never is pleasant to be
reminded of the helplessness of man. In the presence of a loosened
river, with its ravaging, unconquerable volume, this impression is as
strong as possible; and as I looked at the deluge which threatened to
make an island of the Papal palace I perceived that the scourge of water
is greater than the scourge of fire. A blaze may be quenched, but where
could the flame be kindled that would arrest the quadrupled Rhone? For
the population of Avignon a good deal was at stake, and I am almost
ashamed to confess that in the midst of the public alarm I considered
the situation from the point of view of the little projects of a
sentimental tourist. Would the prospective inundation interfere with my
visit to Vaucluse, or make it imprudent to linger twenty-four hours
longer at Avignon? I must add that the tourist was not perhaps, after
all, so sentimental. I have spoken of the pilgrimage to the shrine of
Petrarch as obligatory, and that was, in fact, the light in which it
presented itself to me; all the more that I had been twice at Avignon
without undertaking it. This is why I was vexed at the Rhone.--if vexed
I was--for representing as impr