I did wrong just above,to speak of my attack on this establishment as the only recreation I took that first wet day;for I remember a terribly moist visit to the former palace of the Popes,which could have taken place only in the same tempestuous hours.It is true that I scarcely know why I should have gone out to see the Papal palace in the rain,for I had been over it twice before,and even then had not found the interest of the place so complete as it ought to be;the fact,nevertheless,remains that this last occasion is much associated with an umbrella,which was not superfluous even in some of the chambers and corridors of the gigantic pile.It had already seemed to me the dreariest of all historical buildings,and my final visit confirmed the impression.The place is as intricate as it is vast,and as desolate as it is dirty.
The imagination has,for some reason or other,to make more than the effort usual in such cases to restore and repeople it.The fact,indeed,is simply that the palace has been so incalculably abused and altered.
The alterations have been so numerous that,though Ihave duly conned the enumerations,supplied in guidebooks,of the principal perversions,I do not pretend to carry any of them in my head.The huge bare mass,without ornament,without grace,despoiled of its battlements and defaced with sordid modern windows,covering the Rocher des Doms,and looking down over the Rhone and the broken bridge of SaintBenazet (which stops in such a sketchable manner in midstream),and across at the lonely tower of Philippe le Bel and the ruined wall of Villeneuve,makes at a distance,in spite of its poverty,a great figure,the effect of which is carried out by the tower of the church beside it (crowned though the latter be,in a topheavy fashion,with an immense modern image of the Virgin)and by the thick,dark foliage of the garden laid out on a still higher portion of the eminence.This garden recalls,faintly and a trifle perversely,the grounds of the Pincian at Rome.I know not whether it is the shadow of the Papal name,present in both places,combined with a vague analogy between the churches,which,approached in each case by a flight of steps,seemed to defend the precinct,but each time I have seen the Promenade des Doms it has carried my thoughts to the wider and loftier terrace from which you look away at the Tiber and Saint Peter's.
As you stand before the Papal palace,and especially as you enter it,you are struck with its being a very dull monument.History enough was enacted here:the great schism lasted from 1305to 1370,during which seven Popes,all Frenchmen,carried on the court of Avignon on principles that have not commended themselves to the esteem of posterity.But history has been whitewashed away,and the scandals of that period have mingled with the dust of dilapidations and repairs.The building has for many years been occupied as a barrack for regiments of the line,and the main characteristics of a barrack an extreme nudity and a very queer smell prevail throughout its endless compartments.Nothing could have been more cruelly dismal than the appearance it presented at the time of this third visit of mine.A regiment,changing quarters,had departed the day before,and another was expected to arrive (from Algeria)on the morrow.
The place had been left in the befouled and belittered condition which marks the passage of the military after they have broken carnp,and it would offer but a melancholy welcome to the regiment that was about to take possession.Enormous windows had been left carelessly open all over the building,and the rain and wind were beating into empty rooms and passages;making draughts which purified,perhaps,but which scarcely cheered.For an arrival,it was horrible.Ahandful of soldiers had remained behind.In one of the big vaulted rooms several of them were lying on their wretched beds,in the dim light,in the cold,in the damp,with the bleak,bare walls before them,and their overcoats,spread over them,pulled up to their noses.I pitied them immensely,though they may have felt less wretched than they looked.I thought not of the old profligacies and crimes,not of the funnelshaped torturechamber (which,after exciting the shudder of generations,has been ascertained now,I believe,to have been a mediaeval bakehouse),not of the tower of the glaciere and the horrors perpetrated here in the Revolution,but of the military burden of young France.One wonders how young France endures it,and one is forced to believe that the French con has,in addition to his notorious goodhumor,greater toughness than is commonly supposed by those who consider only the more relaxing influences of French civilization.I hope he finds occasional compensation for such moments as I saw those damp young peasants passing on the mattresses of their hideous barrack,without anything around to remind them that they were in the most civilized of countries.
The only traces of former splendor 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.
