columns and piers, almost
entirely new, arose to support a shallow, gracefully balustraded balcony
and its bases of massive carving. Nine years later a new Archbishop
added to the north side a square XVII century chapel, richly ornamental
in itself, but entirely out of harmony with the fundamental style of the
church. Other chapels, less distinguished, which have been added from
time to time, line the nave both north and south, and all are excrescent
to the original plan. Of the exterior, only the facade retains its
primitive character. The side-walls, "entirely featureless," as has been
well said, "reflect only the various periods of the chapels which have
been added to the Cathedral," and the apse was re-built in 1671, in a
heavy, uninteresting form.

[Illustration: "THE INTERIOR HAS A SHALLOW, GRACEFULLY BALUSTRADED
BALCONY."--AVIGNON.]

These additions, superimposed ornamentations, and rebuildings, together
with the very substantial substructure of the primitive Cathedral, form
to-day a small church of unimpressive, conglomerate style, and except
for its history, unnoteworthy. It is therefore a church whose interest
is almost wholly of the past; and the traveller goes back in
imagination, century after century, to the era of Papal residency, when
the Cathedral was not only ecclesiastically important, but
architecturally in its best and purest form. This church, which Clement
V found on his removal to Avignon, and which may still be easily traced,
was of the simple, primitive Provencal style. No dates of that period
are sufficiently accurate to rely upon; but its interest lies not so
much in chronology as in its portrayal of the general type. The interior
is the usual little hall church of the XI century, with its aisle-less
nave of five bays, and plain piers supporting a tunnelled roof, with
double vault arches. Beyond the last bay, over the choir, is the
Cathedral's octagonal dome, and from the rounded windows of its lantern
comes much of the light of the interior, which is sombre and without
other windows of importance.

The facade is architecturally one of the most significant parts of the
church. Above the portal the wall is supported on either side by plain
heavy buttresses, and directly continued by the solid bulk of the tower.
In 1431 this tower replaced the original one which fell in the
earthquake of 1405. It is conjecturally similar, a heavy rectangle which
quite overweighs the church; plain, with its s