at made all the
difference. I had plenty of time to think of this, for the rain kept me
practically housed for the first twenty-four hours. It had been raining
in these regions for a month, and people had begun to look askance at
the Rhone, though as yet the volume of the river was not exorbitant. The
only excursion possible, while the torrent descended, was a kind of
horizontal dive, accompanied with infinite splashing, to the little
_musee_ of the town, which is within a moderate walk of the hotel. I had
a memory of it from my first visit; it had appeared to me more pictorial
than its pictures. I found that recollection had flattered it a little,
and that it is neither better nor worse than most provincial museums. It
has the usual musty chill in the air, the usual grass-grown forecourt,
in which a few lumpish Roman fragments are disposed, the usual red tiles
on the floor and the usual specimens of the more livid schools on the
walls. I rang up the _gardien_, who arrived with a bunch of keys, wiping
his mouth; he unlocked doors for me, opened shutters, and while (to my
distress, as if the things had been worth lingering over) he shuffled
about after me, he announced the names of the pictures before which I
stopped in a voice that reverberated through the melancholy halls and
seemed to make the authorship shameful when it was obscure and grotesque
when it pretended to be great. Then there were intervals of silence,
while I stared absent-mindedly, at haphazard, at some indistinguishable
canvas and the only sound was the downpour of the rain on the skylights.
The museum of Avignon derives a certain dignity from its Roman
fragments. The town has no Roman monuments to show; in this respect,
beside its brilliant neighbours, Arles and Nimes, it is a blank. But a
great many small objects have been found in its soil--pottery, glass,
bronzes, lamps, vessels and ornaments of gold and silver. The glass is
especially charming--small vessels of the most delicate shape and
substance, many of them perfectly preserved. These diminutive, intimate
things bring one near to the old Roman life; they seems like pearls
strung upon the slender thread that swings across the gulf of time. A
little glass cup that Roman lips have touched says more to us than the
great vessel of an arena. There are two small silver _casseroles_, with
chiselled handles, in the museum of Avignon, that struck me as among the
most charming survivals of antiquity.

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