, to examine with some
attention. Presenting themselves to that silver sheen, they could not
fail to be impressive. So, at least, I said to myself; but unfortunately
I did not believe what I said. It is a melancholy fact that the walls of
Avignon had never impressed me at all, and I had never taken the trouble
to make the circuit. They are continuous and complete, but for some
mysterious reason they fail of their effect. This is partly because they
are very low, in some places almost absurdly so, being buried in new
accumulations of soil and by the filling in of the moat up to their
middle. Then they have been too well tended; they not only look at
present very new, but look as if they had never been old. The fact that
their extent is very much greater makes them more of a curiosity than
those of Carcassonne; but this is exactly, at the same time, what is
fatal to their pictorial unity. With their thirty-seven towers and seven
gates, they lose themselves too much to make a picture that will compare
with the admirable little vignette of Carcassonne. I may mention, now
that I am speaking of the general mass of Avignon, that nothing is more
curious than the way in which, viewed from a distance, it is all reduced
to naught by the vast bulk of the palace of the Popes. From across the
Rhone, or from the train as you leave the place, this great grey block
is all Avignon; it seems to occupy the whole city, extensive, with its
shrunken population, as the city is.

[Illustration]

Chapter xxxv

[Vaucluse]

It was the morning after this, I think (a certain Saturday), that when I
came out of the Hotel de l'Europe, which lies in shallow concavity just
within the city gate that opens on the Rhone--came out to look at the
sky from the little _place_ before the inn and see how the weather
promised for the obligatory excursion to Vaucluse--I found the whole
town in a terrible taking. I say the whole town advisedly, for every
inhabitant appeared to have taken up a position on the bank of the
river, or on the uppermost parts of the promenade of the Doms, where a
view of its course was to be obtained. It had risen surprisingly in the
night, and the good people of Avignon had reason to know what a rise of
the Rhone might signify. The town, in its lower portions, is quite at
the mercy of the swollen waters; and it was mentioned to me that in 1856
the Hotel de l'Europe, in its convenient hollow, was flooded up to
within a few fee