Chapter IV

From Givors the river runs almost in a straight line to Vienne. On both shores rise round-crested wooded hills--the foothills of the parallel ranges of mountains by which the wide valley is shut in. Down this perspective, commandingly upon a height, is seen the city--misty and uncertain at first, but growing clearer and clearer, as the boat nears it, until the stone-work of man and the rock-work of nature become distinct and the picture is complete in all its parts: the time-browned mass of houses on the hill-top; the tower of Philip the Fair; over all, the huge facade of Saint Maurice--an ogival wonder that for centuries was the cathedral church of the Primates of Gaul.

After Marseille, Vienne makes as handsome pretensions to age as are made by any town in France. The tradition of its founding lies hidden in the mists of heroic legend, and is the more momentous because it is so impressively vague. Over its very name the etymologists wrangle with such violence that one is lost in amazement at their ill-tempered erudition; and over its structure the archaeologists--though a bit more civil to each other--are almost as violently at cross-purposes. The best esteemed of those antiquary gentry--at least the one whom I esteem the most, because I like the fine boldness of his claim--is the Dominican chronicler Lavinius: who says flatly that Vienne was founded thirteen centuries before the dawn of the Christian era by a contemporary of Moses, one King Allobrox--a Keltic sovereign descended from Hercules in a right line! That is a good beginning; and it has the merit of embodying the one fact upon which all of the testy antiquaries are agreed: that Vienne the Strong, as folk called it in those days, was a flourishing town long before Lyons was built or Paris even thought of, and an age or two before the Romans came over into Gaul.

When at last they did come, the Romans transformed the town into a great city--the metropolis of the region lying between Geneva and Marseille; and so adorned it with noble buildings--temples, forum, circus, theatre, aqueducts, baths--and so enriched it with all manner of works of art, that it came to be known as Vienne the Beautiful throughout the civilized world. One temple, approximately perfect, has survived to us from that time; and one statue--the famous Crouching Venus: and it seems fair enough to accept Vienne's beauty as proved by these. Moreover, painting and music were cultivated there, together with the other arts: and from all that the historians have to tell us it would appear that the Roman citizens of that city lived softly and well.

In the dark ages of Mediaeval Christianity most of the beauties of Vienne vanished: being destroyed outright, or made over into buildings pertaining to the new faith and the new times. A pathetic little attempt, to be sure, was made by the Viennese to hold fast to their comfortable Paganism--when Valentinian II. was slain, and the old rites were restored, at the end of the fourth century; but it was a mere flash in the pan. The tendencies of the times were too strong to be resisted, and presently the new creed rode down the old. Then it was that Vienne was called Vienne the Holy--because, while losing nothing of her splendours temporal, she gained great store of splendours spiritual: whereof the culmination was that famous Council, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, which crushed the Templars and gave over their possessions to the Crown. While the Council deliberated, Philip the Fair "watched his case," as the lawyers would put it, from the village of Sainte-Colombe--across the river--where he was quartered with his court in the convent of the Cordeliers; and in Sainte-Colombe, the next year, he built the tower that was to safeguard the royal domains against the aggressions of the Archbishops: whose too-notorious holiness was making them overbold.

And nowadays Vienne is a mean little town; a withered kernel in the shell of its former grandeur; a mere sousprefecture; scarcely more than a manufacturing suburb of Lyons. In the tower of Philip the Fair are a cheap restaurant, and a factory of macaroni, and a carpenter-shop. It is enough to make the spirits of the Roman emperors indignant and the bones of the Archbishops rattle dismally in their graves. No longer either strong, or beautiful, or holy, they call it Vienne the Patriotic, now. A city must be something, of course--and patriotism is an attribute that may be had for the claiming, in these days.

But the saving grace of poetry, at least of the love of poetry, still abides in Vienne: as was proved in a manner mightily tickling to our self-complacency as we swept past the town. Taking the place of the stone bridge that was built in Roman times--and so well built that it was kept in service almost down to our own day--a suspension bridge here spans the stream: and the poets and the poet-lovers of Vienne were all a-swarm upon it, their heads and shoulders rising in an animated crenellation above its rail, in waiting for our galley to go by. While we still were a hundred yards away up stream there was a bustling movement among them; and then a bouquet, swinging at the end of a light line, was lowered away swiftly--the bright flowers flashing in the sunlight as they swayed and twirled. Our brethren had calculated to a nicety where our boat would pass. Right over the bow came the bouquet, and fairly into the eager hands stretched out for it--while a great cheer went up from the grateful poets in the boat that was echoed by the generous poets in the air. And the prettiest touch of all was the garland of verses that came to us with the flowers: to bid us welcome and to wish us God-speed on our way. Truly, 'twas a delicately fine bit of poetic courtesy. No troubadour in the days of Vienne the Holy (the holiness was not of an austere variety) could have cast a more graceful tribute upon the passing galley of the debonaire Queen Jeanne.