Chapter X

But I was glad when Mornas, vivid with such bitter memories, dropped out of sight astern. Sleeping dogs of so evil a sort very well may lie; though it is difficult not to waken a few of them when they lie so thickly as here in the Rhone Valley, where almost every town and castle has a chapter of nightmare horrors all its own.

Even Chateauneuf-du-Pape--which we saw a half hour later off to the eastward, rising from a little hill-top and thence overlooking the wide vineyard-covered valley--came to its present ruin at the hands of des Adrets; who, having captured and fired it, left standing only its tall square tower and some fragments of its walls. This was an unfairly lurid ending for a castle which actually came into existence for gentle purposes and was not steeped to its very battlements in crime; for Chateauneuf was built purely as a pleasure-place, to which the Popes--when weary with ruling the world and bored by their strait-laced duties as Saint Peter's earthly representatives--might come from Avignon with a few choice kindred spirits and refreshingly kick up their heels. As even in Avignon, in those days, the Popes and cardinals did not keep their heels any too fast to the ground, it is an inferential certainty that the kicking up at Chateauneuf must have been rather prodigiously high; but the people of the Middle Ages were too stout of stomach to be easily scandalized, and the Pope's responsibilities in the premises were all the lighter because the doctrine of his personal infallibility had not then been formulated officially. And so things went along comfortably in a cheerfully reprehensible way.

It was in those easy-going days that the vineyards were planted, on the slopes below the castle, which were destined to make the name of Chateauneuf-du-Pape famous the toping world over long after the New Castle should be an old ruin and the Avignon Popes a legend of the past. Only within the present generation did those precious vines perish, when the phylloxera began among them its deadly work in France; and even yet may be found, tucked away here and there in the favoured cellars of Provence and Languedoc, a few dust-covered bottles of their rich vintage: which has for its distinguishing taste a sublimated spiciness due to the alternate dalliance of the bees with the grape-blossoms and with the blossoms of the wild thyme. It is a wine of poets, this bee-kissed Chateauneuf, and its noblest association is not with the Popes who gave their name to it but with the seven poets--Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Matthieu, Brunet, Giera, Tavan--whose chosen drink it was in those glorious days when they all were young together and were founding the Felibrige: the society that was to restore the golden age of the Troubadours and, incidentally, to decentralize France. One of the sweetest and gentlest of the seven, Anselme Matthieu, was born here at Chateauneuf; and here, with a tender love-song upon his lips, only the other day he died. The vineyards have been replanted, and in the fulness of time may come to their glory again; but the greater glories of Chateauneuf--which belonged to it once because of its Popes, and again because of its sweet-souled Poet--must be only memories forevermore.

The castles over on the right bank, Montfaucon and Roquemaure, are of the normal painful sort again. Roquemaure is a crooked, narrow, up-and-down old dirty town, where old customs and old costumes and old forms of speech still live on; and, also, its people have a very pretty taste in the twisting and perverting of historic fact into picturesque tradition--as is shown by the way in which they have rearranged the unpleasant details of the death of Pope Clement V. into a bit of melodramatic moral decoration for their own town. Their ingeniously compiled legend runs in this wise: Clement's death in the castle of Roquemaure occurred while he was on his way homeward from the Council of Vienne; where--keeping with the King the bargain which had won for him the Papal throne--he had abolished the Order of the Templars and had condemned their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, to be burned alive. When that sentence was passed, the Grand Master, in turn, had passed sentence of death upon the Pope: declaring that within forty days they should appear together, in the spirit, to try again that cause misjudged on earth before the Throne of God. And the forty days were near ended when Pope Clement came to Roquemaure--with the death-grip already so strong upon him that even the little farther journey to Avignon was impossible, and he could but lay him down there and die. While yet the breath scarce was out of his body, his servants fell to fighting over his belongings with a brutal fierceness: in the midst of which fray a lighted torch fell among and fired the hangings of the bed whereon lay the dead Pope--and before any of the pillagers would give the rest an advantage by stopping in their foul work to extinguish the flames his body was half-consumed. And so was Clement burned in death even as the Grand Master had been burned in life; and so was executed upon him the Grand Master's summons to appear before the Judgment Seat on high!

It is interesting to note that this tradition does very little violence to the individual facts of the case, and yet rearranges them in such a fashion that they are at sixes and sevens with the truth as a whole. When, in my lighter youth, I entered upon what I fancied was antiquarian research I was hot for the alluring theory that oral tradition is a surer preserver of historic fact than is written record; and as I was not concerned with antiquities of a sort upon which my pretty borrowed theory could be tested I got along with it very well. But I am glad now to cite this capital instance in controversion of my youthful second-hand belief--because it entirely accords with my more mature conviction that oral tradition, save as a tenacious preserver of place-names, is not to be trusted at all. And as unsupported written record rarely is to be trusted either, it would seem that a certain amount of reason was at the root of King David's hasty generalization as to the untruthfulness of mankind.

The day was nearly ended as we passed that town with a stolen moral history: and so swept onward, in and out among the islands, toward Avignon. Already the sun had fallen below the crest of the Cevennes; leaving behind him in the sky a liquid glory, and still sending far above us long level beams which gilded radiantly--far off to the eastward--the heights of Mont-Ventour. But we, deep in the deep valley, threaded our swift way among the islands in a soft twilight which gently ebbed to night.

And then, as the dusk deepened to the westward, there came slowly into the eastern heavens a pale lustre that grew brighter and yet brighter until, all in a moment, up over the Alpilles flashed the full moon--and there before us, almost above us, the Rocher-des-Doms and the Pope's Palace and the ramparts of Avignon stood out blackly against the moon-bright sky. So sudden was this ending to our journey that there was a wonder among us that the end had come!

* * * * *

All the Felibres of Avignon were at the water-side to cheer us welcome as the _Gladiateur_, with reversed engines, hung against the current above the bridge of Saint-Benezet and slowly drew in to the bank. Our answering cheers went forth to them through the darkness, and a stave or two of "La Coupe" was sung, and there was a mighty clapping of hands. And then the gang-plank was set ashore, and instantly beside it--standing in the glare of a great lantern--we saw our Capoulie, the head of all the Felibrige, Felix Gras, waiting for us, his subjects and his brethren, with outstretched hands. From him came also, a little later, our official welcome: when we all were assembled for a _ponch d'honneur_ at the Hotel du Louvre--in the great vaulted chamber that once served the Templars as a refectory, and that has been the banquet-hall of the Felibrige ever since this later and not less honorable Order was founded, almost forty years ago.

Not until those formalities were ended could we of America get away to receive the personal welcome to which through all that day we had been looking forward with a warm eagerness--yet also sorrowing: because we knew that among the welcoming voices there would be a silence, and that a face would be missing from among those we loved. Roumanille was dead; and in meeting again in Avignon those who had been closest and dearest to him, and who to us were close and dear, there was heartache with our joy.

SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE,
_August, 1894._

The Comedie Francaise at Orange