1936 On the Continent

to me in more than one sense. To me Avignon, and then Arles and the other Provençal towns, are the most wonderful places in France. I am not asking you to share this impression with me. I know how personal these matters are. But I warn you that if you don’t visit Provence, and especially Avignon and Arles, then you will always be to me, however much you go to other places, the
man who has never been to France!
    Arrange your trip so as to reach Avignon in the evening. Then, when you have taken your room and put your suitcase in it and had a wash, go out and wander round in the only main street until you find a restaurant which suits your purse and looks attractive to you, and have dinner
with a bottle of Château-Neuf-du-Pape
. That wine must be your first introduction to Avignon. It is a rich mellow wine, not as heavy on the liver as most Burgundies are (in fact it isn’t a Burgundy, though many wine lists will insist on putting it with the Burgundies!), and it will put you in just the right mood for taking your first glimpse of Avignon.When you’ve had that wine you’ll probably want to take a day off to see Château-Neuf-du-Pape itself where it is grown, and I would be the last person to dissuade you from that pious pilgrimage.
    When you have your pipe or cigar, or even cigarette, comfortably lighted, take a stroll—you won’t want to do anything else—along the outer boulevards and let the feeling of those lovely fourteenth-century ramparts all round the town sink into you. There will probably be a moon, and those corrugated massive walls will gleam softly at you and give you peace of mind and soul!
    Sit there in a café, any café at all, and have a coffee or liqueur and think a bit of the people who made those walls and who knew so well how to combine sheer beauty of line with the practical and ruthless purposes of war. That is just one thought that may come to you; there will be plenty more.
The Papal Palace
    Then, if you have time, stroll back gently into the town and up to the Palace of the Popes. You will see it again by daylight, but the night-time impression of those massive perpendicular walls in the utter silence of that part of the town is something worth having and something you will never forget. The only impression I know to equal it is to walk
round
the whole of the outside of Chartres Cathedral in the pitch dark and feel its big body kneeling beside you.
    In the day-time, your first visit must be to the Palace of the Popes again. Avignon
is
the Palace of the Popes. You will get again that impression of grimness and terrific power that you had in the evening, but now you will be able to see the wonderful beauty of those severe unrelieved lines and the amazing play of clear-cut blocks of light and shade which their very severity creates. When I was there last the guide was a fascinating person. A real Provençal with walrus moustaches, who told his tale with thoroughness and humour, and every now and then burst into a snatch of Provençal song to ring the echoes of those vast halls. Perhaps he is still there. For your sake I hope he is. He will, of course, try to hurry you too much, but
que voulez-vous?
He has to earn his bread like the rest of us.
    The Palace of the Popes contains some amazing earlymedieval mural paintings, attributed—one of them at any rate, if I remember rightly—to one of the medieval workmen who built the Palace.
    When you have finished with the Palace of the Popes, if you can, there is much else to see in Avignon. For one thing, there is the lovely Romanesque cathedral of the thirteenth century, with the gilded statue of the Virgin on the western tower. The view from the tower is worth seeing too, if you can face the rather rickety climb.
Orange
    Avignon has the advantage, too, of offering you many lovely things to look at in the open air. The walk to Villeneuve-Lès-Avignon is particularly fascinating. Just above the long and rather giddy bridge which will take you across the Rhône, there is the old twelfth-century bridge of Saint Bénézet, only half of which remains, but the ruins flung out into midstream have lost none of their grandeur or beauty. A very small Romanesque chapel is still standing on one of the pillars. Then you are in the country and will slowly climb up the dusty road of Villeneuve and sit down on the grass beside the ruined castle of Saint André, with its round, wonderfully preserved and amazingly powerful-looking turrets. You will enjoy