The sense of Roman greatness which is so oppressive in Orange and in many other parts of Provence, is not felt at Avignon.  Here we exchange the ghost of Imperial for the phantom of Ecclesiastical Rome.  The fixed epithet of Avignon is Papal; and as the express train rushes over its bleak and wind-tormented plain, the heavy dungeon-walls and battlemented towers of its palace fortress seem to warn us off, and bid us quickly leave the Babylon of exiled impious Antichrist.  Avignon presents the bleakest, barest, greyest scene upon a February morning, when the incessant mistral is blowing, and far and near, upon desolate hillside and sandy plain, the scanty trees are bent sideways, the crumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dry ungenial air.  Yet inside the town, all is not so dreary.  The Papal palace, with its terrible Glaciere, its chapel painted by Simone Memmi, its endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber, funnel-shaped to drown and suffocate—­so runs tradition—­the shrieks of wretches on the rack, is now a barrack, filled with lively little French soldiers, whose politeness, though sorely taxed, is never ruffled by the introduction of inquisitive visitors into their dormitories, eating-places, and drill-grounds.  And strange, indeed, it is to see the lines of neat narrow barrack beds, between which the red-legged little men are shaving, polishing their guns, or mending their trousers, in those vaulted halls of popes and cardinals, those vast presence-chambers and audience-galleries, where Urban entertained S. Catherine, where Rienzi came, a prisoner, to be stared at.  Pass by the Glaciere with a shudder, for it has still the reek of blood about it; and do not long delay in the cheerless dungeon of Rienzi.  Time and regimental whitewash have swept these lurking-places of old crime very bare; but the parable of the seven devils is true in more senses than one, and the ghosts that return to haunt a deodorised, disinfected, garnished sepulchre are almost more ghastly than those which have never been disturbed from their old habitations.

Little by little the eye becomes accustomed to the bareness and greyness of this Provencal landscape; and then we find that the scenery round Avignon is eminently picturesque.  The view from Les Doms—­which is a hill above the Pope’s palace, the Acropolis, as it were, of Avignon—­embraces a wide stretch of undulating champaign, bordered by low hills, and intersected by the flashing waters of the majestic Rhone.  Across the stream stands Villeneuve, like a castle of romance, with its round stone towers fronting the gates and battlemented walls of the Papal city.  A bridge used to connect the two towns, but it is now broken.  The remaining fragment is of solid build, resting on great buttresses, one of which rises fantastically above the bridge into a little chapel.  Such, one might fancy, was the bridge which Ariosto’s Rodomonte kept on horse against the Paladins of Charlemagne, when angered by the loss of his love.  Nor is it difficult to imagine Bradamante spurring up the slope against him with her magic lance in rest, and tilting him into the tawny waves beneath.