I had been twice at Avignon before,and yet I was not satisfied.I probably am satisfied now;nevertheless,I enjoyed my third visit.I shall not soon forget the first,on which a particular emotion set indelible stamp.I was travelling northward,in 1870,after four months spent,for the first time,in Italy.It was the middle of January,and I had found myself,unexpectedly,forced to return to England for the rest of the winter.It was an insufferable disappointment;I was wretched and brokenhearted.Italy appeared to me at that time so much better than anything else in the world,that to rise from table in the middle of the feast was a prospect of being hungry for the rest of my days.I had heard a great deal of praise of the south of France;but the south of France was a poor consolation.In this state of mind I arrived at Avignon,which under a bright,hard winter sun was tingling fairly spinning with the mistral.I find in my journal of the other day a reference to the acuteness of my reluctance in January,1870.France,after Italy,appeared,in the language of the latter country,poco simpatica;and I thought it necessary,for reasons now inconceivable,to read the "Figaro,"which was filled with deions of the horrible Troppmann,the murderer of the famille Kink.Troppmann,Kink,le crime do Pantin,very names that figured in this episode seemed to wave me back.Had I abandoned the sonorous south to associate with vocables so base?
It was very cold,the other day,at Avignon;for though there was no mistral,it was raining as it rains in Provence,and the dampness had a terrible chill in it.As I sat by my fire,late at night for in genial Avignon,in October,I had to have a fire it came back to me that eleven years before I had at that same hour sat by a fire in that same room,and,writing to a friend to whom I was not afraid to appear extravagant,had made a vow that at some happier period of the future I would avenge myself on the cidevant city of the Popes by taking it in a contrary sense.I suppose that I redeemed my vow on the occasion of my second visit better than on my third;for then I was on my way to Italy,and that vengeance,of course,was complete.The only drawback was that Iwas in such a hurry to get to Ventimiglia (where the Italian customhouse was to be the sign of my triumph),that I scarcely took time to make it clear to myself at Avignon that this was better than reading the "Figaro."I hurried on almost too fast to enjoy the consciousness of moving southward.On this last occasion I was unfortunately destitute of that happy faith.Avignon was my southernmost limit;after which I was to turn round and proceed back to England.But in the interval Ihad been a great deal in Italy,and that made all the difference.
I had plenty of time to think of this,for the rain kept me practically housed for the first twentyfour hours.It had been raining in,these regions for a month,and people had begun to look askance at the Rhone,though as yet the volume of the river was not exorbitant.The only excursion possible,while the torrent descended,was a kind of horizontal dive,accompanied with infinite splashing,to the little museeof the town,which is within a moderate walk of the hotel.I had a memory of it from my first visit;it had appeared to me more pictorial than its pictures.
I found that recollection had flattered it a little,and that it is neither better nor worse than most provincial museums.It has the usual musty chill in the air,the usual grassgrown forecourt,in which a few lumpish Roman fragments are disposed,the usual red tiles on the floor,and the usual specimens of the more livid schools on the walls.I rang up the gardien,who arrived with a bunch of keys,wiping his mouth;he unlocked doors for me,opened shutters,and while (to my distress,as if the things had been worth lingering over)he shuffled about after me,he announced the names of the pictures before which I stopped,in a voice that reverberated through the melancholy halls,and seemed to make the authorship shameful when it was obscure,and grotesque when it pretended to be great.Then there were intervals of silence,while Istared absentmindedly,at haphazard,at some indistinguishable canvas,and the only sound was the downpour of the rain on the skylights.The museum of Avignon derives a certain dignity from its Roman fragments.The town has no Roman monuments to show;in this respect,beside its brilliant neighbors,Arles and Nimes,it is a blank.But a great many small objects have been found in its soil,pottery,glass,bronzes,lamps,vessels and ornaments of gold and silver.The glass is especially chaming,small vessels of the most delicate shape and substance,many of them perfectly preserved.These diminutive,intimate things bring one near to the old Roman life;they seem like pearls strung upon the slender thread that swings across the gulf of time.A little glass cup that Roman lips have touched says more to us than the great vessel of an arena.There are two small silver casseroles,with chiselled handles,in the museum of Avignon,that struck me as among the most charming survivals of antiquity.