To-day papal Avignon is become French Avignon, a pleasant city where the Provençal sun is hot and where the Mistral whistles merrily. Above the banks of the Rhone the simple Cathedral stands, with its priests still garbed in papal red, its Host still carried under the white papal panoply. Here also is the great Palace of the Popes, "which is indeed," says Froissart, "the strongest and most magnificent house in the world." And yet its grim walls suggest neither peace nor rest; and to him who recalls, this great, impressive pile tells neither of glories nor of triumphs. Bands of unbelieving Pastoureaux marched toward it; soldiers of the "White Companies" and soldiers of du Guesclin gazed mockingly at it; it was the prison of Rienzi, and the home of the harassed Popes who had ever before them, just across the river, the menacing tower of that "fair king" who had led them into "Babylonish captivity."
On the banks of a pleasant little river among the Provençal hills is Vaison, one of the ancient Gallic towns which became entirely romanised; and many illustrious families of the Empire had summer villas there as at Arles and Orange. Barbarians of one epoch or another have devastated Vaison of all her antique treasures, except the remains of an Amphitheatre on the Puymin Hill. Germanic tribes who swooped down in early centuries destroyed her villas and her greater buildings; and vandals of a later day have scattered her sculptures and her tablets here and there. Some are in the galleries of Avignon; a Belus, the only one found in France, was sent to the Museum of Saint-Germain; and in the multitude of treasures in the British Museum, the most beautiful of all her statues, a Diadumenus, is artistically lost. In the days when it still adorned the city, during the reign of the Emperor Gallienus, Vaison was christianised by Saint Ruf, her Bishopric was founded, and in 337 the first General Council of the Church held in Gaul assembled here. Another Council in the V century, and still another in the VI, are proof of her continued importance.
[Illustration: "ON THE BANKS OF A PLEASANT LITTLE RIVER IS VAISON."]
[Illustration: "THE RUINED CASTLE OF THE COUNTS OF TOULOUSE."--VAISON.]