The city contains a great many handsome hotels or family houses, but is not generally well-built; the streets, all but one,--the Rue Calade,--are narrow: the pavement is of small sharp-pointed pebbles. Here is a public library, formed out of the libraries of the suppressed convents; a Museum, in which, among other objects, a valuable collection of coins deserves particular mention, as containing some very rare specimens of the coins of the Greek cities anciently founded in this part of France. There is also annexed to the Museum a small botanical garden. Here is a good infirmary or hospital for the sick. A large convent has been turned into a _succursal_ or subsidiary house to the invalids at Paris, insufficient to receive the increased number of disabled soldiers. The seven parishes of Avignon have been revolutionized into four, with churches not large enough for the congregations. I entered a fine Pantheon-like building, and found it to be a church, with vast Ionic columns supporting large galleries; the whole capable of containing two thousand people: it was used as a manufactory of saltpetre. The Jesuits' college is become a _collège royal_: thus it retains its destination as a place of instruction; but its handsome church has been spoiled by laying a floor across it at mid-height: for this there was no reason, but that an administrator thought, as my informant said, that it was a clever thing to cheat the Almighty of a church, _escamoter une église au bon Dieu_. The walls of the town are particularly well-built and handsome, if walls can ever be handsome: they are of the same sort of stone as the palace, and it is said that each contains precisely the same quantity of stone. They both date from the fourteenth century, when the popes sat, as the phrase is, at Avignon. FOOTNOTES: [37] Notwithstanding. CHAP. X. Thirty English families, it was calculated, were settled, before the Revolution, in Avignon and its territory. The grandson of James II. had lived here for some time. I used to enter, with some little feeling of Jacobitical enthusiasm, the house of the Marquise D. which he had inhabited. The Pretender was accompanied by some who "thought his pretensions well-founded:" others were attracted by the sort of court, held here by the vice legate, and by the attentions which it was then the usage of the court of Rome to pay to foreigners, particularly to the English. It was convenient also that a war between England and France did not affect a subject of the former country at Avignon. The intercourse betwixt this city and Italy had caused more attention to be paid to literature and the fine arts than is usual in provincial towns: that these flourished here, the names of Vernet, Flechier, Poole, and others bear honourable testimony.