In the streets one constantly ran up against all sorts of local celebrities. There was the Sister Boute-Cuire, her covered basket on her arm, and a big crucifix on her ample bosom; or the plasterer Barret, who in some street fight with the Liberals had once lost his hat, and thereupon sworn never to wear one again till Henri V. was on the throne, a vow that involved his going bare-headed for the rest of his life. And at every corner were to be seen the picturesque pensioners of Avignon, a branch of the Military Hotel in Paris, with their wide-brimmed hats and long blue capes, venerable remnants of ancient wars, maimed, lame and blind, who with wooden legs and cautious steps hammered their careful way along the cobbled pavements. The town was passing through a state of unrest and upheaval between the old and new _règimes_, the members of which still fought in secret. Terrible memories of past evils, abuses, reproaches, yet survived, and were very bitter between people of a certain age. The Carlists talked incessantly of the Orange Tribunal, of Jourdan Coupe-têtes, of the massacres of La Glacière. The Liberals were always ready to retaliate with the year 1815, and the assassination of Marshal Brune, whose corpse had been thrown into the Rhône, while his property was plundered and the murderers let go unpunished. Among these latter, Pointer left so notorious a reputation that, did any upstart achieve sudden success in his business, it was at once said of him, “Here are some of Maréchal Brune’s _louis_ cropping up again.” The people of Avignon, like those of Aix and Marseilles, and indeed of all the towns of Provence at that time, regretted the disappearance of the Lily and the White Flag. The warm sympathy on the part of our predecessors for the royal cause was not, I think, so much a political opinion as an unconscious and popular protest against the aggressive centralisation, which the Jacobinism of the first Empire had made so odious. The Lily had always been to the Provençals (who bore it in their national coat of arms) the symbol of a time when their customs, traditions and franchise were respected by the Government; but to think that our fathers wished to return to the abuses which obtained before the Revolution would be a great error, for it was Provence who sent Mirabeau to the Etats Généraux, and there was no part of France where the Revolution was carried on with more passionate fervour than in Provence. The ancient city of Avignon is so steeped in bygone glories that it is impossible to take a step without awakening some memory of the past. Close to the spot where our school was situated once stood the Convent of Sainte-Claire, and it was in that convent chapel that Petrarch first beheld his Laura one April morning in 1327.