Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3: France and the Netherlands, Part 1
History
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3: France and the Netherlands, Part 1
France -- Description and travel; Netherlands -- Description and travel
To the peasants who met the tall, bent, spare figure, musing and
botanizing along the country lanes and fields, he was known as
"Monsieur Émile." Before he left the city on his periodical visits to
England, Mill was wont to leave 300 francs with M. Rey, pastor of the
Protestant Church in Avignon: two hundred for expenses of public
worship; one hundred for the poor, always charging M. Rey to write to
England if any further need arose.
Mill, a great Englishman of European fame, to the amazement of his
French friends, was followed to his last resting-place by no more than
five mourners. As we write news comes that the civic authorities have
decided to recall to posterity the association of the great thinker
with Avignon by giving the name of Stuart Mill to a new boulevard, and
that a bust has been unveiled to his memory near the pleasant city he
loved so well. Mill was much gratified that his pamphlet on "The
Subjection of Women" converted Mistral to the movement for their
enfranchisement, and their legal equality with men.
Villeneuve and the Broken Bridge
By Thomas Oakey
[Footnote: From "The Story of Avignon." Published by E.P. Dutton & Co.]
The royal city of Villeneuve, altho geographically and politically
sundered from Avignon and the County Venaissin, was socially and
economically bound up with the papal city. The same reason that to-day
impels the rich citizens of Avignon to dot the hills of Languedoc with
their summer villas was operative in papal times, and popes and
cardinals and prelates loved to build their summer places on the
opposite bank of the Rhone.
How silent and neglected are the streets of this once wealthy and
important city! How degraded its monuments, how faded its glory! In the
hot, dusty afternoon, as the cranky old omnibus rattles along the
narrow High Street, it appears to awaken echoes in a city of the dead.
Making our way northward, we pass the restored seventeenth-century
portal of the palace of the sainted Cardinal of Luxembourg; the
weather-worn, neglected, late Renaissance portal of the so-called Hôtel
de Conti; the ruined Gothic portal of the palace of Cardinal Pierre de
Thury, through which we pass to the old court-yard and a chapel
subsequently restored and now used as the chapel of the Grey Penitents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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