In former days Avignon was considered the commencement of a Transalpine journey: it was the entrance to Italy. The geographies say: "The Rhone belongs to the King, but the City of Avignon is watered by a branch of the river, the Sorgue, which belongs to the Pope." Is the Pope very certain of long preserving the ownership of the Tiber? At Avignon they used to visit the Celestine[477] monastery. Good King René[478], who reduced the taxes when the tramontane wind blew, had painted a skeleton in one of the halls of the Celestine monastery: it was that of a woman of great beauty whom he had loved[479]. * I looked for the Palace of the Popes and was shown the _ice-house_: the Revolution has done away with celebrated places; the memories of the past are obliged to shoot up through it and to reblossom over dead bones[480]. Alas, the groans of the victims die soon after them! They scarcely reach some echo that causes them to survive a little while after the voice from which they issued is extinguished for ever. But, while the cry of sorrow was expiring on the banks of the Rhone, one heard in the distance the sound of Petrarch's lute: a solitary _canzone_, escaping from the tomb, continued to charm Vaucluse[481] with an immortal melancholy and the love sorrows of olden time. Alain Chartier[482] had come from Bayeux to be buried at Avignon in the Church of St. Anthony. He had written the _Belle Dame sans mercy_, and the kiss of Margaret of Scotland[483] made him live. [Sidenote: Marseilles.] From Avignon I went to Marseilles. What is left to be desired by a town to which Cicero addressed these words, of which the oratorical manner was imitated by Bossuet: "Nor will I forget thee, O Massilia, who in virtue and dignity shouldst rank not only before Greece, but for aught I know before the whole world[484]!" Tacitus, in the Life of Agricola, also praises Marseilles as combining the Greek urbanity with the economy of the Latin provinces. Daughter of Hellas, foundress of Gaul, celebrated by Cicero, captured by Cæsar, is not that sufficient glory united? I hastened to climb to _Notre Dame de la Garde_, to admire the sea which the smiling coasts of all the famous countries of antiquity line with their ruins. The sea, which does not move, is the source of mythology, even as the ocean, which rises twice a day, is the abyss to which Jehovah said: "Thou shalt go no farther[485]."