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That exile reached the haven of Avignon, to be received there not only without any of the annoyance of suspicious espionage, but with all the courtesies that could be paid to an honoured guest. The Vice-Legate and the Archbishop vied with one another in the formal stateliness of their reception.
But Avignon ever most caught my fancy, for there the nights seem peopled with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals, and there on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk abroad, the ramparts, which bade defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen hordes, now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with legend
At that time the intrepid Tartarin lived in the third house on the left as the town begins, on the Avignon road.
Favored by the exile of the popes to Avignon, and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in Upper Italy. The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few open friends. It found many minds eager to receive and able to appreciate it.
In 1355 they sent a deputation to the Pope at Avignon begging him to ask their lord if it was his wish that the town should retain its privileges. The minutes of the municipal meeting, at which this decision was come to, are in existence, and they show how the Romance language was written at Martel in those days: 'Item fo ordenat que Moss.
In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of Heaven down upon a second Pope who resided at Avignon, in southern France, and who retaliated in kind. In the far east the Turks were destroying the last remnants of the Roman Empire and the Russians had started upon a final crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters. But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never heard.
We talked with a man of Avignon, who leaned over the parapet near by, and he was very kind in explaining the points of view, and told us that the river, which winds and doubles upon itself so as to look like at least two rivers, is really the Rhone alone. The Durance joins with it within a few miles below Avignon, but is here invisible. Hotel de l'Europe, June 2d.
For a while he looked at them, then asked in his cold voice: "Who am I, Eve Clavering?" "The Man who came to visit me in my dream at Avignon and told me that I should live," she answered slowly. "And who say you that I am, Andrew Arnold, priest of Christ the God?" "He whom I visited in my youth in far Cathay," answered the old knight in an awed whisper.
Then he set off. On the Avignon road there was not so much as a cat. Doors were shut and curtains drawn across windows. Here and there a street light blinked in the mist rising from the Rhone. Superb and calm Tartarin de Tarascon strode through the night, his heels striking the road with measured tread and the metal tip of his cane raising sparks from the paving-stones.
If you want to insult him and make him bitterly hate you, tell him that Laura was a married woman with a dozen children." "Who was Laura?" asked Catherine; "and why should she not have a dozen children?" "Laura was a beautiful girl with golden hair and a green dress whom Petrarch first saw in a church at Avignon," answered Hazard.
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