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We walked along the Sorgues, which is quite as beautiful and worthy to be sung as the Clitumnus, to the end of the village, to take the road to Vaucluse. Beside its banks stands a dirty, modern "Hotel de Petrarque et Laure." Alas, that the names of the most romantic and impassioned lovers of all history should be desecrated to a sign-post to allure gormandizing tourists!
At its basement sleeps a pool, perfectly untroubled; a lakelet in which the sheltering rocks and nestling wild figs are glassed as in a mirror a mirror of blue-black water, like amethyst or fluor-spar so pure, so still, that where it laps the pebbles you can scarcely say where air begins and water ends. This, then, is Petrarch's 'grotto; this is the fountain of Vaucluse.
It would be a singularly hard-headed, cold-hearted person who could set out for Vaucluse without the smallest thrill; and hard heads and cold hearts don't "run in our family." As we spun away from the Hotel de l'Europe soon after two o'clock that afternoon I felt that I was largely composed of thrill. Cold as the wind had grown, the thrill kept me warm, mingling in my veins with ozone.
There is not so much evil in man as men would have us believe; and it is a happy comfort to know and feel this. Leaving our little inn before day break next morning, we crossed the Sorgues, grown muddy since its infancy at Vaucluse, like many a young soul, whose mountain purity goes out into the soiling world and becomes sullied forever.
He purchased a house at Vaucluse, and there, shut in by lofty and craggy heights, the river Sorgue traversing the valley on one side, amidst hills clothed with umbrageous trees, cheered only by the song of birds, the poet passed his lonely days.
It was the land of Laura and Petrarch, and she, seated with half-closed eyes beneath the Bayfield elms, saw the pair beside the waters of Vaucluse, saw the roses and orange-trees and arid plains of Provence, and wondered at the trouble in their spiritual love. She was not troubled; love as "a dureless content and a trustless joy" lay outside of her knowledge, and she had no desire to prove it.
What pass or cranny in that precipice is cloven for its escape? These questions grow in interest as we enter the narrow defile of limestone rocks which leads to the cliff-barrier, and find ourselves among the figs and olives of Vaucluse.
"Remember the fountain at Vaucluse," said the Shade, in a voice so faint the words seemed to escape his lips like a sigh rather than articulate speech. For an instant Roland felt, not his heart failing him, but the sweat pouring from his forehead.
Leila and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet, Petrarch and Laura repeat what names we may of famous lovers that the fancies of poets have ever adored by the Tigris, or the Avon, or in the shadows of Vaucluse, the names of Swift and Stella are found to appeal no less keenly to heart and brain, to the imagination and to pity. Happy they were not, and could not be.
All traces of them have long since vanished, but a simple column, bearing the inscription; "À PETRARQUE," stands beside the Sorgues. We ascended into the defile by a path among the rocks, overshadowed by olive and wild fig trees, to the celebrated fountains of Vaucluse.
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