It Had Already Seemed To
Me The Dreariest Of All Historical Buildings, And My
Final Visit Confirmed The Impression.
The place is as
intricate as it is vast, and as desolate as it is dirty.
The imagination has, for some reason or other, to
make more than the effort usual in such cases to re-
store and repeople it.
The fact, indeed, is simply that
the palace has been so incalculably abused and altered.
The alterations have been so numerous that, though I
have duly conned the enumerations, supplied in guide-
books, of the principal perversions, I do not pretend
to carry any of them in my head. The huge bare
mass, without ornament, without grace, despoiled of its
battlements and defaced with sordid modern windows,
covering the Rocher des Doms, and looking down over
the Rhone and the broken bridge of Saint-Benazet
(which stops in such a sketchable manner in mid-
stream), and across at the lonely tower of Philippe le
Bel and the ruined wall of Villeneuve, makes at a dis-
tance, in spite of its poverty, a great figure, the effect
of which is carried out by the tower of the church be-
side it (crowned though the latter be, in a top-heavy
fashion, with an immense modern image of the Virgin)
and by the thick, dark foliage of the garden laid out
on a still higher portion of the eminence. This garden
recalls, faintly and a trifle perversely, the grounds of
the Pincian at Rome.
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