It Had Risen Surprisingly
In The Night, And The Good People Of Avignon Had
Reason To Know What A Rise
Of the Rhone might signify.
The town, in its lower portions, is quite at the mercy
of the swollen waters;
And it was mentioned to me
that in 1856 the Hotel de l'Europe, in its convenient
hollow, was flooded up to within a few feet of the
ceiling of the dining-room, where the long board which
had served for so many a table d'hote floated dis-
reputably, with its legs in the air. On the present
occasion the mountains of the Ardeche, where it had
been raining for a month, had sent down torrents
which, all that fine Friday night, by the light of the
innocent-looking moon, poured themselves into the
Rhone and its tributary, the Durance. The river was
enormous, and continued to rise; and the sight was
beautiful and horrible. The water in many places
was already at the base of the city walls; the quay,
with its parapet just emerging, being already covered.
The country, seen from the Plateau des Doms, re-
sembled a vast lake, with protrusions of trees, houses,
bridges, gates. The people looked at it in silence, as
I had seen people before - on the occasion of a rise
of the Arno, at Pisa - appear to consider the prospects
of an inundation. "Il monte; il monte toujours," -
there was not much said but that. It was a general
holiday, and there was an air of wishing to profit, for
sociability's sake, by any interruption of the common-
place (the popular mind likes "a change," and the
element of change mitigates the sense of disaster); but
the affair was not otherwise a holiday.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 241 of 276
Words from 65981 to 66270
of 75796
