Villeneuve and the Broken Bridge
By Thomas Oakey
[Footnote: From "The Story of Avignon." Published by E.P.
Dutton & Co.]
The royal city of Villeneuve, altho geographically and politically
sundered from Avignon and the County Venaissin, was socially and
economically bound up with the papal city. The same reason that to-day
impels the rich citizens of Avignon to dot the hills of Languedoc with
their summer villas was operative in papal times, and popes and cardinals
and prelates loved to build their summer places on the opposite bank of
the Rhone.
How silent and neglected are the streets of this once wealthy and
important city! How degraded its monuments, how faded its glory! In the
hot, dusty afternoon, as the cranky old omnibus rattles along the narrow
High Street, it appears to awaken echoes in a city of the dead.
Making our way northward, we pass the restored seventeenth-century portal
of the palace of the sainted Cardinal of Luxembourg; the weather-worn,
neglected, late Renaissance portal of the so-called Hotel de Conti; the
ruined Gothic portal of the palace of Cardinal Pierre de Thury, through
which we pass to the old court-yard and a chapel subsequently restored and
now used as the chapel of the Grey Penitents.
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