Le Palais du Papes and other ecclesiastical monuments

Monday 12 January brought with it a reminder that we are only a week from departing home – ah, the joys of Heathrow and the torture tube! It was time to get our roller skates on and be real bloody tourists for a day. No matter that there were only four other tourists in town and those restaurateurs that hadn’t close for the winter were sharping razors before the bank foreclosed: we would achieve more sightseeing in a day than most people do in a week.

Days like today are a reminder that the tourist industry is very much a creation of Romanticism: castles, churches and abbeys would all be dust by now if it weren’t for the detemination of the revivalists to preserve – and possibly improve – those monuments left after the iconoclasticism of the Revolutionary period. It is hard sometimes to work out what is construction and what is reconstruction; and there appears to be a detemined effort to reverse some of the more fanciful efforts of the late nineteenth century. Some of the best preserved buildings are recycled: like the Abbey of Chartreuse, now a writer’s and playwright’s centre.

Of course, getting to Chartreuse was never going to be easy. It is in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, over two channels of the Rhone. There is an excellent bus service but the driver decided that we wanted the TGV shuttle and no amount of Franglais was going to dissuade her. We hoofed it instead and it was worth the 45 minutes walk.

The town was full of delights: the water tower at the end of the now broken pont, the old abbey church, streets of very old shops with old courtyards leading from it, the monastery and Fort St Andre. The audio guide to the monastery was excellent and there were lots of little discoveries, like the story of the shot-down American pilot hidden in the cloisters in 1944. The entry and church look ancient: as indeed they are, but the Abbey was still building and expanding in 1789 when the local committee chased the monks out.

Fort St Andre got short shrift as it was closed on Mondays, but it provided a great view. We had no trouble getting back to Avignon: our bus driver was less delusional than the one at our morning encounter.

We tossed ideas about but decided that we better do the Palais du Papes. There was a large crowd milling arount the square outside and we were terrified that our visit would be ruined by radio- controlled tour groups, but they turned out to be the staff, who outnumbered the tourists twenty to one. The only competition was two lovely French boys in the most amazing pastel pants – just friends, of course…

I’m not going to rewrite the guided tour, but it was huge and the survival of so much of the original decoration after revolution and military use was a miracle. While much was lost, what remains is an extraordinary insight into the early Renaissance church and state. Here was the schismatic church against which Dante railed. Yet it certainly did not lack wealth or power.

We wandered into the Jewish Quarter and then did some retail therapy before returning to our quixotic residence for a rest before dinner. We made a better choice tonight and got good service and food.

Our time in France is coming to an end and we are more and more impressed by its dynamic and intelligent society. While the French have some interesting social problems – the new fad for burning cars on New Year’s Eve is a case in point – they are a far better example of democracy than the America of Bush.