The Pope's Palace at Avignon.
By Henry M. Field
The following shows the workings of the papacy in the height of its power and glory. The same cruelty would again be practiced could the Roman Church regain the power which she has lost:— The popes are gone from Avignon, but their ancient palace remains, the monument at once of their glory and their shame, their power and their cruelty. If one would learn the spirit of the Church of Rome in the Middle Ages, let him spend a day in the palace of the popes at Avignon. It is an enormous pile, not unworthily compared with the Vatican, extending, I should think, over several acres, and with its massive walls and lofty towers looks more like a fortress than the peaceful abode of the vicar of Christ. Indeed, it is not at all unlikely that it was built with the idea that it might some day have to stand a siege. For the same purpose Avignon was surrounded with a wall, like the fortified cities of the Middle Ages. In the palace, the consistory—the place of meeting of the conclave, or college of cardinals—is (or was) a magnificent hall, more than a hundred feet long, spanned by great arches, supported by columns like those of a cathedral. The effect of this is lost since the palace was turned into barracks, and even this stately and sacred apartment has been cut into dormitories, and soldiers now sleep on their camp bed-steads, or burnish their arms where once cardinals deliberated on the interests of the Catholic Church. But the eye still traces the proportions of the massive columns, and the exquisite finish of their capitals, and other signs of former magnificence and splendor. All this is very grand, but there are other parts of this ancient and sacred edifice in which the beauty of the architecture cannot hide the terrible purpose of their construction. The residence of the popes, like that of the doges in Venice—was both a palace and a prison. At one end of the great architectural pile stands a tower seven stories high, which was devoted to the inquisition. Here sat that ghostly tribunal, in silence and secrecy, bearing before it those accused of heresy, extorting confessions by torture, and hurrying its victims to execution. There was the chamber of inquisition and the chamber of torture, which was so constructed that no sound could escape through the thick walls, and no one without could hear the shrieks of the wretched victims, or imagine the work of hell that was going on within. There one may still see the chamber of the holy office, in which the accused made their last confessions before going to punishment. This, strange to say, adjoins the banquet hall, for in those "good old times" popes and cardinals feasted while the victims of their cruelty were dying so near them. There was a hall in which those condemned to suffer by fire were burnt. The stone vault is still blackened with the flames. And there it is as significant as the lion's mouth in the doges' palace at Venice; for it opens into the Oubliette, and through this the condemned were pushed to fall to a tremendous depth, to be received on the points of spears and spikes turned upward from below.—Henry M. Field, in Evangelist.