IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT SUNDAY; I SHOULD HAVE been sleeping, but after tossing and turning for two hours, I gave up, got up, and got dressed.
Outside, a fierce wind was roaring across the rooftops. What had Jean called it? The mistral. The mistral was roaring, and the bells in the skeletal iron steeple of the Carmelite church tolled each time the gusts peaked. The moon was full, and the lashing branches outside my window cast shadows that twisted and writhed on my bed, beckoning me outside for some reason. Tiptoeing down the stairs, I unlocked the inn’s rattling wooden gate—the wind nearly tore it from my grasp—and set out into the gale.
Avignon was a maze of narrow, crooked streets, but it was a small maze—barely a mile wide, according to the map I’d studied—so even if I got lost, I couldn’t get terribly lost. Besides, Lumani faced the stone ramparts that ringed the city; to find my way home, all I’d need to do was find and follow the wall. If I walked an extra half mile, so what? The ancient city was beautiful, and the exercise would do me good.
Leaving Lumani, I turned left and followed the wall westward, toward the rocky hill where the Palace of the Popes and the cathedral perched. The streets were empty at this hour, and the city itself was largely shuttered and silent. The only noise came from the wind: the surging, surflike mistral churning across roof tiles and seething through the shredded leaves of plane trees.
I’d not gone far—ten minutes’ easy walk, a scant half mile—when the street butted into another stone wall, even higher than the ancient ramparts: Saint Anne’s Prison, a historical marker informed me, though it was no longer in use. Moonlight cascaded down the rock wall like water sheeting down the face of a cliff. The surface was rough, pockmarked with deep, shadowed craters, which I stepped closer to examine. From waist level up to a height of eight or ten feet, rectangular niches had been gouged into the blocks, and these niches—a hundred or more—were filled with objects: photos, figurines, crucifixes, trinkets, talismans. I puzzled over it, and suddenly I realized what I was seeing. Family and friends of the men inside the prison had filled the niches with mementos and relics.
A half block farther, I came upon a stone chapel tucked against the prison wall; a historical marker identified it as the Chapel of the Pénitents Noirs. The Pénitents Noirs—the Black Penitents—belonged to a religious society that revered John the Baptist; this particular group of them had banded together in the fifteen hundreds to minister to the prison’s inmates as their own way of doing penance. The chapel was small and simple, with the exception of an ornate relief panel above the doorway. The panel, carved in stone, measured eight or ten feet wide by at least fifteen feet high. Most of it was filled with angels, clouds, and rays of sunlight, or rays of heavenly glory; at the center, two hovering angels held some sort of serving tray between them in the sky. By the pale light of the moon, as the mistral roared overhead, I saw that the angels were serving up the severed head of the Baptist: a grisly reminder that martyrs—their bodies and bones—occupied a prominent and powerful place in the faith of medieval Catholics. More mementos and relics.
Zigging and zagging through the labyrinthine streets, I made my way toward what I hoped was the Palace of the Popes. Sure enough, above a nearby rooftop loomed a massive tower, fifteen stories high. The battlements at the top overhung the tower’s wall slightly; moonlight streamed down through narrow slits in the overhangs, streaking the stones of the wall. The slits, I realized as I reached the tower’s base and peered up, would allow boiling oil to be poured down onto attackers—or, at the moment, down onto me. So much for turning the other cheek, I mused.