Une montagne en majesté

Francesco Petrarca, perhaps the most influential poet of Western literature, lived for years in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.  

**Petrarca, between love and hate**  

It is green, quiet, and the water flows from the river Sorgue, which leads a moderate life in the summer, as it is only fed by small streams. In the spring, it is more violent; its countless sources unite a little further under the mountains, and water is forced up from a deep cave, thundering out: the river's creation is almost violent.  

 

Fontaine-de-Vaucluse has the village. The stream of tourists, all heading to the rock from which the water is struck (in summer, it is a hole where inky dark water stands still in the depths), makes more noise than the water. But next to the 19th-century house built where Francesco Petrarca’s home once stood, it is green, quiet, and rural.  

 

The poet lived there intermittently for many years, in a simplicity he admired in himself, as a letter from 1352 proves—he had owned the house with two gardens for fifteen years by then, but he would soon return to Italy for good. He describes the simplicity of his daily life—regarding his thoughts, clothing, food, and drink. And his dwelling. This is the most beautiful passage from the letter, as his small world still exists for me after six hundred and fifty years.  

 

“I bought two gardens here, perfectly suited to my inclinations and intentions. If I were to describe them now, I wouldn’t be done talking anytime soon. To put it in a few words: I think there is hardly a place on earth more beautifully situated than this (…). I always call this spot my Transalpine Helicon. For one garden, only suited for study due to its shade and dedicated to Apollo, is located above the source of the Sorgue, and behind it are only rocks and the dwellings of birds or wild animals. The other, located near my house, looks more cultivated and is dear to Bacchus. It lies (it’s almost impossible to believe!) right in the middle of the very beautiful, fast-flowing river.”  

 

He also studies there, sitting in the shade of a rock wall. The Vaucluse is Petrarca’s place of seclusion, of disdain for the bustling world (whose temptations he knows all too well). A few chairs and a small table stand on the lawn next to the house. People sit in one of his gardens. My thoughts don’t take the lofty flight that Petrarca’s did there. But he must have spent most of his time in his little house. For it was here that he wrote some of his Latin works and many of his poems, which sometimes show a direct reference to his small Arcadia, as in sonnet 114:  

Here in this solitude, where flower and grass  blend their sweet scents into my verses,  I talk to Love and reflect on the past  to bring solace to my sorrowful lingering.  

 

He was one of the greatest and perhaps the most influential poet of Western literature, certainly the greatest poet of love, who immortalized his Laura. The 18th century (when people began to travel) and the Romanticism of the 19th century found Laura, her lover, and the pastoral surroundings of his solitude fascinating. A strong idealization of Petrarchism arose in poetry and visual art, elevating Laura, Francesco, and the Vaucluse to symbols.  

 

For Petrarca, the Vaucluse was already an image: that of his soul seeking rest and solitude, one of the two forces residing within him. The other sought the temptations of the world, fame, and the bustle of existence. At the beginning of his first book *De vita solitaria*, “On the solitary life,” he contrasts two figures in their daily lives: the resting contemplative spirit, almost a monk, and a busy man in a city. It is his own dual portrait. But it is also the image of his two worlds, symbolically embodied in Vaucluse and Avignon. They are the two great opposites of his world but also his internal opposing forces—his worldly and spiritual sides.  

 

His Avignon was that of the popes, who lived there from 1308 to 1377, or rather held court in the richest exile in history. Petrarca both loved and hated it, and the fervor of his hatred can only be explained by his great love for the splendor of court life. He and his brother Gherardo lived a nearly dandy-like life there. His greatest patron, whom he flattered and served, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, resided there; he was a member of the curia.  

 

But it was also there, on Good Friday, April 6, 1327, in the Church of Saint Clare, that he first saw Laura. She became his symbol of light, love, and purity, his poetry, if you will. She, like the Cardinal, would die of the plague in 1348. And the lament for her unreachability in life became a lament for her unreachability in death. "From now on, I want to live through your death."  

 

Avignon—he cursed it so much that his curses seemed self-imposed, both in prose and in his poems. Sonnet 114 begins with the stanza:  

Unfortunate Babylon, where mankind  burns its honor in the fire of sin,  seedbed of heresy, I have fled you  in sackcloth and ashes to extend my life.  

 

The mausoleum that the papal palace in Avignon now seems to have become would have filled him with joy due to its emptiness. It still stands like a fortress—built on a rock, a fortunate coincidence, as the church was established on the rock. Inside, the large and small halls are mostly bare; in two prominent small chapels and the pope’s study, beautiful frescoes by Matteo Giovannetti are still visible. The opulence can only be guessed at, perhaps most of all from the size: the chapel is almost as large as the banquet hall.  

 

Petrarca writes about it in his letters too; it reeked of sensuality and unchastity. The large palace, with its inner incoherence as a building that was often expanded, now stands so empty that it easily becomes another symbol: of a gap in church history (which may consist only of gaps).  

 

There is a second symbol: the Pont St.-Bénézet, which for centuries has no longer reached the other bank of the Rhône.  

 

Across the Rhône lies the charming Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, where many cardinals resided. Pope Innocent VI had the largest Carthusian monastery of the century built there; when others pray, you don’t have to atone yourself. Much of it still stands, with an impressive austerity that reveals not the barrenness of decay but the discipline of asceticism. In a corner of the church, under a richly sculpted Gothic canopy, lies the papal founder, completely abandoned, almost placed outside history. Everything here is dead.  

 

Petrarca witnessed the monastery’s construction. He loved the Carthusian order, especially since 1343 when his brother Gherardo entered the monastery of Montrieux and made the radical choice Petrarca always shied away from.  

 

The sign of difference was given early. In April 1336, Petrarca climbed Mont Ventoux near Carpentras with his brother. In a letter to Augustine’s disciple Francesco Dionigi, who had once given him *The Confessions* as a gift, he described the journey. The account is ambiguous: behind the description of the ascent lies another story—the ascent of a mountain as the path of life toward God. Gherardo climbed quickly and directly. He was the first to reach the top. Petrarca ascended and descended again, did not persevere, and arrived much later at the summit. This account is now considered the earliest literary expression of the experience of nature’s beauty.  

 

The act of climbing was revolutionary. Perhaps the summit was as bare then as it is now. When I stood on that yellow rocky hilltop, which seems like a desert, I didn’t have the lofty thoughts that Petrarca quoted from *The Confessions* at the summit. But he was there with his brother and two servants, alone. It must have been very quiet. And in such silence, the sky draws closer.  

 

His day was a clear one, and he looked around, knowing his homeland Italy lay in the distance. But perhaps in the southwest, he also saw Avignon. At that time, he still felt at home there, and Laura lived there. A little further to the east lay Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. He had yet to discover it, and with it, the happiness of solitude that his brother would fully attain.