A Feast-Day on the Rhone by Thomas A. Janvier

But I was glad when Mornas, vivid with such bitter memories, dropped out of sight astern. Sleeping dogs of so evil a sort very well may lie; though it is difficult not to waken a few of them when they lie so thickly as here in the Rhone Valley, where almost every town and castle has a chapter of nightmare horrors all its own.

Even Chateauneuf-du-Pape -- which we saw a half hour later off to the eastward, rising from a little hill-top and thence overlooking the wide vineyard-covered valley -- came to its present ruin at the hands of des Adrets; who, having captured and fired it, left standing only its tall square tower and some fragments of its walls. This was an unfairly lurid ending for a castle which actually came into existence for gentle purposes and was not steeped to its very battlements in crime; for Chateauneuf was built purely as a pleasure-place, to which the Popes -- when weary with ruling the world and bored by their strait-laced duties as Saint Peter's earthly representatives -- might come from Avignon with a few choice kindred spirits and refreshingly kick up their heels. As even in Avignon, in those days, the Popes and cardinals did not keep their heels any too fast to the ground, it is an inferential certainty that the kicking up at Chateauneuf must have been rather prodigiously high; but the people of the Middle Ages were too stout of stomach to be easily scandalized, and the Pope's responsibilities in the premises were all the lighter because the doctrine of his personal infallibility had not then been formulated officially. And so things went along comfortably in a cheerfully reprehensible way.