This was our own old way again, as far as the Pont de Bonpas; then our road wound to the northeast, away from the world we knew—­I said to myself—­and into a world of romance, a world created by the love of Petrarch for Laura, and sacred to those two for ever more.

The ruined castle, with machicolated towers and haughty buttresses, on the great rampart of a hill, was for me the porter’s lodge at the entrance gate of an enchanted garden, where poetic flowers of love bloomed through seasons and centuries; laurels, roses, and lilies, and pansies for remembrance.  We didn’t see those flowers with our bodies’ eyes, but what of that?  What did it matter that to the Turnours in their splendid glass cage this was just a road, with queer little gnome dwellings scooped out of solid rock to redeem it from common-placeness, with a fringe of deserted cottages farther on, and some ugly brickworks?  My spirit’s eyes saw the flowers, and they clustered thicker and brighter about Pieverde, where I insisted to Mr. Dane that Laura had been born.

He was inclined to dispute this at first, and bring up the horrid theory that the pure white star of Petrarch’s life had been a mere Madame de Sade, with a drove of uninteresting children.  But eagerly I quoted Petrarch himself, using all the arguments on which Pamela and I prided ourselves at the Convent; and by the time we had got as far as that sweet “little Venice full of water wheels,” L’Isle, I’d persuaded him to agree with me.  In the midst of all that lovely, liquid music of running, trickling, fluting water, who could go on callously insisting that Laura resisted Petrarch merely because she was a fat married woman with a large family?

All was green and pastoral here, and we seemed to have come into eternal spring after the bleak, windy plains encircling Avignon.  It was beautiful to remember Petrarch’s description of his golden-haired, dark-eyed love, fair and tall as a lily, sitting in the grass among the violets, where her bare feet gleamed whiter than the daisies when she took off her sandals.  Even Nicolete, flower of Provencal song, had no whiter feet than Laura, I am sure!

We were slipping past the banks of a little river, clear as sapphires and emeralds melted and mingled together.  The sound of its singing drowned the sound of the motor, so that we seemed to glide toward Vaucluse noiselessly and reverently.

At the Inn of Petrarch and Laura the car had to stop; and looking up, we could see on the height above the castle home of Petrarch’s dearest friend, Philippe de Cabassole, guardian of Queen Jeanne of Naples.  Up there on the cliff Petrarch’s eyes must often have turned toward Pieverde with longing thoughts of Laura, that “white dove” who was always for him sixteen, as when he met her first.