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Beauty in Darkness: The Enchanted Nights of Avignon
The last White City of France
Avignon is my last White City.
That’s what Joseph Roth called them. A Jewish Austrian writer, the greatest journalist of his age and one of the greatest travel writers (and novelists) to ever do it.
Nimes. Arles. Toulon. Marseille. Lyon. Ancient cities in the south of France carved out of the white limestone, glowing under the near-permanent sun.
I’ve seen them all. I was saving Avignon. It lies like a ripe fruit at the far end of the branch, as far as I can go on the first weekend of the month, when the trains are cheap. Let your dreams fester too long, and they rot into poison. Why this April was the time to go is irrelevant. It just was.
Roth called Avignon the whitest of the white cities. He wrote one hundred years ago, more or less. He wrote of a Europe that is vanished now. A cosmopolitan, tolerant, decadent Europe, a place that still arguably led the world, but was undeniably in decline.
A continent that bled itself white in the First World War that Roth served in, that cost the world’s richest and most advanced countries millions of their young, leaving a weeping wound that — let’s be honest, let’s be truthful — still hasn’t healed.
