I have already mentioned a crypt under the church dedicated to St. Irene, which is said to be of Roman construction. At the same place I was shown an opening, now boarded up, which leads to a space containing, if you believe the tradition of the place, the bones of 19,000 martyrs, without reckoning women and children, who, as my conductress observed, must have been at least as many more. There is also a well full of relics, but I did not understand whether these were included in the previous number, or an addition to it.
South of Lyon we may begin to observe the constructions in Pisé, which I suspect would not suit a climate so wet as ours; the material seems to be gravel and clay, formed into blocks in a sort of mould on the work itself, and separated by pretty thick beds of mortar. In some districts these blocks are pretty regular parallelopipeda, about six feet long and three thick; in others, they are very irregularly shaped, like Cyclopæan masonry.
I MET at Paris with a brother architect of the name of Sharp, who was going to Rome by the South of France; he left Paris a little after me, and joined me at Lyon. On the 12th we got into the packet-boat, to descend the Rhone; it was loaded with goods and passengers going to the fair at Beaucaire; and such a steam rose from the only room below deck, that I did not choose to venture into it; although a thick drizzling rain which obscured the prospect, and permitted us to see only the ghosts of beautiful scenery, would have made the shelter very acceptable. The packet-boat, or barge, is suffered nearly to drift down the stream, but the boatmen are provided with oars, to direct, rather than to accelerate the motion, as the rudder, though made very large, has of course little power. Our voyage begins upon the Saone, but we entered the Rhone a little below Lyon, and reached Vienne, a distance of nearly eighteen miles, in two hours and a half. Here we left the boat, and although the weather incommoded us all day, yet it was sufficiently fine at intervals to shew us that we were in a beautiful country, and to permit us to see some of the antiquities of the place. A magnificent quay extends along the bank of the river, but the current of the Rhone is so strong, that every thing connected with it must be of the most solid construction. One pier of a bridge is still standing; and a tower, which probably defended the end of it, remains on the opposite shore: a rocky hill rises behind the town, crowned by what appears the fragment of an old castle, but this we did not visit. Vienne is the first town I have seen, where the Roman antiquities remain in sufficient perfection to claim the study of an architect. I ran into the first church which occurred in our ramble through the city, (that of St. André le Bas) and found it a very curious old building, with many fragments of Roman antiquity, particularly two shafts of columns, and capitals upon them, but as the capitals had originally belonged to columns half as large again, the composition was not very happy. It is an edifice of great antiquity, being simply a parallelogram, with a semicircular niche at the end, which forms the choir; the vaulting is pointed, but the openings are round-headed, except three little windows in the choir. It was founded by Ancemond, Duke of Burgundy, and restored by Conrad, King of Burgundy. The latter reigned from 1033 to 1037. A little further we stumbled on an ancient temple, a good deal ruined. The spaces between the columns have been walled up, and the walls of the cell removed, in order to convert the building, first into a christian church, and afterwards into a court of justice. The edifice is not in very good taste, nor very well executed; yet the union of simplicity of form with richness of decoration, produces a pleasing effect under so many disadvantages: and the coming thus by chance upon an object with which one has so many associations, excited an emotion more easily imagined than described. Just out of the town is a slender pyramid on a square basement, perforated in each direction by an arched opening, and with a column at each angle. It is called by the vulgar the tomb of Pontius Pilate, who, according to them, put an end to his own life at this place. Its real date and destination are very uncertain. It is undoubtedly Roman, and probably a sepulchral monument, but there is no inscription. It stands in the middle of a corn-field, and cannot boast much beauty either in itself or in its situation. The finest relic, in point of taste and execution, is what is called the Arch of Triumph.