“Sur le pont d’Avignon
on y danse, on y danse.
Sur le Pont d’Avignon,
on y danse, tout en rond.”
I remember this little tune from kindergarten. But what’s it all about?
A board search didn’t help much, but Google tells me that there’s a bridge. It looks like it doesn’t quite make it across the water… but I can’t figure out why. Sites I found suggest it fell apart, some suggest it was never completed.
When was it built? Was it completed? How did it fall apart (if it did)?
I did find a cute story about a shepherd-cum-saint that is told by angels to build a bridge, and the angels help him win a bet with the mayor…
By the way, the translated lyrics (for non-francophones) are roughly:
On the Avignon bridge
we dance, we dance,
On the Avignon bridge
we dance, all in a circle
(More or less. ‘we’ might be ‘people in general’, and you could find other ways to translate ‘tout en rond’)
My old battered copy of the Michelin Green Guide to Provence (I’m not even going to dignify this with bibliographic details: it’s a tourist guidebook) has: “The bridge of the song … completed in 1190 and was, for years, the only crossing so far down the Rhone. The twenty-two arches have been reduced with the passage of time, by storm and floodwater, to four.”
One has to wonder why anybody would invent/propagate a miracle story about a shepard boy building a bridge with angelic help if it wasn’t finished. That just seems a bit, well, lame in the miracle stakes.
This latter page tells us that the origins of the bridge are unknown but it is believed that it was built in the Roman Era. In 1177, the base of the ruined bridge was used to create a new one, the only bridge over the Rhone at the time, which was subsequently destroyed and rebuilt numerous times.
I’d never heard the song until I visited Avignon (in 1998), but for a fee ( a few francs, I think, maybe US $1 ) you could walk a little ways out onto it, but not across it, and I suppose do a little song and dance number if you like. Aside from that (or in addition, I suppose) Avignon was one of the more relaxing, and enjoyable towns that I visited. It’s still got the old walls all around the central part of town.
I didn’t know they still published the Michelin Guide.
Monkeypants’ panoramic bridge view is neat, and the other link says:
In English:
That’s too bad. Maybe (Complete WAG) they held dances outside the chapel (on what’s left of the bridge) as communal entertainment after the rest of fell apart…
UncleBill’s first quote doesn’t line up with a panamajack’s experience or that of a friend of mine, or pictures in some of the links that show people standing on the bridge.
But, aside from the mysterious origins of the song, I guess that pretty well wraps it up. (I guess if the official town website doesn’t know where it came from, perhaps nobody does).
Next up: Frere Jacques Tapis, Tapis Rouge
They’re very much still published, though in the last year or two they underwent a horrible redesign that ditched the nice, slightly austere feel there was to the maps and illustrations.
Just kidding.