The monks pressed wine for the Pope in Avignon. The Vatican drank fizzy water. We tasted hand-squeezed orange juice and eclairs for our petit-dejeuner. Breakfast at Mas Vieux was a spiritual affair. Transubstantiation of goat cheese and bread. Here, the spirit thrives on mortar and stone. Ancient walls as thick as oaks. No town lies in sight: the isolation of prayer. Old Farm grows a bumper crop of transient souls. They crunch the gravel, find a body called home.
"Mas Vieux" is French for "Old Farm" or "Old Farmhouse". It started as a 13th-century monastery and has been transformed into a lovely bed-and-breakfast inn. "Petit-dejeuner" means breakfast. And at one time in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Catholic Church had two popes, one in Avignon, France; one in the Vatican in Rome.