A Little Tour in France Part 4

The history of Toulouse is detestable, saturated with blood and perfidy; and the ancient custom of the Floral Games, grafted upon all sorts of internecine traditions, seems, with its false pastoralism, its mock chivalry, its display of fine feelings, to set off rather than to mitigate these horrors. The society was founded in the fourteenth century, and it has held annual meetings ever since, - meetings at which poems in the fine old _langue d'oc_ are declaimed and a blushing laureate is chosen. This business takes place in the Capitol, before the chief magistrate of the town, who is known as the _capitoul_, and of all the pretty women as well, - a cla.s.s very numerous at Toulouse.

It was impossible to have a finer person than that of the portress who pretended to show me the apart- ments in which the Floral Games are held; a big, brown, expansive woman, still in the prime of life, with a speaking eye, an extraordinary a.s.surance, and a pair of magenta stockings, which were inserted into the neatest and most polished little black sabots, and which, as she clattered up the stairs before me, lavishly displaying them, made her look like the heroine of an _opera-bouffe_. Her talk was all in _n_'s, _g_'s, and _d_'s, and in mute _e_'s strongly accented, as _autre_, _theatre_, _splendide_, - the last being an epithet she applied to everything the Capitol contained, and especially to a horrible picture representing the famous Clemence Isaure, the reputed foundress of the poetical contest, presiding on one of these occasions. I won- dered whether Clemence Isaure had been anything like this terrible Toulousaine of to-day, who would have been a capital figure-head for a floral game.

The lady in whose honor the picture I have just men- tioned was painted is a somewhat mythical personage, and she is not to be found in the "Biographie Uni- verselle." She is, however, a very graceful myth; and if she never existed, her statue does, at least, - a shapeless effigy, transferred to the Capitol from the so-called tomb of Clemence in the old church of La Daurade. The great hall in which the Floral Games are held was enc.u.mbered with scaffoldings, and I was unable to admire the long series of busts of the bards who have won prizes and the portraits of all the capitouls of Toulouse. As a compensation I was introduced to a big bookcase, filled with the poems that have been crowned since the days of the trou- badours (a portentous collection), and the big butcher's knife with which, according to the legend, Henry, Duke of Montmorency, who had conspired against the great cardinal with Gaston of Orleans and Mary de ??????

Medici, was, in 1632, beheaded on this spot by the order of Richelieu. With these objects the interest of the Capitol was exhausted. The building, indeed, has not the grandeur of its name, which is a sort of promise that the visitor will find some sensible embodiment of the old Roman tradition that once flourished in this part of France. It is inferior in impressiveness to the other three famous Capitols of the modern world, - that of Rome (if I may call the present structure modern) and those of Washington and Albany!

The only Roman remains at Toulouse are to be found in the museum, - a very interesting establish- ment, which I was condemned to see as imperfectly as I had seen the Capitol. It was being rearranged; and the gallery of paintings, which is the least in- teresting feature, was the only part that was not upside-down. The pictures are mainly of the mo- dern French school, and I remember nothing but a powerful, though disagreeable specimen of Henner, who paints the human body, and paints it so well, with a brush dipped in blackness; and, placed among the paintings, a bronze replica of the charming young David of Mercie. These things have been set out in the church of an old monastery, long since suppressed, and the rest of the collection occupies the cloisters.

These are two in number, - a small one, which you enter first from the street, and a very vast and ele- gant one beyond it, which with its light Gothic arches and slim columns (of the fourteenth century), its broad walk its little garden, with old tombs and statues in the centre, is by far the most picturesque, the most sketchable, spot in Toulouse. It must be doubly so when the Roman busts, inscriptions, slabs and sarco- phagi, are ranged along the walls; it must indeed (to compare small things with great, and as the judicious Murray remarks) bear a certain resemblance to the Campo Santo at Pisa. But these things are absent now; the cloister is a litter of confusion, and its trea- sures have been stowed away, confusedly, in sundry inaccessible rooms. The custodian attempted to con- sole me by telling me that when they are exhibited again it will be on a scientific basis, and with an order and regularity of which they were formerly innocent. But I was not consoled. I wanted simply the spectacle, the picture, and I didn't care in the least for the cla.s.sification. Old Roman fragments, ex- posed to light in the open air, under a southern sky, in a quadrangle round a garden, have an immortal charm simply in their general effect; and the charm is all the greater when the soil of the very place has yielded them up.

XXI.

My real consolation was an hour I spent in Saint- Sernin, one of the n.o.blest churches in southern France, and easily the first among those of Toulouse. This great structure, a masterpiece of twelfth-century ro- manesque, and dedicated to Saint Saturninus, - the Toulousains have abbreviated, - is, I think, alone worth a journey to Toulouse. What makes it so is the extraordinary seriousness of its interior; no other term occurs to me as expressing so well the character of its clear gray nave. As a general thing, I do not favor the fashion of attributing moral qualities to buildings; I shrink from talking about tender porticos and sincere campanili; but I find I cannot get on at all without imputing some sort of morality to Saint- Sernin. As it stands to-day, the church has been completely restored by Viollet-le-Duc. The exterior is of brick, and has little charm save that of a tower of four rows of arches, narrowing together as they ascend.

The nave is of great length and height, the barrel-roof of stone, the effect of the round arches and pillars in the triforium especially fine. There are two low aisles on either side. The choir is very deep and narrow; it seems to close together, and looks as if it were meant for intensely earnest rites. The transepts are most n.o.ble, especially the arches of the second tier.

The whole church is narrow for its length, and is singularly complete and h.o.m.ogeneous. As I say all this, I feel that I quite fail to give an impression of its manly gravity, its strong proportions or of the lone- some look of its renovated stones as I sat there while the October twilight gathered. It is a real work of art, a high conception. The crypt, into which I was eventually led captive by an importunate sacristan, is quite another affair, though indeed I suppose it may also be spoken of as a work of art. It is a rich museum of relics, and contains the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas, wrapped up in a napkin and exhibited in a gla.s.s case. The sacristan took a lamp and guided me about, presenting me to one saintly remnant after an- other. The impression was grotesque, but sorne of the objects were contained in curious old cases of beaten silver and bra.s.s; these things, at least, which looked as if they had been transmitted from the early church, were venerable. There was, however, a kind of wholesale sanct.i.ty about the place which overshot the mark; it pretends to be one of the holiest spots in the world. The effect is spoiled by the way the sacristans hang about and offer to take you into it for ten sous, - I was accosted by two and escaped from another, - and by the familiar manner in which you pop in and out. This episode rather broke the charm of Saint-Sernin, so that I took my departure and went in search of the cathedral. It was scarcely worth find- ing, and struck me as an odd, dislocated fragment.

The front consists only of a portal, beside which a tall brick tower, of a later period, has been erected. The nave was wrapped in dimness, with a few scattered lamps. I could only distinguish an immense vault, like a high cavern, without aisles. Here and there in the gloom was a kneeling figure; the whole place was mysterious and lop-sided. The choir was curtained off; it appeared not to correspond with the nave, - that is, not to have the same axis. The only other ec- clesiastical impression I gathered at Toulouse came to me in the church of La Daurade, of which the front, on the quay by the Garonne, was closed with scaffold- ings; so that one entered it from behind, where it is completely masked by houses, through a door which has at first no traceable connection with it. It is a vast, high, modernised, heavily decorated church, dimly lighted at all times, I should suppose, and enriched by the shades of evening at the time I looked into it.

I perceived that it consisted mainly of a large square, beneath a dome, in the centre of which a single person - a lady - was praying with the utmost absorption.

The manner of access to the church interposed such an obstacle to the outer profanities that I had a sense of intruding, and presently withdrew, carrying with me a picture of the, vast, still interior, the gilded roof gleaming in the twilight, and the solitary worshipper.

What was she praying for, and was she not almost afraid to remain there alone?

For the rest, the picturesque at Toulouse consists princ.i.p.ally of the walk beside the Garonne, which is spanned, to the faubourg of Saint-Cyprien, by a stout brick bridge. This hapless suburb, the baseness of whose site is noticeable, lay for days under the water at the time of the last inundations. The Garonne had almost mounted to the roofs of the houses, and the place continues to present a blighted, frightened look. Two or three persons, with whom I had some conversation, spoke of that time as a memory of horror.

I have not done with my Italian comparisons; I shall never have done with them. I am therefore free to say that in the way in which Toulouse looks out on the Garonne there was something that reminded me vaguely of the way in which Pisa looks out on the Arno. The red-faced houses - all of brick - along the quay have a mixture of brightness and shabbiness, as well as the fashion of the open _loggia_ in the top- story. The river, with another bridge or two, might be the Arno, and the buildings on the other side of it - a hospital, a suppressed convent - dip their feet into it with real southern cynicism. I have spoken of the old Hotel d'a.s.sezat as the best house at Toulouse; with the exception of the cloister of the museum, it is the only "bit" I remember. It has fallen from the state of a n.o.ble residence of the sixteenth century to that of a warehouse and a set of offices; but a certain dignity lingers in its melancholy court, which is divided from the street by a gateway that is still imposing, and in which a clambering vine and a red Virginia- creeper were suspended to the rusty walls of brick stone.

The most interesting house at Toulouse is far from being the most striking. At the door of No. 50 Rue des Filatiers, a featureless, solid structure, was found hanging, one autumn evening, the body of the young Marc-Antoine Calas, whose ill-inspired suicide was to be the first act of a tragedy so horrible. The fana- ticism aroused in the townsfolk by this incident; the execution by torture of Jean Calas, accused as a Protestant of having hanged his son, who had gone over to the Church of Rome; the ruin of the family; the claustration of the daughters; the flight of the widow to Switzerland; her introduction to Voltaire; the excited zeal of that incomparable partisan, and the pa.s.sionate persistence with which, from year to year, he pursued a reversal of judgment, till at last he obtained it, and devoted the tribunal of Toulouse to execration and the name of the victims to lasting wonder and pity, - these things form part of one of the most interesting and touching episodes of the social history of the eighteenth century. The story has the fatal progression, the dark rigidity, of one of the tragic dramas of the Greeks. Jean Calas, advanced in life, blameless, bewildered, protesting. his innocence, had been broken on the wheel; and the sight of his decent dwelling, which brought home to me all that had been suflered there, spoiled for me, for half an hour, the impression of Toulouse.

XXII.

I spent but a few hours at Carca.s.sonne; but those hours had a rounded felicity, and I cannot do better than transcribe from my note-book the little record made at the moment. Vitiated as it may be by crudity and incoherency, it has at any rate the fresh- ness of a great emotion. This is the best quality that a reader may hope to extract from a narrative in which "useful information" and technical lore even of the most general sort are completely absent. For Carca.s.sonne is moving, beyond a doubt; and the traveller who, in the course of a little tour in France, may have felt himself urged, in melancholy moments, to say that on the whole the disappointments are as numerous as the satisfactions, must admit that there can be nothing better than this.

The country, after you leave Toulouse, continues to be charming; the more so that it merges its flatness in the distant Cevennes on one side, and on the other, far away on your right, in the richer range of the Pyrenees. Olives and cypresses, pergolas and vines, terraces on the roofs of houses, soft, iridescent moun- tains, a warm yellow light, - what more could the dif- ficult tourist want? He left his luggage at the station, warily determined to look at the inn before committing himself to it. It was so evident (even to a cursory glance) that it might easily have been much better that he simply took his way to the town, with the whole of a superb afternoon before him. When I say the town, I mean the towns; there being two at Car- ca.s.sonne, perfectly distinct, and each with excellent claims to the t.i.tle. They have settled the matter be- tween them, however, and the elder, the shrine of pilgrimage, to which the other is but a stepping-stone, or even, as I may say, a humble door-mat, takes the name of the Cite. You see nothing of the Cite from the station; it is masked by the agglomeration of the _ville-ba.s.se_, which is relatively (but only relatively) new.

A wonderful avenue of acacias leads to it from the station, - leads past, rather, and conducts you to a little high-backed bridge over the Aude, beyond which, detached and erect, a distinct mediaeval silhouette, the Cite presents itself. Like a rival shop, on the in- vidious side of a street, it has "no connection" with the establishment across the way, although the two places are united (if old Carca.s.sonne may be said to be united to anything) by a vague little rustic fau- bourg. Perched on its solid pedestal, the perfect de- tachment of the Cite is what first strikes you. To take leave, without delay, of the _ville-ba.s.se_, I may say that the splendid acacias I have mentioned flung a sum- merish dusk over the place, in which a few scattered remains of stout walls and big bastions looked vener- able and picturesque. A little boulevard winds round the town, planted with trees and garnished with more benches than I ever saw provided by a soft-hearted munic.i.p.ality. This precinct had a warm, lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal, and wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town, at these hours, must be ghostly enough on its neighboring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect, - as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, gra.s.s-grown like all roads where vehicles never pa.s.s, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, complete outer walls and complete inner (these, elaborately forti- fied, are the more curious); and this congregation of ramparts, towers, bastions, battlements, barbicans, is as fantastic and romantic as you please. The approach I mention here leads to the gate that looks toward Toulouse, - the Porte de l'Aude. There is a second, on the other side, called, I believe, the Porte Nar- bonnaise, a magnificent gate, flanked with towers thick and tall, defended by elaborate outworks; and these two apertures alone admit you to the place, - putting aside a small sally-port, protected by a great bastion, on the quarter that looks toward the Pyrenees.

As a votary, always, in the first instance, of a general impression, I walked all round the outer en- ceinte, - a process on the very face of it entertaining.

I took to the right of the Porte de l'Aude, without entering it, where the old moat has been filled in.

The filling-in of the moat has created a gra.s.sy level at the foot of the big gray towers, which, rising at frequent intervals, stretch their stiff curtain of stone from point to point. The curtain drops without a fold upon the quiet gra.s.s, which was dotted here and there with a humble native, dozing away the golden afternoon. The natives of the elder Carca.s.sonne are all humble; for the core of the Cite has shrunken and decayed, and there is little life among the ruins. A few tenacious laborers, who work in the neighboring fields or in the _ville-ba.s.se_, and sundry octogenarians of both s.e.xes, who are dying where they have lived, and contribute much to the pictorial effect, - these are the princ.i.p.al inhabitants. The process of con- verting the place from an irresponsible old town into a conscious "specimen" has of course been attended with eliminations; the population has, as a general thing, been restored away. I should lose no time in saying that restoration is the great mark of the Cite.

M. Viollet-le-Duc has worked his will upon it, put it into perfect order, revived the fortifications in every detail. I do not pretend to judge the performance, carried out on a scale and in a spirit which really impose themselves on the imagination. Few archi- tects have had such a chance, and M. Viollet-le-Duc must have been the envy of the whole restoring fra- ternity. The image of a more crumbling Carca.s.sonne rises in the mind, and there is no doubt that forty years ago the place was more affecting. On the other hand, as we see it to-day, it is a wonderful evocation; and if there is a great deal of new in the old, there is plenty of old in the new. The repaired crenella- tions, the inserted patches, of the walls of the outer circle sufficiently express this commixture. My walk brought me into full view of the Pyrenees, which, now that the sun had begun to sink and the shadows to grow long, had a wonderful violet glow. The platform at the base of the walls has a greater width on this side, and it made the scene more complete. Two or three old crones had crawled out of the Porte Nar- bonnaise, to examine the advancing visitor; and a very ancient peasant, lying there with his back against a tower, was tending half a dozen lean sheep. A poor man in a very old blouse, crippled and with crutches lying beside him, had been brought out and placed on a stool, where he enjoyed the afternoon as best he might. He looked so ill and so patient that I spoke to him; found that his legs were paralyzed and he was quite helpless. He had formerly been seven years in the army, and had made the campaign of Mexico with Bazaine. Born in the old Cite, he had come back there to end his days. It seemed strange, as he sat there, with those romantic walls behind him and the great picture of the Pyrenees in front, to think that he had been across the seas to the far-away new world, had made part of a famous expedition, and was now a cripple at the gate of the mediaeval city where he had played as a child. All this struck me as a great deal of history for so modest a figure, - a poor little figure that could only just unclose its palm for a small silver coin.

He was not the only acquaintance I made at Car- ca.s.sonne. I had not pursued my circuit of the walls much further when I encountered a person of quite another type, of whom I asked some question which had just then presented, itself, and who proved to be the very genius of the spot. He was a sociable son of the _ville-ba.s.se_, a gentleman, and, as I afterwards learned, an employe at the prefecture, - a person, in short, much esteemed at Carca.s.sonne. (I may say all this, as he will never read these pages.) He had been ill for a month, and in the company of his little dog was taking his first airing; in his own phrase he was _amoureux-fou de la Cite_, - he could lose no time in coming back to it. He talked of it, indeed, as a lover, and, giving me for half an hour the advantage of his company, showed me all the points of the place. (I speak here always of the outer enceinte; you penetrate to the inner - which is the specialty of Carca.s.sonne, and the great curiosity - only by application at the lodge of the regular custodian, a remarkable func- tionary, who, half an hour later, when I had been in- troduced to him by my friend the amateur, marched me over the fortifications with a tremendous accompani- ment of dates and technical terms.) My companion pointed out to me in particular the traces of different periods in the structure of the walls. There is a por- tentous amount of history embedded in them, begin- ning with Romans and Visigoths; here and there are marks of old breaches, hastily repaired. We pa.s.sed into the town, - into that part of it not included in the citadel. It is the queerest and most fragmentary little place in the world, as everything save the fortifications is being suffered to crumble away, in order that the spirit of M. Viollet-le-Duc alone may pervade it, and it may subsist simply as a magnificent sh.e.l.l. As the leases of the wretched little houses fall in, the ground is cleared of them; and a mumbling old woman ap- proached me in the course of my circuit, inviting me to condole with her on the disappearance of so many of the hovels which in the last few hundred years (since the collapse of Carca.s.sonne as a stronghold) had attached themselves to the base of the walls, in the s.p.a.ce between the two circles. These habitations, constructed of materials taken from the ruins, nestled there snugly enough. This intermediate s.p.a.ce had therefore become a kind of street, which has crumbled in turn, as the fortress has grown up again. There are other streets, beside, very diminutive and vague, where you pick your way over heaps of rubbish and become conscious of unexpected faces looking at you out of windows as detached as the cherubic heads.

The most definite thing in the place was the little cafe, where. the waiters, I think, must be the ghosts of the old Visigoths; the most definite, that is, after the little chateau and the little cathedral. Everything in the Cite is little; you can walk round the walls in twenty minutes. On the drawbridge of the chateau, which, with a picturesque old face, flanking towers, and a dry moat, is to-day simply a bare _caserne_, lounged half a dozen soldiers, unusually small. No- thing could be more odd than to see these objects en- closed in a receptacle which has much of the appear- ance of an enormous toy. The Cite and its population vaguely reminded me of an immense Noah's ark.

XXIII.

Carca.s.sonne dates from the Roman occupation of Gaul. The place commanded one of the great roads into Spain, and in the fourth century Romans and Franks ousted each other from such a point of vantage.

In the year 436, Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, superseded both these parties; and it is during his oc- cupation that the inner enceinte was raised upon the ruins of the Roman fortifications. Most of the Visigoth towers that are still erect are seated upon Roman sub- structions which appear to have been formed hastily, probably at the moment of the Frankish invasion.

The authors of these solid defences, though occasionally disturbed, held Carca.s.sonne and the neighboring coun- try, in which they had established their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four centuries, of which no traces remain.

These facts I derived from a source no more recondite than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc, - a very luminous description of the fortifications, which you may buy from the accomplished custodian. The writer makes a jump to the year 1209, when Carca.s.sonne, then forming part of the realm of the viscounts of Beziers and infected by the Albigensian heresy, was besieged, in the name of the Pope, by the terrible Simon de Montfort and his army of crusaders. Simon was ac- customed to success, and the town succ.u.mbed in the course of a fortnight. Thirty-one years later, having pa.s.sed into the hands of the King of France, it was again besieged by the young Raymond de Trincavel, the last of the viscounts of Beziers; and of this siege M. Viollet-le-Duc gives a long and minute account, which the visitor who has a head for such things may follow, with the brochure in hand, on the fortifications themselves. The young Raymond de Trincavel, baffled and repulsed, retired at the end of twenty-four days.

Saint Louis and Philip the Bold, in the thirteenth cen- tury, multiplied the defences of Carca.s.sonne, which was one of the bulwarks of their kingdom on the Spanish quarter; and from this time forth, being re- garded as impregnable, the place had nothing to fear.

It was not even attacked; and when, in 1355, Edward the Black Prince marched into it, the inhabitants had opened the gates to the conqueror before whom all Languedoc was prostrate. I am not one of those who, as I said just now, have a head for such things, and having extracted these few facts had made all the use of M. Viollet-le-Duc's, pamphlet of which I was cap- able.

I have mentioned that my obliging friend the _amoureux-fou_ handed me over to the door-keeper of the citadel. I should add that I was at first committed to the wife of this functionary, a stout peasant-woman, who took a key down from a nail, conducted me to a postern door, and ushered me into the presence of her husband. Having just begun his rounds with a party of four persons, he was not many steps in advance. I added myself perforce to this party, which was not brilliantly composed, except that two of its members were gendarmes in full toggery, who announced in the course of our tour that they had been stationed for a year at Carca.s.sonne, and had never before had the curiosity to come up to the Cite. There was something brilliant, certainly, in that. The _gardien_ was an extra- ordinarily typical little Frenchman, who struck me even more forcibly than the wonders of the inner enceinte; and as I am bound to a.s.sume, at whatever cost to my literary vanity, that there is not the slightest danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public property. With his diminutive stature and his per- pendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuber- ant eyes, high peremptory voice, extreme volubility, lucidity, and neatness of utterance, he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. He knew absolutely what he was about, understood the place thoroughly, and constantly reminded his audience of what he himself had done in the way of excavations and reparations. He described himself as the brother of the architect of the work actually going forward (that which has been done since the death of M. Viol- let-le-Duc, I suppose he meant), and this fact was more ill.u.s.trative than all the others. It reminded me, as one is reminded at every turn, of the democratic con- ditions of French life: a man of the people, with a wife _en bonnet_, extremely intelligent, full of special knowledge, and yet remaining essentially of the people, and showing his intelligence with a kind of ferocity, of defiance. Such a personage helps one to under- stand the red radicalism of France, the revolutions, the barricades, the sinister pa.s.sion for theories. (I do not, of course, take upon myself to say that the indi- vidual I describe - who can know nothing of the liberties I am taking with him - is actually devoted to these ideals; I only mean that many such devotees must have his qualities.) In just the _nuance_ that I have tried to indicate here, it is a terrible pattern of man. Permeated in a high degree by civilization, it is yet untouched by the desire which one finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate to the figure of the gentleman. On the other hand, a _nettete_, a faculty of exposition, such as the English gentleman is rarely either blessed or cursed with.

This brilliant, this suggestive warden of Carcas- sonne marched us about for an hour, haranguing, ex- plaining, ill.u.s.trating, as he went; it was a complete little lecture, such as might have been delivered at the Lowell Inst.i.tute, on the manger in which a first- rate _place forte_ used to be attacked and defended Our peregrinations made it very clear that Carca.s.sone was impregnable; it is impossible to imagine, without having seen them, such refinements of immurement, such ingenuities of resistance. We pa.s.sed along the battlements and _chemins de ronde_, ascended and de- scended towers, crawled under arches, peered out of loop-holes, lowered ourselves into dungeons, halted in all sorts of tight places, while the purpose of some- thing or other was described to us. It was very curious, very interesting; above all, it was very pic- torial, and involved perpetual peeps into the little crooked, crumbling, sunny, gra.s.sy, empty Cite. In places, as you stand upon it, the great towered and embattled enceinte produces an illusion; it looks as if it were still equipped and defended. One vivid challenge, at any rate, it flings down before you; it calls upon you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration. For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed, however splendid. What is left is more precious than what is added: the one is history, the other is fiction; and I like the former the better of the two, - it is so much more romantic. One is posi- tive, so far as it goes; the other fills up the void with things more dead than the void itself, inasmuch as they have never had life. After that I am free to say that the restoration of Carca.s.sonne is a splendid achievement. The little custodian dismissed us at last, after having, as usual, inducted us into the inevi- table repository of photographs. These photographs are a great nuisance, all over the Midi. They are exceedingly bad, for the most part; and the worst - those in the form of the hideous little _alb.u.m-pano- rama_ - are thrust upon you at every turn. They are a kind of tax that you must pay; the best way is to pay to be let off. It was not to be denied that there was a relief in separating from our accomplished guide, whose manner of imparting information re- minded me of the energetic process by which I have seen mineral waters bottled. All this while the after- noon had grown more lovely; the sunset had deepened, the horizon of hills grown purple; the ma.s.s of the Canigou became more delicate, yet more distinct. The day had so far faded that the interior of the little cathedral was wrapped in twilight, into which the glowing windows projected something of their color.

This church has high beauty and value, but I will spare the reader a presentation of details which I my- self had no opportunity to master. It consists of a romanesque nave, of the end of the eleventh century, and a Gothic choir and transepts of the beginning of the fourteenth; and, shut up in its citadel like a precious casket in a cabinet, it seems - or seemed at that hour - to have a sort of double sanct.i.ty. After leaving it and pa.s.sing out of the two circles of walls, I treated myself, in the most infatuated manner, to another walk round the Cite. It is certainly this general impression that is most striking, - the impression from outside, where the whole place detaches itself at once from the landscape. In the warm southern dusk it looked more than ever like a city in a fairy-tale. To make the thing perfect, a white young moon, in its first quarter, came out and hung just over the dark sil- houette. It was hard to come away, - to incommode one's self for anything so vulgar as a railway-train; I would gladly have spent the evening in revolving round the walls of Carca.s.sonne. But I had in a measure engaged to proceed to Narborme, and there was a certain magic that name which gave me strength, - Narbonne, the richest city in Roman Gaul.

XXIV.

At Narbonne I took up my abode at the house of a _serrurier mecanicien_, and was very thankful for the accommodation. It was my misfortune to arrive at this ancient city late at night, on the eve of market- day; and market-day at Narbonne is a very serious affair. The inns, on this occasion, are stuffed with wine-dealers; for the country roundabout, dedicated almost exclusively to Bacchus, has. .h.i.therto escaped the phylloxera. This deadly enemy of the grape is encamped over the Midi in a hundred places; blighted vineyards and ruined proprietors being quite the order of the day. The signs of distress are more frequent as you advance into Provence, many of the vines being laid under water, in the hope of washing the plague away. There are healthy regions still, however, and the vintners find plenty to do at Narbonne. The traffic in wine appeared to be the sole thought of the Narbonnais; every one I spoke to had something to say about the harvest of gold that bloomed under its influence. "C'est inoui, monsieur, l'argent qu'il y a dans ce pays. Des gens a qui la vente de leur vin rapporte jusqu'a 500,000 francs par an." That little speech, addressed to me by a gentleman at the inn, gives the note of these revelations. It must be said that there was little in the appearance either of the town or of its population to suggest the possession of such treasures. Narbonne is a _sale pet.i.te ville_ in all the force of the term, and my first impression on ar- riving there was an extreme regret that I had not remained for the night at the lovely Carca.s.sonne. My journey from that delectable spot lasted a couple of hours, and was performed in darkness, - a darkness not so dense, however, but that I was able to make out, as we pa.s.sed it, the great figure of Beziers, whose ancient roofs and towers, cl.u.s.tered on a goodly hill- top, looked as fantastic as you please. I know not what appearance Beziers may present by day; but by night it has quite the grand air. On issuing from the station at Narbonne, I found that the only vehicle in waiting was a kind of b.a.s.t.a.r.d tramcar, a thing shaped as if it had been meant to go upon rails; that is, equipped with small wheels, placed beneath it, and with a platform at either end, but destined to rattle over the stones like the most vulgar of omnibuses.

To complete the oddity of this conveyance, it was under the supervision, not of a conductor, but of a conductress. A fair young woman, with a pouch sus- pended from her girdle, had command of the platform; and as soon as the car was full she jolted us into the town through clouds of the thickest dust I ever have swallowed. I have had occasion to speak of the activity of women in France, - of the way they are always in the ascendant; and here was a signal example of their general utility. The young lady I have mentioned conveyed her whole company to the wretched little Hotel de France, where it is to be hoped that some of them found a lodging. For myself, I was informed that the place was crowded from cellar to attic, and that its inmates were sleeping three or four in a room.

At Carca.s.sonne I should have had a bad bed, but at Narbonne, apparently, I was to have no bed at all. I pa.s.sed an hour or two of flat suspense, while fate settled the question of whether I should go on to Perpignan, return to Beziers, or still discover a modest couch at Narbonne. I shall not have suffered in vain, however, if my example serves to deter other travellers from alighting unannounced at that city on a Wednes- day evening. The retreat to Beziers, not attempted in time, proved impossible, and I was a.s.sured that at Perpignan, which I should not reach till midnight, the affluence of wine-dealers was not less than at Nar- bonne. I interviewed every hostess in the town, and got no satisfaction but distracted shrugs. Finally, at an advanced hour, one of the servants of the Hotel de France, where I had attempted to dine, came to me in triumph to proclaim that he had secured for me a charming apartment in a _maison bourgeoise_. I took possession of it gratefully, in spite of its having an entrance like a stable, and being pervaded by an odor compared with which that of a stable would have been delicious. As I have mentioned, my land- lord was a locksmith, and he had strange machines which rumbled and whirred in the rooms below my own. Nevertheless, I slept, and I dreamed of Car- ca.s.sonne. It was better to do that than to dream of the Hotel de France.

I was obliged to cultivate relations with the cuisine of this establishment. Nothing could have been more _meridional_; indeed, both the dirty little inn and Nar- bonne at large seemed to me to have the infirmities of the south, without its usual graces. Narrow, noisy, shabby, belittered and enc.u.mbered, filled with clatter and chatter, the Hotel de France would have been described in perfection by Alphonse Daudet. For what struck me above all in it was the note of the Midi, as he has represented it, - the sound of universal talk.

The landlord sat at supper with sundry friends, in a kind of gla.s.s cage, with a genial indifference to arriv- ing guests; the waiters tumbled over the loose luggage in the hall; the travellers who had been turned away leaned gloomily against door-posts; and the landlady, surrounded by confusion, unconscious of responsibility, and animated only by the spirit of conversation, bandied high-voiced compliments with the _voyageurs de com- merce_. At ten o'clock in the morning there was a table d'hote for breakfast, - a wonderful repast, which overflowed into every room and pervaded the whole establishment. I sat down with a hundred hungry marketers, fat, brown, greasy men, with a good deal of the rich soil of Languedoc adhering to their hands and their boots. I mention the latter articles because they almost put them on the table. It was very hot, and there were swarms of flies; the viands had the strongest odor; there was in particular a horrible mix- ture known as _gras-double_, a light gray, glutinous, nauseating mess, which my companions devoured in large quant.i.ties. A man opposite to me had the dir- tiest fingers I ever saw; a collection of fingers which in England would have excluded him from a farmers'

ordinary. The conversation was mainly bucolic; though a part of it, I remember, at the table at which I sat, consisted of a discussion as to whether or no the maid- servant were _sage_, - a discussion which went on under the nose of this young lady, as she carried about the dreadful _gras-double_, and to which she contributed the most convincing blushes. It was thoroughly _meri- dional_.

In going to Narbonne I had of course counted upon Roman remains; but when I went forth in search of them I perceived that I had hoped too fondly. There is really nothing in the place to speak of; that is, on the day of my visit there was nothing but the market, which was in complete possession. "This intricate, curious, but lifeless town," Murray calls it; yet to me it appeared overflowing with life. Its streets are mere crooked, dirty lanes, bordered with perfectly insignifi- cant houses; but they were filled with the same clatter and chatter that I had found at the hotel. The market was held partly in the little square of the hotel de ville, a structure which a flattering wood-cut in the Guide-Joanne had given me a desire to behold. The reality was not impressive, the old color of the front having been completely restored away. Such interest as it superficially possesses it derives from a fine mediaeval tower which rises beside it, with turrets at the angles, - always a picturesque thing. The rest of the market was held in another _place_, still shabbier than the first, which lies beyond the ca.n.a.l. The Ca.n.a.l du Midi flows through the town, and, spanned at this point by a small suspension-bridge, presented a cer- tain sketchability. On the further side were the venders and chafferers, - old women under awnings and big um- brellas, rickety tables piled high with fruit, white caps and brown faces, blouses, sabots, donkeys. Beneath this picture was another, - a long row of washerwomen, on their knees on the edge of the ca.n.a.l, pounding and wringing the dirty linen of Narbonne, - no great quant.i.ty, to judge by the costume of the people. In- numerable rusty men, scattered all over the place, were buying and selling wine, straddling about in pairs, in groups, with their hands in their pockets, and packed together at the doors of the cafes. They were mostly fat and brown and unshaven; they ground their teeth as they talked; they were very _meridionaux_.

The only two lions at Narbonne are the cathedral and the museum, the latter of which is quartered in the hotel de ville. The cathedral, closely shut in by houses, and with the west front undergoing repairs, is singular in two respects. It consists exclusively of a choir, which is of the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the next, and of great magnifi- cence. There is absolutely nothing else. This choir, of extraordinary elevation, forms the whole church. I sat there a good while; there was no other visitor. I had taken a great dislike to poor little Narbonne, which struck me as sordid and overheated, and this place seemed to extend to me, as in the Middle Ages, the privilege of sanctuary. It is a very solemn corner.

The other peculiarity of the cathedral is that, exter- nally, it bristles with battlements, having anciently formed part of the defences of the _archeveche_, which is beside it and which connects it with the hotel de ville. This combination of the church and the for- tress is very curious, and during the Middle Ages was not without its value. The palace of the former arch- bishops of Narbonne (the hotel de ville of to-day forms part of it) was both an asylum and an a.r.s.enal during the hideous wars by which the Languedoc was ravaged in the thirteenth century. The whole ma.s.s of buildings is jammed together in a manner that from certain points of view makes it far from apparent which feature is which. The museum occupies several chambers at the top of the hotel de ville, and is not an imposing collection. It was closed, but I induced the portress to let me in, - a silent, cadaverous person, in a black coif, like a _beguine_, who sat knitting in one of the windows while I went the rounds. The number of Roman fragments is small, and their quality is not the finest; I must add that this impression was hastily gathered. There is indeed a work of art in one of the rooms which creates a presumption in favor of the place, - the portrait (rather a good one) of a citizen of Narbonne, whose name I forget, who is described as having devoted all his time and his intelligence to collecting the objects by which the. visitor is sur- rounded. This excellent man was a connoisseur, and the visitor is doubtless often an ignoramus.

XXV.

"Cette, with its glistening houses white, Curves with the curving beach away To where the lighthouse beacons bright, Far in the bay."

That stanza of Matthew Arnold's, which I hap- pened to remember, gave a certain importance to the half-hour I spent in the buffet of the station at Cette while I waited for the train to Montpellier. I had left Narbonne in the afternoon, and by the time I reached Cette the darkness had descended. I therefore missed the sight of the glistening houses, and had to console myself with that of the beacon in the bay, as well as with a _bouillon_ of which I partook at the buffet afore- said; for, since the morning, I had not ventured to return to the table d'hote at Narbonne. The Hotel Nevet, at Montpellier, which I reached an hour later, has an ancient renown all over the south of France, - advertises itself, I believe, as _le plus vaste du midi_. It seemed to me the model of a good provincial inn; a big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown, labyrinthine corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule, into which the diligence, in the _bon temps_, used to penetrate, and an hospitality more expressive than that of the new caravansaries. It dates from the days when Montpellier was still accounted a fine winter re- sidence for people with weak lungs; and this rather melancholy tradition, together with the former celebrity of the school of medicine still existing there, but from which the glory has departed, helps to account for its combination of high antiquity and vast proportions.

The old hotels were usually more concentrated; but the school of medicine pa.s.sed for one of the attrac- tions of Montpellier. Long before Mentone was dis- covered or Colorado invented, British invalids travelled down through France in the post-chaise or the public coach to spend their winters in the wonderful place which boasted both a climate and a faculty. The air is mild, no doubt, but there are refinements of mild- ness which were not then suspected, and which in a more a.n.a.lytic age have carried the annual wave far beyond Montpellier. The place is charming, all the same; and it served the purpose of John Locke; who made a long stay there, between 1675 and 1679, and became acquainted with a n.o.ble fellow-visitor, Lord Pembroke, to whom he dedicated the famous Essay.

There are places that please, without your being able to say wherefore, and Montpellier is one of the num- ber. It has some charming views, from the great pro- menade of the Peyrou; but its position is not strikingly fair. Beyond this it contains a good museum and the long facades of its school, but these are its only de- finite treasures. Its cathedral struck me as quite the weakest I had seen, and I remember no other monu- ment that made up for it. The place has neither the gayety of a modern nor the solemnity of an ancient town, and it is agreeable as certain women are agree- able who are neither beautiful nor clever. An Italian would remark that it is sympathetic; a German would admit that it is _gemuthlich_. I spent two days there, mostly in the rain, and even under these circ.u.m- stances I carried away a kindly impression. I think the Hotel Nevet had something to do with it, and the sentiment of relief with which, in a quiet, even a luxurious, room that looked out on a garden, I reflected that I had washed my hands of Narbonne. The phyl- loxera has destroyed the vines in the country that sur- rounds Montpellier, and at that moment I was capable of rejoicing in the thought that I should not breakfast with vintners.

The gem of the place is the Musee Fabre, one of the best collections of paintings in a provincial city.

Francois Fabre, a native of Montpellier, died there in 1837, after having spent a considerable part of his life in Italy, where he had collected a good many valuable pictures and some very poor ones, the latter cla.s.s including several from his own hand. He was the hero of a remarkable episode, having succeeded no less a person than Vittorio Alfieri in the affections of no less a person than Louise de s...o...b..rg, Countess of Albany, widow of no less a person than Charles Edward Stuart, the second pretender to the British crown. Surely no woman ever was a.s.sociated senti- mentally with three figures more diverse, - a disqualified sovereign, an Italian dramatist, and a bad French painter. The productions of M. Fabre, who followed in the steps of David, bear the stamp of a cold me- diocrity; there is not much to be said even for the portrait of the genial countess (her life has been written by M. Saint-Rene-Taillandier, who depicts her as de- lightful), which hangs in Florence, in the gallery of the Uffizzi, and makes a pendant to a likeness of Alfieri by the same author. Stendhal, in his "Me- moires d'un Touriste," says that this work of art represents her as a cook who has pretty hands. I am delighted to have an opportunity of quoting Stendhal, whose two volumes of the "Memoires d'un Touriste"

every traveller in France should carry in his port- manteau. I have had this opportunity more than once, for I have met him at Tours, at Nantes, at Bourges; and everywhere he is suggestive. But he has the de- fect that he is never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and that his style is per- versely colorless, for a man so fond of contemplation.

His taste is often singularly false; it is the taste of the early years of the present century, the period that produced clocks surmounted with sentimental "sub- jects." Stendhal does not admire these clocks, but he almost does. He admires Domenichino and Guer- cino, and prizes the Bolognese school of painters be- cause they "spoke to the soul." He is a votary of the new cla.s.sic, is fond of tall, squire, regular buildings, and thinks Nantes, for instance, full of the "air n.o.ble."

It was a pleasure to me to reflect that five-and-forty years ago he had alighted in that city, at the very inn in which I spent a night, and which looks down on the Place Graslin and the theatre. The hotel that was the best in 1837 appears to be the best to-day. On the subject of Touraine, Stendhal is extremely refresh- ing; he finds the scenery meagre and much overrated, and proclaims his opinion with perfect frankness. He does, however, scant justice to the banks of the Loire; his want of appreciation of the picturesque - want of the sketcher's sense - causes him to miss half the charm of a landscape which is nothing if not "quiet,"

as a painter would say, and of which the felicities reveal themselves only to waiting eyes. He even despises the Indre, the river of Madame Sand. The "Memoires d'un Touriste" are written in the character of a commercial traveller, and the author has nothing to say about Chenonceaux or Chambord, or indeed about any of the chateaux of that part of France; his system being to talk only of the large towns, where he may be supposed to find a market for his goods. It was his ambition to pa.s.s for an ironmonger. But in the large towns he is usually excellent company, though as discursive as Sterne, and strangely indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of things which the poor pages now before the reader are mainly an attempt to render. It is his conviction that Alfieri, at Florence, bored the Countess of Albany ter- ribly; and he adds that the famous Gallophobe died of jealousy of the little painter from Montpellier. The Countess of Albany left her property to Fabre; and I suppose some of the pieces in the museum of his native town used to hang in the sunny saloons of that fine old palace on the Arno which is still pointed out to the stranger in Florence as the residence of Alfieri.

The inst.i.tution has had other benefactors, notably a certain M. Bruyas, who has enriched it with an extra- ordinary number of portraits of himself. As these, however, are by different hands, some of them dis- tinguished, we may suppose that it was less the model than the artists to whom M. Bruyas wished to give publicity. Easily first are two large specimens of David Teniers, which are incomparable for brilliancy and a glowing perfection of execution. I have a weak- ness for this singular genius, who combined the delicate with the grovelling, and I have rarely seen richer examples. Scarcely less valuable is a Gerard Dow which hangs near them, though it must rank lower as having kept less of its freshness. This Gerard Dow did me good; for a master is a master, whatever he may paint. It represents a woman paring carrots, while a boy before her exhibits a mouse-trap in which he has caught a frightened victim. The good-wife has spread a cloth on the top of a big barrel which serves her as a table, and on this brown, greasy napkin, of which the texture is wonderfully rendered, lie the raw vegetables she is preparing for domestic consumption.

Beside the barrel is a large caldron lined with copper, with a rim of bra.s.s. The way these things are painted brings tears to the eyes; but they give the measure of the Musee Fabre, where two specimens of Teniers and a Gerard Dow are the jewels. The Italian pictures are of small value; but there is a work by Sir Joshua Rey- nolds, said to be the only one in France, - an infant Samuel in prayer, apparently a repet.i.tion of the pic- ture in England which inspired the little plaster im- age, disseminated in Protestant lands, that we used to admire in our childhood. Sir Joshua, somehow, was an eminently Protestant painter; no one can forget that, who in the National Gallery in London has looked at the picture in which he represents several young ladies as nymphs, voluminously draped, hanging gar- lands over a statue, - a picture suffused indefinably with the Anglican spirit, and exasperating to a mem- ber of one of the Latin races. It is an odd chance, therefore, that has led him into that part of France where Protestants have been least _bien vus_. This is the country of the dragonnades of Louis XIV. and of the pastors of the desert. From the garden of the Peyrou, at Montpellier, you may see the hills of the Cevennes, to which they of the religion fled for safety, and out of which they were hunted and harried.

I have only to add, in regard to the Musee Fabre, that it contains the portrait of its founder, - a little, pursy, fat-faced, elderly man, whose countenance con- tains few indications of the power that makes distin- guished victims. He is, however, just such a personage as the mind's eye sees walking on the terrace of the Peyrou of an October afternoon in the early years of the century; a plump figure in a chocolate-colored coat and a _culotte_ that exhibits a good leg, - a culotte pro- vided with a watch-fob from which a heavy seal is suspended. This Peyrou (to come to it at last) is a wonderful place, especially to be found in a little pro- vincial city. France is certainly the country of towns that aim at completeness; more than in other lands, they contain stately features as a matter of course. We should never have ceased to hear about the Peyrou, if fortune had placed it at a Shrewsbury or a Buffalo. It is true that the place enjoys a certain celebrity at home, which it amply deserves, moreover; for nothing could be more impressive and monumental. It consists of an "elevated platform," as Murray says, - an im- mense terrace, laid out, in the highest part of the town, as a garden, and commanding in all directions a view which in clear weather must be of the finest. I strolled there in the intervals of showers, and saw only the nearer beauties, - a great pompous arch of triumph in honor of Louis XIV. (which is not, properly speaking, in the garden, but faces it, straddling across the _place_ by which you approach it from the town), an equestrian statue of that monarch set aloft in the middle of the terrace, and a very exalted and complicated fountain, which forms a background to the picture. This foun- tain gushes from a kind of hydraulic temple, or _cha- teau d'eau_, to which you ascend by broad flights of steps, and which is fed by a splendid aqueduct, stretched in the most ornamental and unexpected manner across the neighboring valley. All this work dates from the middle of the last century. The com- bination of features - the triumphal arch, or gate; the wide, fair terrace, with its beautiful view; the statue of the grand monarch; the big architectural fountain, which would not surprise one at Rome, but goes sur- prise one at Montpellier; and to complete the effect, the extraordinary aqueduct, charmingly fore-shortened, - all this is worthy of a capital, of a little court-city.

The whole place, with its repeated steps, its balus- trades, its ma.s.sive and plentiful stone-work, is full of the air of the last century, - _sent bien son dix-huitieme siecle_; none the less so, I am afraid, that, as I read in my faithful Murray, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the block, the stake, the wheel, had been erected here for the benefit of the desperate Camisards.