Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France Part 10

Except for this curiously bad juxtaposition, both are normally constructed, and each is of so differing a phase of Gothic that they give the effect of two adjoining churches. The choir was begun in the late XII century, on a new axis, and was evidently the commencement of an entire and improved re-construction. In spite of the poorly planned restoration in the XVII century, the worthy conception of this choir is still realised. It is severe, lofty Gothic, majestic by its own intrinsic virtue, and doubly so in comparison with the uncouth puzzle-box effect of the whole. Its unity came upon the traveller with a shock of surprise, relieving and beautiful, and after he had walked about its high, narrow aisles and refreshed his disappointed vision, he left the Cathedral quickly--looking neither to the right nor to the left, without a trace of the temptation of Lot's wife, to "glance backward."

[Sidenote: Montauban.]

Although Montauban was founded on the site of a Roman station, the Mons Alba.n.u.s, it is really a city of the late Middle Ages, re-created, as it were, by Alphonse I., Count of Toulouse in 1144. And it was even a greater hot-bed of heretics than Beziers. Incited first by hatred of the neighbouring monks of Le Moustier, and then by the bitter agonies of the Inquisition, it became fervently Albigensian, and as fervently Huguenot; and even now it has many Protestant inhabitants and a Protestant Faculty teaching Theology.

The Montauban of the present day is busy and prosperous, very prettily situated on the turbid little Tarn. In spite of her constant loyalty to the Huguenot cause, perhaps partly because of it, she has had three successive Cathedrals; Saint-Martin, burned in 1562; the Pro-cathedral of Saint-Jacques; and, finally, Notre-Dame, the present episcopal church, a heavy structure in the Italian style of the XVIII century.

Large and light and bare, the nudeness of the interior is uncouth, and the stiff exterior, decorated with statues, impresses one as pleasantly as clothes upon crossed bean-poles. It is artificial and mannered; the last of the City Cathedrals of Languedoc and the least. If the notorious vices of the XVIII century were as bad as its style of ecclesiastical architecture, they must have been indeed monstrous.

END OF VOLUME I.