whose ill-inspired suicide was to be the first act of a tragedy so
horrible. The fanaticism 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 passionate 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
rigour, 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 suffered there, spoiled for me, for half an
hour, the impression of Toulouse.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxii
[Carcassonne]
I spent but a few hours at Carcassonne; 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 freshness 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 Carcassonne 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 Cévennes 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 mountains, a warm yellow light--what
more could the difficult 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 Carcassonne, perfectly distinct, and each with
excellent claims to the title. They have settled the matter between
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 Cité. You see nothing of the Cité from the
station; it is masked by the agglomeration of the _ville-basse_, which
is relatively (but only relatively) new. A wonderful avenue of acacias
leads to it from the station--leads past it, rather, and conducts you to
a little high-backed bridge over the Aude, beyond which, detached and
erect, a distinct mediæval silhouette, the Cité presents itself. Like a
rival shop on the invidious side of a street, it has "no connection"
with the establishment across the way, although the two places are
united (if old Carcassonne may be said to be united to anything) by a
vague little rustic faubourg. Perched on its solid pedestal, the perfect
detachment of the Cité is what first strikes you. To take leave, without
delay, of the _ville-basse_, I may say that the splendid acacias I have
mentioned flung a summerish dusk over the place, in which a few
scattered remains of stout walls and big bastions looked venerable 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 municipality. 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 neighbouring
hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Doré, 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, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up
to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, complete outer walls and
complete inner (these, elaborately fortified, 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
Narbonnaise, 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 enceinte--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 grassy level at the foot of the big grey 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 grass, which was dotted here and there with a humble native dozing
away the golden afternoon. The natives of the elder Carcassonne are all
humble; for the core of the Cité has shrunken and decayed, and there is
little life among the ruins. A few tenacious labourers who work in the
neighbouring fields or in the _ville-basse_, and sundry octogenarians of
both sexes, who are dying where they have lived and contribute much to
the pictorial effect--these are the principal inhabitants. The process
of converting 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 Cité. 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 architects have had such a chance,
and M. Viollet-le-Duc must have been the envy of the whole restoring
fraternity. The image of a more crumbling Carcassonne 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 crenellations, 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 Narbonnaise 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 paralysed 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 Cité, 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 mediæval 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 Carcassonne. I had not
pursued my circuit of the walls much farther 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-basse_, a gentleman, and, as I
afterwards learned, an employé at the prefecture--a person, in short,
much esteemed at Carcassonne. (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 Cité_--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 Carcassonne and the great
curiosity--only by application at the lodge of the regular custodian, a
remarkable functionary, who, half an hour later, when I had been
introduced to him by my friend the amateur, marched me over the
fortifications with a tremendous accompaniment 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 portentous
amount of history embedded in them, beginning with Romans and Visigoths;
here and there are marks of old breaches hastily repaired. We passed
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 shell. As the leases of the wretched
little houses fall in, the ground is cleared of them; and a mumbling old
woman approached 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 Carcassonne as a stronghold)
had attached themselves to the base of the walls, in the space between
the two circles. These habitations, constructed of materials taken from
the ruins, nestled there snugly enough. This intermediate space 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 café, where the waiters, I think, must be the ghosts of the
old Visigoths; the most definite, that is, after the little château and
the little cathedral. Everything in the Cité is little; you can walk
round the walls in twenty minutes. On the drawbridge of the château,
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. Nothing could be more odd than to see these objects enclosed in a
receptacle which has much of the appearance of an enormous toy. The Cité
and its population vaguely reminded me of an immense Noah's ark.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxiii
[Carcassonne]
Carcassone 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
was during his occupation 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 substructions 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
Carcassonne and the neighbouring country, 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 derive 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
Carcassonne, then forming part of the realm of the viscounts of Béziers
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 accustomed to success, and the town succumbed in the course of a
fortnight. Thirty-one years later, having passed into the hands of the
King of France, it was again besieged by the young Raymond de Trincavel,
the last of the viscounts of Béziers; 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 century, multiplied the defences of
Carcassonne, which was one of the bulwarks of their kingdom on the
Spanish quarter; and from this time forth, being regarded 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 capable.
I have mentioned that my obliging friend the _amoureux-fou_ handed me
over to the doorkeeper of the citadel. I should add that I was at first
committed
[Illustration: CARCASSONNE.]
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
Carcassonne and had never before had the curiosity to come up to the
Cité. There was something brilliant certainly in that. The _gardien_ was
an extraordinarily typical little Frenchman, who struck me even more
forcibly than the wonders of the inner enceinte; and as I am bound to
assume, 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 perpendicular spirit, his
flushed face, expressive protuberant 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. Viollet-le-Duc, I suppose he meant), and this
fact was more illustrative than all the others. It reminded me, as one
is reminded at every turn, of the democratic conditions 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 understand the red radicalism of France, the
revolutions, the barricades, the sinister passion for theories. (I do
not, of course, take upon myself to say that the individual 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 civilisation, 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
_netteté_, a faculty of exposition, such as the English gentleman is
rarely either blessed or cursed with.
This brilliant, this suggestive warden of Carcassonne marched us about
for an hour, haranguing, explaining, illustrating as he went; it was a
complete little lecture, such as might have been delivered at the Lowell
Institute, on the manner in which a first-rate _place forte_ used to be
attacked and defended. Our peregrinations made it very clear that
Carcassonne was impregnable; it is impossible to imagine without having
seen them such refinements of immurement, such ingenuities of
resistance. We passed along the battlements and _chemins de ronde_,
ascended and descended towers, crawled under arches, peered out of
loopholes, lowered ourselves into dungeons, halted in all sorts of tight
places while the purpose of something or other was
[Illustration: CARCASSONNE]
described to us. It was very curious, very interesting; above all it was
very pictorial, and involved perpetual peeps into the little crooked,
crumbling, sunny, grassy, empty Cité. 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 positive, 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 Carcassonne is a splendid achievement. The little
custodian dismissed us at last, after having, as usual, inducted us into
the inevitable 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
_album-panorama_--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 reminded me of the
energetic process by which I had seen mineral waters bottled. All this
while the afternoon had grown more lovely; the sunset had deepened, the
horizon of hills grown purple; the mass 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 colour. This church has high beauty
and value, but I will spare the reader a presentation of details which I
myself 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 sanctity. After leaving it and passing out of the two
circles of walls, I treated myself, in the most infatuated manner, to
another walk round the Cité. 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 silhouette. 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
Carcassonne. But I had in a measure engaged to proceed to Narbonne, and
there was a certain magic in that name which gave me strength--Narbonne,
the richest city in Roman Gaul.
[Illustration]
Chapter xxiv
[Narbonne]