broadly arched. As the eye continues down its length, it is met by the
south aisle of the choir,--opening directly into the centre of the nave.
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
Albanus, 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.