Carcassonne differs from other monumental towns in this: that it
preserves exactly the aspect of many centuries up to a certain moment,
and from that moment has "set," and has suffered no further change. You
see and touch, as you walk along its ramparts, all the generations from
that crisis in the fifth century when the public power was finally
despaired of--and after which each group of the Western Empire began to
see to its own preservation--down to that last achievement of the
thirteenth, when medieval civilisation had reached its full flower and
was ready for the decline that followed the death of St. Louis and the
extinction of the German phantasy of empire.
No other town can present so vivid and clean-cut a fossil of the seven
hundred years into which poured and melted all the dissolution of
antiquity, and out of which was formed or chrystallised the highly
specialised diversity of our modern Europe.
In the fascination of extreme age many English sites are richer;
Winchester and Canterbury may be quoted from among a hundred. In the
superimposition of age upon age of human history, Arles and Rome are far
more surprising. In historic continuity most European towns surpass it,
from Paris, whose public justice, worship, and market have kept to the
same site for quite sixteen centuries, to London, of which the city at
least preserves upon three sides the Roman limit. But no town can of its
nature give as does Carcassonne this overwhelming impression of survival
or resurrection.
* * * * *
The attitude and position of Carcassonne enforce its character. Up
above the river, but a little set back from the valley, right against
the dawn as you come to it from Toulouse through the morning, stands a
long, steep, and isolated rock, the whole summit of which from the sharp
cliff on the north to that other on the south is doubled in height by
what seems one vast wall--and more than twenty towers. Indeed, it is at
such a time, in early morning, and best in winter when the frost defines
and chisels every outline, that Carcassonne should be drawn. You then
see it in a band of dark blue-grey, all even in texture, serrated and
battlemented and towered, with the metallic shining of the dawn behind
it.
So to have seen it makes it very difficult to write of it or even to
paint; what one wishes to do is rather to work it out in enamel upon a
surface of bronze. This rock, wholly covered with the works of the city,
stands looking at the Pyrenees and holding the only level valley between
the Mediterranean and the Garonne, and even if one had read nothing
concerning it one would understand why it has filled all the legends of
the return of armies from Spain, why Victor Hugo could not rest from the
memory of it, and why it is so strongly woven in with the story of
Charlemagne.
There is another and better reason for the quality of Carcassonne, and
that is the act, to which I can recall no perfect parallel in Christian
history, by which St. Louis turned what had been a living town into a
mere stronghold. Every inhabitant of Carcassonne was transferred, not to
suburbs, but right beyond the river, a mile and more away, to the site
of that delightful town which is the Carcassonne of maps and railways,
the place where the seventeenth century meets you in graceful ornaments,
and where is, to my certain knowledge, the best inn south of parallel
45. St. Louis turned the rock into a mere stronghold, strengthened it,
built new towers, and curtained them into that unsurpassable masonry of
the central Middle Ages which you may yet admire in Aigues-Mortes and in
Carnarvon.
This political act, the removal of a whole city, may have been
accomplished in many other places; it is certainly recorded of many:
but, for the moment at least, I can remember none except Carcassonne in
which its consequences have remained. To this many causes have
contributed, but chiefly this, that the new town was transferred to the
open plain from the trammels of a narrow plateau, just at the moment
when all the towns of Western Europe were growing and breaking their
bonds; just after the principal cities of north-western Europe had got
their charters, and when Paris (the typical municipality of that age as
of our own) was trebling its area and its population.
The transference of the population once accomplished, the rock and
towers of Carcassonne ceased to change and to grow. Humanity was gone.
The fortress was still of great value in war; the Black Prince attempted
its destruction, and it is only within living memory that it ceased to
be set down on maps (and in Government offices!) as a fortified place:
but the necessity for immediate defence, and the labour which would have
remodelled it, had disappeared. There had disappeared also that eager
and destructive activity which accompanies any permanent gathering of
French families. The new town on the plain changed perpetually, and is
changing still. It has lost almost everything of the Middle Ages; it
carries, by a sort of momentum, a flavour of Louis XIV, but the masons
are at it as they are everywhere, from the Channel to the Mediterranean;
for to pull down and rebuild is the permanent recreation of the French.
The rock remains. It is put in order whenever a stone falls out of
place--no one of weight has talked nonsense here against restoration,
for the sense of the past is too strong--but though it is minutely and
continually repaired, Old Carcassonne does not change. There is no other
set of walls in Europe of which this is true.
* * * * *
Walking round the circuit of these walls and watching from their height
the long line of the mountains, one is first held by that modern
subject, the landscape, or that still more modern fascination of great
hills. Next one feels what the Middle Ages designed of mass and weight
and height, and wonders by what accident of the mind they so succeeded
in suggesting infinity: one remembers Beauvais, which is infinitely high
at evening, and the tower of Portrut, which seems bigger than any hill.
But when these commoner emotions are passed, one comes upon a very
different thing. A little tower there, jutting out perilously from the
wall, shows three courses of a _small red brick_ set in a mortar-like
stone. When I saw this kind of building I went close up and touched it
with my hand. It was Roman. I knew the signal well. I had seen that
brick, and picked it loose from an Arab stable on the edge of the
Sahara, and I had seen it jutting through moss on the high moors of
Northumberland. I know a man who reverently brought home to Sussex such
another, which he had found unbroken far beyond Damascus upon the Syrian
sand.
It is easy to speak of the Empire and to say that it established its
order from the Tyne to the Euphrates; but when one has travelled alone
and on foot up and down the world and seen its vastness and its
complexity, and yet everywhere the unity even of bricks in their
courses, then one begins to understand the name of Rome.