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 classification. 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 noblest 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 noble, especially the arches of the second tier.
The whole church is narrow for its length, and is
singularly complete and homogeneous. 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
glass 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 brass; 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 sanctity 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.
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