I Could Only Distinguish An Immense Vault,
Like A High Cavern, Without Aisles.
Here and there in
the gloom was a kneeling figure; the whole place was
mysterious and lop-sided.
The choir was curtained
off; it appeared not to correspond with the nave, - that
is, not to have the same axis. The only other ec-
clesiastical impression I gathered at Toulouse came to
me in the church of La Daurade, of which the front,
on the quay by the Garonne, was closed with scaffold-
ings; so that one entered it from behind, where it is
completely masked by houses, through a door which
has at first no traceable connection with it. It is a
vast, high, modernised, heavily decorated church, dimly
lighted at all times, I should suppose, and enriched
by the shades of evening at the time I looked into it.
I perceived that it consisted mainly of a large square,
beneath a dome, in the centre of which a single person
- a lady - was praying with the utmost absorption.
The manner of access to the church interposed such
an obstacle to the outer profanities that I had a sense
of intruding, and presently withdrew, carrying with me
a picture of the, vast, still interior, the gilded roof
gleaming in the twilight, and the solitary worshipper.
What was she praying for, and was she not almost
afraid to remain there alone?
For the rest, the picturesque at Toulouse consists
principally of the walk beside the Garonne, which is
spanned, to the faubourg of Saint-Cyprien, by a stout
brick bridge. This hapless suburb, the baseness of
whose site is noticeable, lay for days under the water
at the time of the last inundations. The Garonne
had almost mounted to the roofs of the houses, and
the place continues to present a blighted, frightened
look. Two or three persons, with whom I had some
conversation, spoke of that time as a memory of horror.
I have not done with my Italian comparisons; I shall
never have done with them. I am therefore free to
say that in the way in which Toulouse looks out on
the Garonne there was something that reminded me
vaguely of the way in which Pisa looks out on the
Arno. The red-faced houses - all of brick - along the
quay have a mixture of brightness and shabbiness, as
well as the fashion of the open _loggia_ in the top-
story. The river, with another bridge or two, might
be the Arno, and the buildings on the other side of
it - a hospital, a suppressed convent - dip their feet
into it with real southern cynicism. I have spoken of
the old Hotel d'Assezat as the best house at Toulouse;
with the exception of the cloister of the museum, it is
the only "bit" I remember. It has fallen from the
state of a noble residence of the sixteenth century to
that of a warehouse and a set of offices; but a certain
dignity lingers in its melancholy court, which is divided
from the street by a gateway that is still imposing,
and in which a clambering vine and a red Virginia-
creeper were suspended to the rusty walls of brick
stone.
The most interesting house at Toulouse is far from
being the most striking. At the door of No. 50 Rue
des Filatiers, a featureless, solid structure, was found
hanging, one autumn evening, the body of the young
Marc-Antoine Calas, whose ill-inspired suicide was to
be the first act of a tragedy so horrible. The fana-
ticism 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 rigidity, 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
suflered there, spoiled for me, for half an hour, the
impression of Toulouse.
XXII.
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 fresh-
ness 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 Cevennes 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 moun-
tains, a warm yellow light, - what more could the dif-
ficult tourist want? He left his luggage at the station,
warily determined to look at the inn before committing
himself to it.
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