This choir,
of extraordinary elevation, forms the whole church.
I
sat there a good while; there was no other visitor. I
had taken a great dislike to poor little Narbonne,
which struck me as sordid and overheated, and this
place seemed to extend to me, as in the Middle Ages,
the privilege of sanctuary. It is a very solemn corner.
The other peculiarity of the cathedral is that, exter-
nally, it bristles with battlements, having anciently
formed part of the defences of the _archeveche_, which
is beside it and which connects it with the hotel de
ville. This combination of the church and the for-
tress is very curious, and during the Middle Ages was
not without its value. The palace of the former arch-
bishops of Narbonne (the hotel de ville of to-day
forms part of it) was both an asylum and an arsenal
during the hideous wars by which the Languedoc was
ravaged in the thirteenth century. The whole mass
of buildings is jammed together in a manner that
from certain points of view makes it far from apparent
which feature is which. The museum occupies several
chambers at the top of the hotel de ville, and is not
an imposing collection. It was closed, but I induced
the portress to let me in, - a silent, cadaverous person,
in a black coif, like a _beguine_, who sat knitting in one
of the windows while I went the rounds. The number
of Roman fragments is small, and their quality is not
the finest; I must add that this impression was hastily
gathered. There is indeed a work of art in one of
the rooms which creates a presumption in favor of the
place, - the portrait (rather a good one) of a citizen
of Narbonne, whose name I forget, who is described
as having devoted all his time and his intelligence to
collecting the objects by which the. visitor is sur-
rounded. This excellent man was a connoisseur, and
the visitor is doubtless often an ignoramus.
XXV.
"Cette, with its glistening houses white,
Curves with the curving beach away
To where the lighthouse beacons bright,
Far in the bay."
That stanza of Matthew Arnold's, which I hap-
pened to remember, gave a certain importance to the
half-hour I spent in the buffet of the station at Cette
while I waited for the train to Montpellier. I had left
Narbonne in the afternoon, and by the time I reached
Cette the darkness had descended. I therefore missed
the sight of the glistening houses, and had to console
myself with that of the beacon in the bay, as well as
with a _bouillon_ of which I partook at the buffet afore-
said; for, since the morning, I had not ventured to
return to the table d'hote at Narbonne. The Hotel
Nevet, at Montpellier, which I reached an hour later,
has an ancient renown all over the south of France, -
advertises itself, I believe, as _le plus vaste du midi_. It
seemed to me the model of a good provincial inn; a
big rambling, creaking establishment, with brown,
labyrinthine corridors, a queer old open-air vestibule,
into which the diligence, in the _bon temps_, used to
penetrate, and an hospitality more expressive than
that of the new caravansaries.
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