Chapter 22

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. It was so evident (even to a cursory
glance) that it might easily have been much better
that he simply took his way to the town, with the
whole of a superb afternoon before him. When I say
the town, I mean the towns; there being two at Car-
cassonne, perfectly distinct, and each with excellent
claims to the title. They have settled the matter be-
tween them, however, and the elder, the shrine of
pilgrimage, to which the other is but a stepping-stone,
or even, as I may say, a humble door-mat, takes the
name of the Cite. You see nothing of the Cite from
the station; it is masked by the agglomeration of the
_ville-basse_, which is relatively (but only relatively) new.
A wonderful avenue of acacias leads to it from the
station, - leads past, rather, and conducts you to a
little high-backed bridge over the Aude, beyond which,
detached and erect, a distinct mediaeval silhouette, the
Cite presents itself. Like a rival shop, on the in-
vidious side of a street, it has "no connection" with
the establishment across the way, although the two
places are united (if old Carcassonne may be said to be
united to anything) by a vague little rustic fau-
bourg. Perched on its solid pedestal, the perfect de-
tachment of the Cite is what first strikes you. To take
leave, without delay, of the _ville-basse_, I may say that
the splendid acacias I have mentioned flung a sum-
merish dusk over the place, in which a few