The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  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. 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 scattered remains of stout walls and big bastions looked vener- able and picturesque. A little boulevard winds round the town, planted with trees and garnished with more benches than I ever saw provided by a soft-hearted municipality. This precinct had a warm, lazy, dusty, southern look, as if the people sat out-of-doors a great deal, and wandered about in the stillness of summer nights. The figure of the elder town, at these hours, must be ghostly enough on its neighboring hill. Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo. It is almost too perfect, - as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum. A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun. It has a double enceinte, complete outer walls and complete inner (these, elaborately forti- fied, are the more curious); and this congregation of ramparts, towers, bastions, battlements, barbicans, is as fantastic and romantic as you please. The approach I mention here leads to the gate that looks toward Toulouse, - the Porte de l’Aude. There is a second, on the other side, called, I believe, the Porte Nar- bonnaise, a magnificent gate, flanked with towers thick and tall, defended by elaborate outworks; and these two apertures alone admit you to the place, - putting aside a small sally-port, protected by a great bastion, on the quarter that looks toward the Pyrenees.

  As a votary, always, in the first instance, of a general impression, I walked all round the outer en- ceinte, - a process on the very face of it entertaining. I took to the right of the Porte de l’Aude, without entering it, where the old moat has been filled in. The filling-in of the moat has created a grassy level at the foot of the big gray towers, which, rising at frequent intervals, stretch their stiff curtain of stone from point to point. The curtain drops without a fold upon the quiet grass, which was dotted here and there with a humble native, dozing away the golden afternoon. The natives of the elder Carcassonne are all humble; for the core of the Cite has shrunken and decayed, and there is little life among the ruins. A few tenacious laborers, who work in the neighboring fields or in the ville-basse, and sundry octogenarians of both sexes, who are dying where they have lived, and contribute much to the pictorial effect, - these are the principal inhabitants. The process of con- verting the place from an irresponsible old town into a conscious “specimen” has of course been attended with eliminations; the population has, as a general thing, been restored away. I should lose no time in saying that restoration is the great mark of the Cite. M. Viollet-le-Duc has worked his will upon it, put it into perfect order, revived the fortifications in every detail. I do not pretend to judge the performance, carried out on a scale and in a spirit which really impose themselves on the imagination. Few archi- tects have had such a chance, and M. Viollet-le-Duc must have been the envy of the whole restoring fra- ternity. The image of a more crumbling Carcassonne rises in t
he mind, and there is no doubt that forty years ago the place was more affecting. On the other hand, as we see it to-day, it is a wonderful evocation; and if there is a great deal of new in the old, there is plenty of old in the new. The repaired crenella- tions, the inserted patches, of the walls of the outer circle sufficiently express this commixture. My walk brought me into full view of the Pyrenees, which, now that the sun had begun to sink and the shadows to grow long, had a wonderful violet glow. The platform at the base of the walls has a greater width on this side, and it made the scene more complete. Two or three old crones had crawled out of the Porte Nar- bonnaise, to examine the advancing visitor; and a very ancient peasant, lying there with his back against a tower, was tending half a dozen lean sheep. A poor man in a very old blouse, crippled and with crutches lying beside him, had been brought out and placed on a stool, where he enjoyed the afternoon as best he might. He looked so ill and so patient that I spoke to him; found that his legs were paralyzed and he was quite helpless. He had formerly been seven years in the army, and had made the campaign of Mexico with Bazaine. Born in the old Cite, he had come back there to end his days. It seemed strange, as he sat there, with those romantic walls behind him and the great picture of the Pyrenees in front, to think that he had been across the seas to the far-away new world, had made part of a famous expedition, and was now a cripple at the gate of the mediaeval city where he had played as a child. All this struck me as a great deal of history for so modest a figure, - a poor little figure that could only just unclose its palm for a small silver coin.

  He was not the only acquaintance I made at Car- cassonne. I had not pursued my circuit of the walls much further when I encountered a person of quite another type, of whom I asked some question which had just then presented, itself, and who proved to be the very genius of the spot. He was a sociable son of the ville-basse, a gentleman, and, as I afterwards learned, an employe at the prefecture, - a person, in short, much esteemed at Carcassonne. (I may say all this, as he will never read these pages.) He had been ill for a month, and in the company of his little dog was taking his first airing; in his own phrase he was amoureux-fou de la Cite, - he could lose no time in coming back to it. He talked of it, indeed, as a lover, and, giving me for half an hour the advantage of his company, showed me all the points of the place. (I speak here always of the outer enceinte; you penetrate to the inner - which is the specialty of Carcassonne, and the great curiosity - only by application at the lodge of the regular custodian, a remarkable func- tionary, who, half an hour later, when I had been in- troduced to him by my friend the amateur, marched me over the fortifications with a tremendous accompani- ment of dates and technical terms.) My companion pointed out to me in particular the traces of different periods in the structure of the walls. There is a por- tentous amount of history embedded in them, begin- ning with Romans and Visigoths; here and there are marks of old breaches, hastily repaired. We passed into the town, - into that part of it not included in the citadel. It is the queerest and most fragmentary little place in the world, as everything save the fortifications is being suffered to crumble away, in order that the spirit of M. Viollet-le-Duc alone may pervade it, and it may subsist simply as a magnificent shell. As the leases of the wretched little houses fall in, the ground is cleared of them; and a mumbling old woman ap- proached me in the course of my circuit, inviting me to condole with her on the disappearance of so many of the hovels which in the last few hundred years (since the collapse of Carcassonne as a stronghold) had attached themselves to the base of the walls, in the space between the two circles. These habitations, constructed of materials taken from the ruins, nestled there snugly enough. This intermediate space had therefore become a kind of street, which has crumbled in turn, as the fortress has grown up again. There are other streets, beside, very diminutive and vague, where you pick your way over heaps of rubbish and become conscious of unexpected faces looking at you out of windows as detached as the cherubic heads. The most definite thing in the place was the little cafe, where. the waiters, I think, must be the ghosts of the old Visigoths; the most definite, that is, after the little chateau and the little cathedral. Everything in the Cite is little; you can walk round the walls in twenty minutes. On the drawbridge of the chateau, which, with a picturesque old face, flanking towers, and a dry moat, is to-day simply a bare caserne, lounged half a dozen soldiers, unusually small. No- thing could be more odd than to see these objects en- closed in a receptacle which has much of the appear- ance of an enormous toy. The Cite and its population vaguely reminded me of an immense Noah’s ark.

  XXIII.

  Carcassonne dates from the Roman occupation of Gaul. The place commanded one of the great roads into Spain, and in the fourth century Romans and Franks ousted each other from such a point of vantage. In the year 436, Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, superseded both these parties; and it is during his oc- cupation that the inner enceinte was raised upon the ruins of the Roman fortifications. Most of the Visigoth towers that are still erect are seated upon Roman sub- structions which appear to have been formed hastily, probably at the moment of the Frankish invasion. The authors of these solid defences, though occasionally disturbed, held Carcassonne and the neighboring coun- try, in which they had established their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four centuries, of which no traces remain. These facts I derived from a source no more recondite than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc, - a very luminous description of the fortifications, which you may buy from the accomplished custodian. The writer makes a jump to the year 1209, when Carcassonne, then forming part of the realm of the viscounts of Beziers and infected by the Albigensian heresy, was besieged, in the name of the Pope, by the terrible Simon de Montfort and his army of crusaders. Simon was ac- customed to success, and the town succumbed in the course of a fortnight. Thirty-one years later, having passed into the hands of the King of France, it was again besieged by the young Raymond de Trincavel, the last of the viscounts of Beziers; and of this siege M. Viollet-le-Duc gives a long and minute account, which the visitor who has a head for such things may follow, with the brochure in hand, on the fortifications themselves. The young Raymond de Trincavel, baffled and repulsed, retired at the end of twenty-four days. Saint Louis and Philip the Bold, in the thirteenth cen- tury, multiplied the defences of Carcassonne, which was one of the bulwarks of their kingdom on the Spanish quarter; and from this time forth, being re- garded as impregnable, the place had nothing to fear. It was not even attacked; and when, in 1355, Edward the Black Prince marched into it, the inhabitants had opened the gates to the conqueror before whom all Languedoc was prostrate. I am not one of those who, as I said just now, have a head for such things, and having extracted these few facts had made all the use of M. Viollet-le-Duc’s, pamphlet of which I was cap- able.

  I have mentioned that my obliging friend the amoureux-fou handed me over to the door-keeper of the citadel. I should add that I was at first committed to the wife of this functionary, a stout peasant-woman, who took a key down from a nail, conducted me to a postern door, and ushered me into the presence of her husband. Having just begun his rounds with a party of four persons, he was not many steps in advance. I added myself perforce to this party, which was not brilliantly composed, except that two of its members were gendarmes in full toggery, who announced in the course of our tour that they had been stationed for a year at Carcassonne, and had never before had the curiosity to come up to the Cite. There was something brilliant, certainly, in that. The gardien was an extra- ordinarily typical little Frenchman, who struck me even more forcibly than the wonders of the inner enceinte; and as I am bound to assume, at whatever cost to my literary vanity, that there is not the slightest danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public property. With his diminutive stature and his per- pendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuber- ant eyes, high peremptory voice, extreme volubility, lucidity, and neatness of utterance,
he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. He knew absolutely what he was about, understood the place thoroughly, and constantly reminded his audience of what he himself had done in the way of excavations and reparations. He described himself as the brother of the architect of the work actually going forward (that which has been done since the death of M. Viol- let-le-Duc, I suppose he meant), and this fact was more illustrative than all the others. It reminded me, as one is reminded at every turn, of the democratic con- ditions of French life: a man of the people, with a wife en bonnet, extremely intelligent, full of special knowledge, and yet remaining essentially of the people, and showing his intelligence with a kind of ferocity, of defiance. Such a personage helps one to under- stand the red radicalism of France, the revolutions, the barricades, the sinister passion for theories. (I do not, of course, take upon myself to say that the indi- vidual I describe - who can know nothing of the liberties I am taking with him - is actually devoted to these ideals; I only mean that many such devotees must have his qualities.) In just the nuance that I have tried to indicate here, it is a terrible pattern of man. Permeated in a high degree by civilization, it is yet untouched by the desire which one finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate to the figure of the gentleman. On the other hand, a nettete, a faculty of exposition, such as the English gentleman is rarely either blessed or cursed with.