I spent but a few hours at Carcassonne;but those hours had a rounded felicity,and I cannot do better than transcribe from my notebook the little record made at the moment.Vitiated as it may be by crudity and incoherency,it has at any rate the freshness 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 mountains,a warm yellow light,what more could the difficult 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 Carcassonne,perfectly distinct,and each with excellent claims to the title.They have settled the matter between them,however,and the elder,the shrine of pilgrimage,to which the other is but a steppingstone,or even,as I may say,a humble doormat,takes the name of the Cite.You see nothing of the Cite from the station;it is masked by the agglomeration of the villebasse,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 highbacked bridge over the Aude,beyond which,detached and erect,a distinct mediaeval silhouette,the Cite presents itself.Like a rival shop,on the invidious 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 faubourg.Perched on its solid pedestal,the perfect detachment of the Cite is what first strikes you.To take leave,without delay,of the villebasse,I may say that the splendid acacias I have mentioned flung a summerish dusk over the place,in which a few scattered remains of stout walls and big bastions looked venerable and picturesque.A little boulevard winds round the town,planted with trees and garnished with more benches than I ever saw provided by a softhearted municipality.This precinct had a warm,lazy,dusty,southern look,as if the people sat outofdoors 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,grassgrown 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 fortified,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 Narbonnaise,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 sallyport,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 enceinte,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 fillingin 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.Afew tenacious laborers,who work in the neighboring fields or in the villebasse,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 converting 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.
