at the traveller feels a "divine wrath" that
they should never have reached their full grandeur of completion, that
this great architectural work should have been begun so near the close
of the city's prosperity, and that in spite of several efforts it has
never been half completed. It is as if a fatality hung over the whole
place, and as if all the greatness Narbonne had conceived was
predestined to destruction or incompletion.

[Illustration: "THE DOOR OF THE CLOISTER."--NARBONNE.]

Of the three structures, the least interesting is the former Palace of
the Archbishops. This is now the Hotel-de-Ville, and as all the body of
the structure between the towers of the XII century was built in our day
by Viollet-le-Duc, very little of the old Palace can properly be said to
exist. Besides its two principal towers, a smaller one, a gate, and a
chapel remain. Viollet-le-Duc has constructed the Hotel-de-Ville after
the perfectly appropriate style of the XIII century, but its stone is so
new and its atmosphere so modern and republican that the traveller left
it without regret and made his way up the dark, steep, badly-paved
alley-way which leads to the door of the Cloister.

This Cloister, which separated the Palace from the Cathedral, is now
dreary and desolate and neglected. Like the Cathedral, it is Gothic,
with sadly decaying traces of graceful ornament. The little plot of
enclosed ground, which should be planted in grass or with a few flowers,
is a mere dirt court, tramped over by the few worshippers who enter the
Cathedral this way. Two or three trees grow as they will, gnarled or
straight. The sense of peaceful melancholy which the traveller had felt
in the Cloister of Beziers is wanting here. This is a place of deserted
solitude; and with a sigh for the beauty that might have been, the
traveller crossed the enclosure and entered the church by the
cloister-door.

[Illustration: "THIS IS A PLACE OF DESERTED SOLITUDE."--NARBONNE.]

Architecturally dissimilar, the fate of this Cathedral is not unlike
that of Beauvais. Each was destined to have a completed choir, and each
to remain without a nave. At Beauvais the addition of transepts adds
very materially to the beauty of the Cathedral. At Narbonne no transepts
exist. There is simply a choir, which makes a very singular disposition
of the church both religious and architectural. Entering the gates which
lead from the ambulatory to the choir, the traveller found that
Bened