te of all the centres of heresy, and the centuries
of struggle seem only to have strengthened the fierceness of its faith.
In 1525, when the Duke de Rohan was absent and a royal army again
summoned it to submission and conversion, the Duchess had herself
carried from a sick bed to the gate of the city which was threatened,
and it is related that the inhabitants of all classes, men, women, and
children, without distinction of sex or age, armed themselves and rushed
victoriously to her aid. Thirty-five years later, their children sacked
churches, destroyed altars and images, and drove out monks and nuns.

Bellicose incidents make history a thrilling story, but they are
accompanied by such material destruction that they too often rob a city
of its greatest treasures, and leave it, as far as architectural
interest is concerned, an arid waste. Such a place is Castres,
prosperous, industrial, historically dramatic, but actually commonplace.
Old houses, picturesque and mouldy, with irregular, overhanging eaves,
lean along the banks of the little river as they are wont to line the
banks of every old stream of the Midi, and they are nearly all the
remains of Castres' Mediaevalism. For her streets are well-paved,
trolleys pass to and fro, department stores are frequent, and that most
modern of vehicles, the automobile, does not seem anachronistic. No
building could be more in harmony with the city's atmosphere of
uninteresting prosperity than its Cathedral, and he who enters in search
of beauty and repose, is doomed to miserable disappointment.

Confronted in the XIV century by a growing heresy, John XXII devised,
among other less Christian methods of combat, that of the creations of
Sees, whose power and dignity of rank should check the progress of the
enemies of the Church; and in 1317, that year which saw the beginning of
so many of these new Sees, the old Benedictine Abbey of Castres, lying
in the very centre of Protestantism, was created a Bishopric. The
century, if unpropitious to Catholicism, was favourable to architecture,
the Abbey was of ancient foundation, and from either of these facts, a
fine Cathedral might reasonably be hoped for,--a dim Abbey-church whose
rounded arches are lost in the gloom of its vaulting, or a bit of
southern Gothic which the newly consecrated prelate might have
ambitiously planned. But the Cathedral of Saint-Benoit is neither of
these, for it was re-constructed in the XVII century, the XVII ce