he rooms were closed.

[Illustration]

Chapter xx

[Toulouse: the Capitol]

The history of Toulouse is detestable, saturated with blood and perfidy;
and the ancient custom of the Floral Games, grafted upon all sorts of
internecine traditions, seems, with its false pastoralism, its mock
chivalry, its display of fine feelings, to set off rather than to
mitigate these horrors. The society was founded in the fourteenth
century, and it has held annual meetings ever since--meetings at which
poems in the fine old _langue d'oc_ are declaimed and a blushing
laureate is chosen. This business takes place in the Capitol, before the
chief magistrate of the town, who is known as the _capitoul_, and of all
the pretty women as well--a class very numerous at Toulouse. It is
unusual to present a finer person than that of the portress who
pretended to show me the apartments in which the Floral Games are held;
a big, brown, expansive woman, still in the prime of life, with a
speaking eye, an extraordinary assurance, and a pair of magenta
stockings, which were inserted into the neatest and most polished little
black sabots, and which, as she clattered up the stairs before me,
lavishly displaying them, made her look like the heroine of an
_opera-bouffe_. Her talk was all in _n_'s, _g_'s and _d_'s, and in mute
_e_'s strongly accented, as _autre_, _theatre_, _splendide_--the last
being an epithet she applied to everything the Capitol contained, and
especially to a horrible picture representing the famous Clemence
Isaure, the reputed foundress of the poetical contest, presiding on one
of these occasions. I wondered whether Clemence Isaure had been anything
like this terrible Toulousaine of to-day, who would have been a capital
figure-head for a floral game. The lady in whose honour the picture I
have just mentioned was painted is a somewhat mythical personage, and
she is not to be found in the "Biographie Universelle." She is, however,
a very graceful myth; and if she never existed, her statue at least
does--a shapeless effigy transferred to the Capitol from the so-called
tomb of Clemence in the old church of La Daurade. The great hall in
which the Floral Games are held was encumbered with scaffoldings, and I
was unable to admire the long series of busts of the bards who have won
prizes and the portraits of all the capitouls of Toulouse. As a
compensation I was introduced to a big bookcase filled with the poems
that have been crown