senting me to one saintly remnant after another. The
impression was grotesque, but some of the objects were contained in
curious old cases of beaten silver and brass: these things at least,
which looked as if they had been transmitted from the early church, were
venerable. There was, however, a kind of wholesale sanctity about the
place which overshot the mark; it pretends to be one of the holiest
spots in the world. The effect is spoiled by the way

[Illustration: TOULOUSE SAINT-SERNIN (THE TRANSEPT)]

the sacristans hang about and offer to take you into it for ten sous--I
was accosted by two and escaped from another--and by the familiar manner
in which you pop in and out. This episode rather broke the charm of
Saint-Sernin, so that I took my departure and went in search of the
cathedral. It was scarcely worth finding, and struck me as an odd,
dislocated fragment. The front consists only of a portal beside which a
tall brick tower of a later period has been erected. The nave was
wrapped in dimness, with a few scattered lamps. I could only distinguish
an immense vault, like a high cavern, without aisles. Here and there in
the gloom was a kneeling figure; the whole place was mysterious and
lopsided. The choir was curtained off; it appeared not to correspond
with the nave--that is, not to have the same axis. The only other
ecclesiastical impression I gathered at Toulouse came to me in the
church of La Daurade, of which the front, on the quay by the Garonne,
was closed with scaffoldings; so that one entered it from behind, where
it is completely masked by houses, through a door which has at first no
traceable connection with it. It is a vast, high, modernised, heavily
decorated church, dimly lighted at all times, I should suppose, and
enriched by the shades of evening at the time I looked into it. I
perceived that it consisted mainly of a large square, beneath a dome, in
the centre of which a single person--a lady--was praying with the utmost
absorption. The manner of access to the church interposed such an
obstacle to the outer profanities that I had a sense of intruding and
presently withdrew, carrying with me a picture of the vast, still
interior, the gilded roof gleaming in the twilight, and the solitary
worshipper. What was she praying for, and was she not almost afraid to
remain there alone? For the rest, the picturesque at Toulouse consists
principally of the walk beside the Garonne, which is spanned, to the
faubou