rg of Saint-Cyprien, by a stout brick bridge. This hapless suburb,
the baseness of whose site is noticeable, lay for days under the water
at the time of the last inundations. The Garonne had almost mounted to
the roofs of the houses, and the place continues to present a blighted,
frightened look. Two or three persons with whom I had some conversation
spoke of that time as a memory of horror. I have not done with my
Italian comparisons; I shall never have done with them. I am therefore
free to say that in the way in which Toulouse looks out on the Garonne
there was something that reminded me vaguely of the way in which Pisa
looks out on the Arno. The red-faced houses--all of brick--along the
quay have a mixture of brightness and shabbiness, as well as the fashion
of the open _loggia_ in the top-storey. The river, with another bridge
or two, might be the Arno, and the buildings on the other side of it--a
hospital, a suppressed convent--dip their feet into it with real
southern cynicism. I have spoken of the old Hotel d'Assezat as the best
house at Toulouse; with the exception of the cloister of the museum, it
is the only "bit" I remember. It has fallen from the state of a noble
residence of the sixteenth century to that of a warehouse and a set of
offices; but a certain dignity lingers in its melancholy court, which is
divided from the street by a gateway that is still imposing and in which
a clambering vine and a red Virginia-creeper were suspended to the rusty
walls of brick and stone.

The most interesting house at Toulouse is far from being the most
striking. At the door of No. 50 Rue des Filatiers, a featureless, solid
structure, was found

[Illustration: TOULOUSE--THE GARONNE]

hanging, one autumn evening, the body of the young Marc-Antoine Calas,
whose ill-inspired suicide was to be the first act of a tragedy so
horrible. The fanaticism aroused in the townsfolk by this incident; the
execution by torture of Jean Calas, accused as a Protestant of having
hanged his son, who had gone over to the Church of Rome; the ruin of the
family; the claustration of the daughters; the flight of the widow to
Switzerland; her introduction to Voltaire; the excited zeal of that
incomparable partisan and the passionate persistence with which, from
year to year, he pursued a reversal of judgment till at last he obtained
it and devoted the tribunal of Toulouse to execration and the name of
the victims to lasting wonder and pity--these