things form part of one of
the most interesting and touching episodes of the social history of the
eighteenth century. The story has the fatal progression, the dark
rigour, of one of the tragic dramas of the Greeks. Jean Calas, advanced
in life, blameless, bewildered, protesting his innocence, had been
broken on the wheel; and the sight of his decent dwelling, which brought
home to me all that had been suffered there, spoiled for me, for half an
hour, the impression of Toulouse.

[Illustration]

Chapter xxii

[Carcassonne]

I spent but a few hours at Carcassonne; but those hours had a rounded
felicity, and I cannot do better than transcribe from my note-book the
little record made at the moment. Vitiated as it may be by crudity and
incoherency, it has at any rate the freshness of a great emotion. This
is the best quality that a reader may hope to extract from a narrative
in which "useful information" and technical lore even of the most
general sort are completely absent. For Carcassonne is moving, beyond a
doubt; and the traveller who in the course of a little tour in France
may have felt himself urged, in melancholy moments, to say that on the
whole the disappointments are as numerous as the satisfactions, must
admit that there can be nothing better than this.

The country after you leave Toulouse continues to be charming; the more
so that it merges its flatness in the distant Cevennes on one side, and
on the other, far away on your right, in the richer range of the
Pyrenees. Olives and cypresses, pergolas and vines, terraces on the
roofs of houses, soft, iridescent mountains, a warm yellow light--what
more could the difficult tourist want? He left his luggage at the
station, warily determined to look at the inn before committing himself
to it. It was so evident (even to a cursory glance) that it might easily
have been much better, that he simply took his way to the town, with the
whole of a superb afternoon before him. When I say the town, I mean the
towns; there being two at Carcassonne, perfectly distinct, and each with
excellent claims to the title. They have settled the matter between
them, however, and the elder, the shrine of pilgrimage, to which the
other is but a stepping-stone, or even, as I may say, a humble door-mat,
takes the name of the Cite. You see nothing of the Cite from the
station; it is masked by the agglomeration of the _ville-basse_, which
is relatively (but only relatively) new. A