y as a magnificent shell. As the leases of the wretched
little houses fall in, the ground is cleared of them; and a mumbling old
woman approached me in the course of my circuit, inviting me to condole
with her on the disappearance of so many of the hovels which in the last
few hundred years (since the collapse of Carcassonne as a stronghold)
had attached themselves to the base of the walls, in the space between
the two circles. These habitations, constructed of materials taken from
the ruins, nestled there snugly enough. This intermediate space had
therefore become a kind of street, which has crumbled in turn, as the
fortress has grown up again. There are other streets beside, very
diminutive and vague, where you pick your way over heaps of rubbish and
become conscious of unexpected faces looking at you out of windows as
detached as the cherubic heads. The most definite thing in the place was
the little cafe, where the waiters, I think, must be the ghosts of the
old Visigoths; the most definite, that is, after the little chateau and
the little cathedral. Everything in the Cite is little; you can walk
round the walls in twenty minutes. On the drawbridge of the chateau,
which, with a picturesque old face, flanking towers, and a dry moat, is
to-day simply a bare _caserne_, lounged half a dozen soldiers, unusually
small. Nothing could be more odd than to see these objects enclosed in a
receptacle which has much of the appearance of an enormous toy. The Cite
and its population vaguely reminded me of an immense Noah's ark.

[Illustration]

Chapter xxiii

[Carcassonne]

Carcassone dates from the Roman occupation of Gaul. The place commanded
one of the great roads into Spain, and in the fourth century Romans and
Franks ousted each other from such a point of vantage. In the year 436
Theodoric King of the Visigoths superseded both these parties; and it
was during his occupation that the inner enceinte was raised upon the
ruins of the Roman fortifications. Most of the Visigoth towers that are
still erect are seated upon Roman substructions which appear to have
been formed hastily, probably at the moment of the Frankish invasion.
The authors of these solid defences, though occasionally disturbed, held
Carcassonne and the neighbouring country, in which they had established
their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled
by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four
centuries,