frontier--Gerona--Crowded platform--What
H. C. thought--Unpoetical incident--From the sublime to the
ridiculous.

The hours went on and the sun declined, and we looked upon the wonderful
old city of Carcassonne.

Rising out of the plain the great limestone rock was crowned by this
fortress of the Middle Ages, its walls and round towers clearly outlined
against the blue sky. These enclose a dead world given up to the poor
and struggling. Its steep, narrow streets have no longer the faintest
echo of military glories. The inner walls date back to the Visigothic
kings; the foundations of some of the towers are Roman, but nothing of
the outer walls seems later than the twelfth century. Here in 1210 the
army of crusaders under Simon de Montfort laid siege, the cruel Abbot of
Citeaux most determined of the enemy. The massacre at Beziers had just
taken place, de Montfort foremost in eagerness to shed blood. Some had
escaped to this little City of Refuge, amongst them the brave Vicomte de
Beziers: one of those men of whom the world has seen not a few, saving
lives at the cost of their own. The little fortress unable to hold out
was taken, and again the massacre was terrible, Beziers himself dying in
prison after great suffering.

A hundred and fifty years later it more successfully resisted the Black
Prince, who, after scattering terror right and left in the plains of
Languedoc, found that he had to retire from these walls baffled and
mortified. To-day they still stand, the most perfect mediaeval monument
in France.

The new town lies in the plain, quietly industrious as the old is silent
and dead, modern and commonplace as the other is ancient and romantic.
Trees overshadow the boulevards, costly fountains plash through the hot
days and nights of summer, running streams make the air musical and
reflect the sapphire skies.

On one side runs the great Canal du Midi, Canal des deux Mers, as it is
called, uniting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. Two hundred and
fifty years ago it was one of the finest engineering works in the world,
and perhaps would never have been finished but for the encouragement of
le Grand Monarque, prime mover in that _age d'or_ when the literary
firmament was studded with such stars of the first order as Moliere,
Corneille, Lafontaine, Bossuet, Fenelon, Pascal, and last, not least,
Madame de Sevigne. There came a crowd of splendours, a succession of
startling events, into that lengthen