Prose Idylls, New and Old

by Charles Kingsley

But these Albigenses must have had something in their hearts for which it was worth while to die. At Aviguonet, that little grey town on the crag above the railway, they burst into the place, maddened by the cruelties of the Inquisitor (an archdeacon, if I recollect rightly, from Toulouse), and slew him then and there. They were shut up in the town, and withstood heroically a long and miserable siege. At last they were starved out. The conquerors offered them their lives—so say the French stories—if they would recant. But they would not. They were thrust together into one of those stone-walled enclosures below the town, heaped over with vine-twigs and maize-stalks, and burned alive; and among them a young lady of the highest rank, who had passed through all the horrors of the siege, and was offered life, wealth, and honour, if she would turn.

Surely profligate infidels do not so die; and these poor souls, whatever were their sins or their confusions, must be numbered among the heroes of the human race.

But the world has mended since then, and so has the French character. Even before the Revolution of 1793, it was softening fast. The massacres of 1562 were not as horrible as those of the Albigense Crusade, though committed—which the former were not—under severe provocation. The massacres of 1793—in spite of all that has been said—were far less horrible than those of 1562, though they were the outpouring of centuries of pardonable fury and indignation. The crimes of the Terreur Blanche, at the Restoration—though ugly things were done in the south, especially in Nismes—were far less horrible again; though they were, for the most part, acts of direct personal retaliation on the republicans of 1793. And since then the French heart has softened fast. The irritating sense of hereditary wrong has passed away. The Frenchman conceives that justice is done to him, according to his own notions thereof. He has his share of the soil, without which no Celtic populace will ever be content. He has fair play in the battle of life; and a ‘Carrière ouverte aux talens.’ He has equal law and justice between man and man. And he is content; and under the sunshine of contentment and self-respect, his native good-nature expands; and he shows himself what he is, not merely a valiant and capable, but an honest, kindly, charitable man.

Yes. France has grown better, and has been growing better, I believe, for centuries past. And the difference between the France of the middle age and the France of the present day, is fitly typified by the difference between the new Carcassone below and the old Carcassone above, where every traveller, even if he be no antiquarian, should stop and gaze about a while.

The contrast is complete; and one for which a man who loves his fellow-men should surely return devout thanks to Almighty God. Below, on the west bank of the river, is the new town, spreading and growing, unwalled, for its fortifications are now replaced by boulevards and avenues; full of handsome houses; squares where, beneath the plane-tree shade, marble fountains pour out perpetual health and coolness; manufactories of gay woollens; healthy, cheerful, market folk; comfortable burghers; industry and peace. We pass outside to the great basin of the Canal de Languedoc, and get more avenues of stately trees, and among them the red marble statue of Riquet, whose genius planned and carried out the mighty canal which joins the ocean to the sea; the wonder of its day, which proved the French to be, at least in the eighteenth century, the master-engineers of the world; the only people who still inherited the mechanical skill and daring of their Roman civilizers. Riquet bore the labour of that canal—and the calumny and obstructiveness, too, which tried to prevent its formation; France bore the expense; Louis Quatorze, of course, the glory; and no one, it is to be feared, the profit: for the navigation of the Garonne at the one extremity, and of the Mediterranean shallows at the other, were left unimproved till of late years, and the canal has become practically useful only just in time to be superseded by the railroads.

Now cross the Aude. Look down upon the willow and aspen copses, where over the heads of busy washerwomen, the nightingale and the hippolais crowded together away from the dusty plains and downs, shake the copses with their song; and then toil upward to the grey fortress tower on the grey limestone knoll; and pass, out of nature and her pure sunshine, into the black shadow of the unnatural Middle Age; into the region of dirt and darkness, cruelty and fear; grim fortresses, crowded houses, narrow streets, and pestilence. Pass through the outer circle of walls, of the latter part of the thirteenth century, to examine—for their architecture is a whole history engraved in stones—the ancient walls of the inner enceinte; massive Roman below, patched with striped Visigothic work, with mean and hasty Moorish, with graceful, though heavy, Romanesque of the times of the Troubadours; a whole museum of ancient fortifications, which has been restored, stone by stone, through the learning of M. Viollet le Duc and the public spirit of the late Emperor. Pass in under the gateway and give yourself up to legends. There grins down on you the broad image of the mythic Dame Carcas, who defended the town single-handed against Charlemagne, till this tower fell down by miracle, and let in the Christian host. But do not believe that she gave to the place its name of Carcassone; for the first syllable of the word is hint enough that it was, long ere her days, a Celtic caer, or hill-fortress. Pause at the inner gate; you need not exactly believe that when the English Crusader, Simon de Montfort, burst it open, and behold, the town within was empty and desolate, he cried: ‘Did I not tell you that those heretics were devils; and behold, being devils, they have vanished into air.’ You must believe, I fear, that of the great multitude who had been crowded, starving, and fever-stricken within, he found four hundred poor wretches who had lingered behind, and burnt them all alive. You need not believe that that is the mouth of the underground passage which runs all the way from the distant hills, through which the Vicomte de Beziers, after telling Simon de Montfort and the Abbot of Citeaux that he would sooner be flayed alive than betray the poor folk who had taken refuge with him, got them all safe away, men, women, and children. You need not believe that that great vaulted chamber was the ‘Chamber of the Inquisition.’ But you must believe that those two ugly rings let into the roof were put there for the torture of the cord; and that many a naked wretch has dangled from them ere now, confessing anything and everything that he—or, alas she—was bidden. But these and their like are the usual furniture of every mediæval court of justice; and torture was not altogether abolished in France till the latter part of the eighteenth century. You need not believe, again, that that circular tower on the opposite side of the town was really the ‘Tower of the Inquisition;’ for many a feudal lord, besides the Inquisitors, had their dens of cruelty in those old times. You need not even believe—though it is too likely to be true—that that great fireplace in the little first-floor room served for the torture of the scarpines. But you must believe that in that little round den beneath it, only approached by a trap in the floor, two skeletons were found fastened by those chains to that central pillar, having died and rotted forgotten in that horrid oubliette—how many centuries ago?

‘Plusieurs ont gemis là bas,’ said M. Viollet le Duc’s foreman of the works, as he led us out of that evil hole, to look, with eyes and hearts refreshed by the change, at a curious Visigothic tower, in which the good bishop Sidonius Apollinaris may have told of the last Burgundian invasion of his Auvergne to the good king Theodoric of the West Goths.

If anyone wishes to learn what the Middle Ages were like, let him go to Carcassone and see.

And now onward to Narbonne—or rather, to what was once Narbonne; one of the earliest colonies ever founded by the Romans; then the capital of the Visigothic kingdom; then of an Arab kingdom: now a dull fortified town—of a filth unspeakable, and not to be forgotten or forgiven. Stay not therein an hour, lest you take fever, or worse: but come out of the gate over the drawbridge, and stroll down the canal. Look back a moment, though, across the ditch. The whole face of the wall is a museum of Roman gods, tombs, inscriptions, bas-reliefs: the wreck of Martial’s ‘Pulcherrima Narbo,’ the old Roman city, which was demolished by Louis XIII., to build the ugly fortifications of the then new fashion, now antiquated and useless. Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live Nature—far more interesting than dead Art.

Everything fattens in the close damp air of the canal. The great flat, with its heavy crops, puts you in mind of the richest English lowland—save for the total want of old meadows. The weeds on the bank are English in type, only larger and richer—as becomes the climate. But as you look among them, you see forms utterly new and strange, whose kinship you cannot fancy, but which remind you that you are nearing Italy, and Greece, and Africa. And in the hedges are great bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green—soon to be stripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines of cypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky. No; you are not in Britain. Certainly not; for there is a drake (not a duck) quacking with feeble treble in that cypress, six feet over your head; and in Britain drakes do not live in trees. You look for the climbing palmipede, and see nothing: nor will you see; for the quacker is a tiny green tree-frog, who holds on by the suckers at the ends of his toes (with which he can climb a pane of glass, like a fly), and has learnt the squirrel’s art of going invisible, without ‘the receipt of fern-seed,’ by simply keeping always on the further side of the branch.