The Place de la Loge, the great café centre of Perpignan, is unique among the smaller cities of France. Here is animation at all hours of the day—and night, a perpetual going and coming of all the world, a veritable Rialto or a Rue de la Paix. It is the business centre of the city, and also the centre of its pleasures, a veritable forum. Cafés are all about; even the grand old Loge de Mer, a delicious construction of the fourteenth century, is a café.
Porte Notre Dame and the Castillet, Perpignan
What a charming structure this Loge is! Its fourteenth-century constructive elements have been further beautified with late flowering Gothic of a century and a half later, and its great bronze lamps suggest a symbolism which stands for eternity, or at any rate bespeaks the solidity of Perpignan for all time.
Beside the Loge is the Hôtel de Ville, with its round-arched doorways and windows, iron-barred in real mediæval fashion, with dainty colonnettes between.
Next is the ancient Palais de Justice, adjoining the Hôtel de Ville. It has a battery of mullioned twin windows of narrow aperture, and is in perfect keeping with the mediæval trinity of which it is a part.
The cathedral of St. Jean is another of Perpignan’s historical monuments, but it is far from lovely at first glance, an atrocious façade having been added by some “restorer” in recent times with more suitable ideas for building fortresses than churches.