Two kilometres above the town are the Gorges de St. Georges, also with a superb roadway burrowed out of the rock. Here is the gigantic usine-hydro-électrique of 6,000 horse-power obtained from a three-hundred-foot fall of water. That such things could be, here in this unheard of little corner of the Pyrenees, is far from the minds of most European travellers who know only the falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen. Axat has a ruined château on the height above the town which is a wonderful ruin although it has no recorded history. To imagine its romance, however, is not a difficult procedure if you know the Pyrenees and their history. Its attractions are indeed many; but it would be a paradise for artists who did not want to go far from their inn to search their subjects. There are in addition a quaint old thirteenth-century church, a magnificently arched stone bridge, and innumerable twisting vaulted passages high aloft near the château.
Away above Axat is the plateau region known as the Capcir, thought to be the ancient bed of a mountain lake. It is closed on all sides by a great fringe of mountains, and is comparatively thickly inhabited because of its particularly good pasture lands; and has the reputation of being the coldest inhabited region in France, though it may well divide this honour with the Alpine valleys of the Tarentaise in Savoie. One passes from the Capcir into the Cerdagne lying to the eastward by the Col de Casteillon.
CHAPTER IX
THE WALLS OF CARCASSONNE
NEVER was there an architectural glory like that of Carcassonne. Most mediæval fortified bourgs have been transformed out of all semblance to their former selves, but not so Carcassonne. It lives to-day as in the past, transformed or restored to be sure, but still the very ideal of a walled city of the Middle Ages.
The stress and cares of commerce and the super-civilization of these latter days have built up a new and ugly commercial city beyond the walls, leaving La Cité a lonely dull place where the very spirit of mediævalism stalks the streets and passages, and the ghosts of a past time people the château, the donjon, and the surrounding buildings which once sheltered counts and prelates and chevaliers and courtly ladies. The old cathedral, too, dedicated to St. Nazaire, as pure a Gothic gem as may be found outside Sainte Chapelle in Paris, is as much of the past as if it existed only in memory, for services are now carried on in a great, gaunt church in the lower town, leaving this magnificent structure unpeopled and alone.
Carcassonne, as seen from the low-lying plain of the valley of the Aude, makes a most charming motif for a picture. In the purple background are the Pyrenees, setting off the crenelated battlements of walls, towers and donjon in genuine fairy-land fashion. It is almost too ethereal to be true, as seen through the dim mist of an early May morning. “A wonderful diadem of chiselled stone set in the forehead of the Pyrenees,” an imaginative Frenchman called it. It would not be wise to attempt to improve on this metaphor.
This world’s wonder—for it is a world’s wonder, though not usually included in the magic seven—has enchanted author, poet, painter, historian and architect. Who indeed could help giving it the homage due, once having read Viollet-le-Duc’s description in his “Dictionnaire Raisonée d’Architecture,” or Nadaud’s lines beginning:—
“Je n’ai jamais vu Carcassonne.”
Five thousand people from all over the world pass its barbican in a year, and yet how few one recalls among his acquaintances who have ever been there.