Gustave Nadaud’s lines on Carcassonne come very near to being the finest topographical verses ever penned. Certainly there is no finer expression of truth and sentiment with regard to any architectural monument existing than the simple realism of the speech of the old peasant of Limoux:—
“‘I’m sixty years; I’m getting old;
I’ve done hard work through all my life,
Though yet could never grasp and hold
My heart’s desire through all my strife.
I know quite well that here below
All one’s desires are granted none;
My wish will ne’er fulfilment know,
I never have seen Carcassonne.”
. . . . . . . . . .
“‘They say that all the days are there
As Sunday is throughout the week:
New dress, and robes all white and fair
Unending holidays bespeak.’
. . . . . . . . . .
“‘O! God, O! God, O! pardon me,
If this my prayer should’st Thou offend!
Things still too great for us we’d see
In youth or near one’s long life end.
My wife once and my son Aignan,
As far have travelled as Narbonne,
My grandson has seen Perpignan,
But I have not seen Carcassonne.’”
What emotion, what devotion these lines express, and what a picture they paint of the simple faiths and hopes of man. He never did see Carcassonne, this old peasant of Limoux; the following lines tell why:—
“Thus did complain once near Limoux
A peasant hard bowed down with age.
I said to him, ‘My friend, we’ll go
Together on this pilgrimage.’
We started with the morning tide;
But God forgive. We’d hardly gone
Our road half over, ere he died.
He never did see Carcassonne.”
In August, 1898, a great fête and illumination was given in the old Cité de Carcassonne. All the illustrious Languedoçians alive, it would seem, were there, including the Cadets de Gascogne, among them Armand Sylvestre, D’Esparbès, Jean Rameau, Emil Pouvillon, Benjamin Constant, Eugène Falguière, Mercier, Jean-Paul Laurens, et als.
All the artifice of the modern pyrotechnist made of the old city, at night, a reproduction of what it must have been in times of war and stress. It was the most splendid fireworks exhibition the world has seen since Nero fiddled away at burning Rome. “La Cité Rouge,” Sylvestre called it. “Oh, l’impression inoubliable! Oh! le splendide tableau! It was so perfectly beautiful, so completely magnificent! I have seen the Kremlin thus illuminated; I have seen old Nuremberg under the same conditions, but I declare upon my honour never have I seen so beautiful a sight as the illuminations of Carcassonne.”
One view of the Cité not often had is from the Montagne Noire, where, from its supreme height of twelve hundred metres (the Pic de Nore) there is to be seen such a bird’s-eye view as was never conceived by the imagination. On the horizon are the blue peaks of the Pyrenees cutting the sky with astonishing clearness; to the eastward is the Mediterranean; and northwards are the Cevennes; while immediately below is a wide-spread plain peopled here and there with tiny villages and farms all clustering around the solid walls of Carcassonne—the Ville of to-day and the Cité of the past.
Over the blue hills, southward from Carcassonne, lies Limoux. Limoux is famous for three things, its twelfth-century church, its fifteenth-century bridge and its “blanquette de Limoux,” less ancient, but quite as enduring.
If one’s hunger is ripe, he samples the last first, at the table d’hôte at the Hotel du Pigeon. “Blanquette de Limoux” is simply an ordinarily good white, sparkling wine, no better than Saumur, but much better than the hocks which have lately become popular in England, and much, much better than American champagne. The town itself is charming, and the immediate environs, the peasants’ cottages and the vineyards, recall those verses of Nadaud’s about that old son of the soil who prayed each year that he might make the journey over the hills to Carcassonne (it is only twenty-four kilometres) and refresh his old eyes with a sight of that glorious mediæval monument.
North of Carcassonne, between the city and the peak of the Montagne Noire, is the old château of Lastours, a ruined glory of the days when only a hill-top situation and heavy walls meant safety and long life.