A century ago a traveller described St. Girons as a “dull crumbling town,” but he died too soon, this none too acute observer. It was near-by St. Lizier that had begun to crumble, while St. Girons itself was already prospering anew. To-day it has arrived. Its definitive position has been established. Its affairs augment continually; and it is one of the few towns in these parts which has added fifty per cent. to its population in the last fifty years.
St. Girons is without any remarkably interesting monuments, though the town is delightfully situated and laid out and there is real character and picturesqueness in its tree-lined promenade along the banks of the Salat. Originally St. Girons was known as Bourg-sous-Ville, being but a dependency of St. Lizier. To-day the state of things is exactly reversed. In the twelfth century it came to have a name of its own, after that of the Apostle Geronius. In the Quartier Villefranche, at St. Girons, on the left bank of the Salat, is the Palais de Justice, once the old château of the seigneurs, which architecturally ranks second to the old Église de St. Vallier with its great Romanesque doorway and its crenelated tower like that of a donjon.
St. Lizier, just out of St. Girons on the St. Gauden’s road, is one of the mediæval glories which exist to-day only in their historic past.
St. Lizier
Its château, its cathedral and its old stone bridge are unfortunately so weather-worn as to be all but crumbled away; but they still point plainly to the magnificent record that once was theirs. Once St. Lizier was the principal city of Couserans, a region which included all that country lying between the basins of the Ariège and the Garonne. In Roman days it was an important strategic point and bore the imposing name of Lugdunum Consoranorum. Later it became a bishopric and preserved all its prerogatives up to the Revolution.
The cloister of the twelfth and fourteenth-century cathedral has been classed as one of those Monuments Historiques over which the French Minister of Beaux Arts has a loving care. The château of other days was used also as an episcopal palace, but has undergone to-day the desecration of serving as a madhouse.