The development of the structure from the individual members of nave and choir is readily traced, and though these parts show not the slightest kind of relationship one to the other, it is from these two fragmentary churches that the completed, if imperfect, whole has been made.
The west front, to-day more than ever, shows how badly the cathedral has been put together; the uncovered bricks creep out here and there, and buildings to the left, which formerly covered the incongruous joint between the nave and choir, are now razed, making the patchwork even more apparent. The square tower which flanks the portal to the north is not unpleasing, and dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The portal is not particularly beautiful, and is bare of decorations of note. It appears to have been remodelled at some past time with a view to conserving the western rose window.
There are no transepts or collateral chapels, which tends to make the ground-plan the more unusual and lacking in symmetry.
The choir (1275-1502) is really very beautiful, taken by itself, far more so than the nave, from which it is extended on a different axis.
It was restored after a seventeenth-century fire, and is supposed to be less beautiful to-day than formerly.
There are seventeen chapels in this choir, with much coloured glass of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, all with weird polychromatic decorations in decidedly bad taste.
Toulouse became a bishopric in the third century, with St. Saturnin as its first bishop. It was raised to the rank of archiepiscopal dignity in 1327, a distinction which it enjoys to-day in company with Narbonne. Six former suffragan bishoprics, Pamiers, Rieux, Mirepoix, Saint-Papoul, Lombez, and Lavaur were suppressed at the Revolution.
In the magnificent Musée of the city is un petit monument, without an inscription, but bearing a cross gammée or Swastika, and a palm-leaf, symbols of the divine Apollo and Artemis. It seems curious that this tiny record in stone should have been found, as it was, in the mountains which separate the sources of the Garonne and the Adour, as the Swastika is a symbol supposedly indigenous to the fire and sun-worshippers of the East, where it figures in a great number of their monuments.
It is called, by the local antiquary, a Pyrenean altar. If this is so, it is of course of pagan origin, and is in no way connected with Christian art.
