St. Hilaire, who founded the abbey at Poitiers, came perhaps before Sergius, but his tenure is obscure as to its exact date.
The cathedral of St. Michel, in the lower town, has been, since 1803, the seat of the bishop's throne.
It is a work unique, perhaps, in its design, but entirely unfeeling and preposterous in its overelaborate decorations. It has a long parallelogram-like nave, "entièrement peinte," as the custodian refers to it. It has, to be sure, a grand vault, strong and broad, but there are no aisles, and the chapels which flank this gross nave are mere painted boxes.
Episcopal dignity demanded that some show of importance should be given to the cathedral, and it was placed in the hands of Viollet-le-Duc in 1849 for restoration. Whatever his labours may have been, he doubtless was not much in sympathy with this clumsy fabric, and merely "restored" it in some measure approaching its twelfth-century form.
It is with St. Nazaire de Carcassonne, the tiny église of the old Cité and the ci-devant cathedral that we have to do.
This most fascinating church, fascinating for itself none the less than its unique environment, is, in spite of the extended centuries of its growth, almost the equal in the purity of its Gothic to that of St. Urbain at Troyes. And this, in spite of evidences of rather bad joining up of certain warring constructive elements.
The structure readily composes itself into two distinct parts: that of the Romanesque (round arch and barrel vault) era and that of the Gothic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
No consideration of St. Nazaire de Carcassonne is possible without first coming to a realization of the construction and the functions of the splendidly picturesque and effective ramparts which enclosed the ancient Cité, its cathedral, châteaux, and various civil and domestic establishments.
In brief, its history and chronology commences with the Visigoth foundation, extending from the fifth to the eighth centuries to the time (1356) when it successfully resisted the Black Prince in his bloody ravage, by sword and fire, of all of Languedoc.