With the siege of Beaucaire fresh in our minds, Simon de Montfort and Count Raimon VI. of Toulouse became enrolled among the names that jumped to the eyes wherever they occurred. We pursued any trail that led to further particulars of these two men who satisfied the human instinct to worship, on the one hand, and to whole-heartedly abominate on the other.
There was no call at any time to moderate one's detestation of de Montfort on account of some untimely incident betraying him in amiable sidelights. He was never discovered playing at ninepins with the children of his captive foe, or chivalrously endowing with a competence for life the widow of the wretch whom he had sent to die in his deepest dungeons. Never was he caught in unguarded moments of virtue; never did he tarnish the full gloss of his villainy by any little inconsistency of honour or compunction. He went on adding contempt to our hatred by a splendid and unremitting variety of treachery and baseness. At his worst, he was a fiend incarnate; and a better moment he never had.
ROMAN FOUNTAIN AT NIMES.
By Joseph Pennell.
Thus for the purposes of melodrama he was invaluable. He gave one's emotions no trouble. He was a beautifully consistent, unmitigated ruffian, and it was a pleasure to undisturbedly loathe him.
Count Raimon of Toulouse and Viscount of Béziers made a very good companion-opposite to this satisfactory scoundrel.
The two seemed to fill the position in our affections of a handsome pair of ornaments on a well-regulated mantelpiece—related by the sharpness of their contrast: Summer and Winter, Vice and Virtue, or the little meteorological man and woman who appear at the house-door, one in and one out (never both at the same time), to indicate fair or foul weather—perhaps also as a sly comment on domestic felicity!
Count Raimon and his companion interested us more especially when we entered Languedoc, the Count's own territory and the principal scene of the Albigensian wars. Beaucaire, as we had seen, which also belonged to Count Raimon, had fallen into the hands of the arch-villain, but there his wonderful luck at last deserted him.
The Pope had set his mind on consolidating the power of the Church and on annexing the lands of the few reigning nobles who protected the Albigenses. Of these Count Raimon of Toulouse was the most determined. He is one of the most striking examples of religious toleration, almost the only one, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Without any leanings towards the doctrines of the heretics, he yet stood by them from first to last, trying by every means in his power to avert the fury of the Pope and the Crusaders. He tried diplomacy, he tried conciliation, but without avail. He held firm in his refusal to hand over any subjects in his dominions, whatsoever their faith, to the fury of the Inquisition. Fortune was against him, with Innocent the Third on the throne, St. Dominic, the powerful originator of the terrible tribunal on the persecuting side, and Simon de Montfort as its military leader.