This first onslaught was repulsed, and perhaps if it had not been for a failure in the water supply, the beautiful city and its noble cause might have prevailed.
How they must have prayed for rain in that wondrous colour-flooded cathedral, when day after day the cruel, cloudless heavens smiled down ironically upon the dusty streets and glaring walls!
At last a parley was arranged between the Count and the besiegers. They gave him a pledge of safe conduct, and he went out to the camp. In the service of Heaven and the Church, the Crusaders considered ordinary honour and good faith superfluous—the usual plea of a good motive for villainous deeds—and they traitorously seized him, and when the city fell they threw him into a dungeon in his own citadel at Carcassonne—with all the beautiful precepts of chivalry ringing in their ears—a piece of work after de Montfort's own heart.
It is better not to dwell on the sack of the city: a sack of the thirteenth century conducted by de Montfort.
"For thou hast delivered them to the vilest of mortal men," the Comte de Foix had exclaimed to the Pope, speaking of the Albigenses at the Council of the Lateran, "to Simon de Montfort."
Count Raimon died in prison, nobody knows by what means. We were shown the noisome little hole in which the noble and tolerant spirit saw the last of this sad and cruel and beautiful world.
In virtue of the poet's faculty of imaginative sympathy Pierre Cardinal, the famous troubadour, had the insight to understand the nobility of this man born centuries too soon.
"As water in the fountain, so chivalry has its source in him. Against the basest of men, nay, against the whole world he stands." So writes the poet of the hero. It was a sorry age in which to be born before one's time!
Happily there are other and brighter memories to associate with Carcassonne. The troubadour of far renown, Pierre Vidal, must have often passed in and out at the great gateway: that delightful, foolish, brilliant personage; courtly, naif, and infinitely charming, yet pathetically unsuccessful, for all his genius—perhaps partly because of it. He was born at Toulouse, and so belonged to this country, then ruled by Raimon V., but his fate was chiefly active at the court of Marseilles where he fell in love with Azalais de Rocca Martina, wife of Count Barral, a lady who is described as possessing "charms of the sort that intoxicate; an emotional power, a magnetism, a luxurious will that swept all resistance away." He called her "Vierna," and wrote his canzos to her under that name.
One of his biographers says of him: "He was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased him, and as he would have it." It is a moot point whether this may not be rather wisdom than folly, for believing things to be as one desires them often goes a long way towards fulfilling that tacit prophecy.