At Narbonne I reached the Canal des Deux-Mers[501]. Corneille, singing this work, adds his own greatness to that of Louis XIV.[502]
Toulouse.
At Toulouse, from the bridge over the Garonne, I could see the line of the Pyrenees; I was to cross it four years later: our horizons succeed one another like our days. They offered to show me, in a cave, the dried body of Fair Paule[503]: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed! Montmorency[504] had been beheaded in the courtyard of the town-hall: that head struck off must have been very important, since they still speak of it after so many other heads have been taken off? I do not know if, in the history of criminal proceedings, there exists an eye-witness' evidence which has more clearly established a man's identity:
"The fire and smoke which covered him," said Guitaut, "prevented me from recognising him; but seeing a man who, after breaking six of our ranks, was still killing soldiers in the seventh, I thought that it could be only M. de Montmorency; I knew it for certain when I saw him thrown to the ground under his dead horse."
The deserted Church of St. Sernin impressed me by its architecture. This church is connected with the history of the Albigenses, which the poem so well translated by M. Fauriel[505] revives:
"The gallant young count, his father's heir and the light of his eyes, with the cross and the sword, enter together by one of the doors. Not a single young girl remains in chamber or on landing; the inhabitants of the town, great and small, all come out to gaze upon the count as on a fair and blooming rose."
It is to the time of Simon de Montfort[506] that the loss of the langue d'Oc dates back:
"Simon, seeing himself lord of so many lands, bestowed them among the gentle men, both French and others, atque loci leges dedimus," say the eight signatory archbishops and bishops.
I should have liked to have had time to inquire at Toulouse after one of my great admirations, Cujas[507], writing, flat on the ground, with his books spread around him. I do not know whether the memory has been preserved of his twice-married daughter Suzanne. Constancy had no great attractions for Suzanne, she set it at naught; but she kept one of her husbands alive with the same infidelities which caused the other's death. Cujas was protected by the daughter of Francis I.[508], Pibrac by the daughter of Henry II.[509]: two Margarets of the blood of the Valois, the true blood of the Muses. Pibrac[510] is famous through his quatrains, which have been translated into Persian. I was perhaps lodged in the house of the president his father. That "good Lord of Pibrac," according to Montaigne, was "a man of so quaint and rare wit, of so sound judgment, and of so mild and affable behaviour." His mind was "so dissonant and different in proportion from our deplorable corruption, and so farre from agreeing with our tumultuous stormes[511]." And Pibrac wrote the apology of St. Bartholomew's Night!
I hurried on without being able to stop: fate threw me back to 1838 to admire in detail the city of Raimond de Saint-Gilles[512], and to speak of the new acquaintances I made there: M. de Lavergne[513], a man of talent, wit, and sense; Mademoiselle Honorine Gasc[514], the Malibran of the future. The latter reminded me, in my new quality of a follower of Clémence Isaure[515], of those verses which Chapelle and Bachaumont[516] wrote in the isle of Ambijoux, near Toulouse: