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Barrymore: and I thought that part of the description fitted, though I had to be told about splendid, fortified Carcassonne with its towering walls and bastions, before I fully understood the simile. "Yes, a Verona and Venice certainly," I answered, "with a sunny coast like that of the French Riviera, and inhabited by people of the Far East."
Also, away across the sea, sheering towards them and making to cross their bows a mile away a two funnelled steamer whose funnels closed to one as she shifted her helm to get within speaking distance of them. She was the Carcassonne, a seven thousand ton freighter carrying passengers, a French boat, bound from Sydney to Cape Town and Marseilles.
Very curious letters exist from Guillaume des Ormes, the seneschal to the regent, describing the siege of Carcassonne by the troops of the viscount; but for these, and for a detailed account of the fortifications, I must refer the reader to M. Viollet-le-Duc's account, in his treatise on the Military Architecture of the Middle Ages.
The young Raymond de Trineavel, baffled and repulsed, retired at the end of twenty-four days. Saint Louis and Philip the Bold, in the thirteenth century, multiplied the defenses of Carcassonne, which was one of the bulwarks of their kingdom on the Spanish quarter; and from this time forth, being regarded as impregnable, the place had nothing to fear.
Indeed, it is even more like an image and less like a reality than Carcassonne; for by position and prospect it seems even more detached from the life of the present day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a canal beside it, and which carry their cargo into actual places.
His songs proved a mine of wealth, and the sumptuously illustrated edition got up by friends and admirers brought him 80,000 francs, with which he purchased a villa, christened Carcassonne, at Nice, therein spending sunny and sunny-tempered days and dispensing large-hearted hospitality. To luckless brethren of the lyre he held out an ungrudgeful hand, alas! meeting with scant return.
We shall have a nobler capital city than Washington, with its horrid red streets, its wilderness of bare squares, its interminable distances " "Carcassonne," Jack murmured. "Carcassonne what's that?" "An exquisite bit of verse and a touching story. "There, there stop. You are talking again. You shall read the poem to me that is, if it isn't a glorification of the North."
The fact that their extent is very much greater makes them more of a curiosity than those of Carcassonne; but this is exactly, at the same time, what is fatal to their pictorial unity. With their thirty-seven towers and seven gates, they lose themselves too much to make a picture that will compare with the admirable little vignette of Carcassonne.
The inhabitants are so few that weeds grow in their streets, and one who walks there in the still mid-day feels that all this completion of architecture, these walls, perfect in every stone, may be an enchanted vision, a mirage; he more than half believes that the cool of the sunset will dispel the illusion, and he will find himself on a pleasant little hill of Languedoc, looking down upon the commonplace "Lower City" of Carcassonne.
Little then dreamed the spiders that sat in that ringing hall of the unmolested leisure they were soon to enjoy. When they were armed they all formed up and marched out of the hall, and Arleon strode before them singing of Carcassonne. But the talk of the Weald arose and went back well fed to byres. They had no need of wars or of rare perils. They were ever at war with hunger.
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