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The history of Toulouse is detestable, saturated with blood and perfidy; and the ancient custom of the Floral Games, grafted upon all sorts of internecine traditions, seems, with its false pastoralism, its mock chivalry, its display of fine feelings, to set off rather than to mitigate these horrors.
The Cardinal de Joyeuse performed the ceremony, the archiepiscopal chair being vacant at the time; and the Princes de Condé and de Conti, the Comte de Soissons, the Ducs de Nevers, d'Elboeuf, and d'Epernon represented the ancient Dukes of Burgundy, Normandy, and Aquitaine, and the Counts of Toulouse, Flanders, and Champagne.
"Ah, Monsieur," said he, "we foresaw that at last there would be a storm. It is well merited, but not by M. le Comte, who will be eternally obliged to you." And, he went immediately with my message to the Comte de Toulouse, who never forgot that I saved him from the fall of his brother.
The great Salle des Illustres was crowded long before he made his appearance, while the Place de Capitol was filled with a vast number of his admirers. The archbishop, the prefect, the mayor, the magistrates, and the principal citizens of Toulouse were present, with the most beautiful women in the city.
And to come down from history and romance to astounding prose, we find, a few years ago, Roubaix, a town of 114,000 souls, that is to say, a fourth of the population of Lyons a town whose financial transactions with the Bank of France exceed those of Rheims, Nimes, Toulouse, or Montpellier, represented by a man of the people, the important functions of mayor being filled by the proprietor of a humble estaminet and vendor of newspapers, character and convictions only having raised the Socialist leader to such a post!
Up above the river, but a little set back from the valley, right against the dawn as you come to it from Toulouse through the morning, stands a long, steep, and isolated rock, the whole summit of which from the sharp cliff on the north to that other on the south is doubled in height by what seems one vast wall and more than twenty towers.
Fierce and steadfast, sentimentally languishing, dying for a difference of faith, or dying as violently to avenge the insult of a frown or a lifted eye-brow, such are the Languedocians whom Toulouse evokes, near to the Gascons and akin to them.
"After I left Turin, though everything for my reception at the palaces of Toulouse and Rambouillet had been prepared in the most sumptuous style of magnificence, yet such was my agitation that I remained convulsively speechless for many hours, and all the affectionate attention of the family of the Duc de Penthievre could not calm my feelings.
He possessed a great fortune and occupied a high position at Toulouse. "Where is Berthaud?" he inquired of one bearer after another, with a busy air. "Where is Berthaud? I must speak to him." The others answered, volunteering contradictory information.
The city of Toulouse was a centre for much of the literary life of the time, and it was during the reign of Count Raimon VI., who was a poet of no small merit, that the art of the troubadours reached its culmination. For half a generation, it is said, his court was crowded with these poets, and he dwelt with them and they with him in brotherly affection.
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