coming back to it. He talked of it, indeed, as a lover,
and, giving me for half an hour the advantage of his
company, showed me all the points of the place. (I
speak here always of the outer enceinte; you penetrate
to the inner - which is the specialty of Carcassonne,
and the great curiosity - only by application at the
lodge of the regular custodian, a remarkable func-
tionary, who, half an hour later, when I had been in-
troduced to him by my friend the amateur, marched
me over the fortifications with a tremendous accompani-
ment of dates and technical terms.) My companion
pointed out to me in particular the traces of different
periods in the structure of the walls. There is a por-
tentous amount of history embedded in them, begin-
ning with Romans and Visigoths; here and there are
marks of old breaches, hastily repaired. We passed
into the town, - into that part of it not included in the
citadel. It is the queerest and most fragmentary little
place in the world, as everything save the fortifications
is being suffered to crumble away, in order that the
spirit of M. Viollet-le-Duc alone may pervade it, and
it may subsist simply as a magnificent shell. As the
leases of the wretched little houses fall in, the ground
is cleared of them; and a mumbling old woman ap-
proached me in the course of my circuit, inviting me
to condole with her on the disappearance of so many
of the hovels which in the last few hundred years
(since the collapse of Carcassonne as a stronghold)
had attached themselves to the base of the walls, in
the space between the two circles. These habitations,