constructed of materials taken from the ruins, nestled
there snugly enough. This intermediate space had
therefore become a kind of street, which has crumbled
in turn, as the fortress has grown up again. There
are other streets, beside, very diminutive and vague,
where you pick your way over heaps of rubbish and
become conscious of unexpected faces looking at you
out of windows as detached as the cherubic heads.
The most definite thing in the place was the little
cafe, where. the waiters, I think, must be the ghosts of
the old Visigoths; the most definite, that is, after the
little chateau and the little cathedral. Everything in
the Cite is little; you can walk round the walls in
twenty minutes. On the drawbridge of the chateau,
which, with a picturesque old face, flanking towers,
and a dry moat, is to-day simply a bare _caserne_,
lounged half a dozen soldiers, unusually small. No-
thing could be more odd than to see these objects en-
closed in a receptacle which has much of the appear-
ance of an enormous toy. The Cite and its population
vaguely reminded me of an immense Noah's ark.



XXIII.

Carcassonne dates from the Roman occupation of
Gaul. The place commanded one of the great roads
into Spain, and in the fourth century Romans and
Franks ousted each other from such a point of vantage.