Motor-Flight Through France

III. The Pyrenees to Provence

III THE PYRENEES TO PROVENCE J\S one turns north-eastward from the Pyref 'l. nees the bright abundant landscape passes gradually into a flattish grey-and-drab country that has ceased to be Aquitaine and is yet not Provence. A dull region at best, this department of Haute Garonne grows positively forbidding when the mistral rakes it, whitening the vineyards and mulberry orchards, and bowing the shabby cypresses against a confused grey sky; nor is the landscape redeemed by the sprawling silhouette of Toulouse-a dingy wind-ridden city, stretched wide on the flat banks of the Garonne, and hiding its two precious buildings in a network of mean brick streets. One might venture the general axiom that France has never wholly understood the use of brick, and that where stone construction ceases [117 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE architectural beauty ceases with it. Saint Sernin, the great church of Toulouse, is noble enough in line, and full of interest as marking the culmination of French Romanesque; but compared with the brick churches of northern Italy it seems struck with aridity, parched and bleached as a skeleton in a desert. The Capitoul, with its frivolous eighteenth-century front, has indeed more warmth and relief than any other building in Toulouse; but meanly surrounded by shabby brick houses, it seems to await in vain the development of ramps and terraces that should lead up to its long bright fa~ade. As the motor enters the hill-country to the northeast of Toulousethe land breaks away pleasantly toward the long blue line of the Cevennes; and presently a deep cleft fringed with green reveals the nearness of the Tarn-that strange river gnawing its way through cheesy perpendicular banks. Along these banks fantastic brick towns are precariously piled: L'Isle-sur-Tarn, with an octagonal brick belfry, and Rabastens, raised on a series of bold arcaded terraces, which may be viewed to advantage from a suspension-bridge [118 ] ..J« a: o ... J: I-« o ... J: llL o ~ ... > ..J« a: ... z ... CJ iii ..J« ALBI : INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL THE PYRENEES TO PROVENCE high above the river. Aside from its exceptionally picturesque site, Rabastens is notable for a curious brick church with fortified tower and much-restored fourteenth-century frescoes clothing its interior like a dim richly woven tissue. But beyond Rabastens lies Albi, and after a midday halt at Gaillac, most desolate and dusty of towns, we pressed on again through the parched country. Albi stood out at length upon the sky-a glaring mass of houses stacked high above the deep cleft of the Tarn. The surrounding landscape was all dust and dazzle; the brick streets were funnels for the swooping wind; and high up, against the blinding blue, rose the flanks of the brick cathedral, like those of some hairless pink monster that had just crawled up from the river to bask on the cliff. This first impression of animal monstrosity-of an unwieldly antediluvian mass of flesh-is not dispelled by a nearer approach. From whatever angle one views the astounding building its uncouth shape and fleshlike tint produce the effect of a living organismhigh -backed,swollen-thighed, wallowing-a giant Tarasque or other anomalous offspring of the [119 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE Bestiary; and if one rejects the animal analogy as too grotesque, to what else may one conceivably compare it ? Among the fortified churches of south-western France this strange monument is the strangest as it is the most vast, and none of the accepted architectural categories seems to fit its huge vaulted hall buttressed with tall organ-pipe turrets, and terminating to the west in a massive dungeon-like tower flanked by pepper-pot pinnacles . The interior of the great secular-looking salle is covered by an unbroken expanse of mural painting, and encrusted, overgrown almost, from the choir and ambulatory to the arches of the lateral chapels, with a prodigious efflorescence of late Gothic wood-carving and sculpture, half Spanish in its dusky grey-brown magnificence. But even this excess of ecclesiastical ornament does not avail to Christianise the churchthere is a pagan, a Saracenic quality about it that seems to overflow from its pinnacled flushed exterior. To reach Carcassonne from Albi one must cross the central mass of the Cevennes. The [120 ] THE PYRENEES TO PROVENCE way leads first, by hill and dale, through a wooded northern-looking landscape, to...