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‘Plusieurs ont gemis la bas,’ said M. Viollet le Duc’s foreman of the works, as he led us out of that evil hole, to look, with eyes and hearts refreshed by the change, at a curious Visigothic tower, in which the good bishop Sidonius Apollinaris may have told of the last Burgundian invasion of his Auvergne to the good king Theodoric of the West Goths.

If anyone wishes to learn what the Middle Ages were like, let him go to Carcassone and see.

And now onward to Narbonne–or rather, to what was once Narbonne; one of the earliest colonies ever founded by the Romans; then the capital of the Visigothic kingdom; then of an Arab kingdom: now a dull fortified town–of a filth unspeakable, and not to be forgotten or forgiven. Stay not therein an hour, lest you take fever, or worse: but come out of the gate over the drawbridge, and stroll down the canal. Look back a moment, though, across the ditch. The whole face of the wall is a museum of Roman gods, tombs, inscriptions, bas- reliefs: the wreck of Martial’s ‘Pulcherrima Narbo,’ the old Roman city, which was demolished by Louis XIII., to build the ugly fortifications of the then new fashion, now antiquated and useless. Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live Nature–far more interesting than dead Art.

Everything fattens in the close damp air of the canal. The great flat, with its heavy crops, puts you in mind of the richest English lowland–save for the total want of old meadows. The weeds on the bank are English in type, only larger and richer–as becomes the climate. But as you look among them, you see forms utterly new and strange, whose kinship you cannot fancy, but which remind you that you are nearing Italy, and Greece, and Africa. And in the hedges are great bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green–soon to be stripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines of cypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky. No; you are not in Britain. Certainly not; for there is a drake (not a duck) quacking with feeble treble in that cypress, six feet over your head; and in Britain drakes do not live in trees. You look for the climbing palmipede, and see nothing: nor will you see; for the quacker is a tiny green tree-frog, who holds on by the suckers at the ends of his toes (with which he can climb a pane of glass, like a fly), and has learnt the squirrel’s art of going invisible, without ‘the receipt of fern-seed,’ by simply keeping always on the further side of the branch.

But come back; for the air even here is suggestive of cholera and fever. The uncleanliness of these Narbonnois is shameless and shocking; and ‘immondices’ of every kind lie festering in the rainless heat. The sickened botanist retreats, and buys a bottle of Eau Bully–alias aromatic vinegar.

There, crowding yon hill, with handsome houses and churches, is Beziers–the blood-stained city. Beneath the pavement of that church, it is said, lie heaped together the remains of thousands of men, women, and children, slaughtered around their own altars, on that fatal day, when the Legate Amalric, asked by the knights how they should tell Catholics from heretics, cried, “Kill them all–the Lord will know his own.”

We will pass on. We have had enough of horrors. And, beside, we are longing to hurry onward; for we are nearing the Mediterranean now. There are small skiffs lying under the dark tower of Agde, another place of blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the offspring of the nether pit. The railway cuts through rolling banks of dark lava; and now, ahead of us, is the conical lava-hill of Cette, and the mouth of the Canal du Midi.