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.
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