Chapter XVI: Section XIV: St. Gaudens to Carcassonne,

105 MILES

(169 KILOMETRES)

DISTANCES ALONG THE ROUTE

Kil. Miles. =St. Gaudens= to St. Martory =19= 11¾ =St. Martory= to Mane =8= 5 =Mane= to St. Lizier =19= 11¾ =St. Lizier= to St. Girons =2= 1¼ =St. Girons= to Le Mas-d’Azil =23= 14¼ [=St. Girons= to Foix =43= 26¾] [=Foix= to Pamiers =20= 12½] =Le Mas-d’Azil= to Pamiers =28= 17¼ =Pamiers= to Mirepoix =22= 13¾ =Mirepoix= to Fanjeaux =20= 12¼ =Fanjeaux= to Montréal =10= 6¼ =Montréal= to Carcassonne =18= 11¼

NOTES FOR DRIVERS

=St. Gaudens to St. Martory.=--Nearly level.

=St. Martory to Mane.=--The road crosses a steep ridge of hills.

=Mane to St. Girons.=--Level. Do not cross the River Salat until St.
Girons is reached.

=St. Girons to Le Mas-d’Azil.=--A well-engineered road through a
hilly country.

=Pamiers.=--A dangerous winding descent to the town. The rest of the
way to Carcassonne the road is undulating, without any dangerous
hills, except on the east side of Fanjeaux, where the descent has a
sharp turn.

PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE ROUTE

=St. Gaudens.=--A small town with a fine Romanesque church; richly
carved capitals and carved choir-stalls.

=St. Martory.=--Though a small place, has two imposing
eighteenth-century gateways. Gendarmerie built with stone from
Abbey of Bonnefont, from which ruin comes the Romanesque door of
the church.

=St. Lizier.=--A Gallo-Roman town now shrunk and decayed, but very
picturesque. Stands on a steep hill, crowned with Episcopal Palace,
surrounded by walls which have Roman bases. Romanesque church, with
beautiful cloisters and Roman stones built into apse. Medieval
bridge over river.

=St. Girons.=--A busy little town; church rebuilt in 1857;
thirteenth-century château, now Palais de Justice, not very
interesting.

=Le Mas-d’Azil.=--A small town near the remarkable limestone cavern
called the Grotte du Mas-d’Azil, through which the road runs.

=Pailhès.=--Village in beautiful surroundings, with medieval château
on hill above.

=Pamiers.=--A busy town, with iron foundries on the River Ariège;
cathedral, 1658-1689, with tower of fourteenth century; vast
fortified fourteenth-century west front to N.D. du Camp; Church of
the Cordeliers, sixteenth century; old houses in bad repair.

The snow clad Pyrenees appear above the roofs of the steep street.]

=Foix.=--Romantically situated town in triangular valley, with the
castle of the Counts of Foix on an isolated rock in the centre.

=Mirepoix.=--Exceedingly picturesque little town, with arcaded square
and much quaint carved woodwork; old gateway and Gothic church of
great charm.

=Fanjeaux.=--A village romantically situated on a hill, with
thirteenth-century church.

=Montréal.=--Another place in a similar situation, with magnificent
views and picturesque streets; church, fourteenth century.

St. Gaudens gets its name from a boy of thirteen years who was martyred in 475 for holding to the Christian faith under the persecution of Euric, King of the Visigoths. It is a dusty little town, with a busy market-place and a beautiful Romanesque church, dating from the beginning of the twelfth century, when the place began to grow prosperous with the establishment of a college of canons at the martyr’s tomb. The church was formerly fortified, and the upper part of the Romanesque tower has been rebuilt by Laffolye, who restored the sculpture of the small tower door of the same period, the carving having been badly mutilated by Montgomery’s Huguenots. One enters by a fine Flamboyant doorway, and finds a very dark interior, with walls hung with old tapestries, and a horrible atmosphere, suggesting an entire lack of ventilation. It is worth while, however, to endure this polluted air in order to examine the finely carved capitals, showing Biblical scenes, including a very interesting Nebuchadnezzar in the fields. The sacristy, with a vaulted roof, and the carved choir-stalls should also be seen.

The road follows the Garonne, and on nearing St. Martory runs close beside it, with a great wall of orange-coloured rock on the left.

ST. MARTORY

is a curious town with two imposing eighteenth-century gateways, one of them by the bridge which is crossed on the way southwards to St. Girons. Arthur Young marvelled at their magnificence when he saw them in 1787. He thought they could only have been built to please the eye of travellers! The gendarmerie is built of the stone brought from the ruined Abbey of Bonnefont, and the Romanesque doorway of the church (sixteenth century) comes from the same monastery, a little south of the town.

A Renaissance château stands on the right bank of the river.

After crossing the hills south of St. Martory, the road drops down to the village of Mane, on the Salat, and all the way to St. Girons one follows that river _without crossing it_. At a point about 6 kilometres from Mane, where there is a bridge to Lacave, one is tempted to cross the river, as the road appears to be entering a stone quarry, but one must not be deterred by this.

ST. LIZIER

is piled up romantically on a steep and almost isolated mass of rock rising from the rushing Salat. It is now a small decayed place without an hotel, but its very steep and picturesque streets lead up to Roman remains of a most interesting character.

Under the name of _Lugdunum Consoranorum_, St. Lizier was one of the nine cities of Novempopulania; it was the capital of Conserans, the seat of a bishopric founded in 450 by St. Vallier, and it remained an episcopal possession until the Revolution. One crosses the medieval bridge of three or four unequal arches, noticing a piece of Roman marble inscribed to the goddess Belisama let into one of the piers, and then, ascending a precipitous street, turns to the right towards the church at the corner, illustrated here.

The interesting Romanesque church dates from the twelfth or the following century, and is built of red brick, with a central tower, now well restored. Roman remains are built into the apse, and there is also a Roman doorway. The sacristan keeps the key of the beautiful cloisters, every capital of which is different and worth study. A tomb dated 1303

is that of Bishop Chatillon, and in the sacristy are portraits of other bishops, whose imposing residence still crowns the highest portion of the town: but this former home of episcopal dignity is now a lunatic asylum. Permission to enter is, however, easily obtained, a _gardien_ conducting the visitor to the small fourteenth-century cathedral and the twelfth-century chapter-house. The bases of the walls of the bishops’ palace are undoubtedly Roman. There were six semicircular and six square towers, and even the twelfth-century episcopal keep stands on a Roman base, just inside the ramparts. Many picturesque corners and some quaint timber-framed houses invite one to linger at St. Lizier, and the time spent there would not be wasted.

ST. GIRONS,

on the other hand, is uninteresting, and as its hotels are uninviting, there is every reason for pushing on. Arthur Young went there in 1787, and wrote as follows:

‘At St. Geronds [St. Girons] go to the Croix Blanche, the most
execrable receptacle of filth, vermin, impudence, and imposition
that ever exercised the patience or wounded the feelings of a
traveller. A withered hag, the dæmon of beastliness, presides
there. I laid, not rested, in a chamber over a stable, whose
effluviæ through the broken floor were the least offensive of the
perfumes afforded by this hideous place. It could give me nothing
but two stale eggs, for which I paid, exclusive of all other
charges, 20f.’

The church was rebuilt in 1857, leaving the fourteenth-century tower only, and the château founded in the thirteenth century, is now the not very interesting Palais de Justice.

The way to Le Mas-d’Azil is along the Route de Foix as far as the fork at Lescure, where one goes to the left. There is a stone direction-post in front of the house at the corner.

ALTERNATIVE ROUTE TO PAMIERS THROUGH FOIX

If, instead of turning to the left, one goes on to Foix, the route
described can be rejoined at Pamiers. The distance is 12 kilometres
longer than by Le Mas-d’Azil.

In the striking picturesqueness of its situation, the medieval
castle of Foix, standing on an isolated mass of rock in the midst
of a triangular valley, is very remarkable. Of the three great
towers, the earliest is the square one on the north side, and the
latest the circular one, wrongly ascribed to Gaston Phœbus. The
Palais de Justice, which was the former Château des Gouverneurs, is
passed on the way up to the castle. The Church of St. Volusien
belongs to the fourteenth-century, but preserves a fine Romanesque
door of a former building.

After passing Lescure the road winds upwards and then falls at an easy gradient in a rocky valley,

The small arched opening has been cut to make a convenient entrance for the road.]

with great grey ridges of rock standing out boldly, their highest points crowned with Calvaries. At Clermont there is a new church, the grey ruin of its castle, and a Calvary. The fields, tilted at every angle, are ploughed with oxen, whose heads are protected with a piece of sheep-skin.

THE GROTTE DU MAS-D’AZIL

A few kilometres beyond Clermont the road curves, and suddenly one is confronted with a vast cliff of yellowish-cream limestone, containing a cavern of gigantic dimensions, into which the green waters of the Arize pour tumultuously. At the side of the cavern’s mouth a small hole has been bored, and into this the road unhesitatingly plunges. The lofty roof of limestone is delicately coloured with mauve, emerald, and pink tints near the mouth, but farther in the darkness is so great that the road is lighted with oil-lamps. Birds fly in and out of the yawning mouth of the cavern, but the sound of their wings is drowned by the roar of the river on its rock-strewn bed. A suppressed excitement fills the mind of the motorist who for the first time drives into this subterranean way, but all too soon there is a glimmer of white light round a bend, and the roof of rock, which has lowered to within a yard or two of his head, suddenly comes to an end, as the car runs out into the dazzling sunshine just beyond the cavern.

The little town of Le Mas-d’Azil has an hotel in the dusty market-place, which can provide a capital _déjeuner_. The church is of uncertain age from a casual glance, and the offensive smell of its interior, combined with the cobwebs, dirt, and damp, make one inclined to hurry away. Protestantism flourished in the town in the seventeenth century, and some of the people still adhere to the reformed faith. In 1625 the Calvinists were obliged to seek refuge in the cavern when attacked by the Catholics. They would have been forced to abandon it through their enemies having dammed up the river and reduced them to extremes of thirst, if the obstruction the Catholics had built had not been broken through by a party of Protestant soldiers.

From Le Mas-d’Azil the road goes through Sabarat and Menay to Pailhès, on the Lèze, where a picturesque château, dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, stands on a wooded spur above the village.

The road to Pamiers goes to the right and then to the left, and winds for about fifteen kilometres through a very picturesque hilly country, with superb views of the Pyrenees across up-and-down country, chequered with growing corn, pale brown ploughed fields, and purple woods. Sowing seed in the old broadcast method still prevails here.

PAMIERS

More bends in the road follow, and then Pamiers appears down below, on the margin of a fertile plain watered by the broad Ariège.

Although having an interesting story, Pamiers does not make many appeals to the visitor. The original town was called Mas St. Antonin, but it has decayed so much that there is scarcely anything to be seen even of its abbey, which gave birth to the town which has vanished.

The cathedral was mainly built between 1658 and 1689, with a brick tower of the fourteenth century. Notre-Dame-du-Camp has a colossal red brick façade of the fourteenth century, with machicolation and two towers, a most astonishing illustration of the Church militant. The Church of the Cordeliers dates from 1512, and is in the style known as Toulousian Gothic, from the town a little to the north. There are a number of old houses in Pamiers, but they are near the ironworks, which are an ugly feature of the town, and in most instances they are frowsy and dilapidated. From the site of the destroyed castle there are fine views of the Pyrenees, but they are no better than those that the road commands.

THE ROAD TO CARCASSONNE

goes south-westwards from the southern side of Pamiers, and turns to the left at a fork, crossing the railway, and running in a straight line over the level plain to the valley of the River Hers, upon which is built the exceedingly attractive little town of

MIREPOIX

It is disposed of with a few cold words in the ordinary guide-books, but it is nevertheless a place of singular picturesqueness. There is an old nucleus, surrounded by wide tree-bordered boulevards, and the hurrying tourist sees none of the antiquity of the town if he does not penetrate the central square. It is surrounded on all sides with arcaded houses resting on heavy wooden pillars, with rows of curiously carved brackets in between. There are pictures everywhere, for at one end of the square is a medieval gateway, and on one side stands the Church of St. Maurice. The interior of this building is a vast aisleless space, and the whole of the walls and the modern roof are covered with painting. The building dates almost entirely from early in the fifteenth century.

All the rest of the way to Carcassonne there are huge views north and south, and there are only two small places to be mentioned. The first is Fanjeaux, which stands out most picturesquely on the left side of the road, with a pair of quaint windmills on the hill opposite. The church dates from the thirteenth century, and is believed to have been built on the site of a temple of Jupiter the present name coming from _Fanum Jovis_. The little town standing out boldly against the sky at sunset is an exceedingly fine sight, and the colour of the foregrounds of nearly every picture the road presents is the burning gold of gorse.

Montréal stands on an isolated hill, and has a fourteenth-century church, built upon a terrace commanding a vast view of the Pyrenees.