Two vast drum-shaped piers, serving to support the tower, are exposed to view at the west end of the nave; but, for the bad effect thus produced, compensation is offered by the very curious paintings, supposed to be of the fifteenth century, with which the surfaces of these piers are covered.  They represent the Last Judgment and the torments of the damned.  Each of the seven capital sins has its compartment, wherein the kind of punishment reserved for sinners under this head is set forth in a manner as quaint as are the inscriptions in old French beneath.  The compartment, illustrating the eternal trouble of the envious has this inscription: 

’La peine des envieux et envieuses.  Les envieus et envieuses sont en ung fleuve congele plonges jusques au nombril et par dessus les frappe un vent moult froid et quant veulent icelluy vent eviter se plongent dedans ladite glace.’

All the wall-surfaces, the vaulting included, are covered with paintings.  The effect clashes with Northern taste, but the absence of a columnar system affords a plausible reason for relieving the sameness of these large surfaces with colour.  The Gothic style of the North, holding in itself such decorative resources, gains nothing from mural paintings, but always loses something of its true character when they are added.  Apart from such considerations, the wall-paintings in the cathedral of Albi have accumulated such interest from time that no reason would excuse their removal.

This unique church was mainly built at the close of the thirteenth century, together with the Archbishop’s palace, with which it was connected in a military sense by outworks.  These have disappeared, but the fortress called a palace remains, and is still occupied by the Archbishop.  It is a gloomy rectangular mass of brick, absolutely devoid of elegance, but one of the most precious legacies of the Middle Ages in France.  It is not so vast as the papal palace at Avignon, but its feudal and defensive character has been better preserved, for, unlike the fortress by the Rhone, it has not been adapted to the requirements of soldiers’ barracks.  At each of the angles is a round tower, pierced with loopholes, and upon the intervening walls are far-descending machicolations.  The building is still defended on the side of the Tarn by a wall of great height and strength, the base of which is washed by the river in time of flood.  This rampart, with its row of semi-elliptical buttresses corresponding to those of the church and its pepper-box tower at one end, the fortress a little above, and the cathedral on still higher ground, but in immediate neighbourhood, make up an assemblage of mediaeval structures that seems as strange in this nineteenth century as some old dream rising in the midst of day-thoughts.  And the rapid Tarn, an image of perpetual youth, rushes on as it ever did since the face of Europe took its present form.