Even by day it has the air of a vignette of Gustave Dore, a couplet of Victor Hugo.  It is almost too perfect—­as if it were an enormous model, placed on a big green table at a museum.  A steep, paved way, grass-grown like all roads where vehicles never pass, stretches up to it in the sun.  It has a double enceinte, complete outer walls and complete inner (these, elaborately fortified, are the more curious); and this congregation of ramparts, towers, bastions, battlements, barbicans, is as fantastic and romantic as you please.  The approach I mention here leads to the gate that looks toward Toulouse—­the Porte de l’Aude.  There is a second, on the other side, called, I believe, Porte Narbonnaise, a magnificent gate, flanked with towers thick and tall, defended by elaborate outworks; and these two apertures alone admit you to the place—­putting aside a small sally-port, protected by a great bastion, on the quarter that looks toward the Pyrenees....

I should lose no time in saying that restoration is the great mark of the Cite.  M. Viollet-le-Duc has worked his will upon it, put it into perfect order, revived the fortifications in every detail.  I do not pretend to judge the performance, carried out on a scale and in a spirit which really impose themselves on the imagination.  Few architects have had such a chance, and M. Viollet-le-Duc must have been the envy of the whole restoring fraternity.  The image of a more crumbling Carcassonne rises in the mind, and there is no doubt that forty years ago the place was more affecting.  On the other hand, as we see it to-day, it is a wonderful evocation; and if there is a great deal of new in the old, there is plenty of old in the new.  The repaired crenellations, the inserted patches, of the walls of the outer circle sufficiently express this commixture.

Carcassonne dates from the Roman occupation of Gaul.  The place commanded one of the great roads into Spain, and in the fourth century Romans and Franks ousted each other from such a point of vantage.  In the year 436, Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, superseded both these parties; and it is during his occupation that the inner enceinte was raised upon the ruins of the Roman fortifications.  Most of the Visigoth towers that are still erect are seated upon Roman substructions which appear to have been formed hastily, probably at the moment of the Frankish invasion.  The authors of these solid defenses, tho occasionally disturbed, held Carcassonne and the neighboring country, in which they had established their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four centuries, of which no traces remain.