So to have seen it makes it very difficult to write of it or even to paint; what one wishes to do is rather to work it out in enamel upon a surface of bronze.  This rock, wholly covered with the works of the city, stands looking at the Pyrenees and holding the only level valley between the Mediterranean and the Garonne, and even if one had read nothing concerning it one would understand why it has filled all the legends of the return of armies from Spain, why Victor Hugo could not rest from the memory of it, and why it is so strongly woven in with the story of Charlemagne.

There is another and better reason for the quality of Carcassonne, and that is the act, to which I can recall no perfect parallel in Christian history, by which St. Louis turned what had been a living town into a mere stronghold.  Every inhabitant of Carcassonne was transferred, not to suburbs, but right beyond the river, a mile and more away, to the site of that delightful town which is the Carcassonne of maps and railways, the place where the seventeenth century meets you in graceful ornaments, and where is, to my certain knowledge, the best inn south of parallel 45.  St. Louis turned the rock into a mere stronghold, strengthened it, built new towers, and curtained them into that unsurpassable masonry of the central Middle Ages which you may yet admire in Aigues-Mortes and in Carnarvon.

This political act, the removal of a whole city, may have been accomplished in many other places; it is certainly recorded of many:  but, for the moment at least, I can remember none except Carcassonne in which its consequences have remained.  To this many causes have contributed, but chiefly this, that the new town was transferred to the open plain from the trammels of a narrow plateau, just at the moment when all the towns of Western Europe were growing and breaking their bonds; just after the principal cities of north-western Europe had got their charters, and when Paris (the typical municipality of that age as of our own) was trebling its area and its population.

The transference of the population once accomplished, the rock and towers of Carcassonne ceased to change and to grow.  Humanity was gone.  The fortress was still of great value in war; the Black Prince attempted its destruction, and it is only within living memory that it ceased to be set down on maps (and in Government offices!) as a fortified place:  but the necessity for immediate defence, and the labour which would have remodelled it, had disappeared.  There had disappeared also that eager and destructive activity which accompanies any permanent gathering of French families.  The new town on the plain changed perpetually, and is changing still.  It has lost almost everything of the Middle Ages; it carries, by a sort of momentum, a flavour of Louis XIV, but the masons are at it as they are everywhere, from the Channel to the Mediterranean; for to pull down and rebuild is the permanent recreation of the French.  The rock remains.  It is put in order whenever a stone falls out of place—­no one of weight has talked nonsense here against restoration, for the sense of the past is too strong—­but though it is minutely and continually repaired, Old Carcassonne does not change.  There is no other set of walls in Europe of which this is true.