{ 513}were Van Ostade's interiors. Old houses, roofs of uneven thatch, leaning one upon another, machines for hemp displayed in the doorways, little courtyards filled with tubs, wheelbarrows, straw, children, animals--a gay and well-to-do air; above all the great illuminator of the country, the universal decorator, the everlasting giver of joy, the sun poured in profusion its beautiful warm light over the walls of ruddy brick, and patched with strong shadows the white roughcast.
Toulouse appears, all red with bricks, amidst the red dust of evening.
A melancholy city, with narrow and flinty streets. The town hall, called _Capicole_, has but one narrow entrance, commonplace halls, a pronounced and elegant façade in the taste of the decorations for public festivals. In order that no one may doubt its antiquity, they have inscribed on it the word _Capitolium._ The cathedral, dedicated to St. Stephen, is remarkable only for one pleasant memory:
"Towards the year 1027," says Pierre de Marca,
"It was the custom at Toulouse to box a Jew's ears in public on Easter day, in the Church of St. Stephen. Hugues, chaplain to Aimery, Viscount { 514}de Rochechouart, being at Toulouse in his master's suite, dealt the Jew a blow with such force that it crushed his head and made his brains and eyes to fall out, as Adhémar has observed in his chronicle."
The choir where Adhémar made this observation is wanting in neither beauty nor grandeur; but what strikes you most on leaving the mountains, is the museum. You find anew thought, passion, genius, art, all the most beautiful flowers of human civilization.
It is a broad, well-lighted hall, flanked by two small galleries of greater height, which form a semicircle, and filled with pictures of all the schools, some of which are excellent. A Murillo, representing _St. Diego and his Monks_; you recognize in it the monastic harshness, the master's sentiment of reality, his originality of expression and earnest vigor. A _Martyrdom of St. Andrew,_ by Caravaggio, black and horrible. Several pictures by the Caracci, Guercino and Guido. A _Ceremony of the Order of the Holy Ghost_ in 1635, by Philip de Champagne. These most real, delicate and noble faces are portraits of the time; you see the contemporaries of Louis XIII. in life. Here are the correct drawing, temperate color, conscientious but not literal exactness of a Fleming become a Frenchman. { 515}