[Illustration: "THE UNFINISHED FAÇADE."--PERPIGNAN.]
The interior of the Cathedral is very large and lofty. It is without aisles and the chapels are discreetly hidden between the piers. Far above one's head curves the ribbed Gothic vaulting, and all around is unbroken space that ends in darkness or the vague outline of an altar, dimly lighted by a flickering candle. The walls are painted in rich, sombre colours, and the light comes very gently through the good old stained-glass windows. It is a southern church, dark, cool, and somewhat mysterious; quite foreign to the glare and heat of reality. People are lost in its solemn vastness, and even with many worshippers it is a solitude where most holy vigils could be kept, a mystic place where the southern imagination might well lose itself in such sacred ardours as Saint Theresa felt. The traveller liked to linger here; in the day-time when he peered vainly at the re-redos of Soler de Barcelona, at Mass-time, when the lighted altar-candles glimmered over its fine old marble, but best of all he liked to come at night. Those summer nights in Rousillon were hot and full of the murmur of voices. The Cathedral was the only silent place; more full than ever of the mysterious--the felt and the unseen. As one entered, the sanctuary light shone as a star out of a night of darkness; in a near-by chapel, a candle sputtered itself away, and a woman--whether old or young one could not see--lighted a fresh taper. Sometimes a man knelt and told his beads, sometimes two women entered and separated for their differing needs and prayers. Sometimes one sat in meditation, or knelt, unmoving, for a space of time; once a child brought a new candle to Saint Antony; always some one came or some one went, until the hour of closing. Then, the bell was rung, the door shut by a hand but dimly seen, and the last few watchers went out--across the little square, down this street or that, until they were lost in the darkness of the summer's night.
[Illustration: "THE STONY STREET OF THE HILLSIDE."--CARCASSONNE.]
The train puffed into the station at Carcassonne, and the impatient traveller, throwing his bags into an hotel omnibus, asked for the Cathedral and walked eagerly on that he might the more quickly "see in line the city on the hill," "the castle walls as grand as those of Babylon," and "gaze at last on Carcassonne." His mind was full of the poem, and faithfully following directions, he hurried through clean, narrow streets until he came at length, not upon a poetic vision of battlemented walls and towers, but on the most prosaic of boulevards and the Church of Saint-Michel which has been the Cathedral since 1803, a large, uncouth building with a big, unfinished tower. There is no façade portal, and a small door-way in the north side leads into the great vaulted hall, one of the most usual and commonplace forms of the Gothic interior of the South. This room, which is painted, receives light from a beautiful rose-window at the West, and a series of small roses, like miniatures of the greater one, are cut in the upper walls of the nave; and little chapels, characterised by the same heavy monotony which hangs like a pall over the whole Cathedral, are lost in the church's capacious flanks.