Mona Caird

"Oh! garden that is blooming in the fields of Montolian,

---

Ye are crimsoned with the blood of the slain."

From MS. poem on the Albigensian Crusades
found by M. Fauriel in the "BibliothÈque du Roi."

CHAPTER XVI

CARCASSONNE, THE ALBIGENSES AND PIERRE VIDAL

With the siege of Beaucaire fresh in our minds, Simon de Montfort and Count Raimon VI. of Toulouse became enrolled among the names that jumped to the eyes wherever they occurred. We pursued any trail that led to further particulars of these two men who satisfied the human instinct to worship, on the one hand, and to whole-heartedly abominate on the other.

There was no call at any time to moderate one's detestation of de Montfort on account of some untimely incident betraying him in amiable sidelights. He was never discovered playing at ninepins with the children of his captive foe, or chivalrously endowing with a competence for life the widow of the wretch whom he had sent to die in his deepest dungeons. Never was he caught in unguarded moments of virtue; never did he tarnish the full gloss of his villainy by any little inconsistency of honour or compunction. He went on adding contempt to our hatred by a splendid and unremitting variety of treachery and baseness. At his worst, he was a fiend incarnate; and a better moment he never had.

ROMAN FOUNTAIN AT NIMES.
By Joseph Pennell.

Thus for the purposes of melodrama he was invaluable. He gave one's emotions no trouble. He was a beautifully consistent, unmitigated ruffian, and it was a pleasure to undisturbedly loathe him.

Count Raimon of Toulouse and Viscount of BÉziers made a very good companion-opposite to this satisfactory scoundrel.

The two seemed to fill the position in our affections of a handsome pair of ornaments on a well-regulated mantelpiece—related by the sharpness of their contrast: Summer and Winter, Vice and Virtue, or the little meteorological man and woman who appear at the house-door, one in and one out (never both at the same time), to indicate fair or foul weather—perhaps also as a sly comment on domestic felicity!

Count Raimon and his companion interested us more especially when we entered Languedoc, the Count's own territory and the principal scene of the Albigensian wars. Beaucaire, as we had seen, which also belonged to Count Raimon, had fallen into the hands of the arch-villain, but there his wonderful luck at last deserted him.

The Pope had set his mind on consolidating the power of the Church and on annexing the lands of the few reigning nobles who protected the Albigenses. Of these Count Raimon of Toulouse was the most determined. He is one of the most striking examples of religious toleration, almost the only one, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Without any leanings towards the doctrines of the heretics, he yet stood by them from first to last, trying by every means in his power to avert the fury of the Pope and the Crusaders. He tried diplomacy, he tried conciliation, but without avail. He held firm in his refusal to hand over any subjects in his dominions, whatsoever their faith, to the fury of the Inquisition. Fortune was against him, with Innocent the Third on the throne, St. Dominic, the powerful originator of the terrible tribunal on the persecuting side, and Simon de Montfort as its military leader.

The Pope had actually recalled the Crusaders from the Holy Land to turn their arms against their own kindred. Heretics at home, he held, were more dangerous than infidels abroad. The war-intoxicated Defenders of the Faith needed no incitement. Their ruthless savagery has cast a shadow over the land to this day. This shadow hangs heavily over the scene of the worst atrocities of the war, and it was remarkable how the radiance so thrillingly pervasive in Provence failed to follow us into the richer country of Languedoc.

Count Raimon's persistent defence of his Albigensian subjects kept the war centred more or less within his dominions, of which Toulouse was the capital.

Here, in Languedoc, it was, above all, that the gracious life which we had learnt to associate with the troubadours was blotted out and quenched in a very sea of blood and suffering.

It is saddening, too, to think that one of those very singers in his later days became infected with the spirit of the Church, and ended as one of the most ferocious of the persecutors.

This renegade was Folquet of Marseilles, who loved Azalais, the wife of Count Barral of Marseilles. He was of a tenacious, zealous, gloomy temperament—not at all of the true troubadour spirit—and this characteristic afterwards shows itself in his ardour against the heretics.

"Too late," he laments, "I have discovered love's falsehood: I am like one who swears never to gamble again after he has lost his whole fortune." Azalais dies, and Folquet enters the monastery of Citeaux. And then he becomes Abbot of Toulouse in the heart of the Albigensian troubles. From that time forth he devotes himself to persecution.

ENTRANCE TOWERS, CARCASSONNE.
By E. M. Synge.

The taking of the hill-set city of BÉziers, where a brilliant Court used to be held, is one of the most terrible incidents in this twenty years' war.

"Kill! kill!" shouted the leaders; "Kill! kill!" the cry was echoed through the blazing city, and sixty thousand souls are said to have perished on that awful day.

Folquet, the ex-troubadour, had been told that heretics and faithful were being indiscriminately massacred.

"Slay them," he cried; "God will know his own."

There is also a similar story about de Montfort, to whom two heretics were brought: one firm in the faith, the other open to conviction.

"Burn them both," shouted de Montfort. "If this fellow means what he says the fire will expiate his sins; and if he lies he will suffer for his imposture."

We saw the city of BÉziers from the windows of the train: a picturesque mass of houses climbing up a steep hill to cluster round the fine fortress-cathedral—another characteristic example of the architecture of Southern France.

Our train puffed along the valley of the Aude to the famous walled city of Carcassonne, the next scene of this savage drama.

It was here that Count Raimon—or the Viscount of BÉziers, as he was also called—had established himself when the news came of the fall of BÉziers. A bad day that must have been for the Count and his garrison! His brother-in-law, King Pedro of Arragon, had come to help him in this almost hopeless cause, and he went at once to mediate with the Crusaders, pleading Raimon's own unimpeachable orthodoxy.

But it was of no use. The Defenders of the Faith were panting for plunder and massacre. They said the Count and twelve knights might depart in peace, but the town must be given up and every other soul in it.

"That shall be when an ass flies to heaven," replied the Count, and prepared for defence.

It was almost with a sense that we were to be present at one of the most terrible moments in mediÆval history that we watched the flying landscape for a first sight of Carcassonne on its height.

Who could ever forget that first impression of it, as the train slowed up to the station of the lower town in the valley and a strange vision came into the sky of a double-walled mediÆval city with a forest of towers rising tall and pointed through the mists and mystery of a far-away romance?

This was a return to the Middle Ages indeed!

The hotel omnibus trundled us—amid a vibrating heap of rugs, handbags, umbrellas—through the ancient streets of the lower town, which the natives spoke of as "modern" to distinguish it from "la CitÉ," which was far more ancient, seeing that it possessed more than one tower belonging to the misty times of the Visigothic kingdom, whose capital was at Toulouse.

As we drove, the turn of the road placed us at different angles with the City of Dreams; and it stood the test.

No sign of fading away, or of dwindling into anything less than its astonishing self.

At the hotel we were received by a most elegant landlady in widow's garb. If it had not been for her pressing us to have our lunch before we started, I feel sure that we should have been off and up to the citÉ without a moment's delay. However, we first made acquaintance with this lady's wonderful cuisine in the old, low-pitched salle-À-manger, where only a few Frenchmen of the commercial type were taking their luncheon. We were neither of us much given to what we called "fussing over our food," but it was impossible for the most benighted of women to fail to notice the delicate art which distinguished every detail of the repast. What we had I cannot remember, but it was a succession of masterpieces. Such modulation of flavours, such opposing of salt and sweet, acid and flat, creamy and piquant; such coquetry in the salad dressing, such sentiment in the sauces! It was wonderful, as all true art is.

Altogether Carcassonne was a place of artistic achievement.

The city, as we wended our way towards it, grew more and more dazzling to the sense of reality. That progress through the lower town, across the Aude, was like walking straight into the background of a mediÆval painting—and who has not longed for that excursion? There was not a sight or a sound to mar the perfection of the place. Doubtless in the old days there would have been more stir as one approached the great double-towered gateway and crossed the bridge over what was once a moat. And there would have been sentries, and perhaps the flash of armour caught between the crenellations of the lower outer walls. Otherwise precisely the same sights and sounds met our senses as met those of the wayfarers of the thirteenth century.

Immediately within the inner walls there is a street of smallish houses. But soon we diverge from this and are admitted by the custodian—a most singular person, by the way—through a side door and up a steep staircase to the ramparts.

And here on emerging, one holds one's breath. Towers, towers, and more towers; towers with high conical roofs in fantastic medley; round towers, square towers, tall, emaciated towers springing above the mass of building; towers with crenellated parapets showing rounded contours to the enemy and flat sides to the town; Visigoth towers recalling the momentous days when barbarian races began to swarm and settle in the fertile provinces of Roman Gaul.

Wonderful was that walk round the walls passing through the long procession of the towers. It was a veritable city of towers, moving like living figures as we moved, appearing in new groups between the houses, opening into vistas, falling back and reappearing.

It seemed as if those silent sentinels were trying to keep us always in view, stealing out cautiously from behind the buildings, crossing, falling back, making way for one another, with a sort of secret movement round the whole circle of their orbit.

There were great flights of steps corbelled out on the inner side of the ramparts, apparently to provide a means of descending to the city, and also of reaching certain points of the fortifications. There were gateways, barbicans, turrets, and a marvellous everchanging series of architectural groupings; walls, bulwarks, battlements.

Below were the outer walls, within which was a spacious grassy enclosure where the men-at-arms used to keep guard.

Citywards, there was the castle, and the cathedral. And at the foot of the ramparts, backing into them, were the little gardens of the citizens of Carcassonne. Boughs would sway against the masonry—Merovingian some of these splendid blocks of stone!—while the bright, quiet sun of a November afternoon poured with broad, equal glow into the silent city.

And far away on the horizon, miles and miles beyond the sweeping plains of Languedoc, the faint white peaks of the Pyrenees!

Our guide was the most singular of men. Whether he had a patriotic hatred of the English I cannot tell, but he did his best to ignore our presence altogether.

Having reeled off his stock information—(not to us, but to the universe generally)—he would retire and lean gloomily over the battlements as if he were taking a stroll on his own account and were contemplating life from the pessimist standpoint. Perhaps he was resisting an inclination to dispose of us mediÆvally in one of the oubliettes.

Sometimes he would gaze down into the gardens below as if he were watching some one at whose folly he was thoroughly disgusted. Yet not a soul was to be seen. An attempt at geniality on our part was met in the most freezing manner. There was something really extraordinary about the man, and I incline to think he was either a patriot sustaining his country's honour by this simple means, or a person suffering from melancholy madness of a very aggravated type.

Even if he unlocked a door for us he studied the far distance till we had passed through. Then he re-locked the door and hurried on in front as if dreading we should ask him stupid questions. It may be he was horribly bored by this eternal round of the bulwarks with foolish tourists.

The longer we lingered on the ramparts of Carcassonne the more incredible it appeared that the town could ever be taken by the means of assault available in the thirteenth century. Yet taken we sadly knew that it was, and by Simon de Montfort!

That was virtually the end of the house of Toulouse and of the cause of the Albigenses.

The lower outer walls were as solid as they could be. Then between the outer and inner walls were stationed sentries and men-at-arms. But supposing these dangers to be overcome, and the foe to aspire to pass through the high inner walls, from whose battlements hundreds of arrows might be flying and boiling pitch be pouring, perhaps the assailant would rush up some cunning, wall-embedded staircase which seemed to promise access to the city or the ramparts. But instead of that it would turn out, after many windings and confused branchings, to be merely a blind passage fashioned thus on purpose to mislead an enemy and prevent his surprising the town. Moreover, even if the impossible were achieved and those vast walls scaled, there was still the castle or inner fortress, where the inhabitants could all collect in time of emergency and bid defiance to every foe except hunger and thirst.

Probably Count Raimon and his garrison expected to be able to hold out against de Montfort in spite of the invariable success of the latter. One can imagine with what ardour the preparations were made for the defence: every watch-tower and turret, every outlook and barbican haunted by anxious faces scanning the country.

And then the attack! The first assault was led by the prelates solemnly chanting the "Veni Creator," and the God of the Christians was called upon to fight on the side of slayers and torturers, of murderers of unarmed citizens and women and children. It was de Montfort who boasted: "Neither age nor sex have we spared; we have slain all!"

This first onslaught was repulsed, and perhaps if it had not been for a failure in the water supply, the beautiful city and its noble cause might have prevailed.

How they must have prayed for rain in that wondrous colour-flooded cathedral, when day after day the cruel, cloudless heavens smiled down ironically upon the dusty streets and glaring walls!

At last a parley was arranged between the Count and the besiegers. They gave him a pledge of safe conduct, and he went out to the camp. In the service of Heaven and the Church, the Crusaders considered ordinary honour and good faith superfluous—the usual plea of a good motive for villainous deeds—and they traitorously seized him, and when the city fell they threw him into a dungeon in his own citadel at Carcassonne—with all the beautiful precepts of chivalry ringing in their ears—a piece of work after de Montfort's own heart.

It is better not to dwell on the sack of the city: a sack of the thirteenth century conducted by de Montfort.

"For thou hast delivered them to the vilest of mortal men," the Comte de Foix had exclaimed to the Pope, speaking of the Albigenses at the Council of the Lateran, "to Simon de Montfort."

Count Raimon died in prison, nobody knows by what means. We were shown the noisome little hole in which the noble and tolerant spirit saw the last of this sad and cruel and beautiful world.

In virtue of the poet's faculty of imaginative sympathy Pierre Cardinal, the famous troubadour, had the insight to understand the nobility of this man born centuries too soon.

"As water in the fountain, so chivalry has its source in him. Against the basest of men, nay, against the whole world he stands." So writes the poet of the hero. It was a sorry age in which to be born before one's time!

Happily there are other and brighter memories to associate with Carcassonne. The troubadour of far renown, Pierre Vidal, must have often passed in and out at the great gateway: that delightful, foolish, brilliant personage; courtly, naif, and infinitely charming, yet pathetically unsuccessful, for all his genius—perhaps partly because of it. He was born at Toulouse, and so belonged to this country, then ruled by Raimon V., but his fate was chiefly active at the court of Marseilles where he fell in love with Azalais de Rocca Martina, wife of Count Barral, a lady who is described as possessing "charms of the sort that intoxicate; an emotional power, a magnetism, a luxurious will that swept all resistance away." He called her "Vierna," and wrote his canzos to her under that name.

One of his biographers says of him: "He was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased him, and as he would have it." It is a moot point whether this may not be rather wisdom than folly, for believing things to be as one desires them often goes a long way towards fulfilling that tacit prophecy.

Alas, things were not exactly as Vidal wished, in spite of his pleasant believings, but he had rosy hours and sang enchanting songs and gave much joy with his gifts and his charm. "Vierna," however, did not at all appreciate him. She gave him a ring and a little perfunctory graciousness, as she was bound to do to sustain her character as a courteous lady; but she appears to have wearied of his songs and his devotion. At last her husband tried to reconcile her to the troubadour, and to induce her to treat him more kindly. Vidal lost heart after a time, and concluded he was a fool.

"But beauty makes the sanest man go mad," he sang or said, and though he had many love-affairs and fancies, they seem to have been of slight seriousness compared with his passion for Azalais. In his erratic life, he haunted the neighbourhood of Carcassonne and Toulouse; visited Albi—whence the luckless Albigenses took their name—and Saissac and Cabaret near Carcassonne. In Provence he had an unpleasant adventure at St. Gilles, where the husband of a lady to whom he addressed love-songs and of whose love he had boasted, became enraged and bored the poet's too eloquent tongue.

In these strange times, the exquisite chivalric civilisation being but newly formed—like a sheet of ice on a dark pool—had very thin places. Vidal's friend Ugo del Baux bore him off—perhaps to his wonderful eyrie in the Alpilles—and nursed him till he was well again.

Vidal's wanderings were far and wide in Languedoc and Provence. We even hear of him singing in the little grey hill-top village of Beuil in the mountains to the north of Nice.

Near Carcassonne lived a famous beauty, Loba de Pegnautier. She inhabited the fortified town of Cabaret, and there knights and troubadours flocked to visit her, among them Pierre Vidal.

The story goes that in order to please her he adopted the crest or emblem of a Wolf in compliment to her name, Loba; and, dressed in a wolf-skin, ran out into the field and had himself hunted by the shepherds with their dogs. But Loba only made fun of him, and it appears that the shepherds hunted him rather too seriously, and altogether the foolish poet came off unhappily in this fantastic scheme of love-making.

He is said to have joined Richard Coeur de Lion in his Crusade, to have visited Spain and Italy, notably the Court of Montferrat, and everywhere to have pursued his troubadour's calling and the will-of-the-wisp of a satisfying love.

He once tried boldness with Azalais and ventured on stealing a kiss one morning while she was sleeping. But he lived to rue the day. She fell into a passion of anger and refused to accept any apology. However, he murmured ancient saws about women and hoped on. Count Barral laughed at his wife for taking the wild poet's doings so seriously. She was not to be appeased, and finally Vidal went off to Cyprus and characteristically married a Princess who claimed the title of Empress of the Eastern Empire. And the two set up an Imperial Court and ordered an expensive throne, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves until Vidal had spent all his money. Presumably the Princess died, or they parted, and then Barral insisted on Vidal's returning to Provence; and he met him joyously at Les Baux, and brought him home to Marseilles where Azalais welcomed him with a freely given kiss as a token of forgiveness. And poor Vidal breaks out into a veritable spring-song of joy and thankfulness. But the Countess tired of him very soon, and never had the least idea of returning his passion.

So he starts again on his wanderings, and goes all over the world with one patron and friend after another, and so ends his strange, brilliant, joyous, troubled, unsatisfied life.

With all his natural susceptibility and need of affection he seems never to have overcome his love for the beautiful Azalais, nor, with all his charm, does he appear to have been able to inspire a serious attachment in any of the innumerable ladies to whom he warbled his graceful canzos. He never seems to have thoroughly grown up, and probably no woman capable of passionate attachment could have bestowed the full flood of it on a nature so immature.

What exactly the quality or qualities may be that bestow the power of inspiring a grande passion is one of the unfathomed mysteries of the heart. Vidal possessed every attribute that could charm—or so one would suppose—yet ladies only laughed at him affectionately, petted him, and gave their hearts elsewhere.

He is one of the most attractive and pathetic of the troubadours, and gives the impression of a sort of erratic genius. His naÏvetÉ is astonishing and charming, in spite of his outrageous habit of boasting of his successes in love and war.

One can easily picture the richly-dressed figure issuing from the great gates of Carcassonne on his beautiful horse—his horse was surely a noble one—followed by his accompanist and his servant, who carried his vielle; and we saw him in our mind's eye riding through the country on his way to Cabaret to pay homage to Loba de Pegnautier—and so he fades into the far away.

Alas, those beautiful towers and walls were destined to be battered and broken by de Montfort and his Crusaders, as we have seen. And it was not long after the taking of the city that the cause of the Albigenses was finally lost on the field of Muret, in this district. De Montfort was killed a little later by a stone at the siege of Toulouse, and a yell of joy and execration went up from the whole Midi which he had tortured so hideously.

We saw his tomb in the cathedral at Carcassonne—and wondered! Our feelings of hatred died away in the glory of that cathedral.

When we entered, we found ourselves suddenly bathed in waves of colour.

The entire east end of the building was a splendid expanse of stained glass stretching from floor to roof, and from wall to wall: the whole breadth of the cathedral, divided only by a few slender mullions. The transmuted glow of the afternoon sun was flooding the church, kindling the tints of the glass to the liquid glory of gems; and it was perfectly, radiantly still.

After all, it is unspeakable pity rather than hatred that madmen like de Montfort ought to inspire; for frenzied cruelty such as his implied a misery and darkness of spirit beyond the power of human speech to express, and surely, sooner or later, an awful expiation.

"But what opinion was it that the Albigenses held which made the Pope and the Crusaders treat them so ferociously?" cried Barbara, bewildered at the accounts of their cruelty and of de Montfort's specially hateful savageries. Well might she ask!

For one thing, the Albigenses would have it that three nails were used at the Crucifixion; whereas all true believers know that there were four——

Barbara stared.

I had chapter and verse for it. A learned controversialist had denounced the Three Nail view as unworthy of Catholics and Christians.

"And for that they killed and racked and tortured——"

In truth it was for that among other errors of doctrine. It is difficult to find out what the Albigenses really believed, for they were so calumniated. Baring-Gould contends that they had revived the ancient paganism of the country.

They believed in two forces, a good and an evil: the nine-lived ManichÆan heresy.

But that belief is represented in our good old friend the Devil, who, indeed, is probably a remnant of Pagan ideas. They rejected the Trinity, refused to worship saints, and discouraged marriage. They seemed very much like any other enthusiastic sect that breaks off from the main body of believers, and is ready to die for Three Nails instead of the orthodox Four. Will the history of religious persecution never cure people of their Three-Nail controversies?