; the ambulatory is entered through the Cloister, or a
pretty little Gothic door-way which if it were not the chief entrance of
the church, would properly seem to have been built for the clergy rather
than for the people who now use it. If these portals are strangely
unimportant, their insignificance does not detract materially from the
stateliness of the apse, which is created by its great height--one
hundred and thirty feet in the interior measurement--and the magnificent
flying-buttresses.

These flying-buttresses give to the exterior its most curious and
beautiful effect. They are a form of Gothic seldom attempted in the
South, and exist here in a rather exceptional construction. Over the
chapels which surround the apse rise a series of double-arched supports,
the outer ones ending in little turrets with surmounting crenellations.
On these supports, after a splendid outward sweep, rest the abutments of
the flying arches. These have a fine sure grace and withal a lightness
that relieves the heaviness imposed on the church by the towers and the
immense strength of the body of the apse. They are the chief as well as
the most salient glory of the exterior, and give to the Cathedral its
peculiar individuality.

[Illustration: "THESE FLYING-BUTTRESSES GIVE TO THE EXTERIOR ITS MOST
CURIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL EFFECT."--NARBONNE.]

Apart from its buttresses, Saint-Just has little decorative style. Its
crenellations and turrets are military and forceful, not ornate. For the
church had its defensive as truly as its religious purpose, and formerly
was united on the North with the fortifications of the Palace, and
contributed to the protection of its prelates as well as to their
arch-episcopal prestige.

In spite of the fostering care of the French government, the Palace, the
Cloister, and the Cathedral seem in the hands of strangers. The
traveller who had longed to see them in their finished magnificence
realised the futility of this wish, but he turned away with another as
vain, that he might have known them even in incompletion, when they were
in the hands of the Church, when the Archbishop still ruled in his
Palace, when the Canons prayed in the Cloister, and the Cathedral was
still a-building.

[Sidenote: Perpignan.]

Perpignan, like Elne, is in Rousillon. The period of her most brilliant
prosperity was that of the Majorcan dominion in the XII century. Later
she reverted to Aragon, and was still so fine a city that for