l-times, and the day-time idling,
which seem so shiftless and so strange to northern minds. This is the
energy, however, which has made Toulouse a rich, opulent city,--a city
with broad boulevards, open squares, and fine buildings, and a city of
the gay Renaissance rather than of the stern Middle Ages. Yet for
Toulouse the Middle Ages were a dark time. What could be gotten by the
sword was taken by the sword, and even the mind of man, in that gross
age, was forced and controlled by the agony of his body. It is a time
whose most peaceful outward signs, the churches, have been preserved to
Toulouse, and the war-signs, towers, walls, and fortifications,
dungeons, and the torture-irons of inquisition, are now--and
wisely--hidden or destroyed. Of the fierce tragedies which were played
in Toulouse, even to the days of the great Revolution, few traces
remain,--the stern, orthodox figure of Simon de Montfort, and of Count
Raymond, his too politic foe, and the anguish of the Crusaders' siege,
the bent form of Jean Calas and the shrewd, keen face of Voltaire, who
vindicated him from afar, these memories seem dimmed; and those which
live are of light-hearted troubadours and gaily dressed ladies of the
city of the gay, insouciant Renaissance to whom an auto-da-fe was a gala
between the blithesome robing of the morning and the serenade in the
moonlight. Fierce and steadfast, sentimentally languishing, dying for a
difference of faith, or dying as violently to avenge the insult of a
frown or a lifted eye-brow, such are the Languedocians whom Toulouse
evokes, near to the Gascons and akin to them. Here is the Academie des
Jeux-Floreaux, the "College of Gay Wit" which was founded in the XIV
century, and still distributes on the third of every May prizes of gold
and silver flowers to poets, and writers of fine prose; and here are
many "hotels" of the Renaissance, rich and beautiful homes of the old
Toulousan nobility whose courts are all too silent. Here is the Hotel du
Vieux-Raisin, the Maison de Pierre, and the Hotel d'Assezat where Jeanne
d'Albret lived; and near-by is a statue of her son, the strongest,
sanest, and most debonnaire of all the great South-men, Henry of
Navarre. Here in Toulouse is indeed material for a thousand fancies.

[Illustration: "THE NAVE OF THE XIII CENTURY IS AN AISLE-LESS CHAMBER,
LOW AND BROADLY ARCHED."--TOULOUSE.]

And here the Cathedral-seeker, who had usually had the proud task of
finding the finest buil