gne.

There is another and better reason for the quality of Carcassonne, and
that is the act, to which I can recall no perfect parallel in Christian
history, by which St. Louis turned what had been a living town into a
mere stronghold. Every inhabitant of Carcassonne was transferred, not to
suburbs, but right beyond the river, a mile and more away, to the site
of that delightful town which is the Carcassonne of maps and railways,
the place where the seventeenth century meets you in graceful ornaments,
and where is, to my certain knowledge, the best inn south of parallel
45. St. Louis turned the rock into a mere stronghold, strengthened it,
built new towers, and curtained them into that unsurpassable masonry of
the central Middle Ages which you may yet admire in Aigues-Mortes and in
Carnarvon.

This political act, the removal of a whole city, may have been
accomplished in many other places; it is certainly recorded of many:
but, for the moment at least, I can remember none except Carcassonne in
which its consequences have remained. To this many causes have
contributed, but chiefly this, that the new town was transferred to the
open plain from the trammels of a narrow plateau, just at the moment
when all the towns of Western Europe were growing and breaking their
bonds; just after the principal cities of north-western Europe had got
their charters, and when Paris (the typical municipality of that age as
of our own) was trebling its area and its population.

The transference of the population once accomplished, the rock and
towers of Carcassonne ceased to change and to grow. Humanity was gone.
The fortress was still of great value in war; the Black Prince attempted
its destruction, and it is only within living memory that it ceased to
be set down on maps (and in Government offices!) as a fortified place:
but the necessity for immediate defence, and the labour which would have
remodelled it, had disappeared. There had disappeared also that eager
and destructive activity which accompanies any permanent gathering of
French families. The new town on the plain changed perpetually, and is
changing still. It has lost almost everything of the Middle Ages; it
carries, by a sort of momentum, a flavour of Louis XIV, but the masons
are at it as they are everywhere, from the Channel to the Mediterranean;
for to pull down and rebuild is the permanent recreation of the French.
The rock remains. It is put in order whenever a stone falls