第50章

The front consists only of a portal,beside which a tall brick tower,of a later period,has been erected.The nave was wrapped in dimness,with a few scattered lamps.I could only distinguish an immense vault,like a high cavern,without aisles.Here and there in the gloom was a kneeling figure;the whole place was mysterious and lopsided.The choir was curtained off;it appeared not to correspond with the nave,that is,not to have the same axis.The only other ecclesiastical impression I gathered at Toulouse came to me in the church of La Daurade,of which the front,on the quay by the Garonne,was closed with scaffoldings;so that one entered it from behind,where it is completely masked by houses,through a door which has at first no traceable connection with it.It is a vast,high,modernised,heavily decorated church,dimly lighted at all times,I should suppose,and enriched by the shades of evening at the time I looked into it.

I perceived that it consisted mainly of a large square,beneath a dome,in the centre of which a single person a lady was praying with the utmost absorption.

The manner of access to the church interposed such an obstacle to the outer profanities that I had a sense of intruding,and presently withdrew,carrying with me a picture of the,vast,still interior,the gilded roof gleaming in the twilight,and the solitary worshipper.

What was she praying for,and was she not almost afraid to remain there alone?

For the rest,the picturesque at Toulouse consists principally of the walk beside the Garonne,which is spanned,to the faubourg of SaintCyprien,by a stout brick bridge.This hapless suburb,the baseness of whose site is noticeable,lay for days under the water at the time of the last inundations.The Garonne had almost mounted to the roofs of the houses,and the place continues to present a blighted,frightened look.Two or three persons,with whom I had some conversation,spoke of that time as a memory of horror.

I have not done with my Italian comparisons;I shall never have done with them.I am therefore free to say that in the way in which Toulouse looks out on the Garonne there was something that reminded me vaguely of the way in which Pisa looks out on the Arno.The redfaced houses all of brick along the quay have a mixture of brightness and shabbiness,as well as the fashion of the open loggia in the topstory.The river,with another bridge or two,might be the Arno,and the buildings on the other side of it a hospital,a suppressed convent dip their feet into it with real southern cynicism.I have spoken of the old Hotel d'Assezat as the best house at Toulouse;with the exception of the cloister of the museum,it is the only "bit"I remember.It has fallen from the state of a noble residence of the sixteenth century to that of a warehouse and a set of offices;but a certain dignity lingers in its melancholy court,which is divided from the street by a gateway that is still imposing,and in which a clambering vine and a red Virginiacreeper were suspended to the rusty walls of brick stone.

The most interesting house at Toulouse is far from being the most striking.At the door of No.50Rue des Filatiers,a featureless,solid structure,was found hanging,one autumn evening,the body of the young MarcAntoine Calas,whose illinspired suicide was to be the first act of a tragedy so horrible.The fanaticism aroused in the townsfolk by this incident;the execution by torture of Jean Calas,accused as a Protestant of having hanged his son,who had gone over to the Church of Rome;the ruin of the family;the claustration of the daughters;the flight of the widow to Switzerland;her introduction to Voltaire;the excited zeal of that incomparable partisan,and the passionate persistence with which,from year to year,he pursued a reversal of judgment,till at last he obtained it,and devoted the tribunal of Toulouse to execration and the name of the victims to lasting wonder and pity,these things form part of one of the most interesting and touching episodes of the social history of the eighteenth century.The story has the fatal progression,the dark rigidity,of one of the tragic dramas of the Greeks.Jean Calas,advanced in life,blameless,bewildered,protesting.his innocence,had been broken on the wheel;and the sight of his decent dwelling,which brought home to me all that had been suflered there,spoiled for me,for half an hour,the impression of Toulouse.