So we turn to the evidence of workmanship; and here again we can shoot at M. Degrand with his own bullets. To show that Albi Bridge is a clumsy structure without art is to prove it unworthy of the year 1178, when the Pontist Friars were active in France, and when at Avignon the genius of Saint Bénézet was planning a wonderful achievement. The more just fault we can find with Albi Bridge as a piece of building, the more fit we make it for the year 1035. Yet M. Degrand, passing from wayward controversy into art-criticism, gives himself away in an excess of fault-finding. He forgets that the bridge, a bad model as architecture, is uncommonly picturesque, and he writes as follows: “There are seven pointed arches, and their spans vary--without order or regulation--from 9 m. 75 c. to 16 m.; the piers in bulk are variable also, some of them being 6 m. 50 c. thick, that is to say, two-thirds of the adjacent voids; they are badly aligned and the spandrils belong almost all to different planes. The breakwaters jut out too far, and meet the current with angles of even less than forty-five degrees; while the buttresses behind, on the down-stream side, are rectangular and almost without projection. Last of all, there is no ornament to dress the nude spandrils and to set them apart from the parapets. _C’est là, en fait, une œuvre barbare...._” Let us conjecture, then, that this barbaric bridge at Albi, with its seven pointed arches, may belong, not to the time of Saint Bénézet, but to the year 1035, or thereabouts. Nearly a century ago, in 1822, it was considerably enlarged, but the arches were not rebuilt. The bridge must have been restored many times, but there is no proof that it was reconstructed in the thirteenth century or in the twelfth. Besides, sportsmen in a controversy should be fair. Yet a good many books of reference say: “The Pont du Tarn at Albi, whose first construction goes back to the year 1035 or 1040, is thirteenth-century work”--a calumny on a very beautiful period in the evolution of Gothic architecture. We should have far too much admiration for the Valentré Bridge at Cahors to give the Pont du Tarn to the thirteenth century; and several other bridges in France do ample justice to the successors of Saint Bénézet. For example, there is the Pont St. Esprit, a masterpiece of the Pontist Friars, and a work so vast in length that Brangwyn is never tired of recalling his first impressions of its magnitude.[26] If, again, we wish to study work that comes to us from the twelfth century, then we turn to the famous bridges at Béziers and Carcassonne. [Illustration: PONT DU TARN AT ALBI IN FRANCE. SAID TO DATE FROM ABOUT THE YEARS 1035-40]