Never was there an architectural glory like that of Carcassonne. Most mediæval fortified bourgs have been transformed out of all semblance to their former selves, but not so Carcassonne. It lives to-day as in the past, transformed or restored to be sure, but still the very ideal of a walled city of the Middle Ages. The stress and cares of commerce and the super-civilization of these latter days have built up a new and ugly commercial city beyond the walls, leaving _La Cité_ a lonely dull place where the very spirit of mediævalism stalks the streets and passages, and the ghosts of a past time people the château, the donjon, and the surrounding buildings which once sheltered counts and prelates and chevaliers and courtly ladies. The old cathedral, too, dedicated to St. Nazaire, as pure a Gothic gem as may be found outside Sainte Chapelle in Paris, is as much of the past as if it existed only in memory, for services are now carried on in a great, gaunt church in the lower town, leaving this magnificent structure unpeopled and alone. Carcassonne, as seen from the low-lying plain of the valley of the Aude, makes a most charming _motif_ for a picture. In the purple background are the Pyrenees, setting off the crenelated battlements of walls, towers and donjon in genuine fairy-land fashion. It is almost too ethereal to be true, as seen through the dim mist of an early May morning. "A wonderful diadem of chiselled stone set in the forehead of the Pyrenees," an imaginative Frenchman called it. It would not be wise to attempt to improve on this metaphor. This world's wonder--for it is a world's wonder, though not usually included in the magic seven--has enchanted author, poet, painter, historian and architect. Who indeed could help giving it the homage due, once having read Viollet-le-Duc's description in his "Dictionnaire Raisonée d'Architecture," or Nadaud's lines beginning:-- "Je n'ai jamais vu Carcassonne." Five thousand people from all over the world pass its barbican in a year, and yet how few one recalls among his acquaintances who have ever been there. It began to dawn upon the French away back in 1835, at the instigation of Prosper Merimée, that they had within their frontiers the most wonderfully impressive walled city still above ground. It was the work of fifty years to clear its streets and ramparts of a conglomerate mass of parasite structures which had been built into the old fabric, and to reconstruct the roofings and copings of walls and houses to an approximation of what they must once have been.