Carcassonne is not very accessible to the casual tourist to southern France who thinks to laze away a dull November or January at Pau, Biarritz, or even on the Riviera. It is not in the least inaccessible, but it is not on the direct line to anywhere, unless one is en route from Bordeaux to Marseilles, or is making a Pyrenean trip. At any rate it is the best value for the money that one will get by going a couple of hundred kilometres out of his way in the whole circuit of France. By all means study the map, gentle reader, and see if you can't figure it out somehow so that you may get to Carcassonne. Carcassonne, the present city, dates from the days of the good Saint Louis, but all interest lies with its elder sister, _La Cité_, a bouquet of walls and towers, just across the eight-hundred-year-old bridge over the Aude. Close to the feudal city, across the Pont-Vieux, was the barbican, a work completed under Saint Louis. It gave immediate access to the city of antiquity, and defended the approaches to the château after the manner of an outpost, which it really was. This one learns from the old plans, but the barbican itself disappeared in 1816. [Illustration] Carcassonne was a most effective stronghold and guarded two great routes which passed directly through it, one the Route de Spain, and the other running from Toulouse to the Mediterranean, the same that scorching automobilists "let out" on to-day as they go from one gaming-table at Monte Carlo to another at Biarritz. The Romans first made Carcassonne a stronghold; then, from the fifth to the eighth centuries, came the Visigoths. The Saracens held it for twenty-five years and their traces are visible to-day. After the Saracens it came to Charlemagne, and at his death to the Vicomtes de Carcassonne, independent masters of a neighbouring region, who owed allegiance to nobody. This was the commencement of the French dynasty of Trencavel, and the early years of the eleventh century saw the court of Carcassonne brilliant with troubadours, minstrels and _Cours d'Amour_. The _Cours d'Amour_ of Adelaide, wife of Roger Trencavel, and niece of the king of France, were famous throughout the Midi. The followers in her train--minstrels, troubadours and lords and ladies--were many, and no one knew or heard of the fair chatelaine of Carcassonne without being attracted to her. Simon de Montfort pillaged Carcassonne when raiding the country round about, but meanwhile the old _Cité_ was growing in strength and importance, and many were the sieges it underwent which had no effect whatever on its walls of stone. All epochs are writ large in this monument of mediævalism. Until the conquest of Roussillon, Carcassonne's fortress held its proud position as a frontier stronghold; then, during long centuries, it was all but abandoned, and the modern city grew and prospered in a matter-of-fact way, though never approaching in the least detail the architectural magnificence of its hill-top sister.