"'I'm sixty years; I'm getting old; I've done hard work through all my life, Though yet could never grasp and hold My heart's desire through all my strife. I know quite well that here below All one's desires are granted none; My wish will ne'er fulfilment know, I never have seen Carcassonne." * * * * * "'They say that all the days are there As Sunday is throughout the week: New dress, and robes all white and fair Unending holidays bespeak.' * * * * * "'O! God, O! God, O! pardon me, If this my prayer should'st Thou offend! Things still too great for us we'd see In youth or near one's long life end. My wife once and my son Aignan, As far have travelled as Narbonne, My grandson has seen Perpignan, But I have not seen Carcassonne.'" What emotion, what devotion these lines express, and what a picture they paint of the simple faiths and hopes of man. He never did see Carcassonne, this old peasant of Limoux; the following lines tell why:-- "Thus did complain once near Limoux A peasant hard bowed down with age. I said to him, 'My friend, we'll go Together on this pilgrimage.' We started with the morning tide; But God forgive. We'd hardly gone Our road half over, ere he died. He never did see Carcassonne." In August, 1898, a great fête and illumination was given in the old _Cité de Carcassonne_. All the illustrious Languedoçians alive, it would seem, were there, including the _Cadets de Gascogne_, among them Armand Sylvestre, D'Esparbès, Jean Rameau, Emil Pouvillon, Benjamin Constant, Eugène Falguière, Mercier, Jean-Paul Laurens, et als. All the artifice of the modern pyrotechnist made of the old city, at night, a reproduction of what it must have been in times of war and stress. It was the most splendid fireworks exhibition the world has seen since Nero fiddled away at burning Rome. "_La Cité Rouge_," Sylvestre called it. "_Oh, l'impression inoubliable! Oh! le splendide tableau! It was so perfectly beautiful, so completely magnificent! I have seen the Kremlin thus illuminated; I have seen old Nuremberg under the same conditions, but I declare upon my honour never have I seen so beautiful a sight as the illuminations of Carcassonne."_