Here nearly everything is of the mouldy past and rusty with age and tradition, though there is a local iron industry something considerable in extent. The highroad from Foix into Andorra cuts the town directly in halves, and on either side are narrow, climbing streets running up the hillside from the river bank, but architectural or topographical changes have been few since the olden times. Tarascon's population--though the place is the market town of the commune--has, in a hundred years, fallen from fifteen hundred to fourteen hundred and forty five, to give exact statistical figures, which are supposed not to lie. Such observations in France really prove nothing, not even that signs of progress are wanting, nor that folk are less prosperous; they simply suggest that its cities and towns are self-satisfied and content, and are not ambitious to outdistance their neighbours in alleged civic improvements of doubtful taste--always at the tax-payers' expense. Tarascon of itself might well be omitted from a Pyrenean itinerary, but when one includes the neighbouring church of Notre Dame de Sabart--a place of pilgrimage for the faithful of the whole region of the Pyrenees on the eighth and fifteenth of September--the case were different. It is one of the sights and shrines of the region, as is that of Stes. Maries-de-la-Mer in Provence, or Notre Dame de Laghat in the old Comté de Nice. The old abbey-fortress built here by Charlemagne has disappeared, but the great Romanesque church, with its three great naves, is avowedly built up from the remains of the former edifice. Most of Charlemagne's handiwork has vanished throughout his kingdom, but the foundations remain, here and there, and upon them has been built all that is best and most enduring in Gaul. In the environs it was planned to make a great centre of affairs, but destiny and the Comtes de Foix ruled otherwise, though, curiously enough, up to the Revolution the "_Prétres de Sabart_" ruled with an iron-bound supremacy many of the affairs of neighbouring parishes which were no business of theirs. It was church and state again in conflict, but the Revolution finished that for the time being.