Memories of the great Emperor Charles haunt the former cathedral of Bordeaux, St. Seurin. Fundamentally it belongs to the cupola type of edifice, and though incessantly rebuilt up to the XV century, it presents the aspect of a Romanesque church. The south portal (c. 1260), sculptured with elaborate foliate ornament, has images of unequal merit. In St. Seurin, says tradition, Charlemagne paused, in 778, with the bodies of the heroes of Roncevaux to be buried at Blaye, his nephew Roland and that paladin's comrade, Sire Olivier, and Archbishop Turpin of Rheims, who fought pagans--_par granz batailles et par mult bels sermuns_. On the altar of St. Seurin the emperor laid the horn that Roland blew in his last extremity, the olifant which the Midi folk say still echoes in the Pyrenean gorges: Vient à Burdele la citet de valur, Desur l'alter seint Sevrin li barun Met l'olifant, plein d'or et de manguns, Li pélerin le veient ki là vunt.[222] (Came to Bordeaux the city of great price, And on the shrine of Baron St. Seurin, The olifant Charles laid, filled full with gold, And to this day pilgrims can see it there.) The XX-century pilgrims to the old city on the Garonne must remember that the _Chanson de Roland_ was written a long, long time ago, and that to-day the olifant of the paladin lives only in the pages of French history, where its place is as secure as the standard of Jeanne d'Arc. _À la peine, à l'honneur._ Without St. Seurin's church we might have forgotten a proud page of Bordeaux' past. TOULOUSE[223] Ici, dans Toulouse, je sens palpiter La prodigieuse histoire du libre Languedoc! Et je vois Saint-Sernin, la grande église romane, ... Et le rempart où la pierre écrasa l'oiseau de Proie que je ne veux pas nommer.... À Toulouse vivante, à Toulouse qui chante, J'élève mon salut et je dis: Ville sainte! Au soleil à jamais épanouis-toi puissante!... L'âme du Midi réfugiée en toi, Chevaleresque et digne, tu as traversé les âges! --Frédéric Mistral, at the _Jeux Floraux_ of Toulouse, 1879.[224] If the influence of both the north and the south is felt at Bordeaux, the unadulterated Midi reigns at Toulouse. It is eminently the capital city of this fertile Languedoc, where art and luxury developed precociously in the earlier periods of the Middle Ages. Here the troubadour still sings in the regional tongue which might to-day be the speech of France (instead of a dialect) had a genius such as Dante written in the _langue d'oc_, the most gracious form of the Romance language. It is spoken in Aragon and Catalonia--lands where the architectural development followed the same trend as that of French Languedoc.