The city which gave its name to the terrible episode of the XIII century lies forty miles east of Toulouse. The local saying is, "Who has not seen the cathedral of Albi and the tower of Rodez has seen nothing." Albi Cathedral yields to none in its gaunt majesty. It stands apart in one's visions of travel, as unique a memorial of past history as the Mount of the Archangel off the coast of Normandy, as Vézelay looking out over the soft valleys of Burgundy, as Le Puy on its basaltic pinnacles. Never was a monument more absolutely itself. [Illustration: _Albi Cathedral (1282-1399). A Midi Fortress Church_] Unfrequented Albi was once in the stir of life, and over its stone bridge, built nine centuries ago, have passed the notable folk of the Middle Ages[235] as they wended their way to Santiago Compostela, whither all the world was going in those days. Time-scarred houses border the reddish Tarn; dark, decayed streets climb the hill. At a curve of the river, bastions and ramparts rise in terraces to a fortified episcopal palace and--crowning all--the enormous bulk of the cathedral. Its long, stark wall strikes the sky in a formidable straight line. The west façade is a massive donjon, four hundred feet above the Tarn. No welcoming west portals here, no extended transept arms of sacrificial mercy, no soaring buttress, no leaping pinnacles. Not the lore of Christ, "Do as you would be done by," seems to have inspired Albi, but the Hebraic spirit of breaking one's enemies' bones, as if the Jehovah of the Old Testament, outraged by Albigensian blasphemies, here asserted himself in a temple that would forever be a looming menace for heretics. Albi's forbidding structure rose between those two harsh epochs--the Albigensian Crusade and the Hundred Years' War. Its aggressive mass was planned by a most aggressive churchman, Bernard, Cardinal de Castanets, the city's learned bishop detested of the people as their uncompromising feudal master, as well as a spiritual chief so harsh in his inquisitorial functions that a pontifical commission was appointed, in 1306, to repair his excesses. In 1282 Bernard de Castanets laid the first stone of Albi Cathedral and for twenty years he and the chapter contributed a twentieth of their revenues. The church was finished by the sixty-fifth bishop, Guillaume de la Voulte, in the last years of the XIV century. To approach the cathedral at its apse end is not so picturesque as from the river side, but it is formidable enough. The prodigious apse rises abruptly, imperiously, from the town square. One fairly shivers beneath its Tolosan brick walls, overtowering and overpowering, broken merely by a few narrow windows--surely the narrowest ever made in a Gothic church--and by uniform bastion-tower buttresses. Gargoyles, of as alien an aspect as those of the Jacobins' at Toulouse, crane their gaunt necks from the upper walls, as if asking what manner of Gothic this is.