The seven eastern chapels of the transept open one on the other above a low dividing wall, and standing out from those walls, so that a narrow passage is made between them and the transept, are detached piers that rise powerfully from pavement to vault-springing. Above their capitals the molds die away in the column--a very early use of a Flamboyant characteristic. The two pillars flanking the entrance to the choir are decorated, midway up, with statues under canopies sculptured by northern artists before 1320. Archæologists declare that the Gothic part of the Cité's ancient cathedral are the perfection of XIV-century construction, elastic in every part, each part fulfilling its own separate function. The ogival principle could not be carried farther. It is thought that some architect of the north made the plan, which local masons executed. The only Midi trait is the flat, tiled roof. Modern restoration has overhauled the citadel of Carcassonne too radically. Imperiously set though it is, does it grip the imagination as entirely as Aigues-Mortes, lying flat on marsh lands, its time-stained walls untouched? Often in France one echoes Pius IX's response to Baron de Crozé, who proposed the restoration of the Coliseum: "Dear Son, I have read your memoir and I thank you for it; but do you not know that there are two sorts of vandalism, one which consists in destroying, the other in restoring? Never has the Coliseum been so beautiful as in its moving contrast of past splendor and magnificent present decay. To restore it is to annihilate the work of centuries, to recompose an ordinary pastiche with no _éclat_." Not that Carcassonne, as redressed by M. Viollet-le-Duc, is deficient in _éclat_; it has too much of it. It is a vision of a feudal fortress too carefully prepared, too deliberately made ready for the tourist. In the lower town are the typically meridional churches of St. Michel, the actual cathedral of Carcassonne, and St. Vincent whose aisleless hall is the widest in the Midi--a span of sixty-eight feet. Even when using diagonals, the south kept true to its favorite Romanesque traditions. Neither church has a triforium, the apse windows are long and narrow, over the entrance of each chapel is an eight-lobed rose, and the buttresses are disguised as walls between the side chapels. The tracery is Rayonnant. St. Vincent was built after the Black Prince burned Carcassonne in 1355. At its sculptured portal was placed a statue of the newly canonized saint-king, Louis IX, under whom this modern Carcassonne was founded. NARBONNE CATHEDRAL[238] Que chaque homme console un homme, Fasse un bien, donne une pitié, Ne t'occupe pas de la somme: Ce pain sera multiplié. --JEAN AICARD (born in the Midi, 1848).