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A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE Bestiary; and if one rejects the animal analogy as too grotesque, to what else may one conceivably compare it?

Among the fortified churches of south-western France this strange monument is the strangest as it is the most vast, and none of the accepted architectural categories seems to fit its huge vaulted hall buttressed with tall organ-pipe turrets, and terminating to the west in a massive dungeon-like tower flanked by pepper-pot pinnacles.

The interior of the great secular-looking salle is covered by an unbroken expanse of mural painting, and encrusted, overgrown almost, from the choir and ambulatory to the arches of the lateral chapels, with a prodigious efflorescence of late Gothic wood-carving and sculpture, half Spanish in its dusky grey-brown magnificence. But even this excess of ecclesiastical ornament does not avail to Christianise the church—there is a pagan, a Saracenic quality about it that seems to overflow from its pinnacled flushed exterior.

To reach Carcassonne from Albi one must cross the central mass of the Cévennes. The [ 120 ]