BÉZIERS AND NARBONNE.
Position of Béziers—S. Nazaire—The Albigenses—Their tenets—Albigensian "consolation"—Crusade against them—The storming of Béziers—Massacre—Cathedral of Béziers—Girls' faces in the train—Similar faces at Narbonne, in Cathedral and Museum—Narbonne a Roman colony—All the Roman buildings destroyed—Caps of liberty—Christian sarcophagi—Children's toys of baked clay—Cathedral unfinished—Archiepiscopal Palace—Unsatisfactory work of M. Viollet-le-Duc—In trouble with the police—Taken for a German spy—My sketch-book gets me off.
The position of Béziers is striking. It crowns a height above the Orb, its
grand fortified church of S. Nazaire occupying the highest point, where
it stands on a platform. This fine church is not the cathedral. In La
Madeleine is the bishop's throne, a church that, with the exception of the
tower and exterior of the apse, has been modernised out of all interest. But S. Nazaire is a stately and beautiful church of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, in the style of the country, very little ornamented externally, and very strongly fortified; even the windows being made impenetrable by their strong grilles of iron. There are two western towers, small, with an arch thrown between their battlements, over the rose window, and this battlemented archway is in fact a screen behind which the besieged sheltered whilst they poured down molten pitch on those who assailed the gateway of the cathedral. For this purpose there is an open space between the screen and the façade. The apse of eight sides, internally is fine; and there is a beautiful octagonal apsidal chapel on the north side, entered from the transept.
Beziers is the scene of a horrible slaughter in 1209, after the siege by
the Crusaders under Simon de Montfort. It had been a headquarter of the
Albigenses. As we are now entering the region reddened with the blood of
these heretics, it will not be improper here to give a little account of
them.
The Albigenses are often erroneously confused with the Waldenses, with
whom really they had little in common. Actually, the Albigenses were not
Christians at all, but Manicheans. The heresy was nothing other than the
reawakening of the dormant and suppressed Paganism of the south of France. There are plenty of documents which enable us to understand their peculiar tenets and practices.
They held a dualism of good and evil principles in the world, equally
matched; and they taught that the evil principle was the origin of all
created matter. Accordingly they rejected the Old Testament, and declared
that all the world and man's body were of diabolic origin, and that the
spirit only was divine. With regard to the person of Christ they were
divided in opinion. Some said He had a phantom body, and that He seemed
only to die on the cross. The real Christ was incapable of suffering. But
another school among them declared that He had a true body born of Mary and
Joseph, and that this was due to the evil principle, and that this body did
hang on the cross. It was the Evil God of the Jews who slew Pharaoh in the
Red Sea. They held that the Good God had two wives, Colla and Coliba, from
whom he had many generations of spiritual beings. Of the Good Christ, the
spiritual, they asserted, that He neither ate nor drank, that He was the
source of all mercy and salvation, but that the Bad Christ was the carnal
one following the Good Christ as the shadow follows the body; that this Bad
Christ had Magdalen as his concubine. They were not agreed as to the future
of man. Some denied the existence of souls, some said that the souls were
fallen angels inhabiting men's bodies, others that the soul was pure and
could only attain to blessedness by emancipation from the body, all the
works of which were evil.