Reminders of the town's mediæval importance are few indeed, and of its château only a lone round tower remains. There are two fortified gateways in the town still above ground, and two thirteenth-century church towers which take rank as admirable mediæval monuments.
Tarascon was one of the four principal fortified towns of the Comté de Foix, but suffered by fire, and for ever since has languished and dozed its days away, so that not even a passing automobile will wake its dwellers from their somnolence. Tarascon has a fine and picturesque bridge over the Ariège which intrudes itself in the foreground from almost every view-point. It is not old, however, but the work of the last century.
Here nearly everything is of the mouldy past and rusty with age and tradition, though there is a local iron industry something considerable in extent.
The highroad from Foix into Andorra cuts the town directly in halves, and on either side are narrow, climbing streets running up the hillside from the river bank, but architectural or topographical changes have been few since the olden times. Tarascon's population--though the place is the market town of the commune--has, in a hundred years, fallen from fifteen hundred to fourteen hundred and forty five, to give exact statistical figures, which are supposed not to lie. Such observations in France really prove nothing, not even that signs of progress are wanting, nor that folk are less prosperous; they simply suggest that its cities and towns are self-satisfied and content, and are not ambitious to outdistance their neighbours in alleged civic improvements of doubtful taste--always at the tax-payers' expense.
Tarascon of itself might well be omitted from a Pyrenean itinerary, but when one includes the neighbouring church of Notre Dame de Sabart--a place of pilgrimage for the faithful of the whole region of the Pyrenees on the eighth and fifteenth of September--the case were different. It is one of the sights and shrines of the region, as is that of Stes. Maries-de-la-Mer in Provence, or Notre Dame de Laghat in the old Comté de Nice.
The old abbey-fortress built here by Charlemagne has disappeared, but the great Romanesque church, with its three great naves, is avowedly built up from the remains of the former edifice. Most of Charlemagne's handiwork has vanished throughout his kingdom, but the foundations remain, here and there, and upon them has been built all that is best and most enduring in Gaul.