Almost the whole range of architectural display is seen here between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Gascony, and any rambling itinerary laid out between the two seas will discover as many structural and decorative novelties as will be found in any similar length of roadway in France.
[Illustration: _Watch-tower in the Val d'Andorre_]
Leaving the purely ecclesiastical edifices--cathedrals and great churches--out of the question, the entire Midi of France, and the French slopes and valleys of the Pyrenees in particular, abounds in architectural curiosities which are marvels to the student and lover of art.
There are _châteaux_, _chastels_ and _chastillons_, one differing from another by subtle distinctions which only the expert can note. Then there are such feudal accessories as watch-towers, donjons and _clochers_, and great fortifying walls and gates and barbicans, and even entire fortified towns like Carcassonne and La Bastide. Surely the feudality, or rather its relics, cannot be better studied than here,--"where the people held the longest aloof from the Crown."
The watch-towers which flank many of the valleys of the Pyrenees are a great curiosity and quandary to archæologists and historians. Formerly they flashed the news of wars or invasions from one outpost to another, much as does wireless telegraphy of to-day. Of these watch-towers, or _tours télégraphiques_, as the modern French historians call them, that of Castel-Biel, near Luchon, is the most famous. It rises on the peak of a tiny mountain in the valley of the Pique and is a square structure of perhaps a dozen or fifteen feet on each side. Sixteen feet or so from the ground, on the northwest façade, is an opening leading to the first floor. This tower is typical of its class, and is the most accessible to the hurried traveller.
The feudal history of France is most interesting to recall in this late day when every man is for himself. Not all was oppression by any means, and the peasant landowner--as distinct from the _vilain_ and _serf_--was a real person, and not a supposition, even before the Revolution; though Thomas Carlyle on his furzy Scotch moor didn't know it.
Feudal France consisted of seventy thousand fiefs or rere-fiefs, of which three thousand gave their names to their seigneurs. All seigneurs who possessed three _châtellenies_ and a walled hamlet (_ville close_) had the right of administering justice without reference to a higher court. There were something more than seven thousand of these _villes closes_, within which, or on the lands belonging to the seigneurs thereof, were one million eight hundred and seventy-two thousand monuments,--churches, monasteries, abbeys, châteaux, castles, and royal or episcopal palaces. It was thus that religious, civic and military architecture grew side by side and, when new styles and modifications came in, certain interpolations were forthwith incorporated in the more ancient fabrics, giving that mélange of picturesque walls and roofs which makes France the best of all lands in which to study the architecture of mediævalism. Among these mediæval relics were interspersed others more ancient,--Roman and Greek basilicas, temples, baths, arenas, amphitheatres and aqueducts in great profusion, whose remains to-day are considerably more than mere fragments.