No sign of fading away, or of dwindling into anything less than its astonishing self.
At the hotel we were received by a most elegant landlady in widow's garb. If it had not been for her pressing us to have our lunch before we started, I feel sure that we should have been off and up to the _cité_ without a moment's delay. However, we first made acquaintance with this lady's wonderful _cuisine_ in the old, low-pitched _salle-à-manger_, where only a few Frenchmen of the commercial type were taking their luncheon. We were neither of us much given to what we called "fussing over our food," but it was impossible for the most benighted of women to fail to notice the delicate art which distinguished every detail of the repast. What we had I cannot remember, but it was a succession of masterpieces. Such modulation of flavours, such opposing of salt and sweet, acid and flat, creamy and piquant; such coquetry in the salad dressing, such sentiment in the sauces! It was wonderful, as all true art is.
Altogether Carcassonne was a place of artistic achievement.
The city, as we wended our way towards it, grew more and more dazzling to the sense of reality. That progress through the lower town, across the Aude, was like walking straight into the background of a mediæval painting--and who has not longed for that excursion? There was not a sight or a sound to mar the perfection of the place. Doubtless in the old days there would have been more stir as one approached the great double-towered gateway and crossed the bridge over what was once a moat. And there would have been sentries, and perhaps the flash of armour caught between the crenellations of the lower outer walls. Otherwise precisely the same sights and sounds met our senses as met those of the wayfarers of the thirteenth century.
Immediately within the inner walls there is a street of smallish houses. But soon we diverge from this and are admitted by the custodian--a most singular person, by the way--through a side door and up a steep staircase to the ramparts.
And here on emerging, one holds one's breath. Towers, towers, and more towers; towers with high conical roofs in fantastic medley; round towers, square towers, tall, emaciated towers springing above the mass of building; towers with crenellated parapets showing rounded contours to the enemy and flat sides to the town; Visigoth towers recalling the momentous days when barbarian races began to swarm and settle in the fertile provinces of Roman Gaul.