This Cloister, which separated the Palace from the Cathedral, is now dreary and desolate and neglected. Like the Cathedral, it is Gothic, with sadly decaying traces of graceful ornament. The little plot of enclosed ground, which should be planted in grass or with a few flowers, is a mere dirt court, tramped over by the few worshippers who enter the Cathedral this way. Two or three trees grow as they will, gnarled or straight. The sense of peaceful melancholy which the traveller had felt in the Cloister of Béziers is wanting here. This is a place of deserted solitude; and with a sigh for the beauty that might have been, the traveller crossed the enclosure and entered the church by the cloister-door.
[Illustration: "THIS IS A PLACE OF DESERTED SOLITUDE."--NARBONNE.]
Architecturally dissimilar, the fate of this Cathedral is not unlike that of Beauvais. Each was destined to have a completed choir, and each to remain without a nave. At Beauvais the addition of transepts adds very materially to the beauty of the Cathedral. At Narbonne no transepts exist. There is simply a choir, which makes a very singular disposition of the church both religious and architectural. Entering the gates which lead from the ambulatory to the choir, the traveller found that Benediction had just begun. On his immediate right, before the altar all aglow with lights, were the officiating priests and the altar-boys; on his left, in the choir, was the congregation in the Canons' stalls; and at the back, as at the end of a nave, rose the organ.
The traveller walked about the ambulatory, and leaning against the farthest wall, tried to view the church, only to be baffled. There was no perspective. The ambulatory is very narrow and the choir-screen very high. The impressions he formed were partly imaginative, partly inductive; and the clearest one was that of sheer height, straight, superhuman height that is one of the unmatchable glories of French Gothic. Here the traveller thought again of Beauvais, and wished as he had so often wished in the northern Cathedral and with something of the same intensity, that this freedom and majesty of height might have been gloriously continued and completed in the nave. Such a church as his imagination pictured would have been worthy of a place with the best of northern Gothic. Now it is a suggestion, a beginning of greatness; and its chief glory lies in the simplicity and directness of its height. Clustered columns rise plainly to the pointed Gothic roof. There is so marked an absence of carving that it seems as if ornamentation would have been weakening and trammelling. It is not bareness, but beautiful firmness, which refreshes and uplifts the heart of man as the sight of some island mountain rising sheer from the sea.