France Travel Destinations – Carcassonne, France by Wade Rowland “We rounded a corner and there, on a rise beyond the river, was Carcassone – a vision for which no photograph could have prepared us. We pulled over to the curb and got out of the car to stand and stare.” I got hooked on travel early in life. And for many years, beginning long before my first passport, it seemed to me that one of the transcendent travel experiences must be to walk the grey stone ramparts of Carcassonne, preferably at night and preferably in the autumn. This notion was firmly lodged in my brain when, as a diffident fourteen-year-old, I discovered the books of one of the most popular travel writers of any era, Richard Halliburton. Carcasonne France – French Medieval Towns In his heyday in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, Halliburton was a household name in America and one of the most widely-read authors of his time. He had discovered early on that what his audience wanted from him was not culture, not politics and geography but adventure and, above all, the romance of travel. And that is what he gave them. He travelled on a shoestring to the most exotic corners of the globe and when adventure did not present itself, he created it. One example will give you the flavour: broke in Buenos Aires while writing the newspaper series that was to become New Worlds to Conquer he spurned an easy bail-out from his publisher and instead invested his last few dollars in a trained monkey and a broken down hurdy gurdy. Performing in the city’s parks and streets earned him: a) a night in jail for by-law infractions; b) a memorable yarn for the newspapers and c) enough money for his passage all the way north to Rio. The unfortunate monkey died on the voyage – not to worry, he milked that story too. Halliburton blew in to Carcassonne late in 1921 on his first trip to Europe as a young Princeton graduate with literary ambitions, and he wrote about it in The Royal Road to Romance, the first of his five, wildly successful travel books. He was on his way by bicycle and knapsack from Paris to Andorra. The air at the foot of the Pyrenees was sharp and clear… “Late on that glittering November evening I left the modern ville basse on foot, crossed the seven-hundred-year-old bridge over the river that separates the fortress from the modern town, looked up the sharp escarpment, and behold, before my eyes, nine centuries disappeared. I became an anachronism, a twentieth-century American living in eleventh-century France. In one sweep the Middle Ages were revealed. A magical moonlit city of walls and towers and battlements, defiant and impregnable, rose before me… Not a person was to be seen, not a light showed, nor a dog barked as I climbed the path and walked beneath the massively fortified gate, through the double line of enormous walls, into a strange world. Incredibly ancient houses, dark and ghostly, reeled grotesquely along the crazy streets. My footsteps echoed. There was no other sound…” Author Richard Halliburton blew in to Carcassonne late in 1921 on his first trip to Europe as a young Princeton graduate with literary ambitions, and he wrote about it in The Royal Road to Romance, the first of his five, wildly successful travel books. He was on his way by bicycle and knapsack from Paris to Andorra. The air at the foot of the Pyrenees was sharp and clear… “Late on that glittering November evening I left the modern ville basse on foot, crossed the seven-hundred-year-old bridge over the river that separates the fortress from the modern town, looked up the sharp escarpment, and behold, before my eyes, nine centuries disappeared. I became an anachronism, a twentieth-century American living in eleventh-century France. In one sweep the Middle Ages were revealed. A magical moonlit city of walls and towers and battlements, defiant and impregnable, rose before me… Not a person was to be seen, not a light showed, nor a dog barked as I climbed the path and walked beneath the massively fortified gate, through the double line of enormous walls, into a strange world. Incredibly ancient houses, dark and ghostly, reeled grotesquely along the crazy streets. My footsteps echoed. There was no other sound…” Halliburton spent the night exploring the city and eventually watched the dawn break from the battlements: Carcassonne “A man appeared in the streets, and then another and another. I knew the hours of enchantment were gone. The ghosts of Crusaders and Saracens and Visigoths, which must have been abroad that night, had marched down the shafts of the ancient wells into the subterranean caverns, to watch over the fabulous treasures which any true native of the citadel will tell you lie buried there. With the night departed Yesterday. The real, unromantic present lived again…” The “real, unromantic present” was where I was, seventy-one years after young Richard had dashed off those breathless lines, and I too was about to see Carcassonne for the first time. My partner Christine beside me, her legs aproned in a large-scale Michelin road map, I was approaching from the north at the wheel of a red, rented Peugeot, purring along undulating roads through the brooding forests of the Black Mountains and then across the flatlands of the River Aude on a narrow, shoulderless highway picketed with two-hundred-year-old plane trees, and finally on through the dusty streets of the modern lower town of Carcassonne. We rounded a corner bracketed by grey stone warehouses and there, on a rise beyond the river, was Carcassonne – a vision for which no photograph could have prepared us. We pulled over to the curb and got out of the car to stand and stare. Nowhere in Europe has a fortified medieval city been preserved so perfectly, or on such a scale. Despite the sheer mass of its miles of walls and its sixty towers and barbicans, it seemed to float above the surrounding fields and vineyards, like a mirage. Carcasonne France – French Medieval Towns The town site on its rock outcropping overlooking the River Aude has been prized for its strategic importance from ancient times and may have been fortified even before the Romans built the first of the walled citadels there. The final touches to the fantastic, many-towered marvel one sees today were put in place by Saint-Louis and his successor Philip the Bold toward the end of the thirteenth century. It survived virtually intact until the mid-1800’s under the protection of the French military and was in the last half of that century completely and brilliantly restored under the inspired direction of architect Eugéne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. There are naturally quibbles about details of the restoration and refinements are continuously being made. Slate roofs, for instance, are slowly being converted to the more authentic baked clay tile. Still, no one denies that the place looks pretty much as it did eight or nine centuries ago when knighthood was in flower, Crusades were in fashion and the stirrup crossbow was the latest and greatest in military hardware. We had been told that, since we were staying at Carcassonne Hotel de la Cite, a hotel within the walls, we would be able to drive our car right inside the citadel, where the hotel had a parking space for us. That sounded reasonable over the telephone from Paris, but when we actually saw the city and its main gate – just wide enough to accommodate a pair of mounted knights in armour – we began to have our doubts. We held our breath as I eased the Peugeot into the gap in the eighteen-foot-high outer wall, across the broad lists to the second, much higher wall, under the portcullis of its massively-fortified gate and then inched our way through the pedestrians thronging the cobbled street inside, which is perhaps ten feet wide from doorknob to doorknob. There were places where neighbours could comfortably have shaken hands across the street from corbelled second stories.
