innumerable records in the treatment of the miserable lepers at Albi.  Having taken the disease which the Crusaders brought back from the East, they were favoured with a religious ceremony distressingly similar to the office for the dead.  A black pall was thrown over them while they knelt at the altar steps.  At the close of the service a priest sprinkled some earth on the condemned wretches, and then they were led to the leper-house, where each was shut up in a cell from which he never came out alive.  The black pall and the sprinkled earth were symbols which every patient understood but too well.

[Illustration:  PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ALBI.]

In nothing is the stern spirit of those ages expressed more forcibly than in the religious buildings of Languedoc.  The cathedral of St. Cecilia at Albi is the grandest of all the fortified churches of Southern France, although in many others the defensive purpose has made less concession to beauty.  Looking at it for the first time, the eye is wonder-struck by its originality, the nobleness of its design, and the grandeur of its mass.  The plan being that of a vast vaulted basilica without aisles, the walls of the nave, rise sheer from the ground to above the roof, and are pierced at intervals with lofty but very narrow windows, the arches slightly pointed and containing simple tracery.  The buttresses which help the walls to support the vaulting of the nave and choir are the most remarkable feature of the design, and, together with the tower, which rises in diminishing stages to the height of 260 feet and there ends in an embattled platform, account for the singularly feudal and fortress-like character of the building.  The outline of the buttresses being that of a semi-ellipse, they look like turrets carried up the entire face of the wall.  The floor of the church is many feet above the ground, and the entrance was originally protected by a drawbridge and portcullis; but these military works were removed in the sixteenth century, and in their place was raised, upon a perron reached by a double flight of steps, a baldachino-like porch as airily graceful and delicately florid as the body to which it is so lightly attached is majestically stern and scornful of ornament.  The meeting here of those two great forces, the Renaissance and feudalism, is like that of Psyche and Mars.  But in expression the porch is Gothic, for although the arches are round-headed, they are surmounted by an embroidery of foliated gables and soaring pinnacles.  It can scarcely be said that the style has been broken, but the contrast in feeling is strong.

Enter the church and observe the same contrast there.  Gothic art within the protecting walls and under the strong tower puts forth its most delicate leaves and blossoms.  Across the broad nave, nearly in the centre, is drawn a rood-screen—­a piece of stonework that has often been compared to lace, but which gains nothing by the comparison.  The screen, together with the enclosure of the choir, with which it is connected, is quite bewildering by the multiplicity of arches, gables, tabernacles, pinnacles, statues, leaves, and flowers.  The tracery is flamboyant, and the work dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century.  The artificers are said to have been a company of wandering masons from Strasburg.