In Troubadour-Land by Sabine Baring-Gould

Position of Béziers -- S. Nazaire -- The Albigenses -- Their tenets -- Albigensian "consolation" -- Crusade against them -- The storming of Béziers -- Massacre -- Cathedral of Béziers -- Girls' faces in the train -- Similar faces at Narbonne, in Cathedral and Museum -- Narbonne a Roman colony -- All the Roman buildings destroyed -- Caps of liberty -- Christian sarcophagi -- Children's toys of baked clay -- Cathedral unfinished -- Archiepiscopal Palace -- Unsatisfactory work of M. Viollet-le-Duc -- In trouble with the police -- Taken for a German spy -- My sketch-book gets me off.

The position of Béziers is striking. It crowns a height above the Orb, its grand fortified church of S. Nazaire occupying the highest point, where it stands on a platform. This fine church is not the cathedral. In La Madeleine is the bishop's throne, a church that, with the exception of the tower and exterior of the apse, has been modernised out of all interest. But S. Nazaire is a stately and beautiful church of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, in the style of the country, very little ornamented externally, and very strongly fortified; even the windows being made impenetrable by their strong _grilles_ of iron. There are two western towers, small, with an arch thrown between their battlements, over the rose window, and this battlemented archway is in fact a screen behind which the besieged sheltered whilst they poured down molten pitch on those who assailed the gateway of the cathedral. For this purpose there is an open space between the screen and the facade. The apse of eight sides, internally is fine; and there is a beautiful octagonal apsidal chapel on the north side, entered from the transept.