Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1

To-day papal Avignon is become French Avignon, a pleasant city where the Provençal sun is hot and where the Mistral whistles merrily. Above the banks of the Rhone the simple Cat...

The whole interior of the church, at whose consecration no less a prelate than Pope Innocent IV had presided, is small and its plan is essentially of the Provençal type. The hig...

Fréjus, which claims to be "the oldest city in France," was one of the numerous trading ports of the Phoenician, and later, during the period of her civic grandeur, an arsenal o...

The first edifice, Saint-Martin's, built shortly after the founding of the town, has long been destroyed; and the second, begun in 1610, to the honour of the Assumption of the B...

The great past of Nîmes is of a more remote antiquity than the Cathedral Building Ages. A small but exquisite Temple, a Nymphæum, Baths, parts of a fine Portal, Roman walls, and...

The foundation of this church goes back to the first Avignon, a small colony of river-fishermen which gave way before the Romans, who established a city, Avernio, on the great r...

Léon Renier, the learned lecturer of the Collège de France, says: "It is remarkable that the changes, the elaborations, the modifications of the architecture given by Rome to al...

The other great branch, "the Religious Orders," were of later institution. From the oriental deserts of the Thebaid, where Saint Anthony had early practised the austerities of m...

In due course of time the driver came, hooked an ancient tin box marked "Lettres" to the dash-board, threw in a sacking-bag, and cap in hand, invited the traveller to mount with...

In the midst of this city, stands a group of mediæval churchly buildings, the Palace of the prelate, his Cathedral, and an adjoining Cloister. They are all either neglected, unf...

Long afterwards this simple, saintly prelate saved a man from crime, and history relates that this same man died at Waterloo as a good and faithful soldier fighting for the fath...

The Cathedral of the Cité is worthy of great protecting walls and there are few churches whose destruction would have been so sad a blow to the architecture of the Midi. Saint-N...

For years the makers of this book have spent the summer time in wandering about the French country; led here by the fame of some old monument, or there by an incident of history...