Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France; Volume 1

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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. They have found the real, unspoiled France, often unexplored by any except the French themselves, and practically unknown to foreigners, even to the ubiquitous maker of guide-books. For weeks together they have travelled without meeting an English-speaking person. It is, therefore, not surprising that they were unable to find, in any convenient form in English, a book telling of the Cathedrals of the South which was at once accurate and complete. For the Cathedrals of that country are monuments not only of architecture and its history, but of the history of peoples, the psychology of the christianising and unifying of the barbarian and the Gallo-Roman, and many things besides, epitomised perhaps in the old words, -the struggle between the world, the flesh, and the devil.- In French, works on Cathedrals are numerous and exhaustive; but either so voluminous as to be unpractical except for the specialist as the volumes of Viollet-le-Duc, or so technical as to make each Cathedral seem one in an endless, monotonous procession, differing from the others only in size, style, and age.