Really, one can lose oneself in this labyrinth, for a single
visit does not enable you to understand the complicated plan of these
combined buildings, where a fortress, a church, an abbey, a prison and a
dungeon, are mingled, and where you can find every style of
architecture, from the Romance of the eleventh century to the
bewildering Gothic of the sixteenth. We could catch only a glimpse of
the knights' hall, which has been converted into a loom-room and is for
this reason barred to the public. We saw only four rows of columns
supporting a ceiling ornamented with salient mouldings; they were
decorated with clover leaves. The monastery is built over this hall, at
an altitude of two hundred feet above the sea level. It is composed of a
quadrangular gallery formed by a triple line of small granite, tufa, or
stucco columns. Acanthus, thistles, ivy, and oak-leaves wind around
their caps; between each mitred ogive is a cut-out rose; this gallery is
the place where the prisoners take the air.
The cap of the _garde-chiourme_ now passes along these walls where, in
olden times, passed the shaved heads of industrious friars; and the
wooden shoes of the prisoners click on the slabs that used to be swept
by the trailing robes of monks and trodden by their heavy leather
sandals.
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