Sabine Baring-Gould

“ Consequently they varied the shapes of their towers, they capped them quaintly, hardly making two alike. Here, at Carcassonne, every tower, or nearly every tower, resembles its fellow, and all have sugar-loaf caps that irritate the eye with iteration of the same form. The citadel has no character of massiveness, no grand donjon to distinguish it from the rest of the fortifications, and the cathedral has only two mean little donkey's ears of towers that are most ineffective, peeping over the walls of the south-western angle of the town. ”

“ In looking out for a study for a picture one has to get where some of the sugar-loaf towers are eclipsed, and there is only one point in the whole circumference where a really satisfactory grouping is obtainable, and that is at the angle outside immediately below the cathedral platform to the west, where the one respectable turret of the castle stands up boldly from the rock, and the flanking turrets overlap and hide each other.
Interesting, most interesting is Old Carcassonne, and picturesque in its fashion; the regret one feels is that, with its opportunities, it is not more so. ”

“ Carcassonne was held as a fief under him as lord paramount. He pleaded the youth of the viscount, asserted his fidelity to the Church, his abhorrence of the Albigensian heresy; it was no fault of his, he argued, that his subjects had lapsed into error, and he declared that the Viscount had authorised him to place his submission in the hands of the legate of Pope Innocent. But the Crusaders were snorting for plunder and murder. The only terms they would admit were that the young viscount might retire with twelve knights; the city must surrender at discretion. ”