ABSTRACT
Stories of an Antiquary, at once transport us to our destination: the foothills
of the Pyrenees. On the northern, French side of the range and almost
exactly half-way between the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, Saint-
Bertrand lies where the young river Garonne leaves its deeply-incised valley in the mountains for the open, rolling lands to the north. Saint-Bertrand is
just the latest of a series of names borne by what has successively been a
Gallo-Roman administrative centre, a mediaeval and later bishopric and a
modern village. To the Roman authorities, it was Lugdunum, the chief town
of the civitas, or administrative area, formed by the lands of the local tribe
they called the Convenae. From the late Roman period until the early
middle ages (Late Antiquity) it was known by the name of those people –
Convenae. In the late eleventh century, bishop Bertrand de l’Isle-Jourdain undertook a great campaign of reform and the building of the present
cathedral; after his death and canonization, the town took his name, Saint-
Bertrand, and, because in the middle ages it lay in the county of the Com-
minges, it took the suffix de-Comminges to distinguish it from other Saint-
Bertrands. During the French Revolution, the bishopric was suppressed, as
was the county, and, when the Napoleonic de´partements were created, Saint-
Bertrand (‘Hauteville’ – an unimaginative secular renaming that did not
stick) was included within the de´partement of the Haute-Garonne. This de´partement comprises essentially the Toulouse agglomeration with a long
finger stretching up the Garonne as far as the Spanish border south of
Bagne`res-de-Luchon; Saint-Bertrand lies in a little bulge of the western side
of this finger and is, thus, very close to the de´partement of Hautes-Pyre´ne´es
immediately to the west and north and only a few kilometres from the
de´partement of the Arie`ge to the east.
