LANGUEDOC REGION A MELANGE OF FRENCH, SPANISH CULTURE.

Byline: Gary A. Warner Orange County Register

It's a stiflingly hot summer afternoon in farthest southern France, and rivulets of sweat drip-drip-drip down the collar of my shirt.

Hefting two bags from the Toulouse railway station to the cab stand, I dream of an icy air-conditioned hotel room.

A knot of taxi drivers lean against their Citroens, smoking Gitanes and scratching 2-day-old growths of beard.

Far from Paris, ``Parlez-vous Anglais?'' generates nothing but smug shrugs. I smile at the driver at the head of the line and exhale, ``Place du Capitole, please.''

``No.'' Perplexed, I pick up my bag and try the next taxi.

``No.'' And the next. ``No.''

I plead. I swear. I offer bribes. They fling their hands in the air, curse and turn their backs.

Finally, a man in a $1,000 Armani suit approaches. ``You cannot get a cab. We beat Paris today.''

The rugby team of upstart Toulouse had upset heavily favored Paris for the national championship, sending the city into a spasm of delirium. The streets are blocked off except for a parade of cars with drunken revelers singing the team fight song: ``Tooo-looos-a, too-loosa-a.''

Beating Paris at much of anything is rare in southern France, and the locals take great relish in celebrating any slight they can deliver to the French capital. Dislike for the dominance of the north is more than a half-millennium old, with no signs of abating.

The area known as Languedoc gives the rest of France half the nation's table wine, and its best cherries and peaches. Locals say Paris gives them nothing but trouble. It used to be war, purges and crusades. Today, the battles are over soccer, rugby and politics.

In the drive to create a great French nation, Languedoc long has been a center of heresy and hate against church and state. The legendary kingdom of Occitaine was forcibly merged with the rest of France. Medieval Cathar heretics were hunted and killed by crusaders who also sacked the property of true believers. The Protestant Camisards were ruthlessly suppressed in the 18th century.

Despite its dreams of independence, the area has been a part of France for more than 700 years. All of Languedoc and Toulouse was incorporated into the kingdom by 1271. Nearby Roussillon didn't come under the French crown until 1642, and neighboring Comtat Venaissin held out until three years into the French Revolution in 1791.

A tour of Languedoc begins in Toulouse. The ``Pink City'' is known for the faded grandeur of its red-brick buildings. The Place du Capitole has recently emerged buffed and renewed from a two-year renovation.

It's a city filled with life, buoyed by millions of francs' worth of spending since the 1970s by the burgeoning aerospace and electronics firms that surround the city. Toulouse is home to Airbus Industrie, the second-largest builder of commercial aircraft in the world.

``Toulouse is a wonderful city full of restaurants serving some of the best food and wine in all of France,'' said Airbus executive Alain Dupiech over a plate of foie gras and a bottle of fine Burgundy at the Le Bouchon Lyonnais restaurant. ``It has the sophistication of Paris without the problems or prices.''

Toulouse is a cultural capital, the medieval home of the Troubadours of Courtly Love, whose ballads inspired Chaucer and Dante before the 13th-century papal crusade and Inquisition snuffed out their songs.

An hour east of Toulouse is the onetime heretic capital, Albi, with its imposing fortresslike cathedral and an art museum devoted to a native son.

The Cathedral St. Cecile is the great monument to the Catholic victors of the 13th-century Cathar rebellion. Albi was a center of the Cathar movement, and the Vatican dubbed its crusade against the free thinkers the Albigensian Crusade, after the city.

The stone and brick cathedral, begun in 1265, is a religious colossus built to dominate the River Tarn valley and its people. From the military-style architecture to the mural of the Last Judgment inside, the message to the former heretic capital is clear: The victory of the church is complete in this world and the next.

Across the square is the Musee Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, housing 600 works of the 19th-century Albigensian artist best known for his paintings of Parisian dance-hall girls.

The trip into the past is completed by a trek to Carcassonne, perhaps the most famous walled city in Europe.

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Photo: (Color) Two nuns chat along the River Tran in the so uthern French city of Albi, in the Languedoc area.

Michael Goulding/Orange County Register