Leaving Martel, I crossed the valley of the Dordogne, and passed on to other valleys southward and eastward, as recounted in the story of my wanderings by 'Southern Waters.' Many months went by, and then one summer day found me wayfaring again by the Dordogne towards the sea. A little below the point where I had crossed in search of the Ouysse I came to the small town of Souillac. This place, although fortified in the Middle Ages, played a much less important part in the wars of the Quercy than the neighbouring burgs of Martel and Gourdon. Its interest lies mainly in its twelfth-century church, and here chiefly in a very remarkable bas-relief of the Last Judgment. This astonishing work of art is to be found not where one would expect it to be, namely, in the tympanum of the portal, but in the interior, against a wall at the west end, over a Gothic arch, whose transition from the preceding style is marked by a billet-moulding. The sculpture is in a high degree typical of the uncouth vigour of the period. The two pillars supporting the arch are so carved as to represent figures of the damned going down into hell. The artist might have been inspired by Dante had he not lived before the poet who collected and fixed upon the sombre canvas of his verse all the woeful visions of eternal punishment that haunted the mediaeval mind. A man and woman are descending to the abyss, he holding her by the hair, and she clasping him by the waist, the faces of both terribly expressive of horror that is new, and utter despair. The meaning is plain, enough: each was the cause of the other's doom, and the sentence of the Judge in the panel above has united them in hell for all eternity. On the opposite pillar are another couple, also clasping one another; but their faces express the blank and passionless misery of a doom foreknown. Monk or layman, he who designed the composition felt the necessity of giving this tragic warning to his fellow-beings. Centuries later an English poet expressed the same idea in verse:

'The woman's cause is man's! they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or god-like, bond or free.'

One of the less conspicuous figures is going down head foremost in the company of an animal that looks very like a pig. This beast having been damned by ecclesiastical sculptors in France as early as the twelfth century, and probably earlier, it is not surprising that a polite peasant, when he mentions it by name, often excuses himself for his supposed breach of good manners by adding: 'Sauf votre respect.'

Nearing a village not far from Souillac, and wondering the while what had become of the picturesque, I saw, as if by enchantment, a few yards away, a little old church covered with ivy, and surrounded by tombstones that were stained with the dead colours of last winter's lichen; one leaning this way, another that, but all going down into the grassy graves. A few chairs and a single bench told that the people who came here to pray were not many nor rich. Most of the flagstones were broken, and the altar was almost simple enough to please a Calvinist. It was the simplicity, not of intention, but of poverty. Are such churches—lost amidst the pensive trees, or bathed by the tender evening light upon the vine-clad hillside—doubly hallowed, or is it the poetry of old memories and ideal pictures stored away behind a multitude of newer impressions that moves us like the wind-blown strains of half-forgotten melodies as we pass them in our wanderings?

Evening found me by the Dordogne, that flowed calmly in a salmon-coloured light, thrown down by a wasteful stony hill, itself lit up by a reflected glow of the sinking sun. The meadows through which the little path ran were dotted all over with golden spots of lotus, and near the water the pale, pure yellow of the evening primrose shone against the darkening willows. The voices of unseen peasants, labouring somewhere in the fields so long as the daylight lasted, were carried up the valley by the breeze, just loosened from its leash; but the sound was only a little louder than the whispering of the poplars.

The gloaming lingered until I reached the village of CazoulÈs. At the inn where I decided to pass the night I fell among bicyclists—quite a crowd of them—all young, frantic with the excitement of some break-neck run, and noisy enough to shock the dog's sense of decorum, for he slunk off with his tail between his legs. Having slaked their thirst, the jovial band of enthusiasts sprang upon their steel horses and dashed off into the darkness, where their voices were quickly lost.

While waiting for dinner, I found nothing so amusing as listening to a high dispute between the hostess and a travelling butcher, with whom she had long had dealings, but whom she had lately deserted because she had found another who sold cheaper. The butcher called his rival a 'dirty sparrow,' but at length proposed to yield the sou on each pound of meat by means of which the 'sparrow' had scored his victory. In future all his meat was to be sold at eleven sous, and on these terms he was restored to favour. Thus, by playing one man off against the other, the artful woman was able to save quite a pile of sous every week on her general expenses. The Frenchwoman of ordinary intelligence, whether she belongs to the north or the south, the east or the west, may be safely trusted to beat any man of her own race at bargaining.

For a rural inn this one at CazoulÈs was good and substantial, but it provided a little too much irritation at night to be consistent with peaceful slumber and happy dreams. This was not, perhaps, the fault of the inn, but of the Dordogne Valley. As soon as the day broke another enemy entered the field. The flies then awoke, refreshed but hungry, and determined to make the most of a good opportunity. The house-flies of the North, when compared to those of the South, seem to have been well brought up, and trained to live with human beings on terms of civility, if not of friendship. The flies of Southern France must be descended from those that were sent to worry Pharaoh, and when one has lived with them during the months of August and September, one can quite believe that their ancestors exasperated the Egyptian king to the point of promising anything so that they might be taken from him.

It was not until I had walked away from CazoulÈs that I realized where I was. I had left the Quercy while wandering through those meadows as the sun was sinking, and had entered PÉrigord—once famous for troubadours, and now for truffles. Nobody can live there today by making verses, and the representative of the jongleur, who once sang from castle to castle to the accompaniment of the mediaeval fiddle, and who was so heartily welcomed at all the baronial feasts and merrymakings, is now a wandering beggar, who gathers crusts from the peasants by his rude minstrelsy, that changes from the pious to the obscene, or from the obscene to the pious, as the character and taste of the audience may decide. Many persons, however, contrive to prosper by hunting for truffles in the exhilarating company of pigs. It is not in this fertile valley that they find them, but on the hillsides and stony table-lands, where the oak flourishes, but never grows tall.

I passed almost at the foot of one of those darkly-wooded, precipitous hills or cliffs which now approach the water's edge and now recede for a mile or more in this part of the valley; widening or diminishing the cultivated land accordingly as the rocky sides of the fissure resisted the washing and mining of the ancient waters.

On the top of the cliff stood a high round tower—the keep of a small feudal stronghold. It is called the Tour de Mareuil. Its position leaves little doubt that in old times its owners, like so many other nobles whose ruined castles crown the heights on both sides of the Dordogne, levied toll upon the boats that came up or went down the river. Navigation must have been always difficult on account of the strong current and the numerous rapids and shallows; but the stream was a means of communication between Bordeaux, PÉrigord, and the Haut-Quercy that was not to be despised, and probably some care was taken to keep the channel open. According to tradition, the English made frequent use of it. The tolls were an important source of income to the nobles whose fortresses overlooked the river. A sharp look-out was always kept from the towers for approaching boats.

I was on my way to the castle where FÉnelon first saw the light, and in order to reach it I had to cross the river. An old flat-bottomed boat, built for conveying men, asses, and other animals from one side to the other, lay off the bank, and two girls, who were in charge of a flock of geese as well as of the ferry, were willing to take me across. While the elder ferried, the younger examined me carefully at close quarters, and apparently with much interest. Presently she asked me if I sold writing-paper. After landing, I soon reached the village of St. Mondane. Here I halted at an inn in the shadow of old walnut-trees. A few yards off, under one of the great trees, was a high wooden crucifix, around which some twenty or thirty geese were standing or lying down, all in a digestive or contemplative mood, and through the openings between the boles and the branches were seen the sunlit meadows sloping to the low willows and the flashing river.

From St. Mondane a charming road or lane between very high banks that are almost cliffs leads upward to the ChÂteau de la Motte-FÉnelon, where, in 1651, was born FranÇois de Salignac de la Motte, known to the world as FÉnelon. Having reached the top of the hill, I soon came in view of a picturesque mass of masonry with round towers capped with pointed roofs, and with Gothic gables hanging lightly in the air over dormer windows; the whole rising out of a dense grove of trees in the midst of a quiet sunny landscape. When quite near I found that the grove was a sombre little wood of ever-green oaks. The same wood, if not the actual oaks, may have been there in FÉnelon's time, for the ilex is one of the commonest trees in PÉrigord on the hills about the Dordogne. As a boy, while climbing here, he may have torn his hose into tatters, notwithstanding his precocious knowledge of Greek. The future churchman may even have robbed a jay's nest on this very spot. What quietude and what deep shadow! Not a leaf stirred; only a fiery shaft of sunshine forced its way here and there through the dark roof of unchanging green to the brown soil and the rampart's mossy wall.

Although the present castle was raised when feudalism was nothing more than a tradition and a sentiment, the outworks, consisting of two walls, the inner one standing on ground considerably higher than the other, were of exceptional strength, and as they were originally, so they remain at the present day. I passed through the outer and then the inner gateway, and, in my search for a human being, accident led me to the kitchen, which was very large and entirely paved with pebbles. Here I found the cook, who, I had been told, was the only person in authority at that time. Surrounded by four great walls, on which hung utensils that were rarely handled except for the periodical scouring, she looked as solemn as a cloistered nun. She consented, however, to show me the interior of the castle, with a pathetic readiness which said that the appearance of an occasional visitor kept her from sinking into hopeless melancholy.

[Illustration: CHÂTEAU DE FÉNELON.]

The most interesting room is the one in which FÉnelon slept. Here is to be seen his four-post bedstead, each of the posts a slender twisted column, the silk hangings and fringe looking very worn and faded after being exposed to the light of over two hundred years. Adjoining this room is the salle À manger, the immense hearth, with seats at the ingle corners, being covered by an elliptical arch. Most of the furniture here and elsewhere is of massive oak, carved in the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The family into whose possession this castle has passed, although distinct from that of Salignac de la Motte, which has now no representative, reverently preserves all that associates the spot with the memory of the illustrious author of 'TÉlÉmaque.'

From the top of one of the machicolated towers I saw a vast expanse of country, singularly grand, but very solemn. From each side of the Dordogne Valley rose and stretched away into the distance a seemingly endless succession of hills, broken up by narrow gorges and glens. Over all, or nearly all these hills lay a dark and scarcely varying mantle of forest. This tract of country is well named PÉrigord Noir. It is one of the few districts of France which still draw a sum from the Government yearly in the form of prize money for the wolves that are killed there.

I returned to St. Mondane and continued my journey westward by the valley, which brought me every day a little nearer to the sea—still so far away. As I had no need to hurry, I sat awhile in the late afternoon upon a low mossy wall, in the deep shade of a dripping, whispering rock, from which hung delicate green tresses of the maiden's-hair fern. Above, the rock was lost in a steep wilderness of trees and dense undergrowth, which met the radiant sky somewhere where the eye could not follow. The bell-like tinkle of water out of sight was the only sound until I heard a patter-patter of webbed feet coming along the road. A flock of geese were moving homeward, followed by a woman, whose feet were as bare as theirs, and whose eyes were fixed upon her distaff and spindle. She would not have noticed me had not the birds, true to their ancient reputation, given the alarm.

A little later I had left the shadow of the wooded rocks and was on the margin of the river, which spread out broadly here between its shelving banks of pebbly shingle. Then, to reach by the shortest way the village where I intended to pass the night, I had to turn once more from the water and cross some wooded hills. Here the jays mocked at the solemnity of the evergreen oaks, and the dark forest echoed as with the laughter of fiends.

GrolÉjac was the curious name of the village I was seeking, and which I at length found partly on a hill and partly in the valley of the Dordogne. Chance taking me to a house that bore the sign of an inn, although it was at the back of a farm-yard, I thought I might as well stop there as anywhere else.

I am waiting for dinner-seldom a cheerful way of killing time. I do not, however, expose myself to the risk of being irritated by the sight of my willing but mechanical hostess scraping the white ashes from the embers, parcelling out these into little heaps of fire upon the hearth, throwing salt into the swinging pot with a hand the colour of which may be distressing to the imagination, then tasting the soup: all this, and much more, I leave her to accomplish in the gathering darkness of the kitchen, and, sparing her the pain of lighting lamp or candle while there is still a gleam of day, I wander out beyond the houses of the village to a quiet woodside, there to watch the coming of night, which, whether it be accompanied by wailing winds and storm-rack brimming with tears, or by that grand serenity which grows in beauty as the light fails, is always like the coming of death.

In the clear obscure, the brown and yellow rocks of bare limestone, at the foot of which is the small inn, seem to be drawing nearer. All their details become luminously distinct as the air grows darker, while the caverns gape like the black mouths of some stealthily approaching, monstrous, many-headed form. Two men are still working in a field of tobacco, and they go on until lights flash forth from all the houses in the valley. Then they slowly move off into the dusk with their ox and waggon.

All about the fields, where the night crickets are now chirruping and the flying beetles are droning, there is a general movement of life towards the village—of men carrying their mattocks on their shoulder or walking in front of the ox that has done his long day's ploughing, of women and children, geese, turkeys, and sheep.

[Illustration: RETURNING FROM THE FIELDS.]

I wonder if the wooden cross beside the tobacco-field was put there to mark the spot where somebody died, in accordance with an old and beautiful custom still much practised in these rural districts of France; but the thought of the laid table at the auberge changes the train of ideas, so, following in the wake of the last goose, I, too, take refuge from the night in the now animated village.

Sitting alone at a great table in a room large enough for a marriage feast, ill-lighted by an oil-lamp, whose flame appears to be afflicted with St. Vitus's dance—a room quite free from ornament, with furniture responding exclusively to the purposes of resting, eating, and drinking, with curtainless windows looking out upon the moonless night that is beginning to sigh and moan at the approach of a storm—my dinner is not a very cheerful one. Not that I am necessarily unhappy when I take a solitary meal. In this matter all depends upon the mood, and the mood frequently depends upon influences too subtle to be analyzed. The dinner was as good as I had a right to expect it to be. A dish on which the hostess had evidently striven to use her best art was of orange mushrooms in a sauce of verjuice; but the substantial one was a roast fowl—an unfortunate bird that was just going to roost with an easy mind, when my coming upset the arrangements of the inn and the poultry house. One fowl, at all events, had had good reason to think it was an ill wind that blew me into the village.

It is a bad custom in rural France to kill fowls just when they are wanted for the spit. Not only is it unpleasant to think that a creature is not allowed time to cool before it begins to turn in front of the fire, but the art of cooking is placed at a disadvantage by the practice. It is of no use, however, trying to convince the people of their error, even when they kill poultry for themselves and can choose their time: they will never do things otherwise than in the way to which they have been accustomed. The French are stubbornly conservative in everything except politics.

As I felt the need of talking to-night, I fetched the farming innkeeper from his kitchen and persuaded him to drink some of his own cognac. This he did without wincing, but he soon returned the compliment by bringing out of a cupboard a bottle of clear greenish liquor, which he said was eau de vie de figues. It was something new to me. I had tasted alcohol distilled from a considerable variety of the earth's fruits, but never from figs before. It retained a strong flavour of its origin, and might have been correctly described as fire-water, for it was almost pure spirit.

I drew this man into conversation upon the peasant's life. All that he said was only confirmation of the opinion I had already formed from other testimony respecting the occupation of Adam when he had to struggle with nature outside of the terrestrial paradise. Let a man own as much soil as he can till with his hands, let him have an ox, too, to help him: he can only live at the price of almost incessant labour and rigorous frugality. This is the normal condition of the peasant-proprietor's existence.

'The peasant who works seriously,' said the farmer, 'does not sleep more than four hours a night during the summer months. He goes to bed at ten, and gets up at two. This would not hurt him if he were better fed, but he eats little besides his soup, and drinks bad piquette.'

The man went back to his kitchen, and then to his bed close by; the flame of the lamp became sick unto death, for it now wanted oil, and the house grew so quiet that the squeaking of the rats and the pattering of their feet could be heard from places that seemed far away. But for the rumbling of the thunder, the only sound from the mysterious world outside would have been the scream, now like the cry of a cat, now like a puppy's bark, of an owl flying with muffled wings up and down the valley. Very different, however, was this little owl's cry from the madman's shout of the great eagle owl, which I had often heard in the rocky vale of the Alzon. I threw open the window of my bedroom and looked out upon the night. It was illumined, not by moon nor by stars, but by lightning flashes, which followed one another with such rapidity that there was no darkness. The quivering flame threw an awful brightness into the great woods upon the tops of the hills.

A few hours later I was wandering through these woods, which were now filled with another light that dried the dripping leaves.

Some miles of forest, then cultivated slopes, and at length the Dordogne again. I was growing rather weary of searching for the mediaeval town of Domme, when I recognised it by its old ramparts upon the summit of a high bare hill, which looked very forbidding indeed where it changed to rock, whose naked escarpments seemed to float as inaccessible as a cloud in the blue air far above the valley. As I climbed the shadeless stony hill in the mid-day sun-glare, I thought that if the soldiers of five or six centuries ago used strong language as they toiled up here in their heavy armour, it was excusable. I was wellnigh repenting of my resolution to reach Domme, when, by a turn of the road, I found myself not many yards in front of a fortified gateway of the fourteenth century, with a drumtower on each side connected by a curtain with the ramparts. At first glance nothing seemed to be wanting. The towers, however, were ruinous in the upper part, and the battlements had disappeared.

With the help of a local pork-butcher, who kept the key, I was able to enter the towers of this gateway. In each was a guard-room of considerable size, and the men-at-arms while on duty there evidently found that in time of peace the hours lagged, for some of them had carved upon the wall with their knives or daggers crucifixes and representations of the Virgin and Child, all closely imitated from church sculpture, painting or window decoration of the Gothic period. Many names are cut in Gothic character on the same walls; a further proof that the vanity of man has ever sprouted in much the same way as now. The antiquary, because he has his own prejudices, perceives an abyss between the act of the Cockney tourist of to-day who carves his name upon an old tower or a menhir, and that of a man who five centuries ago, for no better reason than the other, left upon a guard-room wall a similar record of his passage. The man of the present is a vulgar defacer of interesting monuments, whereas he of the past added to their interest, and prepared a pleasant little surprise for the archaeologist who might walk that way a few centuries later.

Enough of the fortifications of Domme remains to show what a very strong place it was in the Middle Ages. Much of the wall where the town was not naturally defended by the high naked rock, forming a frightful precipice that no besiegers would have attempted to scale, has been well preserved. Standing upon some bastion of this rampart, with the deep valley far below him and the sky above him, the wanderer may allow his fancy almost to convince him that he is really standing upon some 'castle in the air.' Of the many rock-perched towns of the South, this is one of the most remarkable; although, with the exception of the fortifications, little remains of archaeological interest.

According to the chronicles of Jean Tarde, a canon of the neighbouring town of Sarlat, who wrote at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, Domme was first taken by the English in 1346, but not without the help of 'quelques traistres.' From this stronghold they harassed the surrounding country, 'while the armies of one and the other party were in Normandy and Picardy, and that battle of Cressi (Crecy) was fought to the disadvantage of the party of France. Towards the end of the year a truce was accorded, but it was in no way observed in PÉrigord by the English.'

The correct date of the capture of Domme appears to have been 1347. The men who treasonably delivered up the place were afterwards hanged by the French party when they regained possession of the stronghold. In 1369 the English again invested the rock, this time under the command of Robert Knolles. (Tarde, who spelt all English names as he had heard them pronounced in the country, writes Robert Canole.) The place was then so well defended, and success appeared so far off to the partisans of Edward III., that the siege was raised in despair at the end of a month; and the annalist goes on to say that the English then marched into the Quercy and took Roc-Amadour. Domme, however, fell into the English power again; but in 1415 it was once more in the hands of the French. Then we read that the seneschal sent the crier into the public place to proclaim 'de par le Roy' that every inhabitant of Domme was forbidden to leave the town with the intention of living elsewhere, under the penalty of having any property that he might possess in the town confiscated. The motive of this ordinance is explained as follows: 'The wars had already rendered the country so desolate, that at Domme, where the ordinary number of inhabitants who were heads of families was a thousand, there were now no more than a hundred and twenty. The people who had left had abandoned everything, and gone to Spain or elsewhere.'

From the bare and windy hill I went down again into the quiet valley, where, when a few more miles were left behind, I came to La Roque-Gageac, a village at the foot of high-reaching rocks of fantastic outline, not far from the Dordogne. Many houses long ago seem to have climbed far up the warm limestone under the shelter of cornice and canopy, fashioned by the sculptor Time, braving all the storms of centuries, and the danger of being hurled in fragments towards the valley by some falling crag.

In an open space, forming a little square, a man and a woman were holding down a pig, one at each end of a board, where the animal had been stretched out against its inclination, while a third person had the knife ready for action. And the spot chosen for the execution was immediately in front of a very old and interesting shrine, with gabled roof, surmounted by a rude Gothic crucifix. I caught a glimpse of the pale statue and the flowers before it; but only a glimpse, for the struggles of the doomed pig, and the momentary expectation of seeing the red stream gush forth, made me turn away. One sees much that is anything but poetical in the romantic land of the troubadours.

Near this strikingly-picturesque village is a cave such as one might read of in a story of fanciful adventure. It is in a rock beside the Dordogne, where, the river rests in a deep pool. The entrance is under water, and it can only be reached with safety by a good diver when, the sun shining at a certain hour, and the light striking in a particular way, the passage into the cavern is lit up. A boy had made the dive successfully not long before my visit to this place, but he found so much to interest him in the cave while it was lighted a little by the borrowed gleam from the water, that he lingered there until, the sun moving on his course, the angle of refraction suddenly changed. The child had not the courage to take a plunge into the dark gulf, where there was no beacon to guide him, and where he might have struck against the rock. He therefore remained the rest of the day and all night in the cavern. When the sun again lit up the passage leading from his prison, the boy plunged, and a few seconds afterwards he was sitting on the river-bank drying himself in the sun.

* * * * *

I have entered upon the tenancy of a small house beside the Dordogne at Beynac, a village a few miles below La Roque, partly crouching beneath a very high rock, and partly built upon its terraces or ledges up to the inner wall of a feudal castle that was much modified and refashioned in later ages under the pressure of two forces—time, that ruins, and the eternal striving of each generation to attain its own ideal of comfort and elegance. But the grand old keep still rears its rectangular mass behind and far above the later masonry, and when the evening sun shines upon it, the stones, no longer gray, wear again their bright colour of six or seven centuries ago. Presently, as the glow moves higher, the battlements and machicolations take a golden clearness that marks every detail against the blue depth of sky whose fire is fading and preparing to change into the calm splendour that mingles with the dusk. Between the base of the rock and the river is just space enough for a road, which is dazzlingly white now, and well powdered with dust; but in winter it not infrequently disappears under water.

[Illustration: BEYNAC.]

On the opposite shore, above a shelving beach of yellow pebbles and a broken line of osiers, stretch meadows that are intensely green in spring, and would be quickly so again if rain were to fall; but now they are very brown, and the long-tailed sheep that wander over them, tinkling their bells, like to keep near the Dordogne, where they can moisten their mouths from time to time, and thus help themselves to imagine that they are eating grass. Beyond the reach of meadow, almost at the foot of high wooded hills which mark the boundary of the valley on that side, is a modern chÂteau; but the architect found his model for it in the past, when castles were more picturesque than comfortable. When the amber-tinted towers are seen through the haze of a summer morning against the background of wooded hill, one thinks that in just such a castle as this Tasso or Spenser would have put an enchantress, whose wiles, combined with the indolent influence of the valley, few pilgrim knights taking the eastward way to Roc-Amadour would have been able to resist.

I found the valley so hot in the steady blaze of summer that, having reached Beynac, I felt no inclination to go any farther. I thought I would stop there until cooler weather came, and live meanwhile principally in the Dordogne. Several families from different parts of PÉrigord had already come here to spend a mildly exciting and not too costly river season; and there they were, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, splashing in the blue tepid water, with their clothes laid carefully in little heaps upon the pebbly beach or upon the brown grass by the osiers. Despising the shelter which in more fashionable watering-places is thought indispensable, they lazily undressed and dressed in the open air with an appreciation of sunshine and regardlessness of apparel that was almost lizard-like in its freedom from conventional restraint.

I was charmed by the spectacle as I meditated upon the opposite bank. The more I meditated the better I liked the idea of tarrying in a spot where Arcadian simplicity of life was so unaffectedly cultivated. I resolved that I, too, would take a house at Beynac if there was one to be had, and that I would have what I figuratively termed my 'caravan' brought up here. At the auberge—the only one in the place—I learnt that there was but a single house still vacant, and that it was not a very beautiful one. A young fisherman started off barefoot to fetch the owner from his village, four miles away. The country had to be scoured for him, so that it was long before he showed himself.

While waiting, I went out and amused the fish in the Dordogne by pointing a borrowed rod at them, and tempting them with the fattest house-flies I could find; but as soon as they saw the bait they all turned their tails to it. My angling was a complete failure. And yet there were multitudes of fish swimming on the surface; the water seemed alive with them. I concluded that they were observing a solemn fast.

At length the fisherman returned, looking very hot and dusty, and of course thirsty. He was accompanied by a hard-baked man of about sixty—a peasant, apparently, but one who had put on his best clothes in view of an important bargain that was to be made. He had cunning little eyes, and a mouth that seemed to have acquired from many ancestors, and from the habits of a lifetime, a concentrated expression of rustic chicanery which told me that no business was to be done with him without a fight.

He led the way to his house, which was on the road just above the river. I came to terms with him for a month, after the expected fight; but it was not until he had gone away that I began to realize that I had not distinguished myself by my wisdom in this transaction. Even the villagers, who are not dainty in the matter of lodging, described the house as a baraque. It gave me the same impression when I saw the inside of it; but I closed my eyes to its drawbacks, because I had taken a fancy to Beynac, and this was the only furnished dwelling to be obtained there. I thought all the little drawbacks belonging to it, such as the rustic hearth to cook upon, pots with holes in them, rusty frying-pans, deficiency of crockery, and more than a sufficiency of fleas, would be overcome somehow, as they had been elsewhere during my peregrinations in out-of-the-way districts, where the traveller who nurses his dignity, and has a proper regard for the comforts of life, never thinks of stopping. But things did not settle down this time quite so quickly as I had expected.

After the arrival of the 'caravan' I took to fishing—always with the same rod borrowed of the blacksmith-innkeeper—with a zeal that I had not known since I was a boy. I found that things settled down better when I was out of the way. But there was something that settled down only too rapidly. This was the kitchen floor. There was a bare rock forming the back wall of the house, and down it a runnel of water gently trickled. In the wet season it lost all modesty, made a lake that rose above the boards, and tried to find an exit by the back of the chimney. This explained why the fire needed two days' coaxing and blowing before it would burn, notwithstanding that our servant had been reared in the knowledge of such chimney-places and their humours. It also explained why somebody's foot went through the floor in a fresh place two or three times a day. At the end of the first week one had to stride or jump over half a dozen chasms to get from one side to another. About the same time four or five of the lower stairs gave way from rottenness, so that it needed no little agility to reach the bedrooms. The old man had to come and mend his house, and because he had a guilty conscience he brought a basket of figs with him; but, instead of owning that the wood was rotten, he insinuated that it had been maliciously danced upon.

But the heat was the worst tribulation. The house, with all its windows without persiennes—a detail I had quite overlooked—faced the south, so that during the hottest hours of the day the sun was full upon it, and the heat was over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. It was the most scorching August that had been known even in the South of France for years. The recollection of those burning hours in that shanty will be ever green.

Nevertheless, the time spent at Beynac left some pleasant memories. The days were fiery, and, when the south wind blew, almost suffocating; but when the sun went down into the west there usually came a beneficent change. During the few minutes that the golden circle lay seemingly upon the edge of the world, a boat crossing the river appeared to glide over unfathomable depths of splendour; then gradually over the fields of maize and tobacco, and where the yellow stubble of the corn long since reaped had been left, there spread the deep-toned lustre of evening. As the brown dusk filled the valley, and under the sombre walnut-trees the wayside cross became like the spectre of one, shrill voices of old women were heard calling the geese and turkeys that still lingered in the fields.

The geese were often left to come home by themselves, after spending the day along the banks of the river. They belonged to various people, but, being eminently sociable birds, they started off together in flocks of fifty or more. Although there must have been causes of jealousy and rivalry among them, they never seemed to quarrel. They knew when it was time to go home by the failing light, and in the dusk I often met them marching along the road like a regiment of soldiers. As they reached houses to which some of them belonged, detachments would fall out and the others would go on. Every bird would return to the place which had for it the sweet associations of its gosling innocence.

It is now night—the calm summer night without a moon, but spangled with stars. Among those which the Dordogne reflects and holds as if they were its own, is the planet Mars, which gleams readily in the midst of a swarm of lesser yellow lights. The river here is broad and still; there is not ripple enough to make a beam tremble. If the stars in the water flash, it is because the rays are flashed from above. Just below the village there are rapids, and a faint murmur comes up from them, but it is borne under by the shrilling of the crickets that have climbed into the osiers and poplars all along by the water's edge. Now and again there is a great splash in the middle of the stream, which makes one think that a fish large enough to swallow some unsuspecting Jonah of PÉrigord must be there in a playful mood; but this is merely the effect upon the imagination of a sudden noise breaking in upon the monotonous sounds of the night which are so much like silence.

Lured by the freshness of the air and the serene glory of the starlit sky, I wander off down the valley to a spot where the river, all in turmoil, washes and wears away the flanks of rocks rising sheer from its bed like a wall. Looking back, I can see very distinctly the dark mass of the castle and the church by its side high above me against the sky, and every minute or so the lightning-flash from a storm far away in the west brightens the sombre masonry and the rock beneath.

Centuries ago in this light, the rock, the fortress, and its church must have looked much the same as now. An Englishman, who had campaigned with the Black Prince, standing where I am—the road was probably a mule track then—-would have seen against the sky the picture that sets me dreaming of the past. But the quietude of the summer night might have been disturbed by sounds that are not heard now. It is unlikely that so large a castle, containing so many men-at-arms and officials as must have been deemed necessary to its safety and dignity, would at this early hour have been wrapped in silence more complete than that of the valley. There would surely have been some people breathing the cool air on the platform of the keep besides the watchman, some soldiers pacing the chemin de ronde, although peaceful days may have returned to the unlucky land of Guyenne; and the clamour of strong voices would have come down to the river. But now the castle is quiet as its rock which was beaten by the waves of a vanished sea, and those who still live in it are like the keepers of a cemetery. That donjon, whose dark form seems to stand amidst the stars, only serves to mark one of the many tombs of feudalism which rise above the smiling but capricious Dordogne like menhirs—monuments of older illusions—along the ocean-scalloped coast of Brittany.

Animated as Beynac became late in the afternoon, when the little society, composed of extraneous particles, met in costumes that were airy, fantastic, elementary, anything but ceremonious, to exchange civilities in the water, life on the whole was so mildly exciting that when one day a small caravan, drawn by a donkey and preceded by a young man half hidden by a great straw hat and wildly beating a drum, entered the place, there was a great and tumultuous movement of the population. Everybody wanted to know what the donkey and the young man proposed to do at Beynac. On the caravan had been painted 'ThÉÂtre de la GaÎtÉ,' which threw light upon the object of the intruders. The donkey drew up in front of the inn, and the excited crowd waited with ill-contained impatience to see the company of players descend from the battered travelling trunk on wheels. At length a pretty little girl of about twelve, with large and lustrous brown eyes, came out of the box. She was the company. She was in the charge of her mother, who superintended the artistic arrangements, as well as the culinary and financial, but did not venture upon the stage. The young man looked after the donkey and the drum, and filled up his time by catching fish for the company and her mother. The stable of the auberge was hired for evening use as a salle de spectacle, and at one end a very diminutive stage was set up by means of rough planks and old pieces of carpet.

Everybody who could afford to spend a penny or twopence upon vanity and worldliness went to see the performance. It was quite a fashionable gathering. The best society were by common consent allowed to take the best seats—very hard benches—the less ambitious crowded behind, with minds fully made up not to allow themselves to be carried by enthusiasm beyond the expenditure of two sous when the plate went round; while favoured children, who were not expected to pay anything, because they had nothing, climbed into the mangers, and packed themselves as close together as aphids on a rose-stalk. The stable had been carefully cleansed, but the horsey odour that belonged to it could not be swept out. This, with the bad ventilation, and a temperature almost equal to the hatching of eggs without hens, was a drawback; but the audience was in no humour to be critical. A small handbell was rung, two pieces of old carpet were drawn back, and the little girl made her bow to the audience in a costume as near to that of Mignon as she and her mother could make it. She sang:

'Connais-tu le pays Òu fleurit l'oranger?'

and other airs from the opera in a small, bird-like voice, unaccompanied by any music. For three hours the child sang, acted, and danced in the suffocating stable, lighted by two petroleum lamps. The next day I saw Mignon sitting on one of the shafts of the caravan and gnawing the 'drumstick' of a fowl. The child-actress was the prop of her mother and the donkey; her talent also kept the youth, who began to agitate the nerves of Beynac with his diabolical rataplan hours before each performance.

One morning, soon after sunrise, the donkey, which had begun to think that this time it had really been pensioned off, was put into the shafts, and the caravan gradually disappeared upon the white road. Then the village became quite dull again; but it was roused from its torpor by the annual fÊte. This was the chief event of the year. The peasants came in from the scattered villages and from the isolated farms lying in the midst of the chestnut woods. All the women coifed themselves with their best kerchiefs, the heads of most of the young girls being resplendent with brilliant-coloured silk. This coiffure resembles that of the Bordelaise, but it is not so small, nor is it folded so coquettishly. There was much love-making—sometimes exquisitely comic by its rustic naÏvetÉ—and there was a good deal of dancing to the maddening music of two screaming hurdy-gurdies.

At Beynac I made the acquaintance of a French-man who, after angling for riches—a sport at which he lost much bait and caught nothing—turned all his attention to the fish in the Dordogne. He resolved that he would run no more risk by casting his bread upon the wider waters, but that he would make the most of what remained to him by withdrawing to some riverside nook, where his love of the unconventional, and his taste for a free life in the open air, could expand, emancipated from all servitude to society, including the necessity of keeping up what is called 'an appearance.'

What, to my mind, helps greatly to make France such a pleasant country to live in is the large amount of social liberty that one enjoys there. Except in great towns, and in those places which are thronged at certain seasons by cosmopolitan crowds, people can live as simply as they please, and they can wear anything, however cheap or even shabby, without risk of being diminished on this account in the opinion of others. They are liked or disliked, respected or despised, as their conduct and dealings become known and judged.

The Otter—this nickname had been given to my new acquaintance by those who were jealous of his fishing skill—when he was out in his boat never wore anything finer than corduroy trousers, a short blue jacket of the cotton material from which blouses are made, a straw-hat, and espadrilles, into which he put his bare feet. No heavier clothing is consistent with happiness in such a climate as that of the Dordogne Valley during the summer months. When, by gliding over the transparent water, which revealed the pebbles at the bottom almost in the deepest places, and the shoals of fish as they passed up and down the stream, the temptation to plunge became irresistible, the blue jacket and the other garments were thrown off in a few seconds, and the fish were startled by the descent of a black head and beard, followed by the rest of that human form which Carlyle has compared to a forked radish.

Sometimes the Otter made nocturnal expeditions far up the channels of the little streams that fall into the Dordogne. Then he was after crayfish. The ordinary method of catching these crustaceae, namely, with a piece of netting covering a small wire hoop, and baited with meat, had little charm for him. There was another much more in keeping with his passion for movement. He would walk up the beds of the streams quite heedless of the water, holding in one hand a lantern, and having the other free to make a grab at every crayfish he might see scuttling out of harm's way over the stones or sand. As he went slowly up the narrow valleys, the gleam of his lantern through the osiers, the tall loose-strife and hemp-agrimony startled the owls, the hedgehogs and the weasles; but not the sound of water wailing in the darkness, nor the cries of disturbed animals, nor the weird blackness of overhanging trees that hid the stars, troubled his nerves. On he went, through water-meadows, at the bottom of gloomy little gorges, and by the fringe of the forest, until he had wandered miles away from Beynac. We very nearly met one night, both being out with the same object in view. I, however, had very little of his zeal for the sport, and was less interested by the crayfish than by the fantastic indistinctness of trees and shrubs and flowers, which, in the light of the stars and the lantern, seemed to belong to a world with which I was but vaguely familiar, although I had travelled all over it in dreams.

Sometimes I used to go out fishing with the Otter on the Dordogne. When the casting-net was left at home (it was of little use when the water was clear) chub-fishing with the flying-line was generally the chosen form of sport. Here I may say that my companion, who could turn his hand to anything, made his own rods from hazel-sticks. Where the water was sufficiently deep, the boat was rowed and steered with a single-bladed paddle, but where it was shallow much better progress could be made by polling. These are the two methods invariably used by the fishermen and ferrymen of the Dordogne, and it is astonishing with what success they can get a boat up the rapids without having recourse to the towing-line.

When we went chub-fishing, we took the boat a mile or so up-stream, and then let it drift down with the current near a bank that was fringed with willows and acacias. Although we needed only six inches of water, the depth was sometimes miscalculated, and we went aground on a bank of pebbles. Then the Otter, whose bare feet were always ready for such emergencies, stepped out into the sparkling current, and hauled or pushed the boat over the obstacle. What with rapids and banks of pebbles, the excitement of boating on the Dordogne above Lalinde never flags. It looked very easy to throw a line with a worm on it towards the shore, and then draw it back, but the chub showed such little eagerness to be caught by me that I generally preferred to steer and watch my companion pulling them out as he stood in the prow, his face nearly hidden under the thatch of his straw hat. When the fish were in a biting humour, he had one on his hook every time he threw the line.

There are few trout in this part of the Dordogne, but in tributary streams, like the charming little CÉou, they are plentiful. Carp are abundant, but they are very difficult to take with the line, and even with the net, except in time of flood, when they get washed out of their holes, and the water being no longer clear, their very sharp eyes are of little use to them. Then a lucky throw will sometimes bring out two or three carp weighing several pounds each. The fish commonly caught are mullet, perch, barbel, gudgeon, bream, and chub. As a food-supplying river, the Dordogne is one of the most valuable in France, and, owing to the rapid current and the purity of the water, the fish is of excellent quality.

The fixed belief of all the riverside people in this and other valleys is that fish should be cooked alive. You enter an inn and ask for a friture of gudgeon. In a few minutes you see the victims, which have been pulled out of a tank with a small net on the end of a stick, jumping on the kitchen table, and they are still jumping when they go into the boiling grease. I am not among those who have grown callous to such sights, common as they are in France. To see fish scraped, opened, and cooked while still alive gives me disgust for it when it afterwards appears on the table. I can imagine somebody saying: 'Why look at what goes on in the kitchen?' That somebody does not quite understand what rural France is. In a country inn we invariably pass through the kitchen to reach the room set apart for guests, and it has often fallen to my lot to seek rest, shelter, and food in a poor auberge, where the kitchen is also the common room of the family and outsiders.

A Beynac character that left on my memory a lasting impression was old Suzette. Suzette might have been any age between fifty and seventy. She had no beauty, but she must have had a little vanity left, for when I showed her a photograph I had taken of her, she put her hard old hands together, swayed her head from shoulder to shoulder, and actually wept. She could not speak much French, but she said as well as she could that she did not know that she had grown so ugly. I have noticed, however, that my photographs have a tendency to draw tears or angry expressions from most of those on whom I operate, which I can only account for by the reason that these people have not the pleasure of paying for their portraits. What is done for nothing is seldom appreciated. Suzette, not wishing to hurt my feelings, soon wiped out her eyes with her largest knuckle, and, having composed her countenance, thanked me for having photographed her. She had had a rough life, but as she had known little else but hardship and privation, she was contented with what Providence considered enough for her. This was now a two-roomed cottage to live in, and for food a bunch of grapes, a peach or a pear to eat with her bread in the fruit season, a few walnuts to go with it in autumn or winter, chestnuts to boil or roast, and a piece of fat bacon hanging to a beam, from which she cut only just enough at a time to disguise the water which, when thickened with bread, a handful of haricots, and some scraps of other vegetables, made her daily soup. She was a widow now, but although whenever she spoke of her dead husband her head began to wag and the tears to start from her eyes, she had less care and worry and pain as a lonely woman than when she was bearing children and working harder than any pack-mule to bring them up. Her husband was a fisherman of the Dordogne, and she sold his fish in the Sarlat market, some eight miles distant from where they lived by the river. In order to be early in the market, she had to start at about two in the morning, and the road, which was uphill all the way, ran between woods where the wolves, descending from the vaster forests of Black PÉrigord, often howled in winter. She told me it frequently happened when she reached the market that her arms and hands were so benumbed with the cold that she could not take the basket of fish from her head. As a widow, she had lived for a while with a married son, but the young woman soon turned the old one out. Poor Suzette told the story without bitterness; she recognised the law of nature in this expulsion of the mother when she was of no further use to her children, and accepted thankfully the ten francs a month which her son allowed her. She managed to live by fetching and carrying for anyone who would give her two or three sous for an hour's trudging. She used to take my letters to post at the nearest railway-station, and no one who merely noted how nimbly her bare feet moved along the hot, dusty road would have supposed that she had left her youth so far behind her. Battered and pinched and harassed as she had been by destiny, she still believed in the working out of eternal justice, and one day before sunrise she started off on a pilgrimage to a distant sanctuary, and did not return until after many hours. With all this she was gay, and could tell a lively story with plenty of Southern salt. She was a good bit of human nature, worth studying.

Sarlat, where old Suzette went to sell her husband's fish, was a very important stronghold of Black PÉrigord in the Middle Ages, and the chief place in that Sarladais which the English kings of Norman and AngÉvin descent found such a tough bone to pick. The way to it from Beynac leads up steep valleys and gorges, covered with dense forest. Here wolves are to be seen occasionally in winter, but the wolf country begins a little to the north of Sarlat, and stretches towards the Limousin. The town appears to be composed of one long street, and to be dismally uninteresting. There is, however, an old Sarlat that lies a little off the main artery, and which a lazy visitor who does not like the trouble of asking questions might easily miss. There are few scenes more original and picturesque in France than that presented by the ruinous old church, half open to the weather, and the ancient houses that form a framework round it. Under the lofty Gothic vaulting are wooden shops and shanties, and, looking up, you see the smoke from bakers' ovens hanging about the ribs of the great arches, which it has blackened.

Of the old houses, one of the most remarkable is that which was the residence of the philosophical writer, Etienne de la BoËtie, the friend of Montaigne, It is an interesting example of the French Renaissance, the exterior being richly ornamented with carvings.

A very rough, bad time had the men of Sarlat during the long years that they were fighting intermittently for their lives and property with the lawless bands of so-called English, who had turned so many rocks into fastnesses, and who issued from their fortified caverns, that they made almost impregnable, to prey upon the unfortunate people who strove to live by husbandry. These hardened ruffians and freebooters had no respect for treaties, and inasmuch as peace never lasted long, and the English kings of that epoch always liked to feel that they were ready for anything that might happen in France, the companies of brigand soldiers who preferred to serve under the leopards rather than under the golden lilies were left to do pretty much what they pleased in the wilder parts of Guyenne.

After the treaty that followed the battle of Poitiers they continued their depredations, heedless of the orders communicated to them by the English commissioners. They carried their raids up to the walls of Sarlat, even at the time of vintage, although this season was much respected in the Middle Ages by violent men, from a motive that was perhaps not disinterested. They seized the bullocks that were harnessed to the waggons, and bore them off to their strongholds. It is but fair to add, however, that the Sarladais did not formally submit to English authority until 1361—five years after the battle of Poitiers. Then Chandos went to Sarlat and received the submission of the burghers. Soon afterwards Edward III confirmed all the privileges they had been enjoying under the kings of France. But they did not remain quiet long. Persuaded by Talleyrand and other nobles, they rebelled in 1369, and the town became again French. Speaking of this event, Tarde observes:

'And behold how and when the salamander [Footnote: This reptile was borne in the arms of Sarlat.] was again placed under the three fleurs-de-lys, having carried the leopards in chief only eight years two months and a half.'

The people of Sarlat often boast that their town never submitted to the
English. In this matter, however, they are in error.

September came, and I was still at Beynac, although I had found another house. The fruit season was then at its height. Peaches were sold at three sous the dozen, a good melon cost about the same sum, and figs were to be had almost for nothing. On these terms quite a mountain of fruit could be placed upon the table for half a franc. There was often no necessity to run into this extravagance, for the people at Beynac are good-natured, and they would frequently send a basket of their earliest grapes or other fruit. Although the present might have been made by a woman with bare feet, her feelings would have been hurt had money been offered in return.

One day rather late in the month, having grown ashamed of inactivity, I carried my knapsack down to the river and put it into the Otter's smallest boat, which he called the pÉrissoire, although it was not really a canoe. He was the chief builder of it, and as a contrivance for bringing home to man the solemn truth that life hangs to a thread or floats upon a plank—perhaps the worst state of the two—it certainly did him infinite credit. It was a flatbottomed outrigged deal boat, very long, and so narrow that to look over one's shoulder in it was a manoeuvre of extreme delicacy, especially where the rapids caused the water to be in wild commotion. I was told that it would go down stream like an arrow, and so it did. There was no need to row hard, for the current took the fragile skiff along with it so fast that the trees on the banks sped by as if they were running races, and every few minutes brought a change of landscape. It was very delightful; only one sensation of movement could have been better—that of flying.

The water was as blue as the sky above, and over the valley, the wooded hills, and naked rocks lay the sunshine of early autumn, tender in its strength, mingling a balm with its burning. I seemed to be floating swiftly but gently down some lovely but treacherous river of enchanted land. And where is the river that lends itself better to this illusion than the Dordogne—ever charming, changing, and luring like a capricious, fascinating, and rather wicked woman? Now it flows without a sound by the forest, where the imagination places the fairy people and the sylvan deities; now it roars in the shadow of the castle-crowned and savage rock, over which the solitary hawk circles and repeats its melancholy cry; now it seems to sleep like a blue lake in the midst of a broad, fair valley, where in the sunny fields the flocks feed drowsily.

The depth of the water was as variable as the strength of the current. Sometimes I saw the stony bed seven or ten feet below, and then quite suddenly the boat would get into rushing water that sparkled with crystal clearness over a bank of pebbles, and I expected momentarily to hear a grating noise and to feel myself aground; but the little boat went over the shallows like a leaf. I passed a bank large enough to be called an island. The water had not covered it for months, and it was all thickly overgrown with persicaria, which the late summer had stained a carmine red, so that the island was all aflame. The swallows that dipped their wings in the water, the kingfishers that flew along the banks or perched on the willow stumps, and the graceful wagtails, were for some miles my only river companions—excepting, of course, the fish, with which a treacherous current or a sunken rock might have placed me at any moment on terms of still closer intimacy.

But time flew like the boat, and I soon came in sight of a charming little village whose houses with peaked roofs seemed to have been piled one upon another. Here upon stones in the water I recognised the human form supported by two bare legs, and in the posture as of a person about to take a dive, which is not perhaps very graceful, but is one that certainly lends character to the riverside scenery of France. Two or three women were rinsing their linen.

On nearing St. Cyprien the current became swifter and the turmoil of the rapids so great that I prepared my mind here to being swamped by the waves. The question whether I would abandon or try to rescue my knapsack after the wreck was distressing. The risk being over, it was with a sigh of relief that I beached the boat, now half full of water, at the nearest spot to the small town. Having moored it and given the sculls in charge of a man whose house was close by, I was soon walking in the warm glow of the September afternoon by cottage gardens where the last flowers of summer were blooming.

The small burg of less than three thousand inhabitants which bears the name of the African saint was probably, like many others, much more important in the Middle Ages than it is now. In accordance with the building spirit of the past, so strongly pronounced throughout Aquitaine, and obviously inspired by a defensive motive, the houses are closely packed together on a steep hillside. A few ancient dwellings, notably one with a long exterior gallery, show themselves very picturesquely here and there. The town grew up at the foot of an abbey, of which the church still existing exhibits a massive tower that might easily be mistaken at a little distance for an early feudal keep. The lower part of this tower is Romanesque. The interior of the church is in the very simple pointed style of the twelfth century, but the interest has suffered much from restoration. What is chiefly remarkable here is the carved oak of the reredoses and pulpit.

The English in 1422 took the town of St. Cyprien and besieged the abbey, which was a veritable citadel where the inhabitants in the last resort found shelter. A French force coming, however, to the relief of the people, the English, who were probably not very numerous, deemed it prudent to retire.

There being still an hour or more of daylight, I continued the ascent of the hill above the houses and the solemn old church to find a certain ChÂteau de Pages, which I knew to be somewhere in the locality. A woman working her distaff and spindle with that meditative air which the rustic spinners so often have, her bare feet slowly and noiselessly moving over the rough stones, pointed out to me a little lane that wound up the deserted hill between briars bedecked with scarlet hips and bits of ancient wall to which ferns and moss and ivy clung, tinged by the waning golden light. I passed through vineyards from which the grapes had been gathered, then rose by broom and blackthorn to the level land.

I looked in vain for the castle. I might have searched for it until darkness came, but for the help of a boy who was taking home a goat. At length I found it lying in a hollow, a sufficient sign that it was never a stronghold. In feudal times it was probably a small castellated manor belonging perhaps to a knight who could not afford to build himself a donjon on some eminence and to fortify it with walls; but centuries later what remained of the original structure was patched up and considerably enlarged. Now, as I saw it in the dusk, it seemed a very ghost-haunted place. The building had not fallen into ruin; it was still roofed, and might easily have been made habitable; but there was no glass in the windows; all the rooms were silent with that silence so deep and sad of the long-deserted house which is not sufficiently wrecked by time and decay to have lost the pathos of human associations. The breath of the dying twilight stirred the ivy leaves upon the wall of the detached chapel where never a person had prayed for many a year, and the goblin bats came out from the shadowy places to flutter against the pale sky. Then I felt that I had lingered long enough on this desolate spot, and the thought of the awaking hearths brightening the little town with the blaze of wood made me hasten through the heather and gorse that had grown up on the grave of many a vine.

The next morning saw me afloat again. As I was getting away from the shore a man called out to me: 'Your boat is worth nothing! If you try to pass the third bridge you will go to the bottom!'

He spoke very seriously, and I wished to take further counsel of him; but having once got into the current, it carried me off at such a rate that while I was thinking of putting a question I was taken out of speaking distance. I shot through one of the arches of the first bridge, and soon found myself in water that was a little rough for my poor skiff. Here were the rapids again. I had been warned against these before I left the inn. There was no turning back now, and if the commotion of water had been ever so great I should have had to take my chance in it. The Otter's advice when I came to rapids was to pull as hard as I could in the middle of the current. I followed it, and my shallow boat, which had just been described as worthless, darted into the midst of the turmoil, and went through it all as swift as a swallow on the wing. The river, however, had risen considerably during the night, and the strength of the current having much increased in consequence, my belief in the pÉrissoire's worthiness was not sufficient to make me run the risk of being swamped at the third bridge. I therefore landed at the next one, which was close to the village of SÍorac. It seemed that I had only just started from St. Cyprien, and yet I had travelled about six miles. With the help of a willing man the boat was carried to the railway-station, which was not far off, and its journey home having been paid, I ceased for awhile to be a waterfarer, and became again a wayfarer.

Although there was not much to interest me at Siorac, I stayed there to lunch in a small inn, where an old woman grilled me a chop over the embers, and then set before me a pile of grapes, another of pears, and a third of fresh walnuts. The fruit was to me the best part of the meal, for the long hot summer had caused me to look upon meat very much as a necessary evil in the routine of life. While I was seated at the table, the old woman, who now dozed over her distaff in the chimneycorner, would start up every five minutes or so, as if from the beginning of a nightmare, and rush at the flies, which were ravenously busy upon the grapes and pears that I had set aside for them. She hated them with a hatred so fierce and bitter that I thought it rather unbecoming at her time of life.

'On ne pent rien manger,' she said, 'sans que ces diables y touchent.'

This was quite true; but it was not the flies' fault that their parents were prolific, and that they had been hatched in a climate eminently conducive to their vigour and happiness. Their numbers and their voracity showed that they, too, were compelled by the struggle for life to be active and enterprising. Unlike some beings of a higher order, they did not take this trouble sadly; but, then, they were Southern flies.

Having driven them from the table, the aged woman nodded her head with vindictive satisfaction, and murmured, 'C'est Égal; elles vont bientÔt crever'—unmindful of the fact that she, too, had reached the season of life when the frost comes suddenly and catches people unawares.

I returned to the river and crossed the bridge. On one side of it was a high statue of the Madonna and Child, with these words on the pedestal: 'Protectrice du pont, priez pour nous..' The inscription further stated that the statue was raised in remembrance of the flood of 1866. That was in the time of the Empire; nowadays the Government despises all heavenly assistance in the department of roads and bridges, and religious statues are no longer erected in such places. Just before reaching a village called Coux, I was confronted by a very large army of geese, and while the foremost row advanced to the attack with outstretched necks and bills laid near the ground, the others cheered them on. For a minute or so matters looked very serious; then goose and gander courage failed completely, until the army worked round to my rear, when the screams of defiance arose again.

Poor wretches! their high spirits were not going to last long. They would soon have to undergo the cramming process, which a goose detests, for, unlike a pig, it will never of its own will eat more than it needs. In a few weeks the livers of most of them would be made into those excellent truffled pÂtÉs de foie gras, which it is the pride and profit of PÉrigord to send far and wide.

A grand old elm, such as one does not often see in France, stood in front of the village church—a Transition building with a Romanesque portal. Beyond this place the land became marshy, and considerable tracts of it had been planted with Jerusalem artichokes, each of which had now its yellow head that tells its relationship to the sunflower. These artichokes are much grown by damp woodsides, and on other land of little value, in the valleys of PÉrigord. They are rarely used as food for man, for the French, notwithstanding the wide range of their gastronomy, including as it does squirrels and tomtits, and even snakes in certain localities, as well as various herbs and vegetables seldom or never eaten in England, have not been able to acquire a liking for the tubers of the artichoke. The plant is cultivated for feeding cattle, the whole of it doing good service in a region where there is but little grass. The multitude of golden flowers floating, as it were, on sombre green waves light up the autumnal landscape with a new flame when the skies turn gray.

A solitary man whom I found working a loom in a cottage by the side of the river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself—now under a gray sky—on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the gleam of a white flower upon the erect stem of a marsh-mallow. But what gave to this spot a strange and almost weird character was the number of great hoary willows, thirty or forty feet high, with gnarled and twisted boles, scattered over the dark green grass. It was a melancholy grove of fantastic dream-haunted willows, such as belongs to the South and the Virgilian muse:

'Umbrarum hic locus est, somni noctisque soporae.'

And the sad solitude, in which there was not a sound of moving leaf or singing bird, seemed to be peopled by the ghosts of men who were waiting and weeping out their hundred years on the Stygian shore.

Hoary willows, dark alders, and then the road. This led me to Le Buisson—a place possessed of the blue devils, and which exists merely out of compliment to the railway-junction here. Having made arrangements for returning to the inn, I wandered out again to look at the river in the gray evening, and at the bridge where it was predicted that I should go to the bottom if I remained in the little boat. I crossed fields from which tobacco and maize had lately been carried, and reached the bridge of evil prophecy. The river certainly seemed to be doing its best to sweep away the piers, and when it escaped from the arches it raised its voice to a roar; but it seemed to me that on one side the pÉrissoire would have gone through gaily without being swamped. The cry of troubled water in the dusk fascinated me. I lingered, and yet felt the strong impulse to hurry back to the society of men, out of the sound of the angry river, whose slaty waves flashed out strange gleams. What is it in the gloom and horror of nature that so draws us and yet warns us to flee? The day was ending stormily. The poplars wailed, and bent under the lash of the rising wind; dark masses of cloud stood still in the sky, whilst others, torn and scattered below them, rushed hither and thither madly. Every few minutes the faint gleam of lightning, still far off, brought to the black woods along the hills a momentary return of radiance, as though it were the fitful flashing of the day's dying lamp.

The roaring and wailing of the turbid flood now seemed to be repeating in cruel mockery the despairing cries of all the drowning people who were ever the prey of the water-fiends that draw downward in whirlpools to depths where twilight passes into darkness, and take the form of the long waving weeds that look so innocent, but whose grasp is deadly, or guide the current that utters never a sound as it seizes its victim and bears him into an unfathomed gulf under the pitiless rock. A voice within me cried 'Home!' but home had I none anywhere of the staple sort: mine was like a home on wheels.

As I returned to the inn across the fields, I saw some scattered peasant figures moving slowly the same way under the wild sky; men with the ox that was weary like themselves, women with bundles of forage on their heads—melancholy forms or phantoms in the dusky air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh.

In the morning I was on the road to Cadouin. The air was keen and a little frosty, for the hour was early. Men were mowing the last crop of grass, which was powdered with rime. After the meadows came the woods, for the road went south, and was therefore carried over the hills which rise above the valley of the Dordogne. The woods were mainly of chestnut, and, under the action of the storm, followed by the first frost, many a nut lay shining on the road within its gaping prickly shell. After two or three miles of ascent the road sloped downward, and it was not long before I entered a very neat and trim little town, which, however, was altogether village-like. This was Cadouin, and in the centre stood its venerable Romanesque church. I entered the building, which was silent and very dim; not a soul was there but myself. Presently there was a moan in the tower, which seemed so far away: the clock was striking one of the quarters. Now the dim light brightened suddenly, for the sun had risen high enough to dart its rays through a window, and to flash upon a column the brilliant colours of the glass. With the exception of the apse, which is purely Romanesque, the interior of this church is Gothic of the Transition; but most of the capitals of the pier-columns have a plain Romanesque outline. There is no clerestory, the light being admitted from small round-headed windows in the aisle walls. Much of the building dates from the foundation of the abbey of Cadouin, in the early part of the twelfth century; but the existing cloisters, which are what is most remarkable here, date from the fifteenth century, and owe much of their interest to the partial transformation of their style which they afterwards underwent when the spirit of the Renaissance set in. The Gothic tracery of the arches that face the quadrangle unites the strength of stone with the delicacy of pencil drawing. In the late Gothic and Renaissance part, the ceilings are richly and floridly groined, angelic and other figures forming the termination of the low-reaching bosses, the groins converging in fan-like order towards elaborately-carved canopies against the wall. At one end of this wing is a doorway, the jambs and lintels of which are heavily over-worked with carvings very typical of the exuberant fancy of the early French Renaissance.

[Illustration: CLOISTERS OF THE ABBEY OF CADOUIN.]

For centuries Cadouin was a famous place of pilgrimage, in consequence of the claim laid by the abbey to the possession of the Holy Shroud. The following is the history of the celebrated relic, according to Jean Tarde:

'In the year 1100 Hugh, surnamed the Great, brother of the King of France, and Bishop of Le Puy, in Auvergne, having gone on a voyage beyond the seas with Godefrey de Bouillon, found means, after the taking of Jerusalem, to recover this holy relic, and, dying in Palestine, he left it in charge of a priest, his chaplain. The priest falling ill on board ship, and perceiving that his end was drawing near, gave the shroud into the hands of a clerk, a native of PÉrigord. He, after the death of his master, took a small barrel, in the middle of which he placed a partition. In one half he put the sacred sheet, and his drink in the other. In this manner he carried the relic back to his native land, and placed it in a church near Cadouin, of which he had charge. Fearing that someone might steal his treasure, he left it in the barrel, which he put away in a chest near the altar, showing it only to a few of the monks of Cadouin. But one day, while he was absent, fire broke out and gained the whole village. All that was in the church was consumed, excepting the chest that contained the barrel. The monks of Cadouin, informed of the fire, hastened to the spot, and, having broken open the chest, took away the barrel, and carried it to their own church. The clerk, on his return, asked for what had been taken from him; but the monks said that, inasmuch as they had risked their lives in saving it from the flames, it belonged to them. The difference was arranged in this wise: the clerk was received as a religious, and the keeping of the relic was entrusted to him during his lifetime. He himself thought it safer there than in a rural church.'

In 1392, when the country was distracted by the dynastic wars between the crowns of France and England, the Holy Shroud was taken for safety to Toulouse. Subsequently, the people of PÉrigord wished to have it replaced at Cadouin, and the Abbot and Chapter of St. Etienne at Toulouse resisting, much litigation ensued. In 1455 some monks of Cadouin took it away by stealth, and brought it back to their abbey. Tarde mentions, among other circumstances which tended to increase the importance of the abbey of Cadouin, 'les bienfaietz d'une reyne d'Angleterre'.

Had it not been for other plans, I should have continued my journey southward from Cadouin as far as the ChÂteau de Biron, one of the most instructive relics of the past in PÉrigord, and have taken on my way ModiÈres, one of the English bastides which Edward I. farmed for ten years; but I made my way back to the Dordogne, with the intention of ascending the valley of its tributary the VÉzÈre. I did not, however, return to Buisson, but took the road to Ales, which lies a little lower down the stream.

While I was recrossing the hills the sun warmed the world again, and led back the trembling summer which had been scared by the early morning's frost. The half-benumbed butterflies opened and shut their wings many times upon the bramble leaves before they could bring themselves to believe that that pinch of winter was only a joke. It seemed a cruel jest while the bloom of honeysuckle was upon the hedges.

[Illustration: CHÂTEAU DE BIRON: THE LODGE.]

At Ales—a mere group of houses round a little old church with a broad squat tower—I lunched in a very wretched inn. If a pig had not been killed at an early hour that morning I should have been obliged to be satisfied with vegetable and egg diet; and the knowledge that the pig had met with such bad luck only a few hours before did not dispose me in favour of the various dishes prepared from the external and internal parts of him. The aubergiste was an old boatman of the Dordogne, who had steered many a cargo of wine floating with him down-stream in time of partial flood; but that was before the phylloxera had played havoc with the vines. Now he had to get along as well as he could by combining husbandry, pig-rearing, and innkeeping.

On reaching the river again, I perceived that the annual descent of the Auvergnats had commenced. All the people who live by the higher waters of the Dordogne, whether they belong to the Puy de DÔme, the Cantal, or the CorrÈze, are called Auvergnats in PÉrigord, or, rather, such of them as come down the stream with their small barges laden with wood, when the autumnal rains have commenced, and there is sufficient water in the river for their purpose. Sometimes, in their anxiety to turn their wood into money, they start a little too early, and being misled by an increase of the current which is not maintained, they go aground after a few days' navigation. I have seen one of these boats stuck fast on a bank almost in mid-stream, with the rapids nearly breaking over it with a roar that could be heard a mile away. The wood is cut in the forests, which stretch almost without a break for many a league on both sides of the Upper Dordogne, and is seasoned, dressed, and shaped for barrel-making before it is put afloat. The boats, which are some thirty or forty feet long, are necessarily flat-bottomed, and are so roughly built that there are usually gaping spaces between the planks, which are caked with moss. They are good enough for the voyage, which is their first and last. The men return, but never the boats. These are sold as firewood at Libourne, when they have discharged their cargoes. Where the water is deep and comparatively quiet the speed is increased by rowing with very long oars; but where the current is strong the boat has only to be steered. This, however, is work that needs thorough knowledge of the river.

The autumn is a merry time for these Auvergnats. They look forward to it during the long months that they are working in the woods. The annual voyage to the Bordelais gives them an opportunity of again seeing the old friends whom they have been meeting for years at the waterside inns where they frequently put up at night, because the descent of the Dordogne in the dark is rather too exciting. They always say that they will start again in the morning at sunrise, but it often happens that the sun is very high indeed before they are afloat. After all, an Auvergnat is a man no less than another, and because he lives on next to nothing eleven months in the year is perhaps a reason why he should feel that he has earned the right to let his sentiments expand, and to light the lamp of conviviality in his breast during the remaining two or three weeks that he may be away from home.

There is this, however, to be said: whatever money he may possess, he trusts himself with very little when he goes off on his annual river-voyage, and when he has sold his wood he is anxious to get out of danger as quickly as possible.

I had to return some distance up-stream before I was able to cross to Limeuil. This is one of the most picturesque villages on the banks of the Dordogne. It is built on the side of an isolated rock, close to the point where the VÉzÈre falls into the broader river. Before crossing the bridge I lingered awhile gazing at all those high-gabled roofs with red and lichen-stained tiles rising from the blue water towards the blue sky; vine trellises mingling their sunny green with the red of the roofs. Where no houses clung, the yellow rock was splashed with the now crimson sumach.

Then I climbed the long street over the rock and cobble stones between walls half green with pellitory, houses with high gables and rough wooden balconies where geraniums shone in the shadow, and from which the trailing plants hung low in that supreme luxuriance which is the beginning of their death. A few old women sat at their doors spinning, and geese, in small companies of three or four, waddled out of the way; but there was no sound of any kind—Limeuil was as silent as a cemetery. And yet there were cafÉs, which gave the place a false air of liveliness. Some tourists, attracted by the caverns in the valley of the VÉzÈre, had possibly wandered as far as Limeuil; but where were the inhabitants now? Had there been an epidemic, and were the old women, whose heads were bent towards their knees while they clutched their distaffs, the few survivors?

Taking the road to Bugues, I passed a small church with an open belfry with a tiled roof supported by wooden pillars. It stood in a grove of tall cypresses and weeping willows, and the gravestones lay scattered round about. The waning sunshine seemed to fall more tenderly here than upon the open fields where the ruddy pumpkins flamed. It was nearly dark when I reached the little town of Bugues.

[Illustration: TRUFFLE-HUNTERS.]