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[Illustration: A BIT OF OLD FIGEAC. Frontispiece.]

WANDERINGS

BY

SOUTHERN WATERS

EASTERN AQUITAINE

BY

EDWARD HARRISON BARKER

AUTHOR OF 'WAYFARING IN FRANCE'

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON

RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON

Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen

1893

CONTENTS

THE VALLEY OF THE OUYSSE AND ROC-AMADOUR

FROM THE ALZOU TO THE DORDOGNE

WAYFARING UNDERGROUND

IN THE VALLEY OF THE CÉLÉ

IN THE ALBIGEOIS

ACROSS THE ROUERGUE

THE BLACK CAUSSE

THE CAÑON OF THE TARN

IN THE VALLEY OF THE LOT

[Illustration:
OAK CHIMNEY-PIECE AT THE SINECHAUSSÉE (NOW HÔTEL DE VILLE) OF MARTEL.]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A BIT OF OLD FIGEAC—Frontispiece

OAK CHIMNEY-PIECE AT THE SINECHAUSSÉE (NOW HÔTEL DE VILLE) OF MARTEL

THE PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS

ROC-AMADOUR

PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ALBI

AMBIALET

CIGALA, THE SHOEBLACK.

[Illustration: THE PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS.]

WANDERINGS BY SOUTHERN WATERS

THE VALLEY OF THE OUYSSE AND ROC-AMADOUR.

From the Old-English town of Martel, in Guyenne, I turned southward towards the Dordogne. For a few miles the road lay over a barren plateau; then it skirted a desolate gorge with barely a trace of vegetation upon its naked sides, save the desert loving box clinging to the white stones. A little stream that flowed here led down into the rich valley of Creysse, blessed with abundance of fruit. Here I found the nightingales and the spring flowers that avoid the wind-blown hills. Patches of wayside took a yellow tinge from the cross-wort galium; others, conquered by ground-ivy or veronica, were purple or blue. Presently the tiled roofs of the village of Creysse were seen through the poplars and walnuts. A delightful spot for a poetical angler is this, for the Dordogne runs close by in the shadow of prodigious rocks and overhanging trees. What a noble and stately river I thought it, as the old ferryman, with white cotton nightcap on his head, punted me across! I took the greater pleasure in its breadth and grandeur here because I had seen it an infant river in the Auvergne mountains, and had watched its growth as it rushed between walls of rock and forest towards the plains.

What witchery of romance and spell-bound fancy is in the song of the Dordogne as it breaks over its shallows under high rocky cliffs and ruined castles! Everything that can charm the poet and the artist is here. The grandeur of rugged nature combines with the most enticing beauty of water and meadow, and the voices of the past echo with a sweet sadness from cliff to cliff. It is said that several of these castles were built to prevent the English from coming up the river, but this may be treated as one of the many fanciful legends respecting the British period which are repeated throughout Aquitaine.

By cutting off a curve of the Dordogne I soon came to the river-side village of Meyronne, and here I stopped for a meal at a very pleasant little inn, where to my surprise I found that I had been preceded a few days before by another Englishman, who, accompanied by a Frenchman, had come up from Bordeaux in a boat. They must have found it very hard work rowing against the rapids. The hostess here was evidently a woman who treasured her household gods, but who liked also to show them. She gave me my coffee in a china cup that looked as if it had belonged to her great-grandmother; and in the bright little room where she served my lunch was a large walnut buffet elaborately and admirably carved, bearing the date 1676.

After Meyronne my road ran for a few miles beside the broad and curving river. The forms of the great cliffs on each side were ever changing. Over a sky intensely blue sailed the fleecy April clouds before the soft west wind, and whenever the sun shone out with unveiled splendour, the rays fell with summer warmth. While the tinkling of sheep-bells from the ledges of the rocks came down to me, the passionate warble of nightingales, that could not wait for the night, must have risen from the leafy valley to the ears of the listless shepherd-boy gathering feather-grass where goats would not dare to venture, or eating his dark bread in the sun on the edge of a precipice. Time flowed gently like the river, and I was surprised to find myself at Lacave so soon. This village is near the spot where the Ouysse falls into the Dordogne. A little beyond the clustering houses, upon the edge of a high rocky promontory overlooking the Ouysse, is the castle of Belcastel, still retaining its feudal keep and outer wall. In this fortress the English are said to have kept many of their prisoners.

I now left the Dordogne and ascended the valley of the Ouysse. This stream is one of the most remarkable of the natural phenomena of France. To judge from its breadth near the mouth, one would suppose that it had flowed fifty or a hundred miles, but its entire length is less than ten miles. It is already a river when it rises out of the depths of the earth. The narrow valley that it waters is a gorge 500 or 600 feet deep through the greater part of its distance. The traveller at the bottom supposes, or is ready to suppose, that he is in some ravine of the high mountains; in reality, it is simply a fissure of the plateau that was once the bed of the sea. There is no igneous, no metamorphic rock here; nothing but limestone of the Jurassic formation. The convexities on one side of the fissure correspond with marked regularity to the concavities on the other.

For awhile I walked on the lush grass by the brimming river, where in the little creeks and bays the water-ranunculus floated its small white flowers that were to continue the race. Then I left the water and the green ribbon that followed its margin, and, taking a sheep-track, rose upon the arid steeps, where the thinly-scattered aromatic southern-wood was putting forth its dusty leaves. The bare rocks, yellow, white, and gray, towered above me; they were beneath me; they faced me across the valley; wherever I looked they were shutting me off from the outer world. No nightingales were singing here, but I heard the melancholy scream of the hawk and the harsh croak of the raven. And yet, when I looked down into the bottom of this steep desert of stones, what soft and vernal beauty was there! Over the grass of living green was spread the gold of cowslips, just as if that strip of meadow, with its gently-gliding river, had been lifted out of an English dale and dropped into the midst of the sternest scenery of Southern France.

As I went on I soon found that the stony wastes had their flowers too. It would seem as if Nature had wished to console the desert by giving to it her loveliest and most enticing blossoms. I came upon colonies of the poet's narcissus, breathing over the rocks so sweet a fragrance that it was as if a miracle had been wrought to draw it out of the earth. I walked knee-deep through blooming asphodels, beautiful and strange, but only noticed here by the wild bee. I gathered sprays of the graceful alpine-tea, densely crowded with delicate white bloom, and marvelled at the wanton splendour of the iris colouring the gray and yellow stones with its gorgeous blue.

Still following the Ouysse, I came to a spot where the valley ended in an amphitheatre formed by steep hills more than 600 feet high, and covered for the most part with dwarf oak. In the hollow under the dark cliffs was a little lake or pool forty or fifty yards from shore to shore. The water showed no sign of trouble save where it overflowed its basin on the western side, and formed the river that I had been keeping in sight for hours. The pool filled the Gouffre de St. Sauveur. Until the Ouysse finds this opening in the earth it is a subterranean river, and it must flow at a great depth, probably at the base of the calcareous formation, inasmuch as it continues to rise from the gulf the whole year, although from the month of August until the autumn rains nearly every water-course in the country is marked by a curving line of dry pebbles. The funnel-shaped hole descends vertically to the depth of about ninety feet, but there is no means of knowing how far it descends obliquely. The tourist may occasionally catch sight of a shepherd boy or girl with goats or sheep upon the bare or wooded rocks, but his feeling will be one of deep loneliness. He will see ravens and hawks about the crags, and about the river half covered in summer with floating pond-weed, watercress, and the broad leaves of the yellow lily, he will notice many a water-ouzel bobbing with white breast, water-hens gliding from bank to bank, merry bands of divers, and the brilliant blue gleam of the passing kingfisher, which here is allowed to fish in peace, like the otter.

The Gouffre de St. Sauveur has its legend. It is said that when the church of St. Sauveur, on the neighbouring hill, was in imminent danger at the time of the Revolution, the bells were thrown into the pool so that they should not fall into the hands of the enemy. Imaginative people fancy that they can sometimes hear them ringing at the bottom of the water.

After leaving the pool—now very sombre in the shadow of the wooded hill—I crossed a ridge separating me from the Gouffre de Cabouy, out of which flows a tributary of the Ouysse. Thence I reached the deep and singularly savage gorge of the Alzou, which brought me to Roc-Amadour, when the after-light of sunset was lingering rosily upon the naked crags.

* * * * *

Rocks reach far overhead, dazzlingly white where the sunbeams strike them, and below is a green line of narrow valley. A tinkling of bells comes from the stony sides of the gorge, where sheep are browsing the scant herbage and young shoots of southern-wood; and from the curving fillet of meadow, where the grass seems to grow while the eye watches it, rises the shrill little song of the stream hurrying over its yellow bed, which may be dry again to-morrow. This Alzou is no more to be depended upon than a coquette. After a period of drought, a storm that has passed away hours ago will cause it suddenly to come hissing down over the dry stones; but the next day no trace of the flow may be found save a few pools. Or it may grow to a torrent, even a river, that in its wild career scoffs at banks, and spreads devastation through the valley.

It is April, and the nightingales, the swallows, the flowers, the bees, and the kids, whose trembling voices are heard all about the rocks, tell me that the spring has come. I cannot rest in my cottage on the side of the gorge, not even on the balcony that seems to hang in the air over the depth; the sounds from the valley, especially those that the imagination hears, are too enticing.

Upon a high ledge of rock to which I have climbed, not without some unpleasant qualms, I stretch myself out upon a strip of short turf sprinkled with the flowers of the white rock-rose and bordered with candy-tuft, and try to drive out of mind the only disagreeable thought I have at this moment—that of getting down to the path, where I was safe. The worst part of climbing precipitous places is not the going up, but the coming down. Not a human being or dwelling is in sight, so that I can contemplate the wildness of the scene to my mind's content. But a very hoarse voice not far above tells me that I am not alone. A raven perched upon a jutting piece of rock, that curiously resembles some monstrous animal, is watching me, and he looks a very crafty old bird who could speak either French or English if he liked. Presently he flaps heavily off to the opposite side of the gorge, and fetches his wife. They fly over me almost within gunshot, going round and round, expressing an opinion or sentiment with an occasional croak, but apparently quite willing to make their dinner-hour suit my convenience. Do they suppose that I have really taken the trouble to climb up here to die out of the world's way and the sight of my fellow-creatures, like that very unearthly poet whose story Shelley has written? Do they think that they are going to make a hearty meal upon me this evening or to-morrow morning? I remain quite still, pleased at the thought of cheating the greedy, croaking scavengers of Nature, and hoping that they will grow bold enough to settle at length somewhere near me. But they are too suspicious; perhaps with their superior sight they note the blinking of my eyes as I look upwards at the dazzling sky, or instinct may tell them that I am not lying down after the manner of a dying animal. Their patience is more than a match for mine, and so I come down from my ledge and make my way back to my cottage before the pink blush of evening has faded from the rocks.

When the angelus has sounded from the ancient sanctuary, and all the forms of the valley are dim in the dusk, the silence is broken again by a very quiet little bell, which might be called the fairies' angelus if it did not keep ringing all through the spring and summer nights. It is like a treble note of the piano softly touched. It steals up from amongst the flags, hyacinths, and box-bushes of the neglected little garden which I call mine, terraced upon the side of the gorge just beneath the balcony. Now, from all the terraced gardens planted with fruit-trees, comes the same sound of low, clear notes, some a little higher than others, but all in the treble, feebly struck by unseen musicians. How sweetly this tinkling rises from the earth, that trembles with the bursting of seeds and the shooting of stems in the first warm nights of spring! And to think that the musicians should be toads—yes, toads—the most despised and the most unjustly treated of creatures!

This cottage is at Roc-Amadour, and before writing about the place I cannot do better than go down to the level of the stream, and look up at the amazing cluster of buildings clinging to the rocks on one side of the gorge, while the old walls are whitened by the pale brilliancy of the moon. Above the roofs of all the houses is a mass of masonry, vast and heavy, pierced by narrow Romanesque windows—a building uncouth and monstrous, like the surrounding crags. It stands upon a ledge of the cliff, partly in the hollow of the rock, which, indeed, forms its innermost wall. Higher still a great cross shows against the sky, and near to it, upon the edge of the precipice, are the ramparts of a mediaeval fortress, now combined with a modern building, which is the residence of the clergy attached to the sanctuary of Notre Dame de Roc-Amadour.

[Illustration: ROC-AMADOUR.]

The sanctuary—it is inside the massive pile under the beetling rock, and over the roofs of the houses—explains why men in far-distant times had the strange notion of gathering together and constructing dwellings upon a spot where Nature must have offered the harshest opposition to such a project. The chosen site was not only precipitous, but lay in the midst of a calcareous desert, where no stream nor spring of water could be relied upon for six months in the year, and where the only soil that was not absolutely unproductive was covered with dense forest infested by wolves.[*] And yet, in course of time, there grew up upon these forbidding rocks, in the midst of this desert, a little town that obtained a wide celebrity, and was even fortified, as the five ruinous gateways, with towers along the line of the single street, prove even now, notwithstanding the deplorable recklessness with which the structures of the ancient burg have been degraded or demolished during the last half-century. Nothing is more certain than that the origin of Roc-Amadour, and the cause of its development, were religious. It was called into existence by pilgrims; it grew with the growth of pilgrimages, and if it were not for pilgrims at the present day half the houses now occupied would be allowed to fall into ruin. It is impossible to look at it without wonder, either in the daylight or the moonlight. It appears to have been wrenched out of the known order of human works—the result of common motives—and however often Roc-Amadour may suddenly meet the eye upon turning the gorge, the picture never fails to be surprising. It has really the air of a holy place, which many others famed for holiness have not.

[*] Robert du Mont, in his supplement to Sigibert's Chronicles, wrote, more than five hundred years ago, of Roc-Amadour: 'Est locus in Cadurcensi pago montaneis et horribile solitudine circumdatus.'

The founder of the sanctuary was a hermit, whose contemplative spirit led him to this savage and uninhabited valley, whose name, in the early Christian ages, was Vallis tenebrosa, but in which Nature had fashioned numerous caverns, more or less tempting to an anchorite. He is called Amator—Amator rupis—by the Latin chroniclers—a name that, with the spread of the Romance language, would easily have become corrupted to Amadour by the people. According to the legend, however, which for an uncertain number of centuries has obtained general credence in the Quercy and the Bas-Limousin, and which in these days is much upheld by the clergy, although a learned Jesuit—the Père Caillau—who sifted all the annals relating to Roc-Amadour felt compelled to treat it as a pious invention, the hermit Amator or Amadour was no other than Zaccheus, who climbed into the sycamore. The legend further says that he was the husband of St. Veronica, and that, after the crucifixion, they left the Holy Land in a vessel which eventually landed them on the western coast of Gaul, not far from the present city of Bordeaux. They became associated with the mission of St. Martial, the first Bishop of Limoges, and at a later period Zaccheus, hearing of a rocky solitude in Aquitania, a little to the south of the Dordogne, abandoned to wild beasts, proceeded thither, and chose a cavern in the escarped side of a cliff for his hermitage. Here, meditating upon the merits of the Mother of Christ, he became one of her most devoted servants in that age, and during his life he caused a small chapel to be raised to her upon the rock near his cavern, which was consecrated by St. Martial. All this is open to controversy, but what is undoubtedly true is that one of the earliest sanctuaries of Europe associated with the name of Mary was at Roc-Amadour.

It is recorded that Roland, passing through the Quercy in the year 778 with his uncle, Charlemagne, made a point of stopping at Roc-Amadour for the purpose of 'offering to the most holy Virgin a gift of silver of the same weight as his bracmar, or sword.' After his death, if Duplex and local tradition are to be trusted, this sword was brought to Roc-Amadour, and the curved rusty blade of crushing weight which is now to be seen hanging to a wall is said to be a faithful copy of the famous Durandel, which is supposed to have been stolen by the Huguenots when they pillaged the church and burnt the remains of St. Amadour.

That in the twelfth century the fame of Roc-Amadour as a place of pilgrimage was established we have very good evidence in the fact that one of the pilgrims to the sanctuary in 1170 was Henry II. of England. He had fallen seriously ill at Mote-Gercei, and believing that he had been restored to health through the intercession of the Virgin, he set out for the 'Dark Valley' in fulfilment of a vow that he had made to her; but as this journey into the Quercy brought him very near the territory of his enemies, the annalists tell us that he was accompanied by a great multitude of infantry and cavalry, as though he were marching to battle. But he injured no one, and gave abundant alms to the poor. Thirteen years later, the King's rebellious son, Henry, Court Mantel, pillaged the sanctuary of its treasure in order to pay his ruffianly soldiers. This memorable sacrilege had much to do with the insurmountable antipathy of the Quercynois for the English.

I have before me an old and now exceedingly rare little book on Roc-Amadour, which was written by the Jesuit Odo de Gissey, and published at Tulle in 1666. In this, Court Mantel's exploit is spoken of as follows:

'Les guerres d'entre nos Rois très Chrétiens et les Anglais en ce Royaume de France guerroyant ruinèrent en quelque façon Roc-Amadour; mais plus que tous Henri III., Roi d'Angleterre, ingrat des grâces que son père Henri II. y avait recues, en dépit de son père qui affectionnait cette Eglise, son avarice le poussant, pilla cet oratoire et enleva les plaques qui couvraient le corps de S. Amadour et emporta ce qui était de la Trésorerie; mais Dieu qui ne laisse rien impuni châtia le sacrilege de cet impie Prince par une mort malheureuse. De quoi lise qui voudra Roger de Houedan, historien Anglais en la 2 partie de ses Annales.'

There are early records of miracles wrought at Roc-Amadour. Gauthier de Coinsy, a monk and poet born at Amiens in 1177, has left a poem telling how the troubadour, Pierre de Sygelard, singing the praises of the Virgin in her chapel at Roc-Amadour to the accompaniment of his vielle (hurdy-gurdy), begged of her as a miraculous sign to let one of her candles come down from her altar. According to the poem, the candle came down, and stood upon the musical instrument, to the horror and disgust of a monk who was looking on, and who saw no miracle in the matter, but wicked enchantment. He put the candle back indignantly, but when the minstrel sang and played it came down as before. The movement was repeated again before the monk would believe that the miracle was genuine. The poem, which is in the Northern dialect, and is marked throughout by a charming naïveté, commences with a eulogium of the Virgin:

'La douce mère du Créateur
À l'église à Rochemadour
Fait tants miracles, tants hauts faits,
C'uns moultes biax livres en est faits.'

The huge, inartistic, but imposing block of masonry that appears from a little distance to be clinging, after the manner of a swallow's nest, to the precipitous face of the rock, and which is reached from below by more than 200 steps in venerable dilapidation[*], contains the church of St. Sauveur, the chapel of the Virgin, called the Miraculous Chapel, and the chapel of St. Amadour, all distinct. The last-named is a little crypt, and the Miraculous Chapel conveys the impression of being likewise one, for it is partly under the overleaning rock, the rugged surface of which, blackened by the smoke of the countless tapers which have been burnt there in the course of ages, is seen without any facing of masonry.

[*] Since the foregoing was written the old slabs have been turned round, and the steps been made to look quite new.

If by looking at certain details of this composite structure one could shut off the surroundings from the eye, the mind might feed without any hindrance upon the ideas of old piety and the fervour of souls who, when Europe was like a troubled and forlorn sea, sought the quietude and safety of these rocks, lifted far above the raging surf. But the hindrance is found on every side. The sense of artistic fitness is wounded by incongruities of architectural style, of ideas which meet but do not marry. The brazen altar, in the Miraculous Chapel was well enough at the Paris Exhibition of 1889, where it could be admired as a piece of elaborate brass work, but at Roc-Amadour it is a direct challenge to the spirit of the spot. Then again, late Gothic architecture has been grafted upon the early Romanesque. Those who restored the building after it had been reduced to a ruin by the Huguenots in 1562 set the example of bad taste. The revolutionists of 1793 having in their turn wrought their fury upon it, the work of restoration was again undertaken during the last half-century, but the opportunity of correcting the mistake of the previous renovators was lost. The piece of Romanesque architecture whose character has been best preserved is the detached chapel of St. Michael, raised like a pigeon-house against the rock; but even this has been carefully scraped on the outside to make it correspond as nearly as possible to some adjacent work of recent construction.

The ancient treasure of Roc-Amadour has been scattered or melted down, but the image of the Virgin and Child, which according to the local tradition was carved out of the trunk of a tree by St. Amadour himself, is still to be seen over the altar in the Miraculous Chapel. It is probably 800 years old, and it may be older. There is no record to help hypothesis with regard to its antiquity, for since the pilgrimage originated it appears to have been an object of veneration, and the commencement of the pilgrimage is lost in the dimness of the past. Like the statue of the Virgin at Le Puy, it is as black as ebony, but this is the effect of age, and the smoke of incense and candles. The antiquity of the image is, moreover, proved by the artistic treatment. The Child is crowned and rests upon the Virgin's knee; she does not touch him with her hands. This is in accordance with the early Christian sentiment, which dwells upon the kingship of the Child as distinguished from the later mediaeval feeling, which rests without fear upon the Virgin's maternal love and makes her clasp the Infant fondly to her breast.

The 'miraculous bell' of Roc-Amadour has not rung since 1551, but it may do so any day or night, for it is still suspended to the vault of the Miraculous Chapel. It is of iron, and was beaten into shape with the hammer—facts which, together with its form, are regarded as certain evidence of its antiquity. The first time that it is said to have rung by its own movement was in 1385, and three days afterwards, according to Odo de Gissey, the phenomenon was repeated during the celebration of the Mass. All those who were present bore testimony to the fact upon oath before the apostolic notary.

Very early in the Middle Ages the faith spread among mariners, and others exposed to the dangers of the sea, that the Lady of Roc-Amadour had great power to help them when in distress. Hugues Farsit, Canon of Laon, wrote a treatise in 1140, 'De miraculis Beatae Virginis rupis Amatoris,' wherein he speaks of her as the 'Star of the Sea,' and the hymn 'Ave maris stella' is one of those most frequently sung in these days by the pilgrims at Roc-Amadour. A statement, written and signed by a Breton pilgrim in 1534, shows how widely this particular devotion had then spread among those who trusted their lives to the uncertain sea:

'I, Louis Le Baille, merchant of the town of Pontscorf, on the river Ellé, in the diocese of Vannes, declare with truth that, returning from a voyage to Scotland the 13th of the month of February, 1534, at about ten o'clock at night, we were overtaken by such a violent storm that the waves covered the vessel, in which were twenty-six persons, and we went to the bottom. During the voyage somebody said to me: "Let us recommend ourselves to God and to the Virgin Mary of Roc-Amadour. Let us put her name upon this spar and trust ourselves to the care of this good Lady." He who gave me this good counsel and myself fastened ourselves to the spar with a rope. The tempest carried us away, but in so fortunate a manner that the next day we found ourselves on the coast of Bayonne. Half dead, we landed by the grace of God and the aid of His pitiful mother, Notre Dame de Roc-Amadour. I have come here out of gratitude for this blessing, and have accomplished the journey in fulfilment of my vow to her, in proof of which, I have signed here with my hand.—Louis BAILLE.'

Such streams of pilgrims crossed the country from various directions, moving towards the sanctuary in the Haut-Quercy, that inns or 'halts' were called into existence on the principal lines of route, and lanterns were set up at night for the guidance of the wanderers. The last halt was close to Roc-Amadour, at a spot still called the Hospitalet. Here were religious, who bound up the pilgrims' bleeding feet, and provided them with food before they descended to the burg and completed the last part of their pilgrimage—the ascent of the steps—upon their knees. The sportelle, or badge of Notre Dame de Roc-Amadour, ensured the wearer against interference or ill-treatment on his journey. It is acknowledged that the English respected it even in time of war. At the Great Pardon of Roc-Amadour, in 1546, so great was the crowd of pilgrims, who had come from all parts, that many persons were suffocated. The innkeepers' tents gave the surrounding country the appearance of a vast camp. Sixteen years later, when Roc-Amadour fell into the hands of the Huguenots, and the religious buildings were pillaged and partly destroyed, the pilgrimage received a blow from which it never quite recovered. It ceased completely at the Revolution, but has since been revived, and some thousand genuine pilgrims, chiefly of the peasant class, now visit Roc-Amadour every year.

For nearly 300 years the history of the Quercy and Roc-Amadour was intimately associated with that of England. Henry II. did not at first claim the Quercy as a part of Eleanor's actual possessions in Aquitaine; but he claimed homage from the Count of Toulouse, who was then suzerain of the Count of Quercy. Homage being refused, Henry invaded the county, captured Cahors, where he left Becket with a garrison, and thence proceeded to reduce the other strongholds. Roc-Amadour appears to have offered little if any resistance. The Quercy was formally made over to the English in 1191 by the treaty signed by Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur-de-Lion; but the aged Raymond V. of Toulouse protested, and the Quercynois still more loudly. These descendants of the Cadurci found it very difficult to submit to English rule. Unlike the Gascons, who became thoroughly English during those three centuries, and were so loath to change their rulers again that they fought for the King of England to the last, the Quercynois were never reconciled to the Plantagenets, but were ever ready to seize an opportunity of rebelling against them. It is well known that Richard Coeur-de-Lion lost his life at the hand of a nobleman of the Quercy. While Guyenne was distracted by the family quarrel of the first Plantagenets, the troubadour Bertrand de Born by his gift of words so stirred up the patriotic and martial ardour of the Aquitanians that a league was formed against the English, which included Talleyrand, Count of Périgord, Guilhem (or Fortanier) de Gourdon, a powerful lord of the Quercy, De Montfort, the Viscounts of Turenne and Ventadour. These nobles swore upon the Gospels to remain united and faithful to the cause of Aquitaine; but Richard, partly by feats of war and partly by diplomacy, in which it is said the argument of money had no inconsiderable share, broke up the league, and Bertrand de Born, being abandoned, fell into the Plantagenet's hands. But he was pardoned, probably because Richard was a troubadour himself in his leisure moments, and had a fellow-feeling for all who loved the 'gai sçavoir.' Meanwhile, the Lord of Gourdon was not to be gained over by fair words or bribes, and Richard besieged his castle, some ruins of which may still be seen on the rock that overhangs the little town of Gourdon in the Quercy. The fortress was taken, and Richard in his fury caused the stern old man who defended it and two of his sons to be put to death. But there was a third son, Bertrand de Gourdon, who, seeking an opportunity of avenging his father and brothers, joined the garrison of the castle of Châlus in the Limousin, which Richard soon afterwards besieged. He aimed the bolt or the arrow which brought Richard's stormy life to a close. Although forgiven by the dying Coeur-de-Lion, Bertrand was flayed alive by the Brabançons who were in the English army. He left no descendants, but his collaterals long afterwards bore the name of Richard in memory of Bertrand's vengeance.

A member of a learned society at Cahors has sought to prove that Gourdon in the Quercy is the place where the family of General Gordon of Khartoum fame had its origin. It is true that the name of this town in all old charts is spelt Gordon; but, inasmuch as it is a compound of two Celtic words meaning raven's rock, it might as feasibly have been handed down by the Gaelic Scotch as by the Cadurcians.

The Plantagenets came to be termed 'the devil's race' by the people of Guyenne. This may have originated in a saying attributed to Richard himself in Aquitaine: 'It is customary in our family for the sons to hate their father. We come from the devil, and we shall return to the devil.'

In 1368 the English, having again to reduce the Quercy, laid siege to Roc-Amadour. The burghers held out only for a short time, and the place being surrendered, Perducas d'Albret was left as governor with a garrison of Gascons. Froissart quaintly describes this brief siege. Shortly before the army showed itself in the narrow valley of the Alzou, the towns of Fons and Gavache had capitulated, the inhabitants having sworn that they would remain English ever afterwards. 'But they lied,' observes Froissart. Arriving under the walls of Roc-Amadour, which were raised upon the lower rocks, the English advanced at once to the assault. 'Là eut je vous dy moult grant assaust et dur.' It lasted a whole day, with loss on both sides; but when the evening came the English entrenched themselves in the valley with the intention of renewing the assault on the morrow. That night, however, the consuls and burghers of Roc-Amadour took council of one another, and it was unanimously agreed that the English had shown great 'force and virtue' during the day. Then the wisest among them urged that the place could not hold out long against such an enemy, and that if it was taken by force they, the burghers, would be all hanged, and the town burnt without mercy. It was, therefore, decided to surrender the town the next day. This was accordingly done, and the burghers solemnly swore that they would be 'good English' ever afterwards. For their penance they undertook to send fifty mules laden with provisions to accompany the English army on its march for fifteen days. The fact that the burghers owned fifty mules in the fourteenth century shows how much richer they were then, for now they can scarcely boast half as many donkeys, although these beasts do most of the carrying, and even the ploughing.

It is difficult now to find a trace of the wall which defended the burg on the side of the valley; but here, not far above the bed of the Alzou, are some ruins of the castle where Henry II. stayed, and which the inhabitants still associate with his name. It is improbable that he built it; it is more reasonable to suppose that it existed before his marriage with Eleanor in 1152. His son, 'Short Mantle,' also used it when he came to Roc-Amadour, and behaved, as an old writer expresses it, 'like a ferocious beast.' Some ruined Gothic archways may still be seen from the valley, the upper stones yellow with rampant wallflowers in the early spring. The older inhabitants speak of the high walls, the finely-sculptured details, etc., which they remember; and, indeed, it is not very long ago that the ancient castle was sold for a paltry sum, to be used as building material. The only part of the interior preserved is what was once the chapel. It is vaulted and groined, and the old vats and casks heaped up in it show that it was long used for wine-making, before the phylloxera destroyed the vineyards that once covered the sides of the stony hills. A little below this castle is a well, with an extraordinary circumference, said to have been sunk by the English, and always called by the people 'Le puit des Anglais.' It is 100 feet deep, and those who made it had to work thirty feet through solid rock.

* * * * *

After wandering and loitering by rivers too well fed by the mountains to dry completely up like the perfidious little Alzou, I have returned to Roc-Amadour, my headquarters, the summer being far advanced. The wallflowers no longer deck the old towers and gateways with their yellow bloom, and scent the morning and evening air with their fragrance; the countless flags upon the rocky shelves no longer flaunt their splendid blue and purple, tempting the flower-gatherer to risk a broken neck; the poet's narcissus and the tall asphodel alike are gone; so are all the flowers of spring. The wild vine that clambers over the blackthorn, the maple and the hazel, all down the valley towards the Dordogne, shows here and there a crimson leaf; and the little path is fringed with high marjoram, whose blossoms revel amidst the hot stones, and seem to drink the wine of their life from the fiery sunbeams. Upon the burning banks of broken rock—gray wastes sprinkled with small spurges and tufts of the fragrant southernwood, now opening its mean little flowers—multitudes of flying grasshoppers flutter, most of them with scarlet wings, and one marvels how they can keep themselves from being baked quite dry where every stone is hot. The lizards, which spend most of their time in the grasshoppers' company, appear equally capable of resisting fire. In the bed of the Alzou a species of brassica has had time since the last flood to grow up from the seed, and to spread its dark verdure in broad patches over the dry sand and pebbles. The ravens are gone—to Auvergne, so it is said, because they do not like hot weather. The hawks are less difficult to please on the score of climate; they remain here all the year round, piercing the air with their melancholy cries.

I needed quiet for writing, and could not get it. Of all boons this is the most difficult to find in France. It can be had in Paris, where it is easy to live shut off from the world, hearing nothing save the monotonous rumble of life in the streets; but let no one talk to me about the blessed quietude of the country in France, unless it be that of the bare moor or mountain or desolate seashore. In villages there is no escape from the clatter of tongues until everybody, excepting yourself, is asleep. The houses are so built that wherever you may take refuge you are compelled to hear the conversation that is going on in any part of them. In the South the necessity of listening becomes really terrible. The men roar, and the women shriek, in their ordinary talk. A complete stranger to such ways might easily suppose that they were engaged in a wordy battle of alarming ferocity, when they are merely discussing the pig's measles, or the case of a cow that strayed into a field of lucern, and was found the next morning like a balloon. It is hard for a person who needs to be quiet at times to live with such people without giving the Recording Angel a great deal of disagreeable work.

I would not have believed that so small a place as Roc-Amadour, and such a holy one, could have been so noisy if my own experience had not informed me on this subject. Every morning at five the tailor who did duty as policeman and crier came with his drum, and, stationing himself by the town pump, which was just in front of my cottage, awoke the echoes of the gorge with a long and furious tambourinade. While the women, in answer to this signal, were coming from all directions, carrying buckets in their hands, or copper water-pots on their heads, he unchained the pump-handle. Now for the next two hours the strident cries of the exasperated pump, and the screaming gabble of many tongues, all refreshed by slumber and eager for exercise, made such a diabolic tumult and discord as to throw even the braying of the donkeys into the minor key. Of course, sleep under such circumstances would have been miraculous; but, then, no one had any right to sleep when the rocks were breaking again into flame, and the mists which filled the gorge by night were folding up their tents. I therefore accepted this noise as if it had been intended for my good, and the crowd in front of the pump was always an amusing picture of human life. It was at its best on Sunday, for then the tailor—who also did a little shaving between whiles—had put on his fine braided official coat, as well as his sword and best képi. (On very grand days he wore his cocked hat, and was then quite irresistibly beautiful.) He had to look after the women as well as the water. The latter was precious, and it was necessary to protect it in the interest of the community. Then the pump was parsimonious, and all the women being impatient to get their allowance and go, it was needful that someone in authority should stand by to decide questions of disputed priority, and to nip quarrels in the bud which might otherwise lead to a fight. Poor man! how those women worried him every morning with their badinage, and how glad he was to chain up the pump-handle and turn the key!

But this was only the opening act of the day's comedy, or rather the lever de rideau. The little square by the old gateway, whose immediate neighbourhood lent a mediaeval charm to my cottage, was the centre of gossip and idling. I did not think of this when I pitched my tent, so to speak, in the shadow of the old masonry. Knowing full well that the noise of tongues is one of the chief torments of my life, I am always leaving it out of my calculations, and paying the same bill for my folly over and over again. But then I know also that in provincial France, unless you live in an abandoned ruin upon a rock, it is well-nigh impossible to obtain the quietude which the literary man, when he has it not, imagines to be closely allied to the peace that passeth all understanding. The square served many purposes, except mine. The women used it as a convenient place for steaming their linen. This, fashioned into the shape of a huge sugar-loaf, with a hollow centre, stood in a great open caldron upon a tripod over a wood-fire. At night the lurid flames and the grouped figures, illuminated by the glare, were picturesque; but in the daytime the charm of these gatherings was chiefly conversational. Then the children made the square their playground, or were driven into it because it was the safest place for them, and every Sunday afternoon the young men of Roc-Amadour met there to play at skittles.

In quest of peace, I was driven at first into the loft of the inn, of which the cottage was a dependency. Here the vocal music of the inhabitants was somewhat muffled, but the opportunities for studying natural history were rather excessive. A swarm of bees had established themselves in a corner where they could not be dislodged, and they had a way of crawling over the floor that kept my expectations constantly raised. The maize grown upon the small farm having been stored here from time immemorial, the rats had learnt from tradition and experience to consider this loft as their Land of Goshen. When I took up my quarters among them they were annoyed, and also puzzled. They could not understand why I remained there so long and so quiet; but at length they lost patience and gave up the riddle. Then their impudence became unbounded; they helped themselves to the maize whenever they felt disposed to do so, and stared at me with the utmost effrontery as they sat upon their haunches nibbling; they ran races under the tiles and held pitched battles upon the rafters. Talking one day to the proprietor of the house about his rats and other live stock, I tried to excite and distress him by describing the depredation that went on day and night in the loft. But it was with a calm bordering on satisfaction that he listened to my story. Then he told me that the rats ate about two sacks of maize every year.

'And you do not put it elsewhere?' 'Non pas! I leave it here for them.'

'For the rats?'

'Certainly, for the rats. If I did not give them plenty of maize they would eat a hundred francs' worth of linen in a single winter. It is an economy to feed them.'

And there were about a dozen string-tailed cats about the place that never ventured into the loft. They must have been either afraid or too lazy to attack the rats in their stronghold. A man who could accept a plague of rodents in this philosophical spirit could not be otherwise than mild in his dealings with all animals, including men. My old friend liked to let every creature live and enjoy existence. He became so fond of his pigs that it grieved him sorely to have one killed. Much domestic diplomacy had to be used before the fatal order could be wrung from him. He would have gone on fattening the beast for ever had he been allowed, soothing his conscience over the waste with the vague hope that this pig of exceptional loveliness and vigour would grow to the size of a donkey if it were permitted to take its time. He never worried his métayer over money matters, or insisted upon seeing that everything was equally divided. Notwithstanding, that he had been made to smart all his life for his trustfulness and indolent good-nature, experience had taught him nothing of this world's wisdom. No beggar, although known to be a worthless rascal, ever asked him for a piece of bread or a night's lodging in his barn without obtaining it. The old man would lock his ragged guest up for the night, and before letting him out in the morning would often carry some soup to him—stealthily, however, so as not to be observed. As he was always ready to give, and hated every harsh measure, it was to his wood that the unscrupulous went in winter, when they wanted fuel. Sometimes an informer would say to him: 'M—— So-and-so is cutting down your wood.' 'Oh, bast! le pauvre. It is cold weather!' was the reply that he would be most likely to make. His good qualities would have ruined him had not destiny with great discernment and charity nailed him to his little patrimony, where he was comparatively safe.

The bees in the loft were instructive and the rats amusing, but the fleas were neither the one nor the other—they were merely exciting. And so it came to pass that I forsook the place, and by climbing a little staircase cut in the rock, against which the house was built, reached a cavern far above the roof and found at last my ideal writing-place upon the ledge in front of it, where the mallow and the crane's-bill crept over a patch of turf. Here the voices of the noisy little world below were sufficiently toned down by distance. The noisiest creatures up here were the jackdaws, which were constantly flying in and out of the holes in the church wall that rose above me from another and wider ledge of rock. A pair of sooty-looking rock-swallows that had made their nest in the roof of the cavern were much irritated by my presence, but, like the rats, they became reconciled to it. The little martins, always trustful, never hesitated from the first to fly into the cave and drink from the dripping water. When the dusk came on, the bats, which had been hanging by their winged heels all day in dusky holes and corners, fluttered out one after another, and went zigzagging until they were lost to sight over the old stone roofs on which the moss had blackened.

A little before the bats came out was the time when to do aught else but let the sight feast upon the beauty of the rocky little world bounded by the walls of the narrow gorge would have been literally to waste the golden moments. Then it was that the naked crags, which caught the almost level rays of the setting sun, grew brighter and more brilliantly coruscating, until they seemed ready to melt from the intensity of their own heat; then this fiery golden colour would slowly fade and wane into misty purple tones, which lingered long when there was no more sun. Why did it linger? All the sky that I could see was blue, and of deepening tone. But the most wonderful sight was yet to come, when, while the valley was fast darkening, and along the banks of the Alzou's dry channel the walnut-trees stood like dark spectres of uncertain form, those rocks began to glow with fire again as if a wind had risen suddenly and had fanned their dying embers, and the luminous bloom that spread over them was not that of the earthly rose, but of the mystical rose of heaven. What I saw was the reflection of the after-glow, but the glow in the sky was hidden. Sometimes, as the rocks were fading again and a star was already glittering like steel against the dark blue, another flush arose in the dusk, and a faint redness still rested upon the high crags, when the owl flew forth with a shriek to hunt along the sides of the gorge.

One morning, as I climbed to my eyrie, I was shocked to see my oblong writing-table, which I had hoisted up there with considerable difficulty, in an attitude that my neighbour Decros's donkey endeavoured to strike in his most agitated moments—it was standing upon two legs, with the others in the air. The heavy branch of a large fig-tree that had been flourishing for many years upon the overhanging rock far above had come down upon the very spot where I was accustomed to sit, and thus the strange antics of the table were accounted for. From that day the thought of other things above, such as loose rocks, which might also have conceived an antipathy for the table, and might not be so considerate towards me as the fig-tree, weakened my attachment to my ideal writing-place, for the discovery of which I was indebted to the indefatigable tongues of the women of Roc-Amadour.

The mention of my neighbour's donkey recalls to mind an interesting religious ceremony in which that amiable but emotional beast figured with much distinction. Once every year all the animals at Roc-Amadour that are worth blessing are assembled on the plain near the Hospitalet to receive the benediction of the Church. The ceremony is called La bénédiction des bêtes. The animals are chiefly goats, sheep, donkeys, and mules. They are sprinkled with holy water, and prayers are said, so that they may increase and multiply or prosper in any other way that their owners may desire. As the meeting of the beasts took place very early in the morning, I reached the scene just as it was breaking up, and the congregation was dispersing in various directions. I met Decros coming down the hill with his donkey, and saw by the expression of his lantern jaws—he never laughed outright—that something had amused him very much.

'So you have been to the Blessing of the Beasts? said I.

'He has been,' replied the man, pointing to the ass, and not wishing to be confounded with the bêtes himself.

The donkey stuck his long ears forward, which meant, 'Yes, I have,' and there was a deal of humour in the expression.

'And how did he behave?'

'Beautifully; he sang the whole time. The men laughed, but the women said, "Take the beast away!" "No, I won't," said" Il chante la bénédiction."'

September brought the retreat, and the great pilgrimage, which lasts eight days. The first visitors to arrive were the beggars and small vendors of objets de piété. Some came in little carts, which looked as if they had been made at home out of grocers' boxes, and to which dogs were harnessed. At their approach all the Roc-Amadour dogs barked bravely, just as in the old days when the song was written of the 'beggars coming to town.' Others trudged in with their bundles upon their backs, hobbling, hungry and thirsty, but eager for the fray. Some in a larger way of business came in all sorts of vehicles, and a bazaar man arrived in a caravan of his own. Then followed the crowd of genuine pilgrims, nearly all of them peasants, humbly clad, but with money in their pockets which they were determined not to spend foolishly upon meat, drink, and lodging, for the good of their souls was uppermost in their minds, and the length of their stay would depend upon their success in making the money last. By far the greater number were women, and the many bent backs and withered faces among them were a pretty safe sign that they had not all come to implore the aid of the Virgin in that special form of domestic trouble from which so many thousands have sought relief century after century in her sanctuary of Roc-Amadour.

The plain white linen coif—very ugly, but delightfully primitive—worn by a large proportion of these peasants showed that they had crossed the Dordogne from the Bas-Limousin. Many had come all the way on foot, taking a couple of days or more for the journey, and a few had trudged over the hot roads and stony causses[*] barefoot, just like pilgrims of the Middle Ages.

[*] This Languedocian word, which has come to be generally used in describing the limestone uplands, as distinguished from the valleys and gorges of a very extensive district of Southern France, is said to be a corruption of calx.

Indeed, these people were essentially the same in all social and mental characteristics as their predecessors of five or seven centuries ago; their faith was the same, their daily habits were the same, their language was the same, and their mode of dress, as far as the women were concerned, had scarcely changed. They came down the narrow street and under the old crumbling gateways in a continuous stream, holding their rosaries in their hands, together with their baskets and bundles, and praying aloud, even before they reached the foot of the steps. Arriving there, they dropped down upon their knees, and commenced the arduous ascent, interrupted by two hundred genuflexions, during which they repeated an Ave Maria and a special invocation to Notre Dame de Roc-Amadour. Although the stranger belonging to the outer world—so different in every way from that of these simple people—with his mind coloured by particular prejudices, habits of thought, religious or philosophical reasoning, may feel out of sympathy with such pilgrims, he cannot but recognise their sincerity and the serene fulness of their faith.

Above all the pious murmuring rise the harsh voices of those who have come to sell, and who, putting no restraint upon their eagerness to get money, thrust their rosaries and medals almost in the pilgrims' faces. Beggars squatting or lying against the wall on either side of the steps exhibit the bare stump of a leg that wofully needs washing, a withered arm, or the ravages of some incurable and gnawing disease. Yet are they all terribly energetic, wailing forth prayers almost incessantly, or screaming spasmodically an appeal to charity, and adding to the dreadful din by jingling coppers in tin cups. In the immediate precincts of the church, where the hurly-burly of piety, traffic, and mendicity reaches its climax, are the vendors of candles for the chapel and of food for the pilgrims, whose diet is chiefly melon and bread. Creysse, by the Dordogne, produces melons in abundance, which are brought to Roc-Amadour by the cartload, and sold for two or three sous apiece. And to see these pilgrims devour the fragrant fruit in the month of September makes one think that if Notre Dame de Roc-Amadour were not very pitiful the consequences would be disastrous to many.

There was a humorous beggar on the steps who amused me much, for I watched him more closely than he supposed. He had something the matter with his legs—paralyzed, perhaps—but the upper part of his body was sound enough. With one hand he shook the tin cup, but the other, which held a short pipe, he kept steadfastly behind his back. Now and again he turned his face to the wall, as if to drop a tear unseen, but really to take a discreet pull at the pipe. I think he must have swallowed the smoke. Then he would face the crowd again, and repeat his doleful cry:

'De la charité! de la charité! Chrétiens, n'oubliez pas le pauvre estropié! Le bon Dieu vous bénira.'

After all, why should not a beggar smoke? If tobacco is a blessing, why should a man be debarred from it because his legs are paralyzed, and he is obliged to live on charity?

As one of the first thoughts of every genuine pilgrim to this ancient sanctuary is to get shrived, the chaplains, who, with their Superior, are ten in number, have something to do to listen to the story of sins that is poured into their ears almost in a continuous stream during the eight days of the retreat. The rush upon the confessionals begins at five in the morning, and goes on with little intermission all day. The penitents huddle together like sheep in a snowstorm around each confessional, so that the foremost who is telling his sins knows that there is another immediately behind him who, whenever he stops to reflect, would like to give him a nudge m the back. The peasants, whether it be that they have never cultivated the habit of whispering, or whether their zeal be such as to chase from their minds all considerations of worldly shame and human respect, say what they have to say without regard to the rows of ears behind them, and what takes place at these times is almost on a par with the public confessions of the primitive Church.

It is at night, however, during the retreat that the visitor to Roc-Amadour will see the strangest sight if he gives himself the trouble, for then the church of St. Sauveur becomes a hospice where the weary may find the sleep that refreshes and restores the faculties after the work of the day, as sung by St. Ambrose. The church is filled with pilgrims lying upon the chairs, upon the bare stones that the feet of other pilgrims have worn into hollows, sitting with their backs against the walls and piers, snoring also in the confessionals—the most comfortable quarters. Some remain awake most of the night praying silently or aloud. This is how the peasantry of the Quercy and the Limousin enter into the spirit of the September pilgrimage to Roc-Amadour. It is not because they need the money to pay for accommodation in the inns that they use the church by night as well as by day, but because they wish to go through their devotional programme thoroughly. And those who go to the inns often make one room serve for a family of three or four grown-up persons. If there vis one person who does not belong to the family, the others see no harm in admitting him or her; indeed, they think that as Christians they are almost bound to do so.

On the night following the opening of the retreat, Roc-Amadour is illuminated, and the spectacle is one that renders the grandest illuminations in Paris mean and vulgar by comparison. It is not in the costliness of the display that its splendour lies; it is in what may almost be termed the zeal with which Nature works with art towards the same end. Without the rocks and precipices the spectacle would be commonplace; but the site being what it is, the scene has a strange and wonderful charm that may be called either fairylike or heavenly, as the imagination may prefer. The artistic means employed are simple enough—paper lanterns and little lamps of coloured glass; but what an effect is produced when chains of fire have been stretched across the gorge from the summits of the rocks on either side, when the long succession of zigzags reaching up the cliff, and forming the Way of the Cross, is also marked out with fire, when the ramparts on the brink of the precipice are ablaze with coloured lamps, recalling some old poetical picture of an enchanted castle, and a little to the right, on the summit of the cliff where the Via Crucis ends at Calvary, the great wooden cross which French pilgrims carried through the streets of Jerusalem stands against the calm starlit sky like a cross of blood-red flame!

A little below the summit of the cliff, from the large cavern which has been fashioned to represent the Holy Sepulchre, there issues a brilliant light, together with the sound of many voices singing the 'Tantum ergo.' A faint odour of incense wanders here and there among the shrubs, and mingles with the fragrance of flowers upon the terraces. Presently the clergy and the pilgrims come forth, and, forming a long procession, descend the Way of the Cross; and as the burning tapers that they carry shine and flash amongst the foliage, these words, familiar to every pilgrim to Roc-Amadour, sung by hundreds of voices, may be heard afar off in the dark desolate gorge:

'Reine puissante, Mère d'Amour,
Sois-nous compatissante,
O Vierge d'Amadour!'

It is now the vigil of All Souls—the 'Day of the Dead.' No more pilgrims come to Roc-Amadour. A breeze would send the sapless walnut-leaves whirling through the air, but there is no breeze; Nature seems to hold her breath as she thinks of the dead whom she has gathered to her earthy breast. At sundown the people creep out of their houses silently and solemnly; they meet at the bottom of the steps, and when they are joined by the clergy and choirboys, all move slowly upward, praying for the dead and kneeling upon each step. As their forms seen sideways show against the dusky sky, they look like shadows from the ghostly world, and still more so when the rocks on the other side of the gorge brighten again, as with the blood of the pomegranate made luminous, and through the air there spreads a beautiful solemn light that is tenderly yet deeply sad, and which adds something unearthly, something that cannot be named, to the ascending figures.

As the dusk deepens to darkness the funereal glas begins to moan from St. Saviour's Church. Two bells are rung together so as to make as nearly as possible one clash of sound. At first it is a moan, but it soon becomes a strident cry with a continuous under-wail. At the Hospitalet on the hill the bell of the mortuary chapel is also tolling. It is the bell of the dead who lie there in the stony burying-ground upon the edge of the wind-blown causse, calling upon the bells of Roc-Amadour to move the living to pity for those who have left the earth.

As I return to my cottage the dim street is quite deserted, and the arch of the ruined gateway, so often resounding with the voices that come from light hearts, is now as dark and silent as a grave. For two hours the bells continue to cry in the darkness, from the church overhead and from the chapel by the tombs. I can neither read nor write, but sit brooding over the fire on the hearth, piling on wood and sending tall flames and many sparks up the chimney; for that continuous undercry of the iron tongues, 'Pray for the dead! pray for the dead!' fills the valley and seems to fill the world. No fireside feeling can be kindled; it is wasting wood to throw it upon the hearth to-night, for that doleful wail penetrates everywhere: even the demon that lurks at the bottom of Pomoyssin must shudder as he hears it. When at length the bells stop swinging and their vibrations die away, a screech-owl flies close by the open gallery of the house, which we call a balcony, and startles me with its ghostly scream.

The day comes again, fair and hopeful. I am waiting for the old truffle-hunter, with whom I made an appointment for this morning. Presently I see him coming up the bed of the stream, plodding over the yellow stones, which have been dry for four months. I recognise him by his pig, which walks by his side. They are both truffle-hunters, and have both an interest in the business, as will be seen. The man is gray and old, with a sharp prominent nose, suggestive of his chief occupation, and with a bent back—the effect, perhaps, of stooping to pull the pig's ear in the nick of time should the beast be tempted to snap up one of the savoury cryptogams. When it is added that he wears a short blouse and a low, broad-brimmed felt hat, I have described the appearance of the truffle-hunter. Now, inasmuch as the pig is about to play the most important part in the morning's work, its portrait should likewise be drawn. The animal is of a dirty-white colour, like all pigs in this part of France, and is utterly devoid of grace and elegance. It is, in fact, an extremely ugly beast, with an arched back and a very long turned-up nose; but it is four years old, and is accounted 'serious.' Like all other pigs used for truffle-hunting, it is of the female sex. The animal has been carefully educated; it wears a leather collar as a mark of distinction, and is allowed the same liberty as a dog.

We climb the rocky side of the gorge, which is hot work, for the south wind is blowing, and the sun is blazing in a blue sky. The walnuts by the line of the stream are changing colour, and the maples are already fiery; but otherwise there are few signs of autumn. On reaching the plateau we come at once to the truffle-ground. Here the soil is so thin, so stony, and withal so arid, that, were it not for the scant herbage upon which sheep and goats thrive, it would produce nothing but stunted oak, juniper, and truffles. Even the oaks only grow in patches where the rock is not close to the surface. The truffles are never found except very near these trees, or, in default of them, hazels. This is one of the mysteries of the cryptogamic kingdom, which no one has yet been able to explain. The truffle-hunters believe that it is the shade of the trees which produces the underground fruit, and the opinion is based upon experience. When an oak has been cut down, or even lopped, a spot near it that was rich in truffles year after year is soon scoffed at by the knowing pig.

Our work lies amongst the dwarf oaks, for there are no hazels here. At a sign from the old man, the pig sniffs about the roots of a little tree, then proceeds to dig with her nose, tossing up the larger stones which lie in the way as if they were feathers. The animal has smelt a truffle, and the man seizes her by the ear, for her manner is suspicious. This is the first time they have been out together since last season, and the beast has forgotten some of her education. She manages to get a truffle into her mouth; he tugs at her ear with one hand, and uses his stick upon her nose with the other. The brute screams with anger, but will not open her jaws wide enough for him to slip his stick in and hook the truffle out. The prize is swallowed, and the old man, forgetting all decorum, and only thinking of his loss, calls his companion a pig, which in France is always an insult. Our truffle-hunting to-day has opened badly, although one party thinks differently. In a few minutes, however, another truffle is found, and this time the old man delivers a whack on the nose at the right moment, and, seizing the fungus, hands it to me. Now he takes from his pocket a spike of maize, and, picking off a few grains, gives them to the pig to soothe her injured feelings, and encourage her to hunt again. This she is quite ready to do, for a pig has no amour propre. We move about in the dry open wood, keeping always near the trees, and truffle after truffle is turned up from the reddish light soil mixed with fragments of calcareous rock. The forgotten training soon comes back to our invaluable auxiliary; a mere twitch of the ear is a sufficient hint for her to retire at the right moment, and wait for the corn that is in variably given in exchange for the cryptogam. Indeed, before we leave the ground, the animal has got so well into work that when she finds a truffle she does not attempt to seize it, but points to it, and grunts for the equivalent in maize. The pig may be a correct emblem of depravity, but its intelligence is certainly of a superior order.

FROM THE ALZOU TO THE DORDOGNE.

Although the last days of May had come, the Alzou, usually dry at this time, was running with swift, strong current through the vale of Roc-Amadour. There had been so many thunderstorms that the channel was not large enough for the torrent that raced madly over its yellow pebbles. I lingered awhile in the meadow by the stream, looking at the rock-clinging sanctuary before wandering in search of the unknown up the narrow gorge.

In a garden terraced upon the lower flank of the rock, the labour of generations having combined to raise a soil there deep enough to support a few plum, almond, and other fruit trees, a figure all in black is hard at work transplanting young lettuces. It is that of a teaching Brother. He is a thin grizzled man of sixty, with an expression of melancholy benevolence in his rugged face. I have watched him sitting upon a bench with his arm round some little village urchin by his side, while the children from the outlying hamlets, sprawling upon a heap of stones in the sun, ate their mid-day meal of bread and cheese or buckwheat pancakes that their mothers had put into their baskets before they trudged off in the early morning. I have noticed by many signs that he is full of sympathy for the young peasants placed in his charge. Yet with all his kindness he is melancholy. So many years in one place, such a dull routine of duty, such a life of abnegation without the honour that sustains and encourages, such impossibility of being understood and appreciated by those for whose sake he has been breaking self upon the wheel of mortification since his youth, have made him old before the time and fixed that look of lurking sadness in his warmly human eyes.

There are few problems more profound than that of the courage with which men like him continue their self-imposed penal-servitude until they become too infirm to work and are sent to die in some refuge for aged frères. They have accepted celibacy and poverty, that they may the better devote their lives to the instruction of children. They have no sacerdotal state or ideal, no ecclesiastical nor social ambition to help them. They must be always humble; they must not even be learned, for much knowledge in their case would be considered a dangerous thing. Their minds must not rise above their work. They guide dirty little fists in the formation of pot-hooks, and when they have led the boys' intelligence up a few more steps of scholarship the end is achieved. The boy goes out into the world and refreshes his mind with new occupation; but the poor Brother remains chained to his dreary task, which is always the same and is never done.

And what are the wages in return for such a life? Food that many a workman would consider insufficiently generous for his condition, a bed to lie upon and clothes which call down upon the wearer the sarcasms of the town-bred youth. What a land of contrast is France!

There are three Brothers here, but this one, the eldest, is the head. Others come and go, but he remains. Most of his spare time is given to the garden. When the eight o'clock bell begins to swing he will leave his lettuces and soon perch himself on the little platform behind his shabby old desk in the dingy schoolroom, which even in the holidays cannot get rid of its ancient redolence of boys. The school-house, now so much like a prison, was once a mansion, and the most modern part of it is of the period which we should call in England Tudor. A Gothic doorway leads into a hall arched and groined, the inner wall being the bare rock, as is the case with most of the houses at Roc-Amadour. A gutter cut in the stone floor to carry off the drippings formed by the condensation of the air upon the cold surface shows that these half-rock dwellings have their drawbacks.

I leave Roc-Amadour and take my way up the valley. Nature has now reached all that can be attained in vernal pride and beauty here. In a little while she will have put on the careworn look of the Southern summer. Many a plant now in splendid bloom, animated by the spirit of loveliness that presides over the law of reproduction, will soon be casting its seed and bringing its brief destiny to a close. Now all is coquetry, beauty, and ravishment. The rock-hiving bees, unconscious instruments of a great purpose, are yellow with pollen and laden with honey. They find more, infinitely more, nectar than they can carry away. The days are long, and every hour is full of joy. But already the tide is at the turn. The nightingale's rapturous song has become a lazy twitter; the bird has done with courtship; it has a family in immediate prospect, if not one already screaming for food, and the musician has half lost his passion for music. It will come again next year. How swiftly all this life and colour of spring passes away! So much to be looked at and so little time!

This narrow strip of meadow that winds along the bottom of the gorge is not the single tinted green ribbon it lately was. The light of its verdure has been dimmed by the light of flowers. The grass mounts high, but not higher than the oxeye daisies, the blue racemes of stachys, the mauve-coloured heads of scabious, the bladder-campions, the yellow buttercups and goat's-beard. The oxeyes are so numberless in one long reach of meadow that a white drapery, which every breeze folds or unfolds, seems to have been cast as light as sea-foam upon the illimitable forest of stems. The white butterflies that flutter above are like flecks of foam on the wing. Elsewhere it is the blue of the stachys and the spiked veronica that rules. Deeper in the herbage other races of flowers shine in the fair groves of this grassy paradise, and every blossom, however small, is a mystery, a miracle. Here is the star of Bethlehem, wide open in the sunshine and showing so purely white amidst the green, and yonder is the purple fringe-like tuft of the weird muscari. Along the banks of the stream tall lilac-purple, stock-like flowers rise proudly above the grasses. They belong to the hesperis or dame's violet, a common wild-flower in this valley. Upon my left is the abrupt stony slope of the gorge. Between it and the meadow are shrubs of yellow jessamine starred with blossom. But the stony steep that dazzles the eyes with the sun's reflected glare has its flowers too. Nature, in her great passion for beauty, even draws it out of the disintegrated fragments of time-worn rock, whose banks would otherwise be as stark and dry as the desert sand. Lightly as flakes of snow the frail blossoms of the white rock-rose lie upon the stones. Then there are patches of candytuft running from white into pink, crimson flowers of the little crane's-bill, and spurges whose floral leaves are now losing their golden green and taking a hue of fiery brown.

An open wood, chiefly of dwarf oak, and shrubs such as the wayfaring tree, the guelder-rose, and the fly-honeysuckle, now stretches along the opposite side of the gorge. Here scattered groups of columbine send forth a glow of dark blue from the shadowy places; the lily of the valley and its graceful ever-bowing cousin, the Solomon's seal, show their chaste and wax-like flowers amidst the cool green of their fresh leaves; and the monkey-orchis stands above the green moss and the creeping geraniums like a little rocket of pale purple fire just springing from the earth towards the lingering shreds of storm-cloud that are melting in the warm sky.

In a few weeks what will have become of all this greenness and beautiful colour of flowers? The torrid sun and the hot breath of summer will have burnt up the fair garment of spring, and laid bare the arid sternness of the South again. The nightingale still warbles fitfully in the green bushes, but the raven, perched up yonder upon the stark rock, croaks like a misanthrope at the quick passing away of youth and loveliness. What sad undertones, mournful murmurs of the deep that receives the drifted leaves, mingle with the spring's soft flutings and all the voices that proclaim the season of joy!

While listening and day-dreaming, I was overtaken by a man and his donkey, both old acquaintances. Every day, except Sundays and the great Church festivals, when the peasants of the Quercy abstain from work, like those of Brittany, this pair were in the habit of trudging together side by side to fetch and bring back wood from the slopes of the gorge. The ass did all the carrying, and his master the chopping and sawing. It was a monotonous life, but both seemed to think they were not worse off than the majority of men and donkeys. The man was contented with his daily soup of bread-and-water, with an onion or a leek thrown in, and a suspicion of bacon, and the beast with such herbage as he could find while his master was getting ready another load of wood. The man was an old soldier, who had seen some rough service, for he was at Sedan, and was afterwards engaged in the ghastly business of shooting down his own countrymen in Paris. But, with all this, he was as quiet a tempered creature as his donkey, which he treated as a friend. The army, he told me, was the best school for learning how to treat a beast with proper consideration.

I asked why.

'Because,' replied he, 'when a soldier is caught beating a horse, he has eight days of salle de police.'

Man and donkey having disappeared into a wood, my next companion was a small blue butterfly that kept a few yards in front of me, now stopping to look at a flower, now fluttering on again. Some insects, as well as certain birds, appear to derive much entertainment from watching the movements of that fantastic animal—man.

Arcadian leafiness: rocky desolation befitting the mouth of hell. Grass and flowers on which souls might tread in the paradise of the Florentine poet. Stony forms, monstrous, enigmatic, reared like symbolic tokens of defeated gods, or of the worn-out evil passions that troubled old creation before the coming of man, and the fresh order of spiritual and carnal bewilderment. Why should I go on and seek further amazement, while from the lowest to the highest I can read not one of the mystic figures of the solitude around me? What is my relation to them, and theirs to me? Why should that beetle in the grass, upon whose back all the colours of the prism change and glow like supernatural fire, trouble me with the cause and motive of its beauty? Why should yonder rock, standing like a spar of some ship wrecked in a cataclysm of the awful past, draw me to it as though it were the image of a grand, yet unattainable and blighted, longing of the human soul?

The gorge became so narrow and the rocks so high that there was a twilight under the trees, which still dripped with the rain-drops of last night's storm. Hesperis, columbine, and geranium contrasted their floral colours with the deep green of the young grass. Some spots of dark purple were on the ground where the light was most dim. They were the petals and calyxes of that strange flower, lathraea, of the broom-rape family. Each bloom seemed to be carried in the cup of another flower. The plant had no leaves, for it was a thief that drew its nutriment from the root of an honest little tree that had struggled upward in the shade of strong and greedy rivals, and had raised its head at length into the sunshine in spite of them.

After some difficulty in working round and over rocks that barred, the passage, I came to a spot where it was impossible to follow the gorge any farther. The walls narrowed to an opening a few yards wide, where the stream fell in a cascade of some thirty feet. I took my mid-day meal like a forester in the midst of this beautiful desolation, and then, having found a spot where I could escape from the gorge of the Alzou, I climbed the steep towards the north.

Here there was a blinding glare of sunshine reflected by the naked stones. Goats looked down at me from the upper rocks near the line of the blue sky. When I reached the boy who tended them, I asked him the way to the road that I wished to strike upon the plateau. After staring at me for some time, he screwed up his mouth, and said: 'Je comprenais pas français, you.' You did not apply to me, but to himself, for it means I in the Southern dialect.

Here was a boy unable to speak French, although all children in France are now supposed to be educated in the official language of the republic. Such cases are uncommon. In the Haut-Quercy, where patois is the language of everybody, even in the towns, one soon learns the advantage of asking the young for the information that one may need.

I found the road I wanted, and also the spot marked on the map as the Saut de la Pucelle. It is one of those numerous gouffres to be found in the Quercy, especially in the district of the Dordogne.

Here a stream plunges beneath the surface of the earth to join the subterranean Ouysse, or the Dordogne. A ravine, sinking rapidly, becomes a deep, dark, and gloomy gully, at the end of which is a wall of rock. The stream pours down a tunnel-like passage, at the base of the rock, with a melancholy wail. Where the sides are not too steep they are covered with trees and shrubs.

As I stood amidst the poisonous dog-mercury, under the hanging ivy and the hart's-tongue ferns, watching the stream glitter on the edge of everlasting darkness, and listening to its death-dirge, I pictured awful shadows issuing from the infernal passage and seizing the terror-stricken ghost of the guilty horseman, of whom I had heard from a local legend.

This legend, as it is commonly told, is briefly as follows: Centuries ago a virtuous young woman was persecuted by the lord of a neighbouring castle, who was not at all virtuous. One day, when she was mounted upon a mule, he gave chase to her on horseback. He was rapidly gaining upon her, and she, in agony of soul, had given herself up for lost, when, by one of those miracles which were frequent in those days, especially in the country of Notre Dame de Roc-Amadour, the mule, by giving a vigorous stamp with one of his hind-legs, kicked a yawning gulf in the earth, which he, however, lightly passed over with his burden, while the wicked pursuer, unable to check his steed in time, perished in the abyss.

Another legend of the Maiden's Leap is more romantic, but less supernatural. It is a story of the English occupation of Guyenne, and the revolt of the Quercynois in 1368. Before the main body of the British force that subdued Roc-Amadour as related by Froissart arrived in the Haut-Quercy, the castle of Prangères, near Gramat, was entered by a troop of armed men in the English service under Jéhan Péhautier, one of those brigand captains of whom the mediaeval history and legends of Guyenne speak only too eloquently. An orphan, Bertheline de Castelnau, châtelaine of Prangères in her own right, was in the fortress when it was thus taken by surprise. Captivated by her beauty, Jéhan Péhautier essayed to make Bertheline his prisoner; but she made her escape from the castle by night, and endeavoured to reach the sanctuary of Roc-Amadour on foot. Her flight was discovered, and Péhautier and a party of horsemen started in pursuit. She would have been quickly captured had she not met a mounted knight, who was no other than her lover, Bertrand de Terride. She sprang upon his horse, and away they both went through the oak forest which then covered the greater part of the causse; but the gleam of the knight's armour in the moonlight kept the pursuers constantly upon his track. Slowly but surely they gained upon the fugitives. Suddenly Bertheline, who knew the country, perceived that Bertrand was spurring his horse directly towards the precipice now called the Saut de la Pucelle. It was too late, however, to avoid the gulf; she had only time to murmur a brief prayer before the horse bounded over the edge of the rock. To the great wonder and joy of the lovers, the animal cleared the ravine, and alighted safely on the other side. But a very different fate awaited the pursuers. On they came, crashing through the wood, shouting exultantly, for they believed that the prey was now almost in their grasp, when suddenly the air was rent with cries of horror, mingled with the sound of crashing armour, and bodies falling upon the rocks and upon the bed of the stream. An awful silence followed. The dead men and horses were lying in the dark water. As Péhautier felt the solid earth leave him, he gave out his favourite oath, 'Mort de sang!' in a frightful shriek, and the words long afterwards rang in the ears of Bertheline and Bertrand.

As I returned to this spot some months later in order to explore the cavern, I may as well give an account of the adventure here. I was accompanied by my neighbour Decros, who gave his donkey on this occasion a half-holiday. Decros, although a native of the locality, could not tell me how far the cavern extended, for he had never been tempted to explore its depths himself, nor had he heard of anybody who knew more than himself about it. A story, however, was told of a shepherd-boy who long ago went down the opening, and was never seen again.

'Perhaps,' said I, 'we shall find his skeleton.' This observation brought a peculiar expression to my companion's face, which meant that he had no ambition whatever to share the surprise of such a discovery. Although he had done his duty bravely in the war of 1870, he was by no means free from the awe with which these gouffres inspired the country-people, and his soldiering had still left him a Cadurcian Celt, with much of the superstition that he had drawn in with his native air. One morning he found that his donkey had nearly strangled himself over-night with the halter, and Decros could not shake off the impression that this accident was an omen intended to convey some message from the other world. He was ready to go with me into any cavern; but I am sure he would have much preferred scaling dangerous rocks in the broad sunlight, for there he would have felt at home.

There was not too much water to offer any danger, so we stooped down and entered the low vault after lighting candles. The roof soon rose, and we were in a spacious cavern, the sides of which had evidently been washed and worn away into hollows by the sea that rolled here long before the mysterious race raised its dolmens and tumuli upon the surrounding knolls. The passage was wide enough for us to walk on the margin of the stream, or where the water was very shallow; but had much rain fallen, the expedition would have been perilous, for the descending torrent would then have been strong enough to carry a man off his legs.

Stalactites hung from the rocks overhead, and as we proceeded they became more numerous, more fantastic, and more beautiful. They were just as the dropping water had slowly fashioned them in the darkness of ages, where day and night were the same, where nothing changed but themselves, save the voice of the stream, which grew louder or softer according to the play of winds and sunshine and clouds upon the upper world. Some tapered to a fine point, others were like pendant bunches of grapes; all were of the whiteness of loaf-sugar. No tourists stricken with that deplorable mania for taking home souvenirs of everything, and ready to spoil any beauty to gratify their vanity or their acquisitiveness, had cast stones into the midst of the fairy handicraft of the wizard water for the sake of a fragment; nor had the village boys amused themselves here at the expense of the stalactites, for happily they had been well trained in the horror of the supernatural. The cavern ran for a certain distance south-west; then the gallery turned at a sharp angle north-north-west, and continued in this direction. We followed the stream some three or four hundred yards, and then it entered a deep pool or lake under low rocks. We tried a side-passage to see if it led round this obstacle, but it soon came to an end. As I stood on the brink of the deep, black, silent pool, I had a great longing to know what lay beyond; but I had to content myself with imagining the unrevealed wonders of the cavern. It would be just possible, by crouching down in a little boat, to pass under the rock, which is probably no insuperable obstacle. The roof is just as likely to form a high vault on one side of it as on the other. The water is the serious obstacle; but it is safe to say, from the character of the formation, that the deep pool does not extend very far. A peculiarity of these underground streams of the causses is that they generally form a chain of pools.

If a shepherd-boy really lost his life in this cavern, he must have done so by trying to pass the pool, unless he was washed into it by a sudden rush of water after a heavy storm. It must be confessed that the spot is calculated to fill one with superstitious dread. The calm of the deep water into which the stream glides makes it quite easy to imagine, with the help of the surroundings, that there is an evil spirit lurking in it—perhaps that of the wicked Péhautier whom the demons dragged down here. I had another grim thought: Supposing this water, in obedience to some pressure elsewhere, should rise suddenly and flood the lower part of the cavern! There is no knowing what tricks water may play in this fantastic region, where the tendency of rivers is to flow underground, and where one gallery may be connected with a ramification of water-courses extending over many miles of country, and with reservoirs which empty themselves periodically by means of natural syphons. There is a world full of marvels under the causses of the Lot, the Aveyron, and the Lozère; but although much more will be known about it, a vast deal will remain for ever hidden from man.

I will now return to my wayfaring across the Causse de Gramat in the early summer.

I had passed through the village of Alvignac—a little watering-place that draws all the profit it can from a ferruginous spring which rises at Miers hard by, but otherwise uninteresting, and had left on my right the village of Thégra, where the troubadour Hugues de St. Cyr was born, when suddenly the landscape struck me with the sentiment of England. For some hours I had been walking chiefly over the stony causse, searching for a so-called castle that was not worth the trouble of finding. I had seen spurge and juniper, and ribs of rock rising everywhere above the short turf, until I grew weary of the sameness. Now, the sun, whose ardour was already melting into the tenderness of evening, shone upon a broad valley, where the grass stood high in rich meadows separated from other meadows and green cornfields by hedges, from the midst of which rose many a tall tree. The blackbird's low, flute-like note sounded above the shrilling of the grasshoppers.

The little village of Padirac was entered at sundown. The small inn where I chose my quarters for the night had a garden at the back, where vines in new leaf were trained, over a trellis from end to end. There were also broad beans in flower, peas on sticks, currant-bushes, and pear-trees. It was a quiet, green spot, and as I strolled about it in the twilight, vague recollections of other gardens chased one another, but it would have been hard to say whether they were pleasant or sad. My dinner or supper was of sorrel soup and part of a goose that was killed the previous autumn, and, after being slightly salted, was preserved in grease.

Lean tortoiseshell cats, with staring eyes and tails like strings, kept near at hand, and seemed ready to commit any crime for the smallest particle of goose. String-tailed, goggle-eyed, meagre cats that seize your dinner if you do not keep watch over it, and when caressed promptly respond by scratching and swearing, appear to be held in high favour throughout this district. They are expected to live upon rats, and it is this that makes them so disagreeable, for although they kill rats for the pleasure of the chase, they do not like the flavour of them. On this subject there is a standing quarrel between them and society, which insists upon their eating the animals that they kill. In order that the cats shall have every facility for the chase, holes are often cut in the bottom of house-doors, so that at night they may go in and come out as the quarry moves them. Should any food have been left about, what with the rats and the cats, not a trace of it will be seen in the morning. This I know from experience.

Being within a mile or so of the Puit de Padirac—that gloomy hole in the earth which was supposed to be one of the devil's short-cuts between this world and his own, until M. Martel proved almost conclusively that it was not the way to the infernal city, but to a subterranean river, and a chain of lakes that could be followed for two miles—I set out the next morning to find it. I might have spent hours in vain casting about, but for the help of a peasant, who offered, quite disinterestedly, to be my guide. He was an old man, with a very Irish face, and eyes that laughed at life. But for his language he would have seemed a perfectly natural growth of Cork or Kerry.

Here may be the place to remark that the stock of the ancient Cadurci appears to have been much less impaired here in an ethnological sense by the mingling of races than in the country round Cahors. The peasants, generally, have nothing distinctively Southern in their appearance, although they speak a dialect which is in the main a Latin one, the Celtic words that have been retained being in a very small proportion. Gray or blue eyes are almost as frequent among them as they are with the English, and many of the village children have hair the colour of ripening maize.

We left the fertile valley and rose upon the stone-scattered causse where hellebore, spurges, and juniper were the only plants not cropped close to the earth by the flocks of sheep which thrive upon these wastes. All the sheep are belled, but the bells they wear are like big iron pots hanging upon their breasts. Each pot has a bone that swings inside of it and serves as a hammer. The chief use of these bells is to prevent the animal from leaving its best wool, that of the breast, upon the thorns of bushes.

We have now reached the brink of the pit, which is not bottomless, but looks so until the eye faintly distinguishes something solid at a depth that has been measured at 175 feet. The opening is almost circular, with a diameter at the orifice of 116 feet. This prodigious well, sunk in successive layers of secondary rock, looks as if it had been regularly quarried; but men could never have had the motive for giving themselves so much trouble. Did the rock fall in here? No explanation is satisfactory. How it fills one with awe to look into the depth while lying upon a slab of stone that stretches some distance beyond the side of the pit! Bushes with twisted and fantastic arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish hart's-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of heaven pass over, to a thicker darkness whence comes the everlasting wail and groan of hidden water.

This horrid gulf being in the open plain, with not even a foot of rough wall round it as a protection for the unwary, I asked the old man if people had never fallen into it.

'Yes,' he answered, 'but only those who have been pushed by evil spirits.'

He meant that only self-murderers had fallen into the Puit de Padirac. 'Pushed by evil spirits.' Perhaps this is the best of all explanations of the suicidal impulse. Strong thoughts are sometimes hidden under the simplicity of rustic expression. He told me the story of a man who, having gone by night to throw himself into the Puit de Padirac, came in contact with a tough old bush during his descent which held him up. By this time the would-be suicide disliked the feeling of falling so much that, so far from trying to free himself from the bush and begin again, he held on to it with all his might and shrieked for help. But as people who are not pushed by evil spirits give the Puit de Padirac a wide berth after sundown, the wretched man's cries were lost in the darkness. The next morning the shepherd children, as they led their flocks over the plain, heard a strange noise coming from the pit, but their horror was stronger than their curiosity, and they showed their sheep how to run. They went home and told their fathers what they had heard, and at length some persons were bold enough to look down the hole, from which the dismal sound the children had noticed continued to rise. Thus the cause of the mysterious noise was discovered, and the man was hauled up with a rope. He never allowed the evil spirits to push him into the Puit de Padirac again.

The people of these causses have a supernatural explanation for everything that they cannot account for by the light of reason and observation. They have their legend with regard to the Puit de Padirac, and it is as follows: St. Martin, before he became Bishop of Tours, was crossing one day this stony region of the Dordogne to visit a religious community on the banks of the Solane, whither he had been despatched by St. Hilary. He was mounted on a mule, and was ambling along over the desert plunged in pious contemplation, when he heard a little noise behind, and, looking round, he was surprised to see a gentleman close to him, who was also riding a mule. The stranger was richly dressed, and was altogether a very distinguished-looking person, but the excessive brilliancy of his eyes was a disfigurement. They shone in his head like two bits of burning charcoal. 'What do you want, cruel beast?' said St. Martin. This would scarcely have been saintly language had he not known with whom he had to deal. The gentleman thus impolitely addressed returned a soft answer, and forced his company upon the saint, who wished him—at home. Presently Lucifer, for it was he, began to 'dare' St. Martin, after the manner of boys to-day. 'If I kick a hole in the ground I dare you to jump over it,' was the sort of language employed by the gentleman with the too-expressive eyes. 'Done!' said St. Martin, or something equivalent. 'Digging pits is quite in my line of business!' exclaimed the devil, in so disagreeable a voice that the saint's mule would have bolted had the holy rider not kept a tight rein upon her. At the same moment the ground over which the infernal mule had just passed fell in with a mighty rumble and crash, leaving a yawning gulf. 'Now,' said Lucifer, 'let me see you jump over that!' Whereupon, the bold St. Martin drove his spurs into his mule and lightly leapt over the abyss. And this was how the Puit de Padirac was made. The peasants believe that they can still see on a stone the imprint left by the hoof of St. Martin's mule. This adventure did not cause the saint and the devil to part company. They rode on together as far as the valley of Medorium (Miers). 'Now,' said St. Martin, 'you jump over that!' pointing to a little stream that was seen to flow suddenly and miraculously out of the earth. Before challenging the arch enemy he had, however, taken the precaution to lay two small boughs in the form of a cross on the brink of the water. In vain the devil spurred his mule and used the worst language that he could think of to induce the beast to jump. The animal would not; but, as the spurring and swearing were continued, it at length went down on its knees before the cross. But this did not suit the devil's turn. On the contrary, the proximity of that emblem which St. Martin had placed unobserved on the ground made him writhe as though he had fallen into a font. Then with the speed of a lightning flash he returned to his own kingdom—possibly by the Puit de Padirac. A church dedicated to the saint was afterwards built near the scene of his triumph, and the healing spring where it comes out of the earth is still known by the name of Lou Fount Sen Morti—St. Martin's Fountain.

Having left the pit, we went in the direction of Loubressac, to which village my companion belonged. While still upon the causse a spot was reached where a small iron cross had been raised. The stone pedestal bore this inscription:

'SOUVENIR DE HÉLÈNE BONBÈGRE, MORTE MARTYRE EN CE LIEU EN 1844. VIEILLE-ESCAZE ET LAVAL ONT FAIT CONSTRUIRE CETTE CROIX. PRIEZ POUR CES DEUX BIENFAITEURS.'

The old man knew Hélène Bonbègre when he was young, and he told me the tragic story of her death on this spot. She was going home in the evening, and her sweetheart the blacksmith accompanied her a part of the distance. They then separated, and she went on alone. They had been watched by the jealous and unsuccessful lover, whose heart was on fire. Where the cross stands the girl was found lying, a naked corpse. The murderer was soon captured, and most of the people in the district went to St. Céré to see him guillotined. It was a spectacle to be talked over for half a century. The blacksmith never forgave himself for having left the girl to go home alone, and it was he who forged the cross that marks the scene of the crime and sets the wayfarer conjecturing.

The peasant changed his ideas by filling his pipe. He smoked tobacco that he grew in a corner of his garden for his own use, and which he enjoyed all the more because it was tabac de contrebande. He gave me some, which I likewise smoked without any qualm of conscience, and thought it decidedly better than some tobacco of the régie. He lit his pipe with smuggled matches. Had I been an inspector in disguise, I should never have made matters unpleasant for him; he was such a cheery, good-natured companion. He had brought up his family, and had now just enough land to keep him without breaking his back over it. He was quite satisfied with things as they were. I did not ask him if he was a poacher, but took it for granted that he was whenever he saw a good chance. Almost every peasant in the Haut-Quercy who has something of the spirit of Nimrod in him is more or less a poacher. Those who like hare and partridge can eat it in all seasons by paying for it. Occasionally the gendarmes capture a young and over-zealous offender, but the old men, who have followed the business all their lives, are too wary for them. They are also too respectable to be interfered with.

At Loubressac I took leave of my entertaining friend, but not before we had emptied a bottle of white wine together. It was a vin du pays, this district having been less tried by the phylloxera than others farther south and west. I was surprised to find white wine there, the purple grape having been almost exclusively cultivated for centuries in what is now the department of the Lot.

In the room of the inn where I lunched there were four beds; two at one end and two at the other. There was plenty of space left, however, for the tables. The rafters were hidden by the heads of maize that hung from them. The host sat down at the same table with me, and when he had nearly finished his soup he poured wine into it, and, raising the plate to his lips, drank off the mixture. Objectionable as this manner of drinking wine seems to those who have not learnt to do it in their youth, it is very general throughout Guyenne. Those who have formed the habit would be most unhappy if they could not continue it. Faire chabron is the expression used to describe this sin against good manners. The aubergiste was very friendly, and towards the close of the meal he brought out a bottle of his old red wine that he had treasured up 'behind the faggot.'

Before reaching this village I had heard of a retired captain who lived here in a rather dilapidated château, and who was very affable to visitors, whom he immediately invited to look through his telescope, which, although not a very large one, had a local celebrity, such instruments being about as rare as blue foxes in this part of the world. Conducted by the innkeeper, I called upon this gentleman. The house was one of those half-castellated manors which became scattered over France after the Renaissance, and of which the greater number were allowed to fall into complete or partial ruin when the territorial families who were interested in them were extinguished or impoverished by the Revolution. They are frequently to be found in Guyenne, but they are generally occupied by peasants either as tenant-farmers or proprietors; two or three of the better preserved rooms being inhabited by the family, the others being haunted by bats and swallows and used for the storage of farm produce. It suited the captain's humour, however, to live in his old dilapidated mansion, scarcely less cut off from the society that matched with his position in life than if he had exiled himself to some rock in the ocean.

The ceremony of knocking or ringing was dispensed with for the sufficient reason that there was neither bell nor knocker. We entered by the open door and walked along a paved passage, which, was evidently not held as sacred as it should have been by the roving fowls; looked in at the great dark kitchen, where beside the Gothic arch of the broad chimney was some ruinous clockwork mechanism for turning the spit, which probably did turn to good purpose when powdered wigs were worn; then ascended the stone staircase, where there was room for four to walk abreast, but which had somewhat lost its dignity by the balusters being used for hanging maize upon. Presently we came to a door, which the aubergiste knocked sharply with his knuckles.

There was a sound of footsteps within, and then the door opened. I was standing before a rather florid man of about fifty, with close-cropped hair, a brush moustache, and a chin that seemed undecided on the score of shaving. He wore a flannel shirt open at the throat, and a knitted worsted tricot. This was the captain. He evidently did not like Sunday clothes. When he settled down here, it was to live at his ease, like a bachelor who had finished with vanities. But although no one would have supposed from his dress that he was superior to the people around him, his manners were those of a gentleman and an officer who had seen the world elsewhere than at Loubressac. The simple, easy courtesy with which he showed me his rooms, and pointed his telescope for me, was all that is worth attaining, as regards the outward polish of a man. This was so fixed upon him that his long association with peasants had taken none of it away. The few rooms that he inhabited were plainly furnished; in others were heaps of wheat, maize and beans. Passing along a passage I noticed a little altar in a recess, with a statue of the Virgin decked with roses and wild flowers. 'C'est le mois de Marie,' said the captain. He lived with a sister, and she took care that religion was kept up in the house.

It being the Fête-Dieu, preparations were being made in the village for the procession that was to take place after vespers. Sheets were spread along the fronts of the houses, with flowers pinned to them, and reposoirs had been raised in the open air. I did not wait for the procession, as I expected to be in time for the one at the next village, Autoire. I took a path that led me up to the barren causse, from which the red roofs of Autoire soon became visible under an amphitheatre of high wooded hills.

As I approached the little village, the gleam of white sheets mingled with the picture of old houses huddled together, some half-timber, some with turrets and encorbelments, nearly all of them with very high-pitched roofs and small dormer windows. The procession was soon to start. I waited for it at the door of the crowded church, baking in the sun with others who could not get inside, one of whom was a woman with a moustache and beard, black and curly, such as a promising young man might be expected to have. The number of women in Southern France who are bearded like men shocks the feelings of the Northern wanderer, until he grows accustomed to the sight. The curé was preaching about the black bread, and all the other miseries of this life that had to be accepted with thankfulness. Presently the two bells in the tower began to dance, and the rapid ding-dong announced that the procession was forming. First appeared the beadle, extremely gaudy in scarlet and gold, then the cross-bearer, young men as chanters, little boys, most strangely attired in white satin knee-breeches and short lace skirts, scattering rose-leaves from open baskets at their sides; the curé came bearing the monstrance and Host, followed by Sisters with little girls in their charge; lastly was a mixed throng of parishioners. Most of the women held rosaries, and a few of them, bent with age, carried upon their heads the very cap that old Mother Hubbard wore, if tradition and English artists are to be trusted. As the last of the long procession passed out of sight between the walls of white linen, the wind brought the words clearly back:

'Genitori, Genitoque
Laus et jubilatio.'

Now I entered the little church that was quite empty, and where no sound would have been heard if the two voices in the tower had not continued to ring out over the dovecotes, where the white pigeons rested and wondered, and over the broad fields where the bending grasses and listening flowers stood in the afternoon sunshine, 'Laus et jubilatio,' in the language of the bells.

The church was Romanesque, probably of the twelfth century. The nave was flanked by narrow aisles. Upon the very tall bases of the columns were carved, together with foliage, fantastic heads of demons, or satyrs of such expressive ugliness that they held me fascinated. Some were bearded, others were beardless, some were grinning and showing frightful teeth, others had thick-lipped, pouting mouths hideously debased. A few were really bons diables, who seemed determined to be gay, and to joke under the most trying circumstances; but the greater number had morose faces, puckered by the long agony of bearing up the church. Such variety of expression in ugliness was a triumph of art in the far-off age, when the chisel of an unremembered man with a teeming imagination made these heads take life from the inanimate stone.

The road from Autoire to St. Céré soon led me into the valley of the Bave, a beautiful trout-stream, galloping towards the Dordogne through flowery meadows, on this last day of May, and under leaning trees, whose imaged leaves danced upon the ripples in the green shade. As I had no need to hurry, I loitered to pick ragged-robins upon the banks, flowers dear to me from old associations. Very common in England, they are comparatively rare in France.

New pleasures await the wayfarer every hour, almost every minute, in the day, and however long he may continue to wander over this wonderful world of inexhaustible variety, if he will only stop to look at everything, and so learn to feel the charm of little things.

I met a beggar, and fell into conversation with him. He asked me for nothing, and was surprised when I gave him two sous. He was a ragged old man, with a canvas bag, half filled with crusts, slung upon his side. I had already met many such beggars in this part of France. They travel about from village to village, filling their bags with pieces of bread that are given them, and selling afterwards what they cannot eat as food for pigs. As they rarely receive charity in the form of money, they do not expect it. This kind of mendicant is distinctly rural, and belongs to old times.

The bold front of an early Renaissance castle, with round towers at the angles, capped with pointed roofs, drew me from the highroad. It was the Château de Montal, in connection with which I had already heard the story of one Rose de Montal, a young lady of some three centuries ago, who had given her heart to a nobleman of the country, Roger de Castelnau. By-and-by the charms of another lady caused him to neglect the fair Rose de Montal. She remained almost constantly at a window of one of the towers, scanning the country, and longing to catch sight of the faithless Roger. One day he came down the valley of the Bave, and she sang from the height of her tower a plaintive love-song, hoping that he would stop and make some sign; but he passed on, unmoved by the tender appeal of the noble damsel. As he disappeared, she cried, 'Rose, plus d'espoir!' and threw herself from the window.

The métayer, now placed in charge of the castle, showed me over it. It was a sad spectacle. The building, one of the best preserved and most elaborately decorated works of the Renaissance in this part of Guyenne until a few years ago, then fell into the hands of a vulgar speculator, who detached all the carvings that could be removed without difficulty, and sold them in Paris. The noble staircase and all its delicate sculpture remain, but these only add to the regret that one feels for what is no longer there. Had the Commission of Historic Monuments placed the Château de Montal upon its list, it would probably have escaped spoliation, although, in the case of private property, the State has no power to prevent destruction, however grievous the national loss.

I entered St. Céré at sundown. This bright little town lies in the midst of fertility. It is on the banks of the Bave, and at the foot of a hill that rises abruptly from the plain, and is capped by two towers of a ruined feudal stronghold, which show against the horizon far into the Quercy, the Corrèze, and the Cantal. Some of the old streets have quite a mediaeval air, with their half-wood houses with stories projecting upon the floor-joists, and others of a grander origin with turrets resting on encorbelments. I had the luck to find a good old-fashioned inn here, and to pass the evening in very pleasant company.

The next morning I climbed to the top of the neighbouring hill to have a closer view of those towers which had been my landmarks on the previous day, passing through the little village of St. Laurent-les-Tours, which lies immediately under the old fortress after the manner of so many others of feudal origin. The towers are rectangular donjons of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, one being nearly a hundred and fifty feet high. The castle was raised upon a table of calcareous rock; but only the towers, a portion of the outer wall built of enormous blocks of stone, and a ruined archway marking the spot where the drawbridge once hung, remain to tell the tale of the past.

That the Romans had fortified this height there is the strongest evidence in the fact that the substructure of the rampart that once surrounded the castle is of cubic stones laid together according to the method so much practised by the Romans, and known as opus reticulatum. Moreover, the coins, pottery, and arms found here seem to afford conclusive proof that this remarkable hill was one of the fortified positions of the Romans in Gaul.

The spot has its Christian legend, which is briefly this: In the castle that crowned the height in the time of the Visigoth kings was born St. Espérie, daughter of a Duke of Aquitaine. Being pressed to marry, notwithstanding the vow she had made to consecrate her life to God, she hid herself in a neighbouring forest for three months. She was at length discovered by her enraged brother and lover, who cut off her head. Like St. Denis, St. Espérie picked up her head, to the unspeakable astonishment and dismay of her persecutors. They fled from her, but she followed them as far as a little stream that flows into the Bave at St. Céré. Espérie is a saint much venerated in the Haut-Quercy. The church of St. Céré is dedicated to her, and the name given to the town is supposed to be a corruption of Espérie.

From St. Céré I took the road to Castelnau-de-Bretenoux, returning for some distance by the way I came. Inns being now very scarce in the district, I decided to take my chance of lunch in a small village called St. Jean-Lespinasse. Another saint! The map of France is still covered with the names of saints, in spite of all the efforts of revolutionists and pagan reformers to make the people abandon their 'Christian superstitions.' Those who in the 'ages of faith' built up this association of saints and places could have had no conception of the power that these names would have in binding Christianity to the soil in the faithless or doubting ages to come. The only inn at St. Jean-Lespinasse was kept by a blacksmith, and the room where I had my meal was over the forge. Bread and cheese and eggs were, as I expected, the utmost that such a hostelry could offer in the way of food for a wayfarer's entertainment. Before leaving the village I found the church—a curious old structure of the Transition period, with a large open porch covered with mossy tiles, held up by rough pillars. There were stone benches inside, on which generations of villagers had sat and gossiped in their turn. In the interior were columns engaged in the wall of the nave, with the capitals elaborately and heavily foliated with pendent bunches of flowers and fruit, much more in accordance with English than French taste.

I crossed the Bave, and followed a road bordered with hedgerows of quince that presently skirted sunny slopes covered with lately-planted vines. Thunder was moaning and growling in the distance when I reached the much-embowered village of Castelnau, upon a height immediately under the reddish walls and towers of the immense feudal stronghold, the fame of which went far and wide in the Middle Ages. Its name in the Southern dialect means 'new castle,' but it dates from the eleventh or twelfth century. Extensive additions were made in subsequent ages, notably a wing in the Renaissance style, which was inhabited until the middle of the present century, when all but the walls was destroyed by fire.

The feudal castle was built upon the plan of a triangle, with a tower at each angle, the one at the apex being the donjon. The form of this lofty keep is rectangular, and the machicolations and embattlements which were added in the fifteenth century are in a perfect state of preservation. Upon the platform, which I was able to reach by means of ladders and the half-ruinous spiral staircase, viper's bugloss spread its brilliant blue flowers over the dark stones, and enticed the high-soaring bees. The view of the wide and beautiful Dordogne Valley from these old battlements was not less grand because more than one-half of the sky was of a bluish-black—a mysterious canopy that concealed the genius of the storm, but from the turbulent folds of which there darted every minute a dazzling line of light. The tower on which I stood, although the highest of the three, had never been struck by lightning, but one of the others had been repeatedly struck, and the ruined masonry showed abundant signs of the scorching it had undergone in this way. Lightning is capricious and incomprehensible in its preferences.

This castle was besieged by Henry Plantagenet in 1159, but without success. Subsequently he made another effort, and then reduced it. His son Henry made it his headquarters for some time after he had revolted. In 1369 Thomas de Walkaffera the English seneschal who held Réalville on behalf of his sovereign, was besieged there by a Lord of Castelnau, assisted by other barons. The garrison was overcome and massacred. Another Lord of Castelnau, John, Bishop of Cahors, convened a meeting of the States of the Quercy in his fortress, at which a rising against the English was decided upon. It resulted in their temporary expulsion from the Quercy.

Besides the towers and exterior walls, there are some chambers of the old castle in good preservation. The chapel is still roofed, and the altar-stone is in its place. In an elevated chamber at the lower end, the dead were laid while awaiting burial.

Descending to the village, I entered the parish church—a Gothic building of the fourteenth century, containing many interesting details. The oak stalls, each with a quaint human figure carved upon it, are exceedingly curious. Outside the church little girls were playing, in the charge of a Sister who had a beautiful sweet face. She showed me the way to the next village, where I hoped to find shelter from the gathering storm. I have a pleasant picture in the mind of Castelnau—a bowery, ancient, mossy place, with vines climbing about the houses or on trellises in the little steep gardens, and a golden bloom of stonecrop upon the rough walls.

I reached the village of Prudhomat just as the storm burst over it, and took shelter in a small inn, which, like most of those in the country, had its room for the public upstairs. Two women who were there made the sign of the cross each time the lightning flashed—a widespread custom of the French peasantry; but a couple of men who were eating salad and bread paid no heed to the furious cannonade that was kept up by the darkened heavens. It was four o'clock, and they were having their goûter. The peasants of the Quercy do not live on the fat of the land; but they generally have five meals a day, two more than the middle-class French. They begin with soup at a very early hour in the morning; then they have their dinner about ten, which is chiefly soup; at three or four they have a goûter of bread and cheese, salad or fruit; and at six or seven they have their supper, which is soup again.

The old woman who sat near the window worked diligently with her distaff laden with hemp, except when the flashing lightning made her stop to raise her thin hand to her forehead. She was twisting the thread from which the sheets of the country are made. They are coarse, but they last longer than the hands that work the hemp, and descend from mother to daughter.

More than two hours I waited in this auberge while the rain fell in torrents, the lightning blazed, and the thunder crashed. The whole sky was the colour of slate. When at length a line of bright light appeared in the western sky, I could curb my impatience no longer, and, hoisting my pack, I was soon on the road to Carennac.

A little beyond the village I passed a gipsy encampment ranged along the side of the highway on a strip of waste land. There were no tents; but there were four or five miserable little caravans, roofed over with tattered and dirty canvas. They were tents on wheels. Some thin and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside grass, the young burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled their mouths with dust. Small portable stoves—alas! not the traditional fire with three stakes set in the ground and tied at the top, with the pot swinging therefrom—had been lighted outside the caravans, and gipsy women were making the evening soup. Bright-eyed, shock-headed, uncombed, unwashed, but exceedingly happy gipsy children were tumbling over one another on the wet turf, showing so much of their brown skin between their rags that they would have been more comfortable and quite as decent had they been naked. A hideous old man, merely skin and bones, sitting nose and knees together upon a sack, did not take my curiosity in good part, but glared at me morosely. The younger men of this interesting community were elsewhere—perhaps mending saucepans, or reassuring ducks alarmed by the thunderstorm. A musician of the party must have been kept in by the bad weather, for from one of the caravans came the diabolic screech of a wheezing concertina that had got rid of all its ideals and dreams of distinction.

The bright line in the west moved very slowly upwards, and the rain continued to fall, although less drenchingly than before. The setting sun strove with the cloud-rack and coloured the veil of vapour that its rays could not pierce. The nightingales and thrushes in the shrubs, and the finches amidst the later blossoms of the may, took heart again, and the song rose from so many throats near and far that the whole valley of the Dordogne was filled with warbling. As the birds grew drowsy the frogs came out to spend a happy night on the margins of the pools and the brooks, until their joyful screaming and croaking was a universal chorus. I was by the side of the broad river that flowed calmly through the fairest meadows. The face of the stream, the pools in the road, the grass and the leaves, were brightened with the orange glow of a veiled light as of some sacred fire shining in the dusk through clouds of incense. It grew warmer and warmer until it purpled and died away in grayness and mournful shadow. The beauty of nature at such moments, when the colours brighten and fade like the powers of the mind as the human day is closing, takes a solemnity that is unearthly, and it is good to be alone with the mystery.

It was dark when I reached Carennac. I did not realize how wet I was until I sat down in an auberge and tried to make myself comfortable for the night. It is not easy, however, to be happy under such circumstances. When the fire on the hearth was stirred up and fed with fresh wood to cook my dinner of barbel that had just had time to die after being pulled out of the Dordogne, I placed myself in the chimney-corner to dry before the welcome blaze. How cheering is a fire, even in June and in Southern France, on a rainy night, when the sound of sighing trees comes down the chimney and the tired wayfarer's clothes are sticking to his legs and back! How cheering, too, at such a time is a dinner, however modest, in the light and warmth of the fire. A humble barbel has then a more delicate flavour than a salmon-trout cooked with consummate art for people who never know what it is to be hungry.

The next morning I was in the cloisters belonging to the Benedictine priory of Carennac, of which Fénélon was the titular prior. Hither he came for quietude, and here he wrote his 'Télémaque,' a historical trace of which is found in a little island of the Dordogne, which is called 'L'Ile de Calypso.' It is recorded that the mother of the great Churchman and writer, when she feared that she would be childless, went on a pilgrimage to Roc-Amadour, and that Fénélon was the consequence of that act of devotion.

The cloisters of Carennac, built from plans furnished by that fountain of ecclesiastical art in the Middle Ages, the monastery of Cluny, must, judging from the remnants of tracery in the arcades, and the delicately carved bosses of the vaults, have been once a spot where the spirit of Gothic architecture found delight. Now the spirit of ruin dwells there, leading the bramble and the celandine to conquer, year after year, some fresh territory upon the ancient quadrangle's crumbling wall. Above, where the sunbeam strikes upon the wrinkled stone, the lizard basks and the bee fresh from its hive hums as blithely among the yellow flowers of the celandine as if the blocks raised by men in their reaching towards Heaven were nothing more than the rocks that cast their shadows upon the Dordogne. Upon the ground, man, by using no rein of respect to curb the lower needs of life, has desecrated the spot with pigsties! Some inhabitant of Carennac, into whose hands the cloisters passed in recent times, thought that a place which was good enough for Benedictine monks to walk in might, with a little fresh masonry, be made fit for pigs to feed and sleep in. But an end had come to this idyllic state of things. The cloisters of Carennac had just been placed on the list of historic monuments. The adjoining church had been 'classed' long before.

This church, a small Gothic edifice of the twelfth century, has a far-projecting porch enriched with a specimen of mediaeval carving which is a long delight to the few archaeologists who find their way to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles. The influence of Byzantine art is perceptible in the treatment. Very few such masterpieces of twelfth-century carving have been so well preserved as this. The seated figure of Christ in the act of blessing His Apostles, the right hand upraised, the left resting upon a clasped book, impresses the beholder by its majesty and serenity. Very different are the figures of the Apostles: these are men, and of a very common type too, such as the Benedictines were accustomed to see in their own cloisters, or among their dependents at Carennac. But how animated are the forms, and how expressive the faces! The mouldings which serve as a border to the composition are much more Romanesque or Byzantine than Gothic, and the columns that support it have capitals which are purely Romanesque. In the interior of the church is a fifteenth-century group of seven figures, representing the scene of the Holy Sepulchre; an admirable composition, showing to what a high degree of excellence French sculpture had attained even at the dawn of the Renaissance.

WAYFARING UNDERGROUND.

Upon the stony plateau above Roc-Amadour is a cavern well known in the district as the Gouffre de Révaillon. It had for me a peculiar attraction on account of the gloomy grandeur of the scene at the entrance. When I saw it for the first time I understood at once the supernatural horror in which the peasant has learnt to hold such places. It responds to impressions left on the mind of the 'Stygian cave forlorn,' the entrance to Dante's 'City of Sorrow,' and that other cave where Aeneas witnessed in cold terror the prophetic fury of the Sibyl.

This effect of gloom, horror and sublimity is the result of geological conditions and the action of water, which together have produced many similar phenomena in the region of the causses, but in no other case, I believe, with such power in composing the picturesque. Imagine an open plain which in the truly Dark Ages whereof man has had no experience, but of whose convulsions he has learnt to read a little from the book whose leaves are the rocks, cracked along a part of its surface as a drying ball of clay might do, the fissure finishing abruptly and where it is deepest in front of a mass of rock that refused to split. This was apparently the beginning of the Gouffre de Révaillon. Then came another submersion which greatly modified the appearance of things. There was evidently a deluge here after the land had dried and cracked, and it must have lasted a very long time for the waves to have hollowed, smoothed and polished the rocks inside the caverns and elsewhere as we now see them. Those who have observed with a little attention a rugged coast will, without being geologists, recognise the distinctly marine character of the greater number of these orifices in the calcareous district of the causses. The washing and smoothing action of the sea along the sides of the gorges which cut up the surface of the country in such an astonishing manner is not so easy to distinguish. But the reason is obvious. This limestone rock is by its nature disintegrating wherever it is exposed to the air and frost, and the foundations of the bastions which support the causses are being continually sapped by water which carries away the lime in solution and deposits a part of it elsewhere in the form of stalactite and stalagmite in the deep galleries where subterranean rivers often run, and which probably descend to the lowest part of the formation. Thus by the dislodgment of huge masses of rock which have rolled down from their original positions, and the breaking away of the surfaces of others, the most convincing traces of the sea's action here have nearly disappeared. In the gorge of the Alzou, however, near Roc-Amadour, about 100 feet above the channel of the stream, there is a considerable reach of hard rock approaching marble, the polished and undulating surface of which tells the story of the ocean, just as the sides of the caverns in much more elevated positions tell it.

In the rock where the fissure ends at Révaillon is an opening like a vast yawning mouth, the roof of which forms an almost perfect dome. Adown this a stream trickles towards the end of summer, but plunges madly and with a frightful roar in winter and spring. The steep sides of the narrow ravine are densely wooded, and the light is very dim at the bottom when the sun is not overhead. I made my first attempt to descend the dark passage in the early summer, but there was too much water, and I was soon obliged to retreat. One afternoon in October I returned with a companion, and we took with us a rope and plenty of candles. We carried the rope in view of possible difficulties in the shape of rocks inside the cavern, for it should be borne in mind that in gouffres of this character the stream frequently descends by a series of cascades. The weather was very sultry, and the sky towards the west was of a slaty blue. A fierce storm was threatening, but we paid no attention to it—a mistake which others bent on exploring caverns where streams still flow should be warned against. There is probably no force in nature more terrible, or which makes a man's helplessness more miserably felt, than water suddenly rushing towards him when he is underground.

The sun was still shining, however, when we reached the Gouffre de Révaillon and descended into the ravine over roots of trees coiling upon the moss like snakes, some arching upward as if about to spring at the throat of those who disturbed the elfish solitude. At our coming there rose from the great rock such a multitude of jackdaws that for some seconds they darkened the air. With harsh screams the birds soared higher and higher above their fortress, which they had possessed for ages in perfect security. We reached the bed of the stream, where scattered threads of water tinkled as they fell over huge blocks into little pools below, and then went whispering on their way towards the darkness. At the botton of a long slant of greenish slimy stone, patched here and there with moss, I stopped a few minutes, feeling that I could not grasp without an effort the deep gloom and grandeur of my surroundings. The jackdaws had all flown away, and there was no sound now but the tinkle and gurgle of the water. Great snails crawled upon the tufts of rank grass wet with the autumnal dews that the sun had failed to dry, and upon the glistening hart's-tongue ferns, and they looked just the kind of snails that witches would collect to make a hell-broth. Dark ivy hung down from the rocks, and under the vaulted entrance of the cavern was a clump of elders, very sinister-looking, and giving forth when touched an evil narcotic odour. Near these forlorn shrubs was a solitary plant of angelica, now woebegone, its fringed leaves drooping, waiting for the rising water to wash it into the darkness. There were willow-herbs still in bloom, but the crane's-bill struggled with the gloom farther than any other flowering plant, and its bright little purple lamps shone in the very mouth of Night. Gnats there were too, spinning in the semi-darkness, now sinking, now rising, keeping together, a merry band of musicians, each with a small flute, piping perhaps to the little goblins that swung on spiders' webs, and slept upon the fronds of the ferns.

Candles were now lighted, and we left the glimmer of day behind us. A little beyond the great dome the roof became so low that we had to creep along almost on hands and knees, but it presently rose again, and to a great height. The first obstacle—the one that sent me back a few months before—was a steep rock down which the water then fell in such a cascade that there was no getting a foothold upon it. Now the water scarcely covered it, and there was no difficulty in reaching the bottom. Here, however, was a pool through which we had to wade knee-deep. The cavern continued, and the stalagmite became interesting by its fantastic shapes. Here was a mass like an immense sponge, even to the colour, and there, descending from the roof down the side of the rock, was the waved hair of an undine that had been changed into white and glistening stone. The stalactites were less remarkable. The sound of dropping water told us that another cascade was near. This we left behind by climbing along the side of the gallery, clinging to the rock, and in the same way four more obstacles of precisely the same character were overcome. All the distance the slope was rapid, but at intervals there was a sudden fall of from ten to fifteen feet, with a black-looking pool at the foot of the rock, hollowed out by the action of the tumbling torrent. The last of these falls was the worst to cross. To this point the cavern had been already explored, but no farther apparently, the local impression being that it ended just beyond. It was an ugly place. The rock over which the water fell was almost perpendicular, and the pool at the bottom was larger and deeper than the others. Seen by the light of day, any schoolboy might have scoffed at the difficulty of getting beyond it, but when you are descending into the bowels of the earth, where the light of two candles can only dissolve the darkness a few yards around you, every form becomes fantastic and awful, and the effect of water of unknown depth upon the imagination is peculiarly disturbing. But we made up our minds to go on if it were possible. The passage was very narrow, and the sides offered few salient points to which one could cling. We moved along a very narrow ledge in a sitting posture, and then, when we had gone as far as we could in this way, and there was nothing beyond to sit upon, we made a spring. My companion, being the more agile, nearly cleared the pool, but I went in with a great splash, as I expected, and thought myself lucky in being only wetted to the waist. The water was not very cold, the temperature of the cavern being much higher than that of the outer air.

We reckoned that we had by this time travelled underground about half a mile, and as we had been descending rapidly all the way, the distance beneath the surface must have been considerable. My theory with regard to this stream was that it was a tributary of the subterranean Ouysse; but the fact that the cavern ran north-west made me change my opinion, and conclude that this water-course took an independent line towards the Dordogne.

A little beyond the last pool the running water suddenly vanished. We looked around to see if it had taken any side passage; but no: it simply disappeared into the earth, although no hole was perceptible in its stony channel. It passed by infiltration into some lower gallery, where the light of a candle had never shone, and is never likely to shine. But we had not reached the end of the cavern, although the passage became so low that we had now really to go down on all-fours in order to proceed. We had not to keep this posture long, for again the roof rose, although to no great height. We walked on about fifty yards or more, and then came to the end. There was no opening anywhere except by the way we entered. We were like flies that had crawled into a bottle, and a very unpleasant bottle it might have proved to us. We noticed—at first with some surprise—that, although there was not a drop of water now in this cul-de-sac, our feet sank into damp sand that had evidently been carried there by water. Sticks were also lying about, and the walls up to the roof were covered with a muddy slime. It was evident that this hole had been filled with water, and not very long ago; probably the last thunderstorm accounted for the signs of recent moisture. While we were talking about this, a strange, muffled, moaning sound reached our ears. We looked at one another over the tops of two candles. 'Thunder,' said my companion. In a few minutes the same dismal moan, long drawn out, came down the cavern, which acted like a speaking-tube between us and the outer world, and conveyed a timely warning. Was it in time? We were not quite sure of this, for as we issued from the cul-de-sac we heard the water coming down the rocks with a very different voice from that which it had not many minutes before. It was clear that the storm was beginning to tell upon the stream, and if the rain had been falling for half an hour, as I had already seen it fall in the Quercy, we might find the work of recrossing those pools and climbing up the cascades anything but cheerful. Already where we had been able to walk on dry stones the water was now up to our ankles. The first cascade to surmount was the worst. We decided to try it on the side opposite to the one by which we descended, for we observed a jutting and highly-polished piece of stalagmite, which promised to help the manoeuvre. One went first, and the other waited, holding the candle. I was in the rear. When my companion had reached the top of the cascade, I threw him the coil of rope—a useless encumbrance, as it happened—and in so doing put out the candle. Before I was sure that I had a dry match upon me, I failed to seize the humour, although I felt the novelty of the situation. During those seconds of uncertainty, the sound of the water—really fast increasing—seemed to become a deafening roar. However, we both had dry matches, and were able to relight our candles; but it might have been otherwise, wet as we were. Without light we should have been as helpless beneath those rocks as mice in a pitcher. The first cascade conquered, we felt much more comfortable, for the picture of being washed into that cul-de-sac had flashed upon the mind of each.

As the next and the next cascade were passed, our spirits rose still more; and when we saw the gray daylight in the distance, our gaiety was quite genuine, and we no longer 'laughed yellow,' as the French phrase it. The stream was rapidly becoming a frantic torrent, but we were not afraid of it now. On reaching the dome, we saw the water pouring over rocks that were dry when we entered, and the clouds seemed to be emptying their rain in frenzy.

An hour later the stream that was lisping so innocently as it threaded its way amongst the stones, and dropped from rock to rock before the storm, sent up a wild roar from the bottom of the valley, and shrieked like a tormented fiend, as it leaped into the black mouth of the Gouffre de Révaillon. Tons of water had probably collected there at the bottom of the gulf. And I, in my shortsightedness, had hoped that the cavern was two or three miles long! I had great reason to be thankful that it ended where it did, for the excitement of adventure would have carried us on, and we might have gone too deep into the earth to hear the thunder.

On emerging from the darkness, we made all the haste we could to reach the nearest inn. The storm was still at its height; the thunder was an almost continuous roar; and the quick lightning-flashes lit up the streaming country. We were quite drenched on reaching a little wayside auberge. Water was soon boiling upon the wood-fire, and having set rheumatism at defiance with steaming glasses of grog, we left for Roc-Amadour, where, on our arrival, we found our friends about to start with lanterns to look for us in the Gouffre de Révaillon.

* * * * *

Noticing one day a low cavern in the rocks beside the Ouysse, I asked if anyone had ever entered it, and was told that a man had done so; that he had found a long, low gallery, which he followed for two or three hundred yards, and then gave up the attempt to reach the end. It was well known that the hole, being on a level with the water, was much used by otters. The desire to explore this cavern becoming strong, I spoke to Decros about the adventure. He was ready to go with me; and so we started, taking with us enough candles to light a ball-room.

On our way over the hills from Roc-Amadour, we passed two dolmens, one of which was in good preservation. There are several hundred of them in the Quercy; and the peasants, who call them pierros levados (raised stones), also 'tombs of the giants' and caïrous, in which last name the Celtic word cairn has been almost preserved, treat them now with indifference, although it is recorded of one of the early bishops of Cahors that he caused a menhir to be broken to pieces because it was an object of idolatrous worship. Those who have been to the trouble of excavating have almost invariably found in each dolmen a cella containing human bones. In some of them flint implements have been discovered; in others iron implements and turquoise ornaments, showing that the tombs, although all alike, belong to different periods. Tumuli are also numerous, but only a few menhirs and traces of cromlechs are to be seen.

Close to the Gouffre de Cabouy, whose outflow forms a tributary of the Ouysse, is a cottage where a man lives whose destiny I have often envied. When he is tired of fishing or shooting, he works in his thriving little vineyard, which he increases every year. The river is as much his own as if it belonged to him; he gets all he wants by giving himself very little trouble, and has no cares. We needed this man's boat for our expedition, and we found it drawn into a little cove beside the ruined mill, long since abandoned. It was a somewhat porous old punt, with small fish swimming about in the bottom; but it was well enough for our purpose. In the warm sunshine of the October afternoon we glided gently down the quiet stream, which is very deep, but so clear that you can see all the water-plants which revel in it, down to the sand and pebbles. Near the banks we passed over masses of watercress, and what might be likened to floating fields of lilies and pond-weed.

It needed no little reflection and expenditure of art to insert the prow of the boat into the mouth of the cavern. What an ugly and uninteresting hole I then thought it! Having run the punt as far as we could into the opening, there still remained about six feet of water to cross before reaching the sandy mud beyond. A plank, however, that we brought with us served as a bridge. The story of the otters was no fable, for here were the footprints of the beasts all over the mud. We lighted candles and looked into the hole. The ground rose and the roof descended, so that to enter it was necessary to lie perfectly flat, and to crawl along by a movement very like that of swimming; then the passage became so small that there was only room for one to go at a time. Neither of us was ambitious to go first, for there was just a chance of an otter seizing the invader by the nose; but neither liked to show the white feather. Each in turn went in a few yards, planted a lighted candle in the mud, and then found some pretext for returning. The hot air of the cavern was almost suffocating, and one felt so helpless flattened against the earth, with the rock pressing so tight upon the back that even to wriggle along was difficult. 'Decros is a native,' thought I, 'and he ought to be used to this kind of work. I will let him understand that he is expected now to do his duty.' In he went again, and planted another candle about a yard in front of the last one. Then he stopped and fired a shot from the revolver that we carried in turn for the otters, and the sound of the detonation seemed to echo in a muffled fashion from the bowels of the earth.

'How many otters have you killed?' I shouted.

'None,' he replied. 'I just fired to let them know that we are here.'

I then asked him if he was going on, and I fancied that he tried to shrug his shoulders, but found the rock in the way. His practical reply, however, was to slowly back out. When he was able to stand up again, he said he believed he had seen the end of the cavern, and would like me to take another look. I now realized that if the secrets of the fantastic realm which my fancy had pictured were to be revealed to me, there must be no more shirking. When I flattened myself out again upon the mud, it was with the determination to go right through the neck of the bottle, for such the passage figuratively was. At one moment I felt tightly wedged, unable to move forward or backward, in a hot steamy atmosphere that was not made any pleasanter by the smoke of the burnt powder; but, the sight of the now rising roof encouraged me to further efforts, and presently I was able to stand upright—in fact, I was in a cavern where a giant of the first magnitude could have walked about with ease, but where he might have been a prisoner for life. I was resolved, however, that Decros should not escape his share of the adventure, so I called to him to come on, and he quickly joined me. To my great disappointment, the cavern soon came to an end. Where, we asked, could the otters be hiding themselves? Examining the place more carefully, we found a passage going under the rock at the farther extremity, but nearly filled with sand which the river had washed up in time of flood. Here, then, was the continuation of the cavern. The passage had been made by water, for a subterranean stream must at one time have found an exit here into the Ouysse, and now water was reversing the process by filling up the ancient conduit. But for the otters that kept it open, we should probably have seen no trace of it; and it was for this that we had wriggled our way into the hideous hole like serpents! I left with the impression that there was much vanity in searching for the wonders of the subterranean world.

Having brought back the boat, we stopped at the cottage by the vineyard and tried the juice of the grapes which three weeks before were basking in the sun. It was now a fragrant wine of a rich purple, with a certain flavour of the soil that made it the more agreeable. The fisherman's wife also placed upon the table a loaf of home-made bread, of an honest brown colour, some of the little Roc-Amadour cheeses made from goat's milk, and a plate of walnuts. The window looked out upon the sunny vines, whose leaves were now flaming gold or ruddy brown; the blue river shone in the hollow below, and through the open door there came the tinkling of bells from the rocky wastes where the small long-tailed sheep were moving slowly homeward, nibbling the stunted herbage as they went.

This sound reminded us that the sun would soon drop behind the hill, and that the Pomoyssin, to which we intended to pay a visit on our way home, was not a spot that gained attractiveness from the shades of night. I had heard the country-people speak of it as a peculiarly horrible and treacherous gouffre, and its name, which means 'unwholesome hole,' corresponds to the local opinion of it. The shepherd children would suffer torture from thirst rather than descend into the gloomy hollow and dip out a drop of the dark water which is said to draw the gazer towards it, and then into its mysterious depths under the rock, by the spell of some wicked power. Some years ago a woman, supposed to have been drawn there by the evil spirit, was found drowned, and since then the spot has been avoided even more than it was before.

It was to this place, then, that we went when the sun was setting. The way led up a deep little valley which was an absolute desert of stones. A dead walnut-tree, struck apparently by lightning, with its old and gnarled branches stretching out on one side like weird arms, was just the object that the imagination would place in a valley blighted by the influence of evil spirits, in proximity to a passage communicating from their world to this one. Presently, as we drew near some high rocks, Decros, pointing to a dark hollow in the shadow of them said, 'There it is.' We went down into the basin to the edge of the water that lay there, black and still, Decros showing evident reluctance and restlessness the while, so strongly was his mind affected by all the stories he had heard about the pool. Moreover, it was rapidly growing dusk. In this half-light the funnel in which we were standing certainly did look a very diabolic and sinister hole. The fancy aiding, everything partook of the supernatural: the dark masses of brambles hanging from the rocks, the wild vines clinging to them with leaves like flakes of deep-glowing crimson fire, and especially the intermittent sound of gurgling water.

I was glad to have seen the Pomoyssin under circumstances so favourable, but it was with relief that I left it and began to climb the side of the gorge from this valley of dreadful shadows towards the pure sky that reddened as the brown dusk deepened below.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE CÉLÉ.

It was a burning afternoon of late summer when I walked across the stony hills which separate the valley of the Lot from that of its tributary the Célé, between Capdenac and Figeac. I did not take the road, but climbed the cliffs, trusting myself to chance and the torrid causse. I wished that I had not done so when it was too late to act differently. There was nothing new for me upon the bare hills, where all vegetation was parched up except the juniper bushes and the spurge. At length I found the road that went down with many a flourish into the valley of the Célé, and I reached Figeac in the evening, covered with dust, and as thirsty as a hunted stag. Here I took up my quarters for awhile.

Figeac is not a beautiful town from the Haussmannesque point of view—the one that is destined to prevail in all municipal councils; but it is full of charm to the archaeologist and the lover of the picturesque. There are few places even in France which have undergone so little change during the last five or six hundred years. Elsewhere, thirteenth and fourteenth century houses are becoming rare; here they are numerous. There are streets almost entirely composed of them. These streets are in reality narrow crooked lanes paved with pebbles, slanting towards the gutter in the centre. Some are only three or four yards wide, and the walls half shut out the light of day. You look up and see a mere strip of blue sky, but trailing plants reaching far downward from window-sills, one above the other, light up the gloom with many a patch of vivid green. You venture down some dim passage and come suddenly upon a little court where an old Gothic portal with quaint sculptures, or a Renaissance doorway with armorial bearings carved over the lintel, bears testimony to the grandeur and wealth of those who once lived in the now grimy, dilapidated, poverty-stricken mansion. Pretentious dwellings of bygone days have long since been abandoned to the humble.

Here is a typical house in the Rue Abel, which is scarcely wide enough for two to walk abreast. The oak door is elaborately carved with heads and leaves, flowers and line ornament, all in strong relief. One grimacing puckered head has a movable tongue that once lifted a latch on being touched. Near the ground the oak has been half devoured by the damp. This door would have been sold long ago to antiquaries or speculators if the house since the Revolution had not become the property of several persons all equally suspicious of one another, and with the Cadurcian bump of obstinacy equally developed. They had no respect for the carving, and they were eager to 'touch' the money; but their interests in the house not being the same, they could never come to an understanding over the door; consequently, in spite of very tempting offers, the piece of massive oak continues to hang upon its rusty hinges. So much the better for the student of antiquities, for, without denying that museums are eminently useful, it is certain that they deprive objects of a great deal of their interest and their power of suggesting ideas by detaching them from their surroundings. Moreover, it is not at all sure that these things, when they have been bought up and carried away, will ever be put in a place where anybody can see them who may have the wish to do so. And then, when a thing has been put into a museum, it becomes such labour and painfulness to look for it; and most of us are so lazy by nature. I will make a frank confession. For my own part, I should scarcely look at this old door if it were in the Cluny or any other museum; but here, in ancient Figeac, I see it where it was many lustres ago, and the pleasure of finding it in the midst of the sordidness and squalor that follow upon the decay of grandeur and the evaporation of human hopes makes me feel much that I should not feel otherwise, and calls up ideas as a February sunbeam calls gnats out of the dead earth and sets them spinning.

I venture up the stone staircase, although most of the finely carved balusters are gone, and the arch-stones have so slipped out of place that they seem to cling together by the will of Providence rather than by any physical law. The stairs themselves, although of fine stone that has almost the polish of marble, are cracked as if an earthquake had tormented them, and worn by the tread of innumerable feet into deep hollows. I reach a landing where a long corridor stretches away into semi-darkness. The floor is black with dirt, and so are the doors which once opened into rooms where luxury waited upon some who were born, and upon others (perchance the same) who died. A sound reaches me from the far-end of the corridor that makes me feel like a coward. It is the raving of a madman. How he seems to be contending with all the fiends of hell! Sometimes his voice is so low, and the words crowd one upon another so fast, that the muttering is like the prolonged growl of a wild beast; then the mood changes, and the unseen man seems to be addressing an invisible audience in grand sonorous sentences as though he were a Cicero; and perhaps he may be, but as he speaks in patois his eloquence is lost upon me. What a terrible excitement is in his voice! How it thrills and horrifies! And he is alone, quite alone in this dismal old house with the fiends who harass him. This I learn from a young girl whom I meet at the bottom of the staircase. She tells me that the man is only mad at the time of the new or the full moon (I forget which), and that his raving lasts but two or three days. Then nobody ventures near him; but at other times he is quite rational and harmless. He has left, however, upon me an impression more lasting perhaps than that of the old tottering staircase that threatens to close up every moment like a toy snake that has been stretched out.

Most of the old houses are entered by Gothic doorways, and the oak doors are studded with large nail-heads. The locks and bolts are of mediaeval workmanship. Sometimes you see an iron ring hanging to a string that has been passed through a hole in the door. It is just such a string as Little Red Riding-hood (an old French fable, by-the-bye) pulled to lift the latch at the summons of the wicked wolf. And what a variety of ancient knockers have we here! Many are mere bars of iron hanging to a ring; but others are much more artistic, showing heads coifed in the style of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, serpents biting their own tails, and all manner of fanciful ideas wrought into iron. In wandering about the dim old streets, paved with cobble stones, architectural details of singular interest strike one at every turn. Now it is the encorbelment of a turret at the angle of a fifteenth or sixteenth century mansion that has lost all its importance; now a dark archway with fantastic heads grimacing from the wall; now an arcade of Gothic windows, with graceful columns and delicate carvings—a beautiful fragment in the midst of ruin.

What helps much to render these dingy streets, passages, and courts of Figeac so delightfully picturesque is the vegetation which, growing with southern luxuriance in places seemingly least favourable to it, clings to the ancient masonry, or brightens it by the strong contrast of its immediate neighbourhood in some little garden or balustraded terrace. Wherever there are a few feet of ground some rough poles support a luxuriant vine-trellis, and grapes ripen where one might suppose scarcely a gleam of sunshine could fall. The vine clambers over everything, and sometimes reaches to the top of a house two stories high. The old walls of Figeac are likewise tapestried with pellitory and ivy-linaria, with here and there a fern pushing its deep-green frond farther into the shadow, or an orpine sedum lifting its head of purple flowers into the sunshine that changes it to a flame.

There is much in the life of this place that matches perfectly with the surroundings. Enter by a Gothic doorway, and you will come upon a nail-maker's forge, and see a dog turning the wheel that keeps the bellows continually blowing. The wheel is about a foot broad, and stands some three feet high. The dog jumps into it at a sign from his master, and as the wheel turns the sparks from the forge fall about the animal in showers. Each dog is expected to work five or six hours; then, when his task is done, he is allowed to amuse himself as he pleases, while a comrade takes his turn at the wheel. The nail-makers discovered long ago that dog labour was cheaper than boy labour, and not so troublesome. Nevertheless, these wheels belong to an order of things that has nearly passed away.

The crier or tambourineur, as he is generally called, because he carries a drum, which he beats most lustily to awaken the curiosity of the inhabitants, is making the round of the town with an ox, which is introduced to the public as 'le boeuf ici présent.' The crier's business is to announce to all whom it may concern that the animal is to be killed this very evening, and that its flesh will be sold to-morrow at 1 franc 25 centimes the kilo. It will all go at a uniform price, for this is the local custom. Those who want the aloyau, or sirloin, only have to be quick. The ox, notwithstanding that he has a rope tied round his nose and horns, and is led by the butcher, evidently thinks it a great distinction to be tambouriné; his expression indicating that this is the proudest day of his life. Every time the drum begins to rattle he flourishes his tail, and when each little ceremony is over he moves on to a fresh place with a jaunty air, as if he were aware that all this drumming and fuss were especially intended for his entertainment. No condemned wretch ever made his last appearance in public with a better grace.

Another day I see this crier going round the town accompanied by a boy every available part of whose person is decked with ribbons, and all kinds of things ordinarily sold by drapers and haberdashers. Over each shoulder is slung a pair of women's boots. The boy is a walking advertisement of an exceptional sale, which a tradesman announces with the help of the crier and his drum.

A band of women and girls come up from the riverside, walking in Indian file, and each with a glittering copper water-pot on her head. What beautiful water-pots these are! They have the antique curve that has not changed in the course of ages. They swell out at the bottom and the top, and fall gracefully in towards the middle. As the women quit the sunshine and enter the deep shadow of the street the shine of their water-pots is darkened suddenly, like the sparks of burnt paper which follow one upon another and go out.

The sound of solemn music draws me into a church. A requiem Mass is being chanted. In the middle of the nave, nearer the main door than the altar, is a deal coffin with gable-shaped lid, barely covered by a pall. A choir-boy comes out of the sacristy, carrying a pan of live embers, which he places at the head of the coffin. Then he sprinkles incense upon the fire, and immediately the smoke rises like a snow-white cloud towards the vaulting; but, meeting the sunbeams on its way, it moves up their sloping golden path, and seems to pass through the clerestory window into the boundless blue.

Now the procession moves towards the cemetery. It is a boy's funeral, and four youths of about the same age as the one who lies in darkness hold the four corners of each pall, two of which are carried in front of the coffin. After the hearse come members of the confraternity of Blue Penitents, one of whom carries a great wooden cross upon his shoulder. Others carry staves with small crosses at the top, or emblems of the trades that they follow. The dead boy's father is a Penitent, and this is why the confraternity has come out to-day. They now wear their cagoules raised; but on Good Friday, when they go in procession to a high spot called the Calvary, the leader walking barefoot and carrying the cross on his shoulder in imitation of Christ, they wear these dreadful-looking flaps over their faces. Their appearance then is terrible enough; but what must that of the Red Penitents, who accompanied condemned wretches to execution, have been? In a few years there will be no Blue Penitents at Figeac. As the old members of the confraternity die, there are no postulants to fill their places. Already they feel, when they put on their 'sacks', that they are masquerading, and that the eye of ridicule is upon them. This state of mind is fatal to the conservation of all old customs. The political spirit of the times is, moreover, opposed to these religious processions in France. That of the fête-Dieu at Figeac would have been suppressed some years ago by the Municipal Council had it not been for the outcry of the tradespeople. All the new dresses, new hats, and new boots that are bought for this occasion cause money to be spent that might otherwise be saved, and those who are interested in the sale of such things wish the procession through the streets to be kept up, although in heart they may be among the scoffers at religion.

The religious confraternities in Aquitaine date from the appearance of the routiers at the close of the twelfth century. These routiers were then chiefly Brabançons, Aragonese, and Germans. According to an ecclesiastical author and local historian, the Abbé Debon, the lawless bands spread such terror through the country that they stopped the pilgrims from going to Figeac, Conques, and other places that had obtained a reputation for holiness. A canon of Le Puy in Auvergne, much distressed by the desertion of the sanctuary of Notre Dame de Puy, which rivals that of Roc-Amadour in antiquity, formed the design of instituting a confraternity to wage war against the routiers and destroy them. A 'pious fraud' was adopted. A young man, having been dressed so as to impersonate Notre Dame du Puy, appeared to a carpenter who was in the habit of praying every night in the cathedral, and gave him the mission of revealing that it was the will of the Holy Virgin that a confraternity should be formed to put down the brigands and establish peace in the country. Hundreds of men enrolled themselves at once. The confrères, from the fact that they wore hoods of white linen, obtained the name of Chaperons Blancs. Upon their breasts hung a piece of lead with this inscription: 'Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi dona nobis pacem.' The confraternity spread into Aquitaine, and the routiers were defeated in pitched battles with great slaughter; but the chaperons in course of time became lawless fanatics, and were almost as great a nuisance to society as those whom they had undertaken to exterminate. They were nevertheless the ancestors in a sense of the confraternities of penitents who, at a later period, became so general in Europe.

The monthly fair at Figeac offers some curious pictures of rural life. The peasants crowd in from the valleys and the surrounding causses. Racial differences, or those produced by the influences of soil and food—especially water—for a long series of generations, are very strongly marked. There is the florid, robust, blue-eyed, sanguine type, and there is the leaden-coloured, black-haired, lantern-jawed, sloping-shouldered, and hollow-chested type. Then there are the intermediates. Considered generally, these peasants of the Haut-Quercy are not fine specimens of the human animal. They are dwarfed, and very often deformed. Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this physical degeneration of the Cadurci. Their character is honest in the main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the force of circumstance. Their worst qualities are shown at a fair, where they cheat as much as they can, and place no limit to lying. Their canon of morality there is that everyone must look after himself. I have been assured by a priest that they never think of confessing the lies that they tell in bartering, because they maintain that every man who buys ought to understand his business. I much wondered why, at a Figeac fair, when there was a question of buying a bullock, the animal's tail was pulled as though all his virtue were concentrated in this appendage. I learnt that the reason of the tugging was this: Cattle are liable to a disease that causes the tail to drop off, but the people here have discovered a very artful trick of fastening it on again, and it needs a vigorous pull to expose the fraud. Among other tricks of the country is that of drenching an ill-tempered and unmanageable horse with two litres of wine before taking him to the fair. He then becomes as quiet as a lamb. I heard the story of a curé, who was thus imposed upon by one of his own parishioners. He wanted a very quiet horse, and he found one at the fair; but the next day, when he went near the animal, it appeared to be possessed of the devil. All this is bad; but there is satisfaction to the student of old manners in knowing that everything takes place as it did centuries ago. The cattle-dealers and peasants here actually transact their business in pistoles and écus. A pistole now represents 10 francs, and an écu 3 francs.

The summer is glorious here, and as the climate is influenced by that of Auvergne, it is less enervating by the Célé than in the neighbouring valley of the Lot. There, some twenty miles farther south, the grapes ripen two or three weeks sooner than they do upon these hillsides. But the vent d'autan—the wind from the south-east—is now blowing, and, although there is too much air, one gasps for breath. The brilliant blue fades out of the sky, and the sun just glimmers through layers of dun-coloured vapour. It is a sky that makes one ill-tempered and restless by its sameness and indecision. But the wind is a worse trial. It blows hot, as if it issued from the infernal cavern. It sets the nerves altogether wrong, and disposes one to commit evil deeds from mere wantonness and the feeling that some violent reaction from this influence is what nature insists upon. It is a wind that does not blow a steady honest gale, but goes to work in a treacherously intermittent fashion—now lulled to a complete calm, now springing at you like a tiger from the jungle. Then your eyes are filled with dust, unless you close them quickly, or turn your back to the enemy in the nick of time. The night comes, and brings other trouble. You try to sleep with closed windows, so that you may hear less of the racket that the wind makes outside, but it is impossible: you stifle. You get up and open a window—perhaps two windows. The wind rushes in, but it is like the hot breath of a panting dog. The noise of swinging persiennes that have got loose, and are banged now against the wall, now against the window-frame, mingles with a woful confusion of sounds within, as though a most unruly troop of ghosts were dancing the farandole all through the house. If any door has been left open, it worries you more by its banging at intervals of a minute than if it went on without stopping to consider. Therefore you are compelled to rise again, and go and look for it—anything but a cheerful expedition if you cannot find the matches. When this south wind falls, the rain generally comes, bringing great refreshment to the parched earth, and all the animals that live upon it.

As I have referred to the house in which I live, I may as well say something more with regard to it and the things which it contains. It is not one of the ancient houses of Figeac, but it is old-fashioned and provincial. The rooms are rather large, the floors are venerably black, and the boarded ceilings supported by rafters have never had their structural secrets or the grain of the timber concealed by a layer of plaster. What you see over-head is simply the floor of the room or the loft above. And yet this is not considered a poor-kind of house; it is as good as most good people hereabouts live in. The furniture is simple, but solid; it was made to last, and most of it has long outlasted the first owners. In every room, the kitchen excepted, there is a bed, according to the very general custom of the country. The character of the people is distinctly utilitarian, notwithstanding the blood of the troubadours. There is even a bed in the salle à manger. A piece of furniture, however, from which my eye takes more pleasure is one of those old clocks which reach from the ceiling to the floor, and conceal all the mystery and solemnity of pendulum and weights from the vulgar gaze. It has a very loud and self-asserting tick, and a still more arrogant strike, for such an old clock; but, then, everybody here has a voice that is much stronger than is needed, and it is the habit to scream in ordinary conversation. A clock, therefore, could not make itself heard by such people as these Quercynois, unless it had a voice matching in some sort with their own. Another piece of furniture that pleases me, because it is of shining copper, which always throws a homely warmth into a room, is a large basin fixed upon a stand against the wall, with a little cistern above it, also of copper. It is intended for washing the hands by means of a fillet of water that is set running by turning the tap. In this dry part of the world water has to be used sparingly, and, indeed, there is very little wasted upon the body. Everybody who has travelled in Guyenne must be familiar with the article of household furniture just described. Every young wife piously provides herself with one, together with a warming-pan; for the old domestic ideas are religiously handed down here from mother to daughter. But I must shorten this 'journey round my room,' so little in the manner of Le Maistre.

Most of the furniture was once the property of a priest, and would be still if he were alive. The good man is gone where even the voices of the Figeacois cannot reach him; but he has left abundant traces of his piety behind him. The walls of these rooms are almost covered by them. I cannot help being edified, for I am unable to look upon anything that approaches the profane.

When I grow thoughtful over all these works of art and objets de piété—engravings, lithographs, statuettes, crucifixes, crosses worked in wool, stables of Bethlehem, little holy-water stoops, and the faded photographs belonging to the early period of the art (portraits, no doubt, of brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces, all revealing that air of rusticity in Sunday clothes which is not to be mistaken)—I have before me the whole story of a simple life, surrounding itself year after year with fresh emblems and tokens of the hope that reaches beyond the grave, and the affections of nature that become woven on this side of it, and which mingle joy and sorrow even in the cup of a village priest.

It is in these quiet, provincial places, where existence goes on in the old-fashioned, humdrum way, that people take care of their household property, and respect the sentiment that years lay up in it: they hand it down to the next generation as they received it. Little objects of common ornament, of religious or intellectual pleasure, thus preserved, throw in course of time a vivid light on human changes.

And it is this vivid light that I am now feeling in these dim rooms. I am aware that nearly everything here is the record of an epoch to which I do not belong—that the world's mind has undergone a great change even in the provinces since the influence that comes forth from these silent traces of past thought were in harmony with it. What interests me more than anything else here is an allegorical or mystical map, designed, drawn, and coloured with all the patience and much of the artistic skill of an illuminating monk of the thirteenth century. I doubt if in any presbytery far out in the marshes or on the mountains a priest could now be found with the motive to undertake such a task. It belongs to the same order of ideas as the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' In this map one sees the 'States of Charity,' the 'Province of Fervour,' the 'Empire of Self-Contempt,' and other countries belonging to a vast continent, of which the centre is the 'Kingdom of the Love of God,' connected to a smaller continent—that of the world—by a narrow neck of land called the 'Isthmus of Charity.' In the continent of the world are shown the 'Mountain of Ingratitude,' the 'Hills of Frivolity,' the territory of 'Ennui,' of 'Vanity,' of 'Melancholy,' and of all the evil moods and vices to which men are liable. Separated from the mainland, and washed by the 'Torrent of Bitterness,' are the 'Rocks of Remorse.' Among the allegorical emblems in various parts of the chart is a very remarkable tree with blue trunk and rose-coloured leaves called the 'Tree of Illusions.' Far above it lies the 'Peninsula of Perfection,' and near to this, under a mediaeval drum-tower, is the gateway of the 'City of Happiness.'

There is a little garden at the back of the house, where flowers and vegetables are mixed up in the way I like. The jessamine has become a thicket. Vines ramble over the trellis and the old wall, and from the window I see many other vines showing their lustrous leaves against tiled roofs of every shade, from bright-red to black. In the next garden is my friend the aumônier, an octogenarian priest, who is still nearly as sprightly of body as he is of mind. He lives alone, surrounded by books, in the collection of which he has shown the broad judgment, and impartiality of the genuine lover of literature. There is a delicious disorder in his den, because there is no one to interfere with him. He is now much excited against the birds because they will not leave his figs alone, and someone has just lent him a blunderbuss wherewith to slay them. Perhaps he will show them the deadly weapon, and hope that they will take the hint; but there is too much kindness underneath his wrath for him to be capable of murdering even a thievish sparrow. He likes to make others believe, however, that he is desperately in earnest. His keen sense of the comic and the grotesque in human nature makes him one of the raciest of story-tellers; but although he does not put his tongue in traces, he is none the less a worthy priest. There are many such as he in France—men who are really devout, but never sanctimonious, whose candour is a cause of constant astonishment, who are good-natured to excess, and who are more open-hearted than many children. Their friendship goes out readily to meet the stranger, and, speaking from my own experience, I can say that it wears well. In the street, on the other side of the house, six women have perched themselves in a row. They have come out to talk and enjoy the coolness of the evening, and, in order that their tender consciences may not prick them for being idle, they are paring potatoes, and getting ready other vegetables for the morrow. They all scream together in Languedocian, which, by-the-bye, is anything but melodious here when spoken by the common people. It becomes much less twangy and harsh a little farther South. How these six charmers on chairs can all listen and talk at the same time is not easy to understand. The truth is, very little listening is done in this part of the world. The saying On se grise en parlant is quite applicable here. People often get drunk on nothing stronger than the flow of their own words.

All the women being now on their way to the land of dreams, and consequently quiet for a few hours, and all the sounds of the earth being hushed save the song of the crickets among the vine-leaves, and in the fruit-trees of the moonlit garden, I will try to see Figeac up the vista of the ages, and if I succeed, perhaps the reader may be helped at the same time to gather interest in this queer old place, whose name, having been made familiar to the English who followed Henry II to France in the twelfth century, is perhaps a reason why their descendants will not 'skip' at first sight these few pages of local history.

The early history of Figeac, or what has long passed as such, is based upon an ingenious stratification of fraud, arising out of a very old quarrel between the monks of Figeac and the monks of Conques, and the determination of the former to prove at all costs that their monastery was the more ancient of the two. This would be a matter of indifference to me had I not been myself entrapped by the snares laid by certain abbots of Figeac for their contemporaries and posterity, and been obliged to throw away much that I had written, and which was far more interesting than the truth. If I had only suspected the fraud, I might have been tempted to keep suspicion down in order to spare the picture of the Carlovingian age which I had elaborated; but it is known at the École des Chartres, and the Abbé B. Massabie of Figeac has, moreover, written a book that removes all doubt as to the spuriousness of the charters upon which the abbots of Figeac, when their jealousy of Conques reached its climax in the eleventh century, based their pretensions to priority. The most important of these charters, and the one that has sent various local historians on a voyage into the airy realms of fiction, is attributed to Pepin le Bref, and bears the date 755. Another is a Bull attributed to Pope Stephanus II., also dated 755, in which is described the ceremony of consecrating the church of St. Sauveur, attached to the abbey, which in the first-mentioned document Pepin is said to have founded. Here it is related that when the Pontiff approached the church strains of mysterious music were heard issuing from the edifice, and such a cloud stood before it that the procession waited for hours before entering. Then, when the Pope walked up to the altar-stone, he found that it had been miraculously consecrated, crosses being marked upon it in oil still wet. Now, the charter attributed to Pepin contains many passages copied verbatim from one preserved at Rodez, and signed by Pippinus, or Pepin I., King of Aquitaine. Its date is 838, and it enriches the monastery of Conques, already existing, with certain lands at Fiacus (Figeac), which is thenceforward to be called New Conques; the motive of this gift being to extend to the monks those material advantages which a rich valley is able to afford, but which are not to be found in a stony gorge surrounded by barren hills. There would have been less scandal to Christianity if Pepin had put a curb on his pious generosity, and had left the monks of Conques to contend with the desert. The charter, moreover, sanctions the building of a monastery at Figeac, which is to remain under the rule and governance of the abbots of Conques. In the eleventh century, the discord between the two monasteries had reached such a pass that popes and councils were appealed to to settle the question of priority. In 1096 the Council of Nîmes laid down a modus vivendi without pronouncing upon the principle. It was decreed that the abbots of Figeac should thenceforth be independent of the abbots of Conques.

The monks of Conques appear to have followed originally the rule of St. Martin, and to have adopted that of St. Benedict soon after its introduction into France. The abbey of Figeac was therefore always Benedictine. About the year 900 the monks began to cultivate learning, their labour having previously been devoted almost exclusively to the soil. A certain Abbot Adhelard set them to copy manuscripts, and in course of time Figeac possessed a valuable library, of which the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the Revolution have left very few traces.

The first half of the eleventh century was full of turmoil, trouble, and torment. The 'blood-rain' that fell all over Aquitaine, and which made people watch in terror for what might come next, was followed by a three years' famine, which drove men in their hunger to prey upon one another. The inns were man-traps; solitary travellers who ventured inside of them were killed and devoured. Those were not good wayfaring days. A man actually offered human flesh for sale in the market of Tournus; but he was burnt alive. During this frightful period, the Abbot of Figeac distinguished himself by his charity, and, in order to find work for the unemployed, built a wall round the burg; but the monastery was much impoverished in consequence.

Towards the close of the eleventh century four slender obelisks—called 'needles' in the country—were set up on the hills around Figeac apparently to mark the boundaries of the sauveté; for the abbey enjoyed the right of sanctuary. Two of these needles still exist. According to an absurd story, which has been repeated by various writers, misled by the forgeries already mentioned, the monks, when they came to this part of the valley of the Célé, found it an uninhabited wilderness without a name, and somebody exclaimed, 'Fige acus!' ('Set up needles!'), when the question of marking the boundary was being discussed. This ingenious explanation of the word Figeac will not bear examination.

Every traveller in Aquitaine must have been struck by the remarkable number of places there whose names end in ac. It is commonly supposed that the termination is derived from aqua, and refers to the river or stream near which the town or village was built.

Ac, however, does not at all correspond to the well-known corruptions of aquae still found in the names of places in France where the Romans constructed baths. We are on much surer ground in assuming it to be of Celtic origin, and to have belonged in a special manner to the dialect spoken by the Cadurci, Ruteni and other Southern tribes. It nevertheless occurs at Carnac—that spot of Brittany where is to be seen the most remarkable of all monuments, commonly attributed to the Celts. The word probably meant town. It is unreasonable to suppose that the monks found the valley of the Célé a desert, considering how densely populated was the whole of this part of Gaul at the time of Caesar's invasion. So inhabited was it that the surplus population spread all over the known world, just as the English do to-day. The popular notion with regard to the needles is that they were intended to carry lanterns to guide the pilgrims by night either to Figeac or to Roc-Amadour. Such lanterns were set up in Aquitaine, and some examples may still be seen; but they are very different in character from these obelisks, which in all probability were used to mark the boundary of the salvamentum. It is true that in the Middle Ages the right of asylum was, as a rule, confined to the sanctuary itself or its immediate precincts; but there were exceptions, especially in the South of France, where this sacred zone, which in the Romance language was termed the sauvetat, often extended a considerable distance beyond the walls of a monastic town. Within these bounds persons fleeing from pursuers had the right of asylum; but, on the other hand, there are documents to show that those who committed crimes inside the limit were held guilty of sacrilege.

Early in the Middle Ages the town of Figeac enjoyed the privileges of a royal borough under the protection of the kings of France, who in course of time came to be represented there by their viguier (vicar). The civic administration was in the hands of consuls as early as the year 1001. They rendered justice and even passed sentence of death. The burghers were exempt from all taxation and servitude. The municipality had the right of coining money for the king, and the ruined mint can still be seen. Such was the state of things down to the time when the English appeared in the country. Henry II., having taken Cahors in 1154, left his chancellor, Becket, there as governor. The Figeacois, who at first looked upon Becket as an enemy, after he was murdered at Canterbury, and when the fame of his saintliness began to spread through France, dedicated a church to him. This edifice has disappeared; but the part of the town where it was situated, or where, to speak more correctly, it was afterwards rebuilt, is still called the Quartier St. Thomas. So little were the English loved, however, as a nation by the Quercynois, that, after St. Louis had been canonized, they refused to observe his festival, because they found it impossible to forgive him for having, by the treaty of Abbeville, passed them over to England without their consent.

Figeac was less troubled than some other towns in the Quercy by the English, because in different treaties the kings of France managed to keep a grip upon it as a royal borough.

The gates of the town were, however, thrown open to the English without a struggle about the middle of the fourteenth century, and to punish the consuls, when they again became French, King John took away their right to coin money; but the privilege was restored in consideration of the ardour they had shown in freeing themselves from the British yoke.

The victory of the Black Prince at Poitiers, followed by the treaty of Brétigny, made the King of England absolute master of the Quercy. The Prince of Wales came in person to take possession of Cahors in 1364, and despatched his seneschal, Thomas de Walkaffara, to Figeac to receive from the inhabitants the oath of fealty. They swore obedience, but with much soreness of soul. They afterwards got released from their oath by the Pope, and joined a fresh league formed against the English. After enjoying the sweets of French nationality again for a brief period, they were made English once more by the treaty of Troyes. But the British domination in Guyenne was now approaching its close. The maid of Domrémy was about to change her distaff for an oriflamme. The year 1453 saw the English power completely broken in Aquitaine; a collapse which an old rhymer records with more relish than inspiration:

'Par Charles Septième à grande peine
Furent chassés en durs détroits
Les Anglais de toute Aquitaine,
Mil quatre cent cinquante trois.'

Figeac escaped the horrors which were spread through the South of France by the religious wars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but it was not similarly spared by those of the sixteenth century. The Huguenots laid siege to the town in 1576, and entered it by the treasonable help of a woman—the wife of one of the consuls. There was the usual massacre that followed victory, whether on the side of Protestants or Catholics, and the people became Calvinists for the same reason that they had centuries before become English. In less than fifty years afterwards they were all Catholics again. During this unsettled period, however, there was great domestic dissension in the town, owing to the circumstance that many women belonging to the old Catholic stock had married Protestants who had come into the place. As they could not agree with their husbands, and as many of these refused to be converted for their sake (they may have been thankful for an opportunity of getting rid of them), a refuge called 'L'hospice des mal-mariées' was built for the unhappy wives. When the need for this very singular institution no longer existed it was pulled down.

The Church of St. Sauveur, as we see it to-day, is disappointing. It has been so much rebuilt after different convulsions, and pulled about when there has been less excuse, that many a church in an obscure village gives more pleasure as a whole to the eye that seeks unity of design and inspiration in a work of art. Nevertheless, there are details here that no archaeologist will despise. In the nave are the piers and Romanesque capitals of an early, but not the earliest, church on the spot. They are certainly not later than the twelfth century. Baptismal fonts, now used as holy-water stoups, are probably of anterior workmanship. Cut out of solid blocks of stone, their carving shows all the interlacing lines and exquisite finish of detail, purely ornamental, that marks the pre-Gothic period in the South of France, when the artistic spirit of Christianity was still confined to the close imitation of Roman and Byzantine art.

The Church of Notre Dame du Puy, built upon a height, as the word puy implies, is likewise interesting only in respect of details, such as the sculptured archivolts of the portal and the fourteenth-century rose-window. It, however, contains a very remarkable example of sixteenth-century wood-carving in its massive and elaborate reredos, a portion of which, having been destroyed by fire, has been repaired with plaster, but so skilfully that it is very difficult to perceive where the artistic fraud begins and where it ends.

The extraordinary interest of Figeac to the archaeologist lies, however, in its civic and domestic architecture. This has been preserved simply because the inhabitants have for centuries played no part in the political history of the country, and their pursuits or interests having remained constantly agricultural, they have been equally cut off from the commercial movement. But every year will diminish the charm of this dirty old town to the antiquary. It will be observed that all the old streets are not accidentally crooked, but that they have been carefully laid out on curved or zigzag lines, which turn now in one direction and now in another. The motive was a defensive one in view of street-fighting, which was often so terrible and so prolonged in the Middle Ages. Each curve of a street formed an obstacle to the onward rush of an enemy, and only allowed those burghers who were actually engaged to be exposed to arrows and bolts. The townsmen could dispute the ground inch by inch and for days, as they did at Cahors when they were surprised by Henry of Navarre, although firearms had then come into use.

Wine-growing, until some eight or ten years ago, was the chief source of revenue to the people of Figeac, as well as to those in the neighbouring valley of the Lot. Middle-aged people here can recollect the days when wine was so cheap that the inn-keepers did not take the trouble to measure it out to their customers, but charged them a uniform price of two sous for stopping and drinking as much as they pleased. But all this has been changed by the phylloxera. From being exceptionally prosperous, the people of the district have become poor. Very few have now any money to lay out in replanting their vineyards. Land has so fallen in value that it can be bought at a price that seems scarcely credible. With £100 one might become the proprietor of a large vineyard. Higher up the hills, where the chestnut and juniper thrive, half the money would buy quite a considerable estate. Here and elsewhere in France thousands of acres lie uncultivated and unproductive, except as regards that which nature unaided renders to man. Not all, but a very large portion, of this waste-land would well repay cultivation if the capital needed for clearing and working it were obtainable. That the lands suitable for wine-growing could be rendered remunerative is absolutely certain if those who undertook the task had the money necessary for the first outlay of planting and could afford to wait for the return.

The valley of the Celé between Figeac and the junction of the little river with the Lot contains some of the most picturesque scenery to be found in the Quercy. About ten miles below Figeac it becomes a gorge, which until past the middle of the present century was almost cut off from communication with neighbouring towns. All the carrying was done on the backs of mules and donkeys; but since the road was made along the right bank of the Célé, these animals have been used less and less. It is no uncommon thing, however, to see now a heavily-laden pack-mule coming up the valley to the Figeac fair. It was in their rock-fortresses by the Celé that the English companies in Guyenne are said to have made their final resistance. The long and sustained efforts which were needed to dislodge them from their almost inaccessible fastnesses will be understood by anyone who may go wayfaring like myself along the banks of this tributary of the Lot.

For the first two hours the walk was unexciting, for the valley was too wide and too cultivated to give much pleasure to the eye that looks for character in nature. At the village of Corn there was a decided change. Here lofty honeycombed rocks rose behind the houses that were built not very far above the stream, whose swiftness is supposed to have been the origin of its name. Not one of the several caverns extends far into the cliff. Their chief interest lies in the traditions with which they are associated. In one of them the inhabitants of the little burg are said to have assembled in the Middle Ages to elect their consuls freely, and to escape possible annoyance from their lord, whose castle was on the opposite hill. Another, still called the Citadel, was that in which they took refuge from the enemy, especially from the roving bands of armed men who made common cause with England. In 1380 Bertrand de Bassoran, captain of an English company, captured Corn, and using this place as his point d'appui, he placed garrisons in the neighbouring burgs of Brengues, Sauliac, and Cabrerets. He also compelled the consuls of Cajarc to treat with him.

After a hasty meal in a little inn where I had to be satisfied mainly with good intentions, I called upon the schoolmaster. The poor man was spending most of his dinner-hour on the threshold of his small school-house amidst the rocks because some unruly or idle urchins were 'kept in.' How much pleasanter, I thought, it would have been for him to have produced in their case a wholesome cutaneous irritation, and set himself, as well as the young reprobates, free! But the French law does not tolerate the corporal punishment of children nowadays, although the exasperated pedagogue cannot always resist the temptation of applying his ruler upon a bunch of grimy little knuckles. This schoolmaster, although he was past the age of fifty and had grown corpulent, was still tied fast to the village schoolroom that was much too small to hold thirty children comfortably. By the aid of reading, writing, and arithmetic, he had got into a little creek where he was safe from the stormy seas of life, and he had never allowed his ambition to draw him out into the ocean. Nevertheless, he nursed and rocked his little vanity like the rest of mortals. He had written what he termed a 'Monograph of Corn.' He brought out from his desk a copybook wherein he had set it all down with the utmost attention to upstrokes and downstrokes and punctuation. It was a pleasure to him to find somebody to whom he could read what he had written, and he had in me an attentive listener.

Wandering on by the winding Célé, the charm of the little river made me sit down upon a bank to look at the pictures that were painted on the water by the sunshine, the clouds, and the poplars. Then, continuing my journey, I saw on the opposite side of the stream a cluster of houses with an ancient church in their midst, and almost detached from this church, and yet a part of it, a tower like a campanile capped by a wooden belfry with pointed roof and far-reaching eaves. A bridge led across the water. I found the village to be Sainte Eulalie d'Espagnac. Here there existed from the early Middle Ages a celebrated convent for women of the order of St. Augustine. The founder, Aymeric d'Hébrard, was the Bishop of a see in Spain, and he brought thence Moorish slaves to cultivate the land with which he had endowed his community of a hundred nuns. Down to the Revolution most of the daughters of the nobility in the Quercy were educated here. Little is now left of the conventual building; but the church contains architectural details of much interest, and the tombs of those irreconcilable enemies of the English, Bertrand de Cardaillac, Bishop of Cahors, and the Marquis de Cardaillac—the most famous warrior of this bellicose and illustrious family.

Having reached the village of Brengues, I went immediately in search of the English rock-fortress of which I had already heard. A path led me up the steep hillside to the foot of a long line of high rocks of yellowish limestone, so escarped and so forbidding to vegetable life that I did not see even a wild fig-tree hanging from a crevice. A path ran along at the base of this prodigious wall, from the top of which stretched the arid causse. I had only gone a little way when I saw before me a fortified Gothic gateway jutting out from the rock to which it was attached, and extending across the path to where the hill became so steep as to sufficiently protect from assault on that side those who had a motive for defending the ledge under the high cliff. I examined this old piece of masonry with much curiosity.

The pointed form of the arch disposes of the hypothesis which has been put forward without much reflection, that this legacy of the old wars in Guyenne is part of the defences raised in the country by the unfortunate Waifré, Duke of Aquitaine, when he was being chased from rock to rock by his relentless enemy. Here we have work that is evidently not anterior to the English occupation, and which in all probability belongs to the fourteenth or the early part of the fifteenth century. Now, as Brengues was undoubtedly one of those places where the English companies firmly established themselves, and to which they clung with great tenacity, there is very small risk of error is coming to the conclusion that it was they who built this fortified gateway. The masonry, composed of carefully-shaped stones, and laid together with an excellent mortar that has become as durable as the rock itself, has been wonderfully preserved. Had it been placed in the valley it would have been pulled down long ago, and the materials would have been used for building houses or pigsties. The upper part of the wall is dilapidated, so that it is impossible to say whether it was originally embattled or not. There is no staircase, but the defenders had doubtless a suspended plank or beam on which they stood when they wished to shoot arrows or bolts over the top of the wall. On the side nearest the rock is a splayed opening ending outwardly in a crosslet large enough for three or four men to use at the same time.

This gateway was only an outwork to defend the ledge of rock. About two hundred yards farther is a cavern some twenty or thirty feet above the path, and only accessible by means of a ladder. It has been walled up, openings being left here and there for loopholes. Near the top is a row of three windows without arches, and at the base an opening that served for a door, and which could easily be closed up. Although the stones were shaped for building, they were laid together without mortar; but the wall is so thick, and so protected by its position, that this rough fortification has remained almost unchanged from the date of its construction. It is a much less finished piece of work than the gateway, but there are other rock-fortresses in the district, attributed by general consent to the English, so similar to it in character that there is no reason for doubting that the companies built this one also. It is probable, however, that the gateway already mentioned, and the one that corresponded to it on the other side of the cavern, but of which few vestiges can now be seen, were constructed subsequently, when the science of fortification was better understood by the routiers. Such a fortress could never have been used in a military sense by a large number of men, but to a band of brigands and cut-throats it was a stronghold of the first order. As they doubtless laid up in their cavern a large store of the provisions which they obtained by their continual forays in the surrounding region, they were capable of withstanding a long siege even against an enemy many times as numerous as themselves, for the reason that only a few men could attack them at the same time, and the defenders had an enormous advantage in the struggle. It is a very general belief in the district that there was formerly a passage by which this cavern communicated with the causse; no trace of it, however, has been discovered.

M. Delpon, author of a work published in 1831, and entitled 'Statistique du Département du Lot,' mentions these fortified caverns of the Quercy in the following passage, which gives a vivid picture of the kind of life that the English companies led and made others lead in the fourteenth century:

'They (the English) possessed in the Quercy the forts of Roc-Amadour, Castelnau, Verdale, Vayrac, Lagarennie, Sabadel, Anglars, Frayssinet, Boussac and Assier, and some other castles on escarped hills from which it was difficult to expel them. They also seized upon caverns formed by nature in the flanks of precipitous rocks, and fortified them with walls in which all the character of English structures can still be recognised. The garrisons that occupied these places represented six thousand lances distributed over the Quercy, the Rouergue, and High Auvergne. When they sallied forth, the earth, to use an expression of one or their chiefs, Emérigot, surnamed Black Head, trembled under their feet.[*] They robbed travellers, made citizens prisoners—especially ecclesiastics—in order to extort exorbitant ransoms, they took from the peasants their beasts and their crops, and forced them to work in strengthening the dens of their spoliators with new fortifications. In fine, the Quercy was continually devastated, and the inhabitants only tilled the earth to satisfy the avidity of the English companies. The population could shield themselves from their violence only by concealing themselves in subterranean retreats, where traces of their sojourn are still observable. The English were continually recruited by all the depraved men of the provinces which they laid under contribution.'

[*] The entire passage from which these words are taken is to be found in Froissart's chronicles, and it runs as follows, the spelling being modernized: 'Que nous étions rejouis quand nous chevaussions à l'aventure et que nous pouvions trouver sur le champ un riche prieur ou marchand ou des mulets de Montpellier, de Narbonne, de Carcassone, de Limoux, de Béziers, de Toulouse, chargés de draps, de brunelles, de pelleterie, venant de la foire de Landit, d'épiceries venant de Bruges, de draps de soie, de Damas ou d'Alexandrie. Les vilains nous pourvoyaient et apportaient dans nos châteaux le blé, la farine, le pain tout cuit, l'avoine pour les chevaux, le bon vin, les boeufs, les brébis, les moutons tous gras, la poulaille et la volataille. Nous étions servis, gouvernés et étoffés comme rois et princes, et quand nous chevaussions le pays tremblait devant nous.'

This last remark is only too well justified by the evidence which those centuries have handed down. Indeed, to such an extent were these companies composed of Aquitanians, that one may well ask if some of them contained a single genuine Englishman. I have found no record in the Quercy of the captain of a company of routiers having borne an Anglo-Saxon name. Two English captains who took Figeac by surprise (a document relating to this event, written in Latin of the fourteenth century, is to be found in the municipal archives) were named Bertrand de Lebret and Bertrand de Lasale. Those who captured Martel had names equally French. There is, of course, the hypothesis that these leaders were Anglicised Normans, but the stronger probability is that they were native adventurers of Aquitaine who found it to their interest to place themselves under the protection of the King of England.

Towards the close of the fourteenth century, all those who wished to drive the English out of Guyenne rallied round the chiefs of the house of Armagnac. This great family of the Rouergue, which was ultimately absorbed by the Royal House of France and became extinct, at one time espoused the British cause; but it contributed more than any other to the final dispersion of the English companies in Guyenne. In 1381 the people of the Gévaudan, the Quercy, and High Auvergne, solicited the help of the Count of Armagnac against the companies, and he accepted the leadership of the coalition. He convened a meeting of delegates at Rodez, to which the English chiefs were invited, and the decision that was then come to did not say much for the sagacity or the valour of those who represented the majority. It was agreed that the sum of 250,000 francs—equivalent to about £200,000 to-day—should be paid to the English on condition of their surrendering the fortresses which they occupied. This fact goes far to prove that the companies were virtually independent, and that although all their outrages were ostensibly committed in the British name, they were freebooters in the fullest sense of the word. Of the sum that was to be paid to them, the clergy were to contribute 25,000 francs, the nobles 16,660. The inhabitants of the Quercy agreed to pay 50,833 francs. The captains of the companies took oath that on receiving the money they would quit Guyenne for ever. They may have kept their oath, but their followers were not to be induced to change their habits so easily. The routiers, still going by the name of the English companies, continued to hold the least accessible places in Guyenne, fortified in the main by nature, until long after the British sovereigns had abandoned their ambitious designs in France.

In the fifteenth century so many of the inhabitants of the Quercy had been killed or ruined by the companies that some districts were almost depopulated. In the town of Gramat there were only seven inhabitants left at the close of the Hundred Years' War. In order that the lands should not remain uncultivated, the nobles enfeoffed them to strangers from the Rouergue and other neighbouring provinces. This circumstance is supposed to account in a large measure for the differences in dialect which are to be observed in adjoining communes. There is no evidence to-day, so far as I have been able to ascertain, of English words having been introduced into the Languedocian of Guyenne. The striking resemblance of many patois words to those of the English language bearing the same meaning—a resemblance that is helped by the Southern pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs—must be referred to linguistic influences far more remote and obscure than the political fact that Guyenne was intimately connected with English history for three hundred years. For example, that familiar animal the cat is called in Guyenne lou catou and even lou cat; but the word belongs to the Romance language, and is the same all through Languedoc and Provence. The fact that the English left no mark upon the language in Guyenne is almost a conclusive proof that such of the Anglo-Saxon stock as followed the Norman leaders into Aquitaine, and who remained in the country any length of time, were not sufficiently numerous to impose their idiom upon others. They probably did not preserve it long themselves; but, like the English grooms who find occupation in France today, they quickly adopted the language that was generally spoken around them. Patient investigation might, nevertheless, show that the English did leave some of their words, as well as their blood, in the country. It would, indeed, be astonishing if this were not so. Even the Greek colony at Marseilles and Aries, although far removed, must have influenced the dialect of Guyenne; for the peasants of the Quercy use the word hermal to describe a piece of waste land bordering a cultivated field, the origin of which expression was, doubtless, Hermes, the god of boundaries. This is not the only Greek word that has been corrupted, but nevertheless preserved, in the Quercy patois.

Wherever the English were long established in their fastnesses amidst the rocks which form the rugged sides of the deep-cut gorges of the Quercy, many of the inhabitants have clung, century after century, to the belief that the terrible freebooters buried a prodigious amount of treasure with the intention of returning and fetching it on the first opportunity. So persistently was this tradition handed down at Brengues that many years ago a cavern, the entrance of which had been covered over with stones and earth, having been accidentally discovered on the plateau just above the Château des Anglais, it was eagerly explored, as well as a similar cavern close by. The excitement was increased by the circumstance that the discovery of these openings appeared to coincide with the indications of a local witch. It was evident that the caverns had at one time been used by men, for they contained masonry put together with mortar. By dint of excavating, hidden galleries were revealed; but although a human skeleton was discovered, no treasure was found. The explorers, however, came upon a vast collection of bones of extinct animals, and of others which, although they are now to be found both in the Arctic and in the tropical regions, have not existed in a state of nature in France during the historic period. The bones of the reindeer, for instance, were found lying with those of the hyena and the rhinoceros, many of them embedded in the calcareous breccia so frequently seen in the valley of the Célé. Here was evidence of a glacial and a torrid period, separated by an aeonic gulf; but how the remains came to be piled one upon another in this way is a secret of the ancient earth. There are prodigious layers of these bones lying at a great depth in the rock, where there is no cavern to suggest that the animals entered by it, or that they were taken there by man. The beds of phosphate which English enterprise has turned to so good an account in this part of France, and which are followed in the earth just like a seam of coal or a vein of metal, are merely layers of bones. While I was at Brengues, the skeleton of a young rhinoceros was discovered in the phosphate mine at Cajarc.

On the hill above the Célé, on the side opposite to that where the Château des Anglais is to be seen, are the remains of an entrenched camp, upon the origin of which it is almost idle to speculate. In the same neighbourhood is a cavern situated high up in the face of a perpendicular rock. It is inaccessible by ordinary means; but a beam fixed at the entrance, and worn into a deep groove by a rope, shows that it was used as a refuge. A tradition says that Waifré hid himself there.

I passed the night at Brengues, and was awakened in the early morning by the jingle of bells just beneath my window, and a man's voice repeating, 'Tè, Tè, Tè!' A couple of bullocks were being yoked, and presently they followed the man towards the fields of tobacco and maize by the little river, already shining in the sun. Very soon afterwards I, too, had begun my day's work.

In a little more than an hour I was at the next village—St. Sulpice. Here above the houses, huddled together like sheep on the lower steep of the right-hand hill, were the ruins of a castle, hanging to the rock that dwarfed it even in the days of its pride. I climbed to it, and found that it was built on terraces one above the other, formed by the rocky shelves. A considerable portion of the strong wall at the base of the structure remains, and on each terrace there is something left of the feudal fortress. Ivy, with gnarled and fantastic stocks, has so overspread the masonry in places that hardly a gray stone shows through the dense matting of sombre leaves and hoary, wrinkled stems. Multitudes of bats cling to the ruinous vaulting where the light is very dim, and lurk in the hollows of the rock. A stone thrown up will bring them fluttering down and whirling about the head of the intruder, noiselessly as if they were the ghosts that haunt the spot, but dare not reveal to the eye of man the human shape that they once wore. This castle belonged, and still belongs, to the D'Hébrard family, which was connected by marriage with the Cardaillacs and most of the ancient aristocracy of the Quercy.

Leaving St. Sulpice, another hour's walk down the valley brought me to Marcillac, which, after Figeac, was the most important place on the Célé in the Middle Ages. It is now, however, a mere village. According to local historians, it was here that Palladius, Bishop of Bourges, retired in the fifth century to escape from the persecution of the Arians. Nothing, however, that has been written of its history, prior to the ninth or tenth century, can be accepted with any confidence. What can be safely affirmed is, that here, between the rocky cliffs that border the Célé, arose one of the earliest of the Benedictine abbeys in France. The ruined cloisters of the monastery have all the severe charm of the simple Romanesque style of the early period, but there is no means of knowing whether they date from the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth century. There are several beautiful capitals elaborately embellished with intersecting line ornament still preserved, although no value whatever is placed upon them by the inhabitants. The cloisters are used for stables, and other common farm purposes.

The abbey church must have fallen into complete ruin, when a portion of it was restored and rebuilt in the fifteenth century. Then about half the nave—the western end—was cut off, and left open to the weather. It is roofless, and the visitor walking, now in deep shadow, now in brilliant light, as the fragments of masonry may hide or reveal the sun, sees the blue sky through the arches and over the tops of the ivy-covered walls. This part of the old church shows the transition between the Romanesque and the Gothic styles.

It would have been a slight upon Marcillac had I left the place without seeing the most famous of its caverns, which goes by the name of the Grotte de Robinet. I might have looked for it in vain all day had I not taken a guide.

First, the causse had to be reached by ascending the cliffs on the right bank of the Célé. Then I saw before me the stony undulating land, with the sad sentiment of which I had already grown so familiar. An old woman, nearly doubled up with age and field labour, but who plied her distaff as she led her black goats to browse upon the waste, made me understand that the solitude was not altogether bereft of human life. After walking a mile or so, we descended into a deep hollow wooded with those dwarf oaks which, together with the juniper, hid at one time most of the nakedness of these calcareous tracts that stretch from gorge to gorge. One might have supposed that such a dale would have had a spring at the bottom; but no: everywhere it was parched, arid, and rocky. The rain that falls all around goes to swell some deep subterranean stream that issues no one knows where. This peculiarity of the formation explains why nearly all the caussenards have no water, either for themselves or their animals, except that which they collect from the skies in tanks sunk in the earth. Since the failure of the vines—which formerly flourished upon the causses wherever there was a favourable slope—the peasants have learnt to make a mildly alcoholic liquor by gathering and fermenting the juniper berries, which previously they had never put to any use.

We had nearly ascended the opposite side of this wooded hollow, when the guide, pointing through the sunlit trees to a very dark but narrow opening in the rocks, said, 'There it is!' We had reached the cavern. He went first, carrying aloft a wisp of burning straw, which he renewed from time to time from the bundle that he carried under his arm.

The practice of burning straw, so that people may have a good flare-up for their money, has, together with the selfish custom of throwing stones at the stalactites, gone far to spoil all the caverns of this region, which have been much visited. The Grotte de Robinet must have been dazzlingly beautiful at one time, but now most of the stalagmite and stalactite has been completely blackened by smoke. Even the rocks, over which one has to climb, and sometimes crawl, are covered with a sooty slime, which gives one the appearance, when daylight returns, of having been smeared with lamp-black. I put on a blouse before entering, and had great reason to be glad that I did so. In spite of all the mischief that has been done to it, the Grotte de Robinet is a very remarkable cavern, and the time spent on the somewhat arduous and slippery task of exploring its depths is not wasted. Its length is about half a mile, and the descent, which is almost continuous, is at times very rapid. The passage connects a succession of vast and lofty spaces, which are not inappropriately termed salles. In some of these, the dropping water has raised from the floor of the cavern statuesque and awful forms of colossal grandeur. Some of these have been little changed by the smoke, but stand like white figures of fantastic giants. While looking at them, I thought how little I should like to be in the position of a certain curé of Marcillac, who spent three days and three nights in this weird company. He frequently entered the cavern alone, with a scientific object, and his familiarity with it led him to despise ordinary precautions. One day he was far underground, with only a single candle in his possession, and no matches. A drop of water from the roof put the candle out, and all his efforts to return by the way he came were futile. Meanwhile, his parishioners, hunting high and low for their curé, chanced to see his soutane, where he had left it, hanging to a bush at the entrance of the Grotte de Robinet, and when they rescued him, there was very little left of his passion for studying nature underground.

The most wonderful and the most beautiful object in the cavern is to be seen in the vast hall, which is the last of the series. This hall has a dome-shaped roof that rises to the height of about sixty feet, and it is supported in the centre, with every appearance of an architectural motive, by a single slender column that seems to have been carved with consummate skill out of alabaster. No image that I can think of conveys the picture of this exquisite stalagmite so justly as that of a column formed of the blossoms of lilies, each cup resting within another.

Having left Marcillac, I passed under the mediaeval village of Sauliac, built high up on a shelf of naked rock, and then reached Cabrerets, which lies two or three miles above the junction of the Célé and the Lot. The village is at the foot of towering limestone cliffs, and many of the houses are built against the gray and yellow stone. The most interesting structure, however, is the castellated one that clings to the face of the rock far above all inhabited dwellings. It goes by the name of the Château du Diable, and it is the most considerable of all the rock-fortresses in the valleys of the Célé and the Lot which are attributed to the English companies. It possesses towers and embattlements, and it was evidently intended to defend the defile from any force advancing from the wider valley. Here, doubtless, many a desperate struggle occurred before the companies were dispersed and English influence was finally overcome in these wilds of the Quercy. At a little distance from it, the long iron of a mediaeval arrow, having fastened its head in a cleft of the rock, remained sticking there for centuries, and was only recently removed. The Prefect of the Department took a fancy to it, and had not the good judgment to leave it where it had so long been an object of curiosity. There, resting in the place where the arm of the archer had cast it, it told a story of the old wars, and set the imagination working; but in a collection of local antiquities it is as dumb and almost as worthless as any other piece of old iron.

IN THE ALBIGEOIS.

A long dull road or street, a statue of the navigator La Perouse, a bandstand with a few trees about it, and plain, modern buildings without character, some larger and more pretentious than others, but all uninteresting. Is this Albi? No, but it is what appears to be so to the stranger who enters the place from the railway-station. The ugly sameness is what the improving spirit of our own times has done to make the ancient town decent and fit to be inhabited by folk who have seen something of the world north of Languedoc and who have learnt to talk of le comfortable. The improvement is undoubted, but so is the absolute lack of interest and charm; at least, to those who are outside of the persiennes so uniformly closed against the summer sun.

Albi, the veritable historic Albi, lies almost hidden upon a slope that leads down to the Tarn. Here is the marvellous cathedral built in the thirteenth century, after the long wars with the Albigenses; here is the Archbishop's fortified palace, still capable of withstanding a siege if there were no artillery; here are the old houses, one of pre-Gothic construction with very broad Romanesque window, slender columns and storied capitals, billet and arabesque mouldings; another of the sixteenth century quite encrusted with carved wood; and here are the dirty little streets like crooked lanes, where old women, who all through the summer months, Sundays excepted, give their feet an air-bath, may be seen sitting on the doorsteps clutching with one bony hand the distaff and drowsily turning the spindle with the other.

To live in one of these streets might disgust the unseasoned stranger for ever with Southern life; but to roam through them in the early twilight is the way to find the spirit of the past without searching. Effort spoils the spell. Strange indeed must have been the procession of races, parties and factions that passed along here between these very houses, or others which stood before them. Romans, Romanised Gauls, Visigoths, Saracens and English; the Raymonds with their Albigenses, the Montforts with their Crusaders from the north, the wild and sanguinary pastoiureux and the lawless routiers, the religious fanatics, Huguenots and Catholics of the sixteenth century, and the revolutionists of the eighteenth. All passed on their way, and the Tarn is no redder now for the torrents of blood that flowed into it.

Notwithstanding that the name Albigenses was given after the council of Lombers to the new Manichaeans, Albi was less identified with the great religious and political struggle of Southern Gaul in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than were Castres and other neighbouring towns. If, however, it was comparatively fortunate as regards the horrors of that ferocious war, it was severely scourged by the most appalling epidemics of the Middle Ages. Leprosy and the pest had terrors greater even than those of battle. The cruelty of those feudal ages finds one of its innumerable records in the treatment of the miserable lepers at Albi. Having taken the disease which the Crusaders brought back from the East, they were favoured with a religious ceremony distressingly similar to the office for the dead. A black pall was thrown over them while they knelt at the altar steps. At the close of the service a priest sprinkled some earth on the condemned wretches, and then they were led to the leper-house, where each was shut up in a cell from which he never came out alive. The black pall and the sprinkled earth were symbols which every patient understood but too well.

[Illustration: PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ALBI.]

In nothing is the stern spirit of those ages expressed more forcibly than in the religious buildings of Languedoc. The cathedral of St. Cecilia at Albi is the grandest of all the fortified churches of Southern France, although in many others the defensive purpose has made less concession to beauty. Looking at it for the first time, the eye is wonder-struck by its originality, the nobleness of its design, and the grandeur of its mass. The plan being that of a vast vaulted basilica without aisles, the walls of the nave, rise sheer from the ground to above the roof, and are pierced at intervals with lofty but very narrow windows, the arches slightly pointed and containing simple tracery. The buttresses which help the walls to support the vaulting of the nave and choir are the most remarkable feature of the design, and, together with the tower, which rises in diminishing stages to the height of 260 feet and there ends in an embattled platform, account for the singularly feudal and fortress-like character of the building. The outline of the buttresses being that of a semi-ellipse, they look like turrets carried up the entire face of the wall. The floor of the church is many feet above the ground, and the entrance was originally protected by a drawbridge and portcullis; but these military works were removed in the sixteenth century, and in their place was raised, upon a perron reached by a double flight of steps, a baldachino-like porch as airily graceful and delicately florid as the body to which it is so lightly attached is majestically stern and scornful of ornament. The meeting here of those two great forces, the Renaissance and feudalism, is like that of Psyche and Mars. But in expression the porch is Gothic, for although the arches are round-headed, they are surmounted by an embroidery of foliated gables and soaring pinnacles. It can scarcely be said that the style has been broken, but the contrast in feeling is strong.

Enter the church and observe the same contrast there. Gothic art within the protecting walls and under the strong tower puts forth its most delicate leaves and blossoms. Across the broad nave, nearly in the centre, is drawn a rood-screen—a piece of stonework that has often been compared to lace, but which gains nothing by the comparison. The screen, together with the enclosure of the choir, with which it is connected, is quite bewildering by the multiplicity of arches, gables, tabernacles, pinnacles, statues, leaves, and flowers. The tracery is flamboyant, and the work dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century. The artificers are said to have been a company of wandering masons from Strasburg.

Two vast drum-shaped piers, serving to support the tower, are exposed to view at the west end of the nave; but, for the bad effect thus produced, compensation is offered by the very curious paintings, supposed to be of the fifteenth century, with which the surfaces of these piers are covered. They represent the Last Judgment and the torments of the damned. Each of the seven capital sins has its compartment, wherein the kind of punishment reserved for sinners under this head is set forth in a manner as quaint as are the inscriptions in old French beneath. The compartment, illustrating the eternal trouble of the envious has this inscription:

'La peine des envieux et envieuses. Les envieus et envieuses sont en ung fleuve congelé plongés jusques au nombril et par dessus les frappe un vent moult froid et quant veulent icelluy vent éviter se plongent dedans ladite glace.'

All the wall-surfaces, the vaulting included, are covered with paintings. The effect clashes with Northern taste, but the absence of a columnar system affords a plausible reason for relieving the sameness of these large surfaces with colour. The Gothic style of the North, holding in itself such decorative resources, gains nothing from mural paintings, but always loses something of its true character when they are added. Apart from such considerations, the wall-paintings in the cathedral of Albi have accumulated such interest from time that no reason would excuse their removal.

This unique church was mainly built at the close of the thirteenth century, together with the Archbishop's palace, with which it was connected in a military sense by outworks. These have disappeared, but the fortress called a palace remains, and is still occupied by the Archbishop. It is a gloomy rectangular mass of brick, absolutely devoid of elegance, but one of the most precious legacies of the Middle Ages in France. It is not so vast as the papal palace at Avignon, but its feudal and defensive character has been better preserved, for, unlike the fortress by the Rhône, it has not been adapted to the requirements of soldiers' barracks. At each of the angles is a round tower, pierced with loopholes, and upon the intervening walls are far-descending machicolations. The building is still defended on the side of the Tarn by a wall of great height and strength, the base of which is washed by the river in time of flood. This rampart, with its row of semi-elliptical buttresses corresponding to those of the church and its pepper-box tower at one end, the fortress a little above, and the cathedral on still higher ground, but in immediate neighbourhood, make up an assemblage of mediaeval structures that seems as strange in this nineteenth century as some old dream rising in the midst of day-thoughts. And the rapid Tarn, an image of perpetual youth, rushes on as it ever did since the face of Europe took its present form.

As I write, other impressions come to mind of this ancient town on the edge of the great plain of Languedoc. A little garden in the outskirts became familiar to me by daily use, and I see it still with its almond and pear trees, its trellised vines, the blue stars of its borage, and the pure whiteness of its lilies. A bird seizes a noisy cicada from a sunny leaf, and as it flies away the captive draws out one long scream of despair. Then comes the golden evening, and its light stays long upon the trailing vines, while the great lilies gleam whiter and their breath floods the air with unearthly fragrance. A murmur from across the plain is growing louder and louder as the trees lose their edges in the dusk, for those noisy revellers of the midsummer night, the jocund frogs, have roused themselves, and they welcome the darkness with no less joy than the swallows some hours later will greet the breaking dawn.

I left Albi to ascend the valley of the Tarn in the last week of June. I started when the sun was only a little above the plain; but the line of white rocks towards the north, from which Albi is supposed to take its name, had caught the rays and were already burning. The straight road, bordered with plane-trees, on which I was walking would have had no charm but for certain wayside flowers. There was a strange-looking plant with large heart-shaped leaves and curved yellow blossoms ending in a long upper lip that puzzled me much, and it was afterwards that I found its name to be aristolochia clematitis. It grows abundantly on the banks of the Tarn. Another plant that I now noticed for the first time was a galium with crimson flowers. I soon came to the cornfields for which the Albigeois plain is noted. Here the poppy showed its scarlet in the midst of the stalks of wheat still green, and along the borders were purple patches of that sun-loving campanula, Venus's looking-glass.

Countrywomen passed me with baskets on their heads, all going into Albi to sell their vegetables. Those who were young wore white caps with frills, which, when there is nothing on the head to keep them down, rise and fall like the crest of a cockatoo; but the old women were steadfast in their attachment to the bag-like, close-fitting cap, crossed with bands of black velvet, and having a lace front that covers most of the forehead. When upon this coif is placed a great straw hat with drooping brim, we have all that remains now of an Albigeois costume. As these women passed me, I looked into their baskets. Some carried strawberries, some cherries, others mushrooms (boleti), or broad beans. The last-named vegetable is much cultivated throughout this region, where it is largely used for making soup. When very young, the beans are frequently eaten raw with salt. Almost every taste is a matter of education.

The heat of the day had commenced when I reached the village of Lescure. This place is of very ancient origin. Looking at it now, and its agricultural population numbering little more than a thousand, it is difficult to realize its importance in the Middle Ages. The castle and the adjacent land were given in the year 1003 by King Robert to his old preceptor, the learned Gerbert, who became known to posterity as Pope Sylvester II. In the eleventh century, Lescure was, therefore, a fief of the Holy See; and in the time of Simon de Montfort the inhabitants were still vassals of the Pope. In the fourteenth century they were frequently at war with the people of Albi, who eventually got the upper hand. Then Sicard, the Baron of Lescure, was so completely humiliated that he not only consented to pay eighty gold livres to the consuls of Albi, but went before them bareheaded to ask pardon for himself and his vassals. Already the feudal system was receiving hard blows in the South of France from the growth of the communes and the authority vested in their consuls. What is left of the feudal grandeur of Lescure? The castle was sold in the second year of the Republic, and entirely demolished, with the exception of the chapel, which is now the parish church. Of the outer fortifications there remains a brick gateway, with Gothic arch carrying a high machicolated tower, connected to which is a fragment of the wall. To this old houses, half brick, half wood, still cling, like those little wasps' nests that one sees sometimes upon the sides of the rocks.

On entering the small fourteenth-century church, I found that it had been decorated for a funeral. A broad band of black drapery, upon which had been sewn at intervals Death's heads and tears, cut out of white calico, was hung against the wall of the apse, and carried far down each side of the nave. To me all those grinning white masks were needless torture to the mourners; but here again we are brought to recognise that taste is a matter of education.

More interesting than anything else in this church is the Romanesque holy-water stoup, with heads and crosses carved upon it, and possibly belonging to the original chapel of the castle. The chief archaeological treasure, however, of Lescure is a church on a little hill above the village, and overlooking the Tarn. It is dedicated to St. Michael, in accordance with the mediaeval custom of considering the highest ground most appropriate to the veneration of the archangel. It is Romanesque of the eleventh century, and belonged to a priory of which no other trace is left. The building stands in the midst of an abandoned cemetery; and at the time of my visit the tall June grasses, the poppies and white campions hid every mound and almost every wooden cross. Over the gateway, carved in the stone, is the following quaint inscription, the spelling being similar to that frequently used in the sixteenth century:

'Sur la terre autrefois nous fûmes comme vous.
Mortels pensés y bien et priés Dieu pour nous.'

Beneath these lines are a skull and cross-bones, with a tear on each side.