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From the top of one of the machicolated towers I saw a vast expanse of country, singularly grand, but very solemn. From each side of the Dordogne Valley rose and stretched away into the distance a seemingly endless succession of hills, broken up by narrow gorges and glens. Over all, or nearly all these hills lay a dark and scarcely varying mantle of forest.
In the deep gorges of the Dordogne and its tributaries, the snow rarely lies more than a few days upon the ground, whereas upon the wind-swept plateau above the scanty population have to contend with the rigours of that French Siberia which may be said to commence here on the west, and to extend eastward over the whole mass of metamorphic and igneous rocks, which is termed the great central plateau of France, although it lies far south of the true centre of the country.
Leaving the tunnel, the line continues along the slope, then gradually descends towards Souillac. Two or three miles from that little station, which is a junction, the line runs alongside the highroad to Salignac, skirts for a brief distance the Corrèze, one of the largest tributaries on the right bank of the Dordogne, and then plunges into the heart of Lot.
Count v. Quite as curious, and with a less tragic history is La Roche Gageac on the Dordogne, below Sarlat. "Ma chere patrie," wrote the old chronicler, Jean Tarde, "une petite ville bien close et tres forte dependant de la temporalite de l'evesque de Sarlet, la quelle ne fut jamais prinse par les Anglais."
It charges you first with having aided and abetted the escape of your son, whom an enquiry held in another place had implicated in the murder of the Marquise de Langrune; and it charges you secondly with having killed your son, whose body has been recovered from the Dordogne, in order that you might escape the penalty of public obloquy."
Gluges is on the Dordogne near Martel, where high up in the cliff, difficult of access, is the fortified cave-castle of Guillaume Taillefer, son of Raymond IV., Count of Toulouse, who was created Lord of Quercy in 972. Nearly on the level of the river is a cave half walled up, with traces of fresco on the walls, of course much later than the time of Taillefer.
In the latter part of August the papers reported from the Dordogne that a mob there had seized a young man, a M. de Moneys, of whom a gang had asserted that he had shouted "Vive la Prusse!" had stripped him, bound him with ropes, carried him out into a field, laid him on a pile of damp wood, and as this would not take fire quick enough, had pushed trusses of straw underneath all round him, and burnt him alive.
There is no trace of a chapel such as that of which Tarde speaks, nor any other mark to show the place. But the little stream is there as of old, and the beautiful Dordogne that drank the mingled blood of the two armies which its tributary poured into it flows serenely and blue as it did then under the same summer sky.
The next year a party of painters settled themselves near by, roughing it as best they could, and in the year following, Mme. de Bergerac and her daughter Héloïse came with Julien, and, buying the old farm of Pontivy, on the highway over Notre Dame, turned it into a summer house that almost made amends for their lost château on the Dordogne, stolen from them as virulent Royalists by the triumphant Republic in 1794.
While waiting, I went out and amused the fish in the Dordogne by pointing a borrowed rod at them, and tempting them with the fattest house-flies I could find; but as soon as they saw the bait they all turned their tails to it. My angling was a complete failure. And yet there were multitudes of fish swimming on the surface; the water seemed alive with them.
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