The flies of Southern France must be descended from those that
were sent to worry Pharaoh, and when one has lived with them during the
months of August and September, one can quite believe that their ancestors
exasperated the Egyptian king to the point of promising anything so that
they might be taken from him.
It was not until I had walked away from Cazoules that I realized where I
was. I had left the Quercy while wandering through those meadows as the sun
was sinking, and had entered Perigord--once famous for troubadours, and
now for truffles. Nobody can live there today by making verses, and the
representative of the jongleur, who once sang from castle to castle to the
accompaniment of the mediaeval fiddle, and who was so heartily welcomed at
all the baronial feasts and merrymakings, is now a wandering beggar, who
gathers crusts from the peasants by his rude minstrelsy, that changes
from the pious to the obscene, or from the obscene to the pious, as the
character and taste of the audience may decide. Many persons, however,
contrive to prosper by hunting for truffles in the exhilarating company
of pigs. It is not in this fertile valley that they find them, but on the
hillsides and stony table-lands, where the oak flourishes, but never grows
tall.
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