Having reached the top of the hill, I soon came in view of a
picturesque mass of masonry with round towers capped with pointed roofs,
and with Gothic gables hanging lightly in the air over dormer windows; the
whole rising out of a dense grove of trees in the midst of a quiet sunny
landscape. When quite near I found that the grove was a sombre little wood
of ever-green oaks. The same wood, if not the actual oaks, may have been
there in Fenelon's time, for the ilex is one of the commonest trees in
Perigord on the hills about the Dordogne. As a boy, while climbing here,
he may have torn his hose into tatters, notwithstanding his precocious
knowledge of Greek. The future churchman may even have robbed a jay's nest
on this very spot. What quietude and what deep shadow! Not a leaf stirred;
only a fiery shaft of sunshine forced its way here and there through the
dark roof of unchanging green to the brown soil and the rampart's mossy
wall.
Although the present castle was raised when feudalism was nothing more than
a tradition and a sentiment, the outworks, consisting of two walls, the
inner one standing on ground considerably higher than the other, were of
exceptional strength, and as they were originally, so they remain at the
present day.
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