provinces. A great calm pervaded this sequestered corner of France;
no line of railway penetrated it; and in consequence, it led a life
entirely apart from the big world, a life such as it had known in the
good old time.

After visiting the terraces I would go into the ruined interior, into
the courts, up the stairways and through the empty galleries. I climbed
to the old towers and put to flight flocks of pigeons, and disturbed the
sleep of bats and owls. On the first floor there was a suite of spacious
rooms, still roofed over, and very dark because of the shuttered
windows. I penetrated into these chambers, and I felt an almost
delicious terror when I heard my footsteps echoing through the
sepulchral stillness of the place. Then I would pass in review before
the strange Gothic paintings and the half-effaced frescoes that still
retained traces of gilt ornamentation; the fabled monsters and garlands
of impossible flowers had been added at the time of the Renaissance.
This magnificent, pictured past, fantastic and barbarous to the point
of being terrible, seemed to me, at that time, very vague and dim and
distant; I could not realize that it had been lighted up by the same
midday sunshine that warmed the red stones of the ruins about me. And
now that I am better able to estimate Castelnau, when I recall it to my
memory, after having seen most of the splendors of this earth, I still
think the enchanted castle of my childhood, as it stands upon its
glorious height, one of the most superb ruins of mediaeval France.

In one of the towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal
blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place
have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower. There alone, in the
silence as of a city of the dead, I would lean out of the little window
cut in the thick wall and contemplate the green verdure lying below me,