towns. According to the tradition preserved by the family to whom the house
belongs, it was in one of the chimney-corners of this room that Prince
Henry sat on the evening of the day that he left Roc-Amadour. It is
uncertain, however, whether the Prince went to Martel immediately after the
sacrilege, or after a pilgrimage that he made to the sanctuary to atone for
his crime, when he was suffering from the disease that killed him. There
is a local legend that he was followed by two monks, who contrived to put
poison into his goblet; but whether he was poisoned or died of dysentery at
Martel, as the chroniclers maintain, is a detail of small importance. That
he did die here, and very repentantly, on a bed of ashes, and held up by
the Bishop of Cahors, is a historical fact.

An indubitable testimony of the English occupation of Martel is the
heraldic leopard of the Plantagenets. I found it carved in stone among
the ruins of King Henry's palace, and hard by I saw it again upon a rusty
fireplate that had been thrown into a corner. There is not a native of
Martel who is not ready to talk of _le leopard anglais_.

The English were never loved by the Martellois. The people of this district
are strong in their attachments, and perhaps even stronger in their
animosities and prejudices. Without doubt the English did not treat them
with marked tenderness; but there was very little human kindness in the
Middle Ages, and the French, or the races which now compose France, left
nothing to be invented in the arts of cruelty and oppression in the wars
that they waged among themselves before they learnt, or were forced to
learn, that it was to their interest to hold together and form one
nation. Moreover, the greater number of the so-called English who kept a
considerable part of Aquitaine in continual terror for three centuries were
natives of the soil.