Dante had he not lived before the poet who collected and fixed upon the
sombre canvas of his verse all the woeful visions of eternal punishment
that haunted the mediaeval mind. A man and woman are descending to the
abyss, he holding her by the hair, and she clasping him by the waist, the
faces of both terribly expressive of horror that is new, and utter despair.
The meaning is plain, enough: each was the cause of the other's doom, and
the sentence of the Judge in the panel above has united them in hell for
all eternity. On the opposite pillar are another couple, also clasping one
another; but their faces express the blank and passionless misery of a
doom foreknown. Monk or layman, he who designed the composition felt the
necessity of giving this tragic warning to his fellow-beings. Centuries
later an English poet expressed the same idea in verse:

'The woman's cause is man's! they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or god-like, bond or free.'

One of the less conspicuous figures is going down head foremost in the
company of an animal that looks very like a pig. This beast having been
damned by ecclesiastical sculptors in France as early as the twelfth
century, and probably earlier, it is not surprising that a polite peasant,
when he mentions it by name, often excuses himself for his supposed breach
of good manners by adding: '_Sauf votre respect_.'

Nearing a village not far from Souillac, and wondering the while what had
become of the picturesque, I saw, as if by enchantment, a few yards away, a
little old church covered with ivy, and surrounded by tombstones that were
stained with the dead colours of last winter's lichen; one leaning this
way, another that, but all going down into the grassy graves. A few chairs
and a single bench told that the people who came here to pray were not many
nor rich. Most of the flagstones were broken, and the altar was almost