but at length proposed to yield the sou on each pound of meat by means of
which the 'sparrow' had scored his victory. In future all his meat was to
be sold at eleven sous, and on these terms he was restored to favour. Thus,
by playing one man off against the other, the artful woman was able to save
quite a pile of sous every week on her general expenses. The Frenchwoman of
ordinary intelligence, whether she belongs to the north or the south, the
east or the west, may be safely trusted to beat any man of her own race at
bargaining.

For a rural inn this one at Cazoules was good and substantial, but it
provided a little too much irritation at night to be consistent with
peaceful slumber and happy dreams. This was not, perhaps, the fault of the
inn, but of the Dordogne Valley. As soon as the day broke another enemy
entered the field. The flies then awoke, refreshed but hungry, and
determined to make the most of a good opportunity. The house-flies of the
North, when compared to those of the South, seem to have been well brought
up, and trained to live with human beings on terms of civility, if not of
friendship. 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