although peaceful days may have returned to the unlucky land of Guyenne;
and the clamour of strong voices would have come down to the river. But now
the castle is quiet as its rock which was beaten by the waves of a vanished
sea, and those who still live in it are like the keepers of a cemetery.
That _donjon_, whose dark form seems to stand amidst the stars, only serves
to mark one of the many tombs of feudalism which rise above the smiling but
capricious Dordogne like menhirs--monuments of older illusions--along the
ocean-scalloped coast of Brittany.

Animated as Beynac became late in the afternoon, when the little society,
composed of extraneous particles, met in costumes that were airy,
fantastic, elementary, anything but ceremonious, to exchange civilities in
the water, life on the whole was so mildly exciting that when one day a
small caravan, drawn by a donkey and preceded by a young man half hidden by
a great straw hat and wildly beating a drum, entered the place, there was a
great and tumultuous movement of the population. Everybody wanted to know
what the donkey and the young man proposed to do at Beynac. On the caravan
had been painted '_Theatre de la Gaite_,' which threw light upon the object
of the intruders. The donkey drew up in front of the inn, and the excited
crowd waited with ill-contained impatience to see the company of players
descend from the battered travelling trunk on wheels. At length a pretty
little girl of about twelve, with large and lustrous brown eyes, came out
of the box. She was the company. She was in the charge of her mother,
who superintended the artistic arrangements, as well as the culinary and
financial, but did not venture upon the stage. The young man looked after
the donkey and the drum, and filled up his time by catching fish for the
company and her mother. The stable of the auberge was hired for evening use
as a _salle de spectacle_, and at one end a very diminutive stage was set
up by means of rough planks and old pieces of carpet.