There are few trout in this part of the Dordogne, but in tributary streams,
like the charming little Ceou, they are plentiful. Carp are abundant, but
they are very difficult to take with the line, and even with the net,
except in time of flood, when they get washed out of their holes, and the
water being no longer clear, their very sharp eyes are of little use
to them. Then a lucky throw will sometimes bring out two or three carp
weighing several pounds each. The fish commonly caught are mullet, perch,
barbel, gudgeon, bream, and chub. As a food-supplying river, the Dordogne
is one of the most valuable in France, and, owing to the rapid current and
the purity of the water, the fish is of excellent quality.

The fixed belief of all the riverside people in this and other valleys is
that fish should be cooked alive. You enter an inn and ask for a _friture_
of gudgeon. In a few minutes you see the victims, which have been pulled
out of a tank with a small net on the end of a stick, jumping on the
kitchen table, and they are still jumping when they go into the boiling
grease. I am not among those who have grown callous to such sights, common
as they are in France. To see fish scraped, opened, and cooked while still
alive gives me disgust for it when it afterwards appears on the table. I
can imagine somebody saying: 'Why look at what goes on in the kitchen?'
That somebody does not quite understand what rural France is. In a country
inn we invariably pass through the kitchen to reach the room set apart for
guests, and it has often fallen to my lot to seek rest, shelter, and food
in a poor auberge, where the kitchen is also the common room of the family
and outsiders.

A Beynac character that left on my memory a lasting impression was old
Suzette. Suzette might have been any age between fifty and seventy. She had
no beauty, but she must have had a little vanity left, for when I showed
her a photograph I had taken of her, she put her hard old hands together,