This was not much, as she took care to point out.  The nearest approach to meat there was eggs, excepting, of course, the fat bacon—­quite uneatable in the English fashion—­which is the basis of all the soup made throughout a great part of France.  Having lighted a fire on the hearth, and fried me some eggs with bits of fat bacon instead of butter, she said she must go and call ‘papa,’ who was working in the vineyard.  So she left me in charge of the inn while she went to fetch her father on the hillside.  While I was alone, I looked at the sunny view of green meadows and trees through the open door that faced the shining river, and easily fancied that what I saw was a bit of verdant England.  In the room, too, the twittering of a pair of canaries recalled impressions of other days; but the plague of flies was thoroughly French, and it soon brought me back to realities.  When the girl returned with her father, she gave me some excellent goat-cheese, and for my dessert some hazelnuts, together with a spirit distilled from plums, similar to the quertch of Alsace.

I had not been long in the sunshine again, when I noticed a large house in the midst of the vines not far off the road.  On drawing near I found that it was ruinous, and had been long since abandoned.  It had been a rather grand house once, and must have belonged to people of importance in the country.  There was a finely-carved scutcheon with arms over the Gothic door, and the mullioned windows, which had lost all their glass, had something of the pathos of gentility that, becoming poor and old, has been abandoned to all winds and weathers.  The little courtyard was full of high weeds and shrubs, and the wild flags that grow on the rocks had laid their green leaves together to hide the wounds of the old walls.  Swallows, sparrows, and bats were now the tenants of this mysterious house, which must have had a troubled history.  The picture has since haunted my memory; the mind goes back to it in a strange way, and the sentiment of it, as it was communicated to me, I find perfectly expressed in these lines by Alphonse Karr: 

    ’De la solitaire demeure
    Une ombre lourde d’heure en heure,
    Se detache sur le gazon,
    Et cet ombre, couchee et morte
    Est la seule chose qui sorte
    Tout le jour de cette maison.’

Some distance farther I passed another deserted dwelling.  It was perched upon rocks, and was overgrown with ivy and clematis.  The road led me down beside the Lot, which now began to rush again over rocks as the hills drew closer, and the valley became once more a gorge.  On one side were dense woods; on the other vines reached up to the sky.

At length I saw before me a row of houses beside the river in a bright bit of valley hemmed in by high cliffs.  On the rocks behind the houses were a church and a castle.