and another ruined barbican, and near to these, on the verge of the precipice, a high rectangular tower, which was the citadel and prison.  The lower part was occupied by the schoolmaster of the commune, and he allowed me to ascend the winding staircase, which led to two horrible dungeons, one above the other.  Neither was lighted by window or loophole, and but for the candle I should have been in utter darkness.  Great chains by which prisoners were fastened to the wall still lay upon the ground, and as I raised them and felt their weight, I thought of the human groans that only the darkness heard in the pitiless ages.  In another part of the building was a heavy iron collar that was formerly attached to one of these chains.  There were also several old pikes in a corner.

A little beyond the citadel I found the church, a small Romanesque building without character.  An eighteenth-century doorway had been added to it, and the tympan of the pediment was quite filled up with hanging plants.  Still more suggestive of abandonment was the little cemetery behind, which was bordered by the ramparts.  It was a small wilderness.  Just inside the entrance, a life-sized figure with outstretched arms lay against a damp wall in a bed of nettles and hemlock.  It had become detached from the cross on which it once hung, and had been left upon the ground to be overgrown by weeds.  I have seen many a neglected rural cemetery in France, but never one that looked so sadly abandoned as this.  It was like the ’sluggard’s garden,’ where ‘the thorn and the thistle grow higher and higher.’  Most of the gravestones and crosses were quite hidden by dwarf elder, artemisia, wild carrot, and other plants all tangled together.  A grave had just been dug in this wilderness and it was about to have a tenant, for the two bells in the open tower were sounding the glas, and a distant murmur of chanting was growing clearer.  The priest had gone to ‘fetch the body,’ and the procession was now on its way.  On the top of the earth and stones thrown up on each’ side of the new grave were a broken skull, a jawbone, several portions of leg and arm bones, besides many smaller fragments of the human framework.  I thought the gravedigger might at least have thrown a little earth over these remains out of consideration for the feelings of those who were about to stand around this grave, but concluded that he probably understood the people with whom he had to deal.  Presently this functionary—­a lantern-jawed, nimble old man, with a dirty nightcap on his head—­made his appearance to take a final look at his work.  After strutting round the very shallow hole he had dug, in an airy, self-satisfied manner, he concluded that everything was as it should be, and retired for the priest to perform his duty.