It was quite dark when I reached Saint-Gery.  The narrow passage leading to the best inn was illumined by the red glare of a forge, and was rich in odours ancient and modern.  Some twenty geese tightly packed in a pen close to the hostelry door announced my arrival with shrieks of derision.  They said:  ’It’s Friday; no goose for you to-night!’ Those who suppose that geese cannot laugh have not studied bucolic poetry from nature.  The forge was attached to the inn, a very common arrangement here, and one that enables the traveller who has hope of sleep at daybreak—­because the fleas are then thinking of rest after labour—­to enjoy the melody of the ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ without the help of Handel.

I was not cheered by the sight of goose or turkey turning on the spit as I entered the vast smoke-begrimed kitchen, lighted chiefly by the flame of the fire, but the great chain-pot sent forth a perfume that was not offensive, although the soup was maigre.  There was also fish that had been freshly pulled out of the Lot.  The cooking left something to be desired, but the hostess, the wife of the Harmonious Blacksmith, had thrown her best intentions into it.  A rosy light wine grown upon the side of a neighbouring hill compensated for the lack of culinary art.  It was a rather rough inn, but I had been in many worse.  Seated in the chimney-corner after dinner, and sending the smoke of my pipe to join the sparks of the blazing wood up the yawning gulf where the soot hung like stalactites below the calm sky and twinkling stars, I had a long talk with the aubergiste, who told me that he had been taken prisoner at Sedan, and had, in consequence, spent eight months in Germany.  He considered that he had been as well treated by the Germans as a prisoner could expect to be.  He had always enough to eat, but there was no soup, and, lacking this, he thought it impossible for any civilized stomach to be happy.

Rural inns have charms, especially when they are old and picturesque, and smell of the Middle Ages; but to be kept a prisoner in one of them by rainy weather is apt to plunge a restless wanderer into the Slough of Despond.  The chances are that the inn itself becomes at such times a slough, so that Bunyan’s expression is then applicable in a real as well as in a figurative sense.  There is a constant coming in and going out of peasants with dripping sabots, of dogs with wet paws, and draggle-tailed hens with miry feet; geese, and even pigs, not unfrequently venture inside, and have a good walk round before their presence is noticed and they are treated to quotations from Rabelais, enforced with the broomstick.  Then the rain beats in at the open door, which nobody troubles to close.  Under these circumstances, the rural inn becomes detestable.  So I found the auberge at Saint-Gery, where I waited long hours for the weather to change, after having received a soaking while climbing the escarped cliffs which rise so grandly on one side of the little town.