Having left the pit, we went in the direction of Loubressac, to which village my companion belonged.  While still upon the causse a spot was reached where a small iron cross had been raised.  The stone pedestal bore this inscription: 

’SOUVENIR DE HELENE BONBEGRE,
MORTE MARTYRE EN CE LIEU EN 1844. 
VIEILLE-ESCAZE ET LAVAL ONT FAIT CONSTRUIRE CETTE CROIX. 
PRIEZ POUR CES DEUX BIENFAITEURS.’

The old man knew Helene Bonbegre when he was young, and he told me the tragic story of her death on this spot.  She was going home in the evening, and her sweetheart the blacksmith accompanied her a part of the distance.  They then separated, and she went on alone.  They had been watched by the jealous and unsuccessful lover, whose heart was on fire.  Where the cross stands the girl was found lying, a naked corpse.  The murderer was soon captured, and most of the people in the district went to St. Cere to see him guillotined.  It was a spectacle to be talked over for half a century.  The blacksmith never forgave himself for having left the girl to go home alone, and it was he who forged the cross that marks the scene of the crime and sets the wayfarer conjecturing.

The peasant changed his ideas by filling his pipe.  He smoked tobacco that he grew in a corner of his garden for his own use, and which he enjoyed all the more because it was tabac de contrebande.  He gave me some, which I likewise smoked without any qualm of conscience, and thought it decidedly better than some tobacco of the regie.  He lit his pipe with smuggled matches.  Had I been an inspector in disguise, I should never have made matters unpleasant for him; he was such a cheery, good-natured companion.  He had brought up his family, and had now just enough land to keep him without breaking his back over it.  He was quite satisfied with things as they were.  I did not ask him if he was a poacher, but took it for granted that he was whenever he saw a good chance.  Almost every peasant in the Haut-Quercy who has something of the spirit of Nimrod in him is more or less a poacher.  Those who like hare and partridge can eat it in all seasons by paying for it.  Occasionally the gendarmes capture a young and over-zealous offender, but the old men, who have followed the business all their lives, are too wary for them.  They are also too respectable to be interfered with.

At Loubressac I took leave of my entertaining friend, but not before we had emptied a bottle of white wine together.  It was a vin du pays, this district having been less tried by the phylloxera than others farther south and west.  I was surprised to find white wine there, the purple grape having been almost exclusively cultivated for centuries in what is now the department of the Lot.