There is a little garden at the back of the house, where flowers and vegetables are mixed up in the way I like.  The jessamine has become a thicket.  Vines ramble over the trellis and the old wall, and from the window I see many other vines showing their lustrous leaves against tiled roofs of every shade, from bright-red to black.  In the next garden is my friend the aumonier, an octogenarian priest, who is still nearly as sprightly of body as he is of mind.  He lives alone, surrounded by books, in the collection of which he has shown the broad judgment, and impartiality of the genuine lover of literature.  There is a delicious disorder in his den, because there is no one to interfere with him.  He is now much excited against the birds because they will not leave his figs alone, and someone has just lent him a blunderbuss wherewith to slay them.  Perhaps he will show them the deadly weapon, and hope that they will take the hint; but there is too much kindness underneath his wrath for him to be capable of murdering even a thievish sparrow.  He likes to make others believe, however, that he is desperately in earnest.  His keen sense of the comic and the grotesque in human nature makes him one of the raciest of story-tellers; but although he does not put his tongue in traces, he is none the less a worthy priest.  There are many such as he in France—­men who are really devout, but never sanctimonious, whose candour is a cause of constant astonishment, who are good-natured to excess, and who are more open-hearted than many children.  Their friendship goes out readily to meet the stranger, and, speaking from my own experience, I can say that it wears well.  In the street, on the other side of the house, six women have perched themselves in a row.  They have come out to talk and enjoy the coolness of the evening, and, in order that their tender consciences may not prick them for being idle, they are paring potatoes, and getting ready other vegetables for the morrow.  They all scream together in Languedocian, which, by-the-bye, is anything but melodious here when spoken by the common people.  It becomes much less twangy and harsh a little farther South.  How these six charmers on chairs can all listen and talk at the same time is not easy to understand.  The truth is, very little listening is done in this part of the world.  The saying On se grise en parlant is quite applicable here.  People often get drunk on nothing stronger than the flow of their own words.

All the women being now on their way to the land of dreams, and consequently quiet for a few hours, and all the sounds of the earth being hushed save the song of the crickets among the vine-leaves, and in the fruit-trees of the moonlit garden, I will try to see Figeac up the vista of the ages, and if I succeed, perhaps the reader may be helped at the same time to gather interest in this queer old place, whose name, having been made familiar to the English who followed Henry II to France in the twelfth century, is perhaps a reason why their descendants will not ‘skip’ at first sight these few pages of local history.