Seen from without, nothing would indicate a human habitation; the ruins lie in all the splendor of their downfall.

I have not replaced one stone—­walled up one lizard—­the house-leek, St. John’s-wort, bell-flower, sea-green saxifrage, woody nightshade and blue popion flower have engaged in a struggle upon the walls of arabesques, and carvings which would discourage the most patient ornamental sculptor.  But above all, a marvel of nature attracts your admiring gaze:  it is a gigantic ivy, dating back at least to Richard Coeur de Lion, it defies by the intricacy of its windings those geneological trees of Jesus Christ, which are seen in Spanish churches; the top touching the clouds, and its bearded roots embedded in the bosom of the patriarchal Abraham; there are tufts, garlands, clusters, cascades of a green so lustrous, so metallic, so sombre and yet so brilliant, that it seems as if the whole body of the old building, the whole life of the dead abbey had passed into the veins of this parasitic friend, which smothers with its embrace, holding in place one stone, while it dislodges two to plant its climbing spurs.

You cannot imagine what tufted elegance, what richness of open-work tracery this encroachment of the ivy throws upon the rather gaunt and sharp gable-end of the building, which on this front has for ornament but four narrow-pointed windows, surmounted by three trefoil quadrilobes.

The shell of the adjoining building is flanked at its angle by a turret, which is chiefly remarkable for its spiral stairway and well.  The great poet who invented Gothic cathedrals would, in the presence of this architectural caprice, ask the question, “Does the tower contain the well, or the well the tower?” You can decide; you who know everything, and more besides—­except, however, Mlle. de Chateaudun’s place of concealment.

Another curiosity of the old building is a moucharaby, a kind of balcony open at the bottom, picturesquely perched above a door, from which the good fathers could throw stones, beams and boiling oil on the heads of those tempted to assault the monastery for a taste of their good fare and a draught of their good wine.

Here I live alone, or in the company of four or five choice books, in a lofty hall with pointed roof; the points where the ribs intersect being covered with rosework of exquisite delicacy.  This comprises my suite of apartments, for I never could understand why the little space that is given one in this world to dream, to sleep, to live, to die in, should be divided into a set of compartments like a dressing-case.  I detest hedges, partitions and walls like a phalansterian.

To keep off dampness I have had the sides of the market-house, as my mother calls it, wainscoted in oak to the height of twelve or fifteen feet.

By a kind of gallery with two stairways, I can reach the windows and enjoy the beauty of the landscape, which is lovely.  My bed is a simple hammock of aloes-fibre, slung in a corner; very low divans, and huge tapestry arm-chairs, for the rest of the furniture.  Hung up on the wainscoting are pistols, guns, masks, foils, gloves, plastrons, dumb-bells and other gymnastic equipments.  My favorite horse is installed in the opposite angle, in a box of bois des iles, a precaution that secures him from the brutalizing society of grooms, and keeps him a horse of the world.