One follows a hedge, climbs a path, and enters an open portal which has sunken into the ground to the depth of one third of its ogive.  The men who used to pass through it on horseback would be obliged to bend over their saddles in order to enter it to-day.  When the earth is tired of supporting a monument, it swells up underneath it, creeps up to it like a wave, and while the sky causes the top to crumble away, the ground obliterates the foundations.  The courtyard was deserted and the calm water that filled the moats remained motionless and flat under the pond-lilies.

The sky was white and cloudless, but without sunshine.  Its bleak curve extended far away, covering the country with a cold and cheerless monotony.  Not a sound could be heard, the birds did not sing, even the horizon was mute, and from the empty furrows came neither the scream of the crows as they soar heavenward, nor the soft creaking of plough-wheels.  We climbed down through brambles and underbrush into a deep and dark trench, hidden at the foot of a large tower, which stands in the water surrounded by reeds.  A lone window opens on one side:  a dark square relieved by the grey line of its stone cross-bar.  A capricious cluster of wild honeysuckle covers the sill, and its maze of perfumed blossoms creeps along the walls.  When one looks up, the openings of the big machicolations reveal only a part of the sky, or some little, unknown flower which has nestled in the battlement, its seed having been wafted there on a stormy day and left to sprout in the cracks of the stones.

Presently, a long, balmy breeze swept over us like a sigh, and the trees in the moats, the moss on the stones, the reeds in the water, the plants among the ruins, and the ivy, which covered the tower from top to bottom with a layer of shining leaves, all trembled and shook their foliage; the corn in the fields rippled in endless waves that again and again bent the swaying tops of the ears; the pond wrinkled and welled up against the foot of the tower; the leaves of the ivy all quivered at once, and an apple-tree in bloom covered the ground with pink blossoms.

Nothing, nothing!  The open sky, the growing grass, the passing wind.  No ragged child tending a browsing cow; not even, as elsewhere, some solitary goat sticking its shaggy head through an aperture in the walls to turn at our approach and flee in terror through the bushes; not a song-bird, not a nest, not a sound!  This castle is like a ghost:  mute and cold, it stands abandoned in this deserted place, and looks accursed and replete with terrifying recollections.  Still, this melancholy dwelling, which the owls now seem to avoid, was once inhabited.  In the dungeon, between four walls as livid as the bottom of an old drinking-trough, we were able to discover the traces of five floors.  A chimney, with its two round pillars and black top, has remained suspended in the air at a height of thirty feet.  Earth has accumulated on it, and plants are growing there as if it were a jardiniere.