“He was a young man who came to a bad end,” said the young women.  More fearful, their grandmothers crossed themselves as they went along the foot of the wall in the evening.  The memory of the disembowelled children persisted.  The Marshal, known only by his surname, still had power to terrify.

Durtal had gone every day from the inn where he lodged to the chateau, towering over the valleys of the Crume and of the Sevre, facing hills excoriated with blocks of granite and overgrown with formidable oaks, whose roots, protruding out of the ground, resembled monstrous nests of frightened snakes.

One might have believed oneself transported into the real Brittany.  There was the same melancholy, heavy sky, the same sun, which seemed older than in other parts of the world and which but feebly gilded the sorrowful, age-old forests and the mossy sandstone.  There were the same endless stretches of broken, rocky soil, pitted with ponds of rusty water, dotted with scattered clumps of gorse and fruze copse, and sprinkled with pink harebells and nameless yellow prairie flowers.

One felt that this iron-grey sky; this starving soil, empurpled only here and there by the bleeding flower of the buckwheat; that these roads, bordered with stones placed one on top of the other, without cement or plaster; that these paths, bordered with impenetrable hedges; that these grudging plants; these inhospitable fields; these crippled beggars, eaten with vermin, plastered with filth; that even the flocks, undersized and wasted, the dumpy little cows, the black sheep whose blue eyes had the cold, pale gleam that is in the eyes of the Slav or of the tribade; had perpetuated their primordial state, preserving an identical landscape through all the centuries.

Except for an incongruous factory chimney further away on the bank of the Sevre, the countryside of Tiffauges remained in perfect harmony with the immense chateau, erect among its ruins.  Within the close, still to be traced by the ruins of the towers, was a whole plain, now converted into a miserable truck garden.  Cabbages, in long bluish lines, impoverished carrots, consumptive navews, spread over this enormous circle where iron mail had clanked in the tournament and where processionals had slowly devolved, in the smoke of incense, to the chanting of psalms.

A thatched hut had been built in a corner.  The peasant inhabitants, returned to a state of savagery, no longer understood the meaning of words, and could be roused out of their apathy only by the display of a silver coin.  Seizing the coin, they would hand over the keys.

For hours one could browse around at ease among the ruins, and smoke and daydream.  Unfortunately, certain parts were inaccessible.  The donjon was still shut off, on the Tiffauges side, by a vast moat, at the bottom of which mighty trees were growing.  One would have had to pass over the tops of the trees, growing to the very verge of the wall, to gain a porch on the other side, for there was now no drawbridge.