Over Strand and Field | Page 5

luminous river,
brightening the solitude. Overhead, a dome of leaves, through which
one can see the sky presenting a vivid contrast of blue, reverberates a
bright, greenish light, which illuminates the ruins, accentuating the
deep furrows, intensifying the shadows, and disclosing all the hidden
beauties. You advance and walk between those walls and under the
trees, wander along the barbicans, pass under the falling arcades from
which spring large, waving plants. The vaults, which contain corpses,
echo under your footfalls; lizards run in the grass, beetles creep along
the walls, the sky is blue, and the sleepy ruins pursue their dream.
With its triple enclosure, its dungeons, its interior court-yards, its
machicolations, its underground passages, its ramparts piled one upon
the other, like a bark on a bark and a shield on a shield, the ancient
Château of the Clissons rises before your mind and is reconstructed.
The memory of past existences exudes from its walls with the
emanations of the nettles and the coolness of the ivy. In that castle, men
altogether different from us were swayed by passions stronger than
ours; their hands were brawnier and their chests broader.
Long black streaks still mark the walls, as in the time when logs blazed
in the eighteen-foot fireplaces. Symmetrical holes in the masonry
indicate the floors to which one ascended by winding staircases now
crumbling in ruins, while their empty doors open into space.
Sometimes a bird, taking flight from its nest hanging in the branches,
would pass with spread wings through the arch of a window, and fly far
away into the country.
At the top of a high, bleak wall, several square bay-windows, of
unequal length and position, let the pure sky shine through their crossed
bars; and the bright blue, framed by the stone, attracted my eye with
surprising persistency. The sparrows in the trees were chirping, and in
the midst of it all a cow, thinking, no doubt, that it was a meadow,
grazed peacefully, her horns sweeping over the grass.

There is a window, a large window that looks out into a meadow called
la prairie des chevaliers. It was there, from a stone bench carved in the
wall, that the high-born dames of the period watched the knights urge
their iron-barbed steeds against one another, and the lances come down
on the helmets and snap, and the men fall to the ground. On a fine
summer day, like to-day, perhaps, when the mill that enlivens the
whole landscape did not exist, when there were roofs on the walls, and
Flemish hangings, and oil-cloths on the window-sills, when there was
less grass, and when human voices and rumours filled the air, more
than one heart beat with love and anguish under its red velvet bodice.
Beautiful white hands twitched with fear on the stone, which is now
covered with moss, and the embroidered veils of high caps fluttered in
the wind that plays with my cravat and that swayed the plumes of the
knights.
We went down into the vaults where Jean V was imprisoned. In the
men's dungeon we saw the large double hook that was used for
executions; and we touched curiously with our fingers the door of the
women's prison. It is about four inches thick and is plated with heavy
iron bars. In the middle is a little grating that was used to throw in
whatever was necessary to prevent the captive from starving. It was this
grating which opened instead of the door, which, being the mouth of
the most terrible confessions, was one of those that always closed but
never opened. In those days there was real hatred. If you hated a person,
and he had been kidnapped by surprise or traitorously trapped in an
interview, and was in your power, you could torture him at your own
sweet will. Every minute, every hour, you could delight in his anguish
and drink his tears. You could go down into his cell and speak to him
and bargain with him, laugh at his tortures, and discuss his ransom; you
could live on and off him, through his slowly ebbing life and his
plundered treasures. Your whole castle, from the top of the towers to
the bottom of the trenches, weighed on him, crushing, and burying him;
and thus family revenges were accomplished by the family itself, a fact
which constituted their potency and symbolised the idea.
Sometimes, however, when the wretched prisoner was an aristocrat and
a wealthy man, and he near death, and one was tired of him, and his

tears had acted upon the hatred of his master like refreshing bleedings,
there was talk of releasing him. The captive promised everything; he
would return the fortified towns, hand over the keys to his best cities,
give his daughter in