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
Chateau 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.
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