The poor brute! I
cannot think of him now without a certain feeling of remorse.
The road down hill is curved and its edges are covered with clumps of
sea-rushes or large patches of a certain reddish moss. To the right, on
an eminence that starts from the bottom of the dale and swells in the
middle like the carapace of a tortoise, one perceives high, unequal
walls, the crumbling tops of which appear one above another.
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.
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