Two Summers in Guyenne Part 16

The village of St. Michel is close to the chateau, but is of much more ancient origin, as its church plainly shows. The venerable Romanesque door-way was to me more beautiful because of the purple spots of snapdragon, that shone in the clear dimness of the twilight like little coloured lamps about the crevices of the old stones. It is uncertain whether Montaigne was christened here or in the family chapel. It was a strange christening wherever it took place, for we are told that he was 'held over the font' by persons of most humble condition, his father's motive in this matter being, according to the printers of the early edition of the 'Essays' already referred to, 'to attach him to those who might have need of him rather than to those of whom he might have need.' It was Papessu, another village in the neighbourhood, to which he was sent as a nurseling, and where, in obedience to the injunctions of his Spartan father, he was treated like one of the peasant family with whom he was placed. He was reared from his cradle in frugality and philosophy, and, considering what an unpleasant childhood he must have pa.s.sed, it is truly wonderful that he fulfilled parental expectations, and did not turn out a hard drinker and a brawling cavalier.

There is a tradition in Perigord which some local writers have accepted as fact, that the Montaigne family was of English origin. It is not easy to ascertain the ground on which it rests. The patronymic was Eyquem, and the _chevalier-seigneur_, who settled in Perigord and took the territorial t.i.tle of Montagne or Montaigne, came from the Bordelais.

That is about all that is really known of the family. If the Eyquem had borne a prominent part against the French kings in the long wars which had not ended a hundred years before the birth of the moralist, this would have been sufficient to account for their being described as English.

Speaking of the peasants of his district, Montaigne tells us that their dress was 'more distant from ours than that of a man who is only clothed with his skin.' From this we have a right to suppose that their appearance was original, if not picturesque. To-day it is neither one nor the other.

With the exception of the kerchief tied round the back of the head, after the fas.h.i.+on of the Perigourdine or the Bordelaise, by some of the women, these peasants wear nothing to distinguish them from those who have entirely abandoned a local costume.

I was in no way pleased with the villagers of St. Michel-Montaigne, nor did they seem to be agreeably impressed by me. Those to whom I spoke did not conceal their surprise that I had been allowed to see over the castle. I think they must have set me down for something less respectable than a plasterer, and I began to think quite seriously that I was neglecting my appearance. Then I thought of the knapsack, which was really getting to look, from long usage, as if the time had come for placing it in the way of a deserving _chiffonnier_, but I could not make up my mind to buy another.

I was anxious to pa.s.s the night in the village, for I hoped that the inhabitants had preserved some traditions of Montaigne; but there was only a small and very dirty-looking auberge that had any pretension to lodge man and beast, and here the hostess rejected my overtures with vivacity.

Consequently, I was compelled to trudge on, and as I left the place I shook the dust from off my feet at the inhabitants. There was plenty of it, but I am afraid it did them little harm.

The road, now descending towards the Dordogne, pa.s.sed through great vineyards, and there was enough light for the cl.u.s.tered bunches of grapes to be seen on every vine. Under the calm sky, still full of the heat of the summer day, and glowing duskily, the wide, sloping land offered up all its myriads of broad, motionless leaves and its wealth of fruit to the G.o.d of wine. O gentle peace of the summer night that has still the bloom of the sun upon its dusky cheek--peace untroubled by any sound save the joyous shrilling of the cricket that has climbed upon the darkening leaf--why do I hurry onward upon the dusty road, instead of sitting upon a bank amid the fragrant thyme and agrimony, and letting the mind lay in great store of your sweetness against the cold and dismal nights to come?

I reached the village of La Mothe by the Dordogne, and while I was casting about for an inn that looked comfortable, and also hospitable, I met a pretty little brunette with a rich southern colour in her cheeks, charmingly coifed _a la bordelaise_, and tripping jauntily along with a coffee-pot in her hand. It was pleasant to look at a nice face again after all the ill-favoured visages that had risen up against me during the second half of the day, and so I stopped this pretty girl and asked her to tell me which was the best hotel in the place. She would not answer the question, but she mentioned a hotel which she said was as good as any. Thither I went, and found a comfortable little inn, where I was well received. I had not been there long when the little brunette entered. She was the 'daughter of the house.' I now understood that her hesitation was conscientious.

The hostess was a small, sprightly woman with a smiling face, which, together with her bright-coloured coif gracefully hanging to her black hair, made up such a head as puts one in a good temper for a whole evening.

She was so highly civilized that she actually asked me if I would like to wash my hands. I expected that she was going to lead me to one of those little cisterns--'fountains' in French--attached to the wall, that one sees throughout Guyenne, and which have come down almost unchanged in form, as well as the roller-towels that often go with them, from the feudal castles of the twelfth century; but I was wrong. She led me to a bucket. Filling a large ladle with water, she fixed it lengthwise, and the handle being a tube, the water ran slowly out from the end. I quite understood that I had to wash my hands with the trickling water, for I had often done it before.

These ladles with hollow handles are also used for sprinkling the floors, which are never washed in Southern France. The sprinkling lays the dust, cools the air, and depresses the fleas for at least a quarter of an hour.

After I had dealt with a well-cooked little dinner, plentifully bedewed with a pleasant but not insidious wine grown upon the sunny slopes above the Dordogne, I made the discovery that the best room in the house was occupied by the dark-eyed damsel, except when a guest came along who managed to ingratiate himself with her mother, and then the daughter had to turn out. The room was not exactly luxurious, for it contained little besides the bed, a table, and a chair, but it was bright and clean; and when I had confided myself to the strong hempen sheets that had still half a century of wear in them, and had pa.s.sed the first quarter of an hour, which is always critical, without being made aware by scouts and skirmishers of the advance of a hostile force, I was very thankful that I was not received with open arms in the village of St. Michel-Montaigne.

The next morning I met the Dordogne again after a long separation. It was now a great river flowing quietly through a vine-covered plain. The rapids had all been left far away, but it had begun to feel the tide, and this to a river is like the first shock of death. It struggles for awhile with destiny, and a sadder sound than the cry which it made when it came forth from the rock or the little lake is heard in the quiet evening or the more solemn night. Although it is flowing back to its true source, the river shrinks from the vast and mysterious ocean as we shrink ourselves from the immense unknown.

But at this hour of eight in the morning, with a sun so bright and a sky so blue, only the broad and serene beauty of the water makes itself felt. As the river goes curving over the vine-covered land, its stillness is almost that of a lake, and it mirrors nothing but the sky, save the trees and flowers of it's banks. The moments are precious, for the tender loveliness of the landscape will wane as the light gains strength.

On each side of the Dordogne, between the water and the vineyards, which stretch away with scarcely a break across the plain and up the sides of the distant hills, is a strip of rough field. The suns.h.i.+ne of four months, with hardly a shower to moisten the earth, has made flowers scarce, but on this long curving bend of coa.r.s.e meadow the gra.s.s has kept something of its greenness, and the season of blossoming stays by the beautiful stream.

There is a wanton tangling and mingling of the waste-loving flowers, such as the yellow toad-flax, the bristling viper's bugloss, the th.o.r.n.y ononis that spreads a hue of pink as it creeps along the ground, sky-blue chicory on wiry stems, large milk-white blooms of _datura_, and purple heads of _centaurea calcitrapa_, whose spines are avoided like those of a hedgehog by people who walk with bare feet. Upon the banks, the high hemp-agrimony and purple loosestrife, with here and there an evening primrose, flaunt their ma.s.ses of colour over the water or the pebbly sh.o.r.e.

From a distant church tower that rises above the wilderness of vines a clear-voiced bell calls through the morning air, _Sanctus! sanctus!

sanctus!_ by which all know who care to think of it that the priest standing at the altar there has come to the most solemn part of his ma.s.s.

Wandering on, indifferent to the flight of time, upon these pleasant banks, which, but for a bullock-cart that came jolting and creaking along by the edge of the vines, I might have thought quite abandoned by all other humanity, I saw afar off a little cl.u.s.ter of white houses that seemed to be floating on the blue water. I knew that this could be nothing else but Castillon, and that the effect of floating houses was an illusion caused by a bend of the river. And so I was nearing at length that place where the destinies of France and England, so long interwoven, became again distinct, and where the English nationality, which five-and-twenty years before was in imminent danger of absorption as the fruit of victory, was decisively saved from this fate by a defeat for which all England then in her blindness mourned. The loss of Guyenne made an alien dynasty national, and by stopping the outflow of the Anglo-Saxon race upon the Continent, preserved its energies for the fulfilment of a very different destiny from that which had almost begun when a peasant-girl dropped her distaff and took up the sword.

On reaching Castillon I had one of those disappointments to which a traveller should always be prepared after being taught so often by experience that distance idealizes a scene. How much less romantic the town looked now than when I saw it floating, as it seemed, upon the sky-blue water in a haze of gold-dust fired by the slanting rays! It was then like the Castillon of some troubadour's song; now it was a mean-looking little sun-baked town modernized to downright plainness, with no remnant of its ramparts remaining save a sombre old Gothic gateway near the river, and no ecclesiastical architecture deserving notice. Its site, however, is the same as that which it occupied in the Middle Ages, namely, close to the Dordogne, upon a ridge of rising land running up towards the hills which close the valley on the north. On the eastern side this ridge for some distance is so steep as to be almost escarped, but it is covered with gra.s.s or vines; on the opposite side it is now only a little above the plain. The battle was fought, not under the walls of the town, but somewhat to the north-east of it in the open country.

Talbot's mistake lay in the confidence with which he attacked an entrenched army much stronger than his own, and especially in his contempt for Messire Jean Bureau's guns. The old leader now belonged to a dying epoch, and his great faith in British and Gascon archers may well have led him to undervalue the power of artillery, notwithstanding that it was used with terrible effect by Edward III. at Crecy more than a hundred years before.

The French had profited by that lesson, and at Castillon they turned the tables on their tenacious adversaries.

It may be well to briefly recall the circ.u.mstances under which this momentous battle was fought. One after another the English had been compelled to surrender to the victorious armies of Charles VII. their fortresses in Poitou, Angoumois, Guyenne and Gascony; so that of their immense province of Aquitaine, which at one time stretched from the Loire to the Pyrenees, they possessed nothing. Even Bordeaux, after remaining faithful to England for 200 years, was a French city at the middle of the fifteenth century. It would probably have remained so without any fresh appeal to arms if Charles VII. had treated the inhabitants with the same justice, and accorded them the same liberties which they enjoyed while they were the subjects of the English kings. It is a truly remarkable fact that, although these kings were so intimately connected with France by blood and ambition, they had borrowed enough of the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race for establis.h.i.+ng foreign possessions upon the solid basis of reciprocal interest to make their administrative policy in Aquitaine incomparably better by its equity, the facilities which it afforded for local government, the a.s.sertion of individual rights, and the growth of communal prosperity, than that of the French kings and the great n.o.bles who, while owing homage, to the crown, were virtually sovereigns.

At no time was there much dissatisfaction with the rule of the English sovereigns and their seneschals in Western Aquitaine. It was only in the wilder parts of the country, such as the Quercy and the Rouergue, where Celtic blood was, and still is, almost pure, and where the people were very difficult to govern--Caesar had found that out before Henry Plantagenet, Becket, and John Chandos--that there were frequent revolts, entailing as a fatal consequence in those feudal ages barbaric repression. Throughout the flouris.h.i.+ng Bordelais the people became firmly and thoroughly attached to the English cause, not less than the Alsatians and Lorrainers became attached to that of France in later times--although there is no historical parallel between the origin of the two connections. Bordeaux was like another London when the Black Prince held his splendid but profligate court there. Commercial interest had doubtless something to do with this fidelity of the Bordelais, for the wealthy English soon learnt to appreciate the delicate flavour of the wines grown upon the chalky hillsides by the Garonne and the Dordogne, and 500 years ago s.h.i.+ps came from London and Bristol to Bordeaux and returned laden with pipes and hogsheads; but a sagacious and--the times being considered--a large-minded and generous system of government gave to the people that feeling of security which was then so rare, and which was the beginning of all patriotic sentiment.

French writers who have studied this subject frankly admit that we have here the true explanation of the strong attachment of the Bordelais and the Gascons to the English cause. As an ill.u.s.tration, it may not be amiss to translate the following pa.s.sages from 'Les Anglais en Guyenne,' by M. D.

Brissaud:

'The Aquitanians had reason to thank the English Government for not having treated them as foreigners, like the inhabitants of a conquered province, as the people of Ireland, for example, had been treated, and for having confined its action to the development of judicial inst.i.tutions, of which the germ was found in the feudal system of France.... The kings of England not only refrained from setting themselves in opposition to the local justice of the _arriere-fiefs_; we have seen them, and we shall see them again in the history of the communal movement, favour the extension of trial by peers, while accommodating at the same time their administrative system to the spontaneous manifestations of opinion in a continental country. They even took care in the composition of the courts that the Aquitanians should not feel the supremacy of the foreigner. With rare exceptions, the _personnel_ of the courts of justice was recruited from among the inhabitants of the province--a precious advantage at a time when the predominance of provincial feeling caused those magistrates who were sent from the North of France into the South by the Capetian royalty to be regarded as foreigners and enemies. The consequence of this choice by England of Aquitanians in preference to English in the composition of the courts was that under Philippe le Bel or Philippe de Valois Guyenne had a right to consider itself in possession of a milder and more impartial system of justice than other provinces of the South already attached like Languedoc to the crown of France.'

When, therefore, the Bordelais fell under French rule, the exactions of Charles and the cynicism with which he broke faith, together with the stagnation in the wine trade, caused the people to wish very heartily that the English would return and try their luck again with the sword. A revolt was secretly planned, in which many of the powerful barons of Aquitaine leagued themselves with the burghers of Bordeaux, for the n.o.bles were as dissatisfied with the new state of things as the commoners. The Earl of Shrewsbury, notwithstanding his great age, came over from England with a very small following, and placed himself at the head of the insurrection.

The name of Talbot was sufficient to fire the Bordelais and the Gascons with enthusiasm and confidence. As the news of his landing in the Medoc spread, men rushed to arms and raised the old battle-cries of the English in Aquitaine. Bordeaux opened its gates immediately to the veteran leader, and the example was quickly followed by Libourne, Castillon, St. emilion, and other strong places in the district. This was in the month of October, 1452. It was not until May of the following year that Charles VII. decided to risk the fortunes of war with the two armies which he had mustered--one on the Garonne, and the other on the Charente. By that time the whole of Western Guyenne was again English. The plan of campaign followed was the one laid out by the long-headed Jean Bureau, a man of figures and calculations--a small Moltke of the fifteenth century. He had been the King's treasurer, his _argentier_; then the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Orleans made him Mayor of Bordeaux, and now, because he had a taste for guns, he was Grand Master of the Artillery. He advised Charles that the best course to adopt in order to spoil the English scheme would be to take possession of the roads leading to Bordeaux, and thus cut off communication with the interior. Now, Castillon was an important strategical point, commanding one of the princ.i.p.al gates of the Bordelais, and it was resolved to make a vigorous effort to s.n.a.t.c.h this fortress, which was but weakly garrisoned, from the hands of the English. The army, which was under the nominal command of the Comte de Penthievre, but whose ruling spirit was Jean Bureau, accordingly marched on Castillon, and the King's army moved in the same direction. Talbot, having tidings of the enemy's plans, hurried eastward with all the forces he could muster to the relief of the garrison.

His main object, however, was probably to prevent a junction of the two armies. He was confident of being able to defeat both if he could engage them separately.

The French army came down the valley of the Dordogne, and drew near to Castillon when Talbot was still far away. The plan of the leaders was not to attack the town until their camp had been well fortified with earthworks and palisades, for it was felt that they could not be too cautious when an adversary like Talbot was in the country, and possibly near at hand. The entrenched camp was laid out and ordered with a military science in advance of the age. The position, moreover, was very judiciously chosen, considering the impossibility in which the French were placed of selecting high ground. The camp was in a fork formed by the Dordogne and its small tributary, the Lidoire, which flows in a south-westerly direction, and falls into the broad river a mile or two above Castillon. Bureau was given ample time to raise his ramparts, dig his moats, fix his palisades, and set up his park of artillery, on which he laid so much store. Then were detached 800 archers--Angevins and Berrichons--who took up their quarters at an abbey that then existed a little to the north of the town, at the foot of a wooded hill. The fortress was therefore threatened on two sides.

On July 16 Talbot arrived on the scene, and at the first brush obtained a signal advantage by taking the French completely by surprise. On the march from Libourne he did not trust himself to the broad valley, which, being highly cultivated then as it is now, offered no cover, but followed the line of hills to the north of it, on which much of the ancient forest still clung. Thus he managed to conceal his advance until his men broke suddenly upon the unsuspecting archers of Anjou and Berry, and slaughtered them with that thoroughness which was characteristic of mediaeval warfare. Talbot belonged to an age that gave no quarter and expected none. A man down was a man lost, unless he had extraordinary luck. The ma.s.sacre of these archers put the English army--which, after the drafts made on various garrisons, was now said to be about 6,000 strong--in good spirits. Not many of the fugitives reached the camp. Talbot did not follow up this advantage by attempting an immediate attack upon the fortified position in the plain. He gave his men a rest after their toilsome march over rough ground, and put off the decisive battle until the morrow. In the meantime, he placed himself in communication with the garrison of Castillon, and arranged that a sortie in force should take place on the signal being given for the great tug-of-war. He made the abbey his headquarters, and it has been recorded that the casks of wine found in the cellars of the dispossessed monks were speedily drained.

The momentous day of July 17 broke, and Talbot was waiting to hear ma.s.s before risking upon the die of a battle the English cause in Aquitaine, so wonderfully and bloodlessly redeemed in a few months. One of the last of the mediaeval knights, the ardour of his loyalty was tinged with mysticism, and any cause that he had espoused would have become holy in his eyes. He therefore raised those aged eyes now to the G.o.d of battles as he knelt in the quiet sanctuary, impatient though he was to see the vineyards and the meadows redden again with the blood that he had been shedding with the zeal of a Crusader for more than half a century. His chaplain was laying the altar, when a sudden movement of armed men disturbed the kneeling octogenarian from his devotions. Tidings were brought that the French camp was breaking up in disorder, and that the enemy was about to escape. At this news the blood of the old warrior began to rush through his veins, and without waiting for the ma.s.s, he had his armour brought to him. Clad in iron and mounted upon his white horse, accompanied by his son, the Lord Lisle--Shakespeare's John Talbot--he rode down into the plain. The enemy was not in disorder, but was waiting behind the entrenchments for the expected onslaught.

Talbot gave the order for the attack, and his thousand knights and esquires charged down upon the camp. When they were well within range of Bureau's artillery, the 'three hundred cast-iron pieces mounted on wheels, which they called _bombardes_,' [Footnote: Chroniques de Jean Tarde.] broke into a roar, and the stone b.a.l.l.s worked terrible havoc upon horses and riders.

The ground was quickly strewn with heavily armoured men, who lay there as helpless as turned turtles, and who were ridden over by those in the rear.

The mediaeval cavalry was shattered or thrown into hopeless confusion by the new artillery. The infantry met with no better success in moving to the a.s.sault of the hastily raised ramparts bristling with guns. The English army was demoralized by this unexpected reception. In vain did Talbot ride again and again into the thickest of the fray--the besieged had now a.s.sumed the offensive. Even his grand old figure and his rallying cry failed to turn back the tide of disaster. It has been written that in his wrath he struck those of his own party who endeavoured to draw him out of the danger to which he was constantly exposing himself. He felt that at his age it was not worth while to survive defeat, in order that he might die in his bed with a mind tortured by gnawing regret a few months or years later.

But although he resolved not to save himself, he urged his son to flee.

On this point there is too much agreement between English and French chroniclers for it to be possible to doubt that Shakespeare's well-known scene between the old and the young Talbot, in the first part of 'King Henry VI.,' was founded on fact. Moreover, what was more natural than that the father, when he saw the evil turn that things were taking, should have said to his son:

'Therefore, dear boy, mount on my swiftest horse, And I'll direct thee how thou shall escape By sudden flight. Come, dally not; be gone'?

What more natural, too, than that the son of such a father should have replied in words which, although less rhythmical, would have been in substance these?--

'Is my name Talbot? and am I your son?

And shall I fly?

The world will say he is not Talbot's blood, That basely fled when n.o.ble Talbot stood.'

To the fact that the battle of Castillon was fought in Perigord, although the town is in the Bordelais, we doubtless owe the interesting description that Jean Tarde has left us of the memorable struggle. His narrative, so far as it relates to the incident between Talbot and his son, is in the main the same as Shakespeare's; but being told in the plain prose of a simple annalist, it lacks the rhetorical and romantic embellishments which the British poet thought fit to add. In the following translation of the most interesting part of Tarde's description of the battle, an effort has been made to preserve the style of the writer:

'The English troops entered courageously by the pa.s.sage where the artillery awaited them, which (pa.s.sage) alone could give them access to the French army. He who commanded the artillery took his time, and at the first discharge laid low three or four hundred. This ma.s.sacre, coming unexpectedly, troubled the whole English army, and threw it into disorder, which pained Talbot to see; and fearing the defeat of his men, he told the Sieur de l'Isle, his son, to withdraw and reserve himself for a more fortunate occasion; who replied that he could not retire from the combat in which he saw his father running the risk of his life. To this Talbot rejoined, 'I have in my life given so many proofs of my valour and military virtue, that I cannot die to-day without honour, and I cannot flee without making a breach in the reputation I have acquired by so much labour; but to you, my son, who are bearing here your first arms, flight cannot bring any infamy nor death much glory.' [Footnote: 'J'ay pendant ma vie donne tant de tesmoignages de ma valeur et vertu militaire que je ne puys meshuy mourir sans honneur et ne puys fuir sans fere breche a la reputation que j'ay acquise par tant de travaux; mais vous mon filz qui portes icy vos premieres armes, la fuitte ne vous peut apporter aucune infamie, ny la mort beaucoup de gloire.'] But without giving heed to this counsel, the young lord, full of generous courage, rea.s.sured his men, made them fall again into rank, and having ranged them with their bucklers fixed in tortoise fas.h.i.+on, sped on to the attack of his enemies in their camp; for they had not dared to leave their trenches. The French, seeing themselves pressed in this way, entered into the battle. Great was the _melee_. The artillery of the French continued all the while to fire upon the English troops, and so well that a stone striking Talbot broke his thigh. The English seeing their chief on the ground, believing him dead, and recognising that the French were the stronger in artillery and in the number of men, lost courage, fell into disorder, and only thought of saving themselves. The French, on the contrary, took heart and fought with fury. The battle was b.l.o.o.d.y. Talbot, his son the Sieur de l'Isle, another b.a.s.t.a.r.d son, and a son-in-law, were killed with the greater part of the English n.o.bility, and the whole army was cut to pieces. Talbot's body was buried on the spot where it was found, and upon his grave was built a small chapel that still exists, but open to the sky and half ruined.'

Jean Tarde concludes his narrative of the battle with these remarks:

'The English army being thus defeated, Castillon surrendered, and the King in person besieged Bordeaux, which surrendered on October 18. Following its example, all the other towns of Guyenne again submitted to him. Thus ended the domination of the English in Guyenne, of which (province) they were completely dispossessed, and which at once returned to the sceptre and crown of France, after remaining for three hundred years in the claws of the English leopards.'

There are some patent inaccuracies in Tarde's account--the statement, to wit, that Talbot was buried on the spot where he fell, whereas his body was carried from the field and taken to England. The ecclesiastical chronicler must have accepted the story in circulation among the common people, which is repeated to this day by the peasants around Castillon, who even point out a mound which they call 'Talbot's grave.' Shakespeare does not fall into this error, although he brings Jeanne d'Arc upon the battlefield, notwithstanding that she was burnt twenty-two years before the death of Talbot.

According to the version accepted by French historians, Talbot was overthrown by a cannon-shot, and was afterwards despatched on the ground by a soldier who ran his sword through the hero's throat. His body was carried into the French camp, where it remained all night, and it was so disfigured that his herald could hardly recognise it. Many of the fugitives were drowned or were killed by the archers while attempting to swim across the Dordogne. Four thousand English, or English partisans, were said to have been slain on this fatal day, and only a small remnant of the army managed to retreat within the walls of Castillon. The French then besieged the town, and the bombardment was so furious that the garrison was soon willing to surrender on the best terms that could be obtained. Bordeaux was not besieged until St. emilion, Libourne, Fronsac, Bazas, Cadillac, and other strongholds of the Bordelais had capitulated.

After this rather long journey into the past, I must return to my wayfaring upon the battlefield of Castillon, over which more than four centuries have crept since the events occurred which gave it so dramatic a celebrity.

Scorched by the now blazing sun, I took the shadeless road leading out of the town towards the north-east, and after walking about a mile between vineyards, I came to the commemorative monument of the battle raised in 1888 by the Union Patriotique de France. It is a low obelisk, with no ornament save a mediaeval sword carved upon it, with point turned upwards.

Facing the road is the following inscription:

'_Dans cette plaine le 17 Juillet, 1453, fut remporte la victoire qui delivra du joug de l'Angleterre les provinces meridionals de la France et termina la guerre de cent ans_.'

The abbey where the French archers were surprised and slain must have been near this spot, but it was down in the valley by the Lidoire where Talbot fell. There is no trace of a chapel such as that of which Tarde speaks, nor any other mark to show the place. But the little stream is there as of old, and the beautiful Dordogne that drank the mingled blood of the two armies which its tributary poured into it flows serenely and blue as it did then under the same summer sky.

An Englishman who now wanders over the battlefield of Castillon can hardly realize how his country grieved at the defeat of Talbot far away here amidst the southern vines. To-day it seems so absurd, so contrary to the policy of common-sense, that England, then so thinly populated, should have striven so hard and so long in order to be a Continental power; when now, with her dense population, half subsisting upon foreign supplies, she blesses that accident of nature which caused the bridge of rocks that connected her with the mainland to disappear beneath the sea. Surely if history teaches anything, it teaches the vanity of politics.

From Castillon I bent my course to St. emilion on the road to Libourne; the Dordogne, which here twists like a snake in agony, being left somewhat to the south. The whole country, hill and plain, was clad with vineyards, but I soon grew weary of looking at the numberless short vines fastened to stakes in one broad blaze of unchanging suns.h.i.+ne. Even the hanging cl.u.s.ters of grapes wearied the eye by endless repet.i.tion.

By-and-by, out of all this sameness rose a hill in that abrupt manner which strikes a peculiar character into this southern landscape, and upon the hill were jutting rocks and a broken ma.s.s of strangely-jumbled masonry-roofs rising out of roofs, gables crus.h.i.+ng gables, feudal towers, great walls, and one tall heaven-pointing spire. This was St. emilion, respected in the Middle Ages as a strong fortress of the Bordelais, and now so famous for its wine that the locality has long ceased to produce more than an insignificant part of that which is put into bottles bearing the name of a saint who drank nothing stronger than water. Only the wine that is grown upon the sides of the hill is really St. emilion; it changes as soon as the vineyards reach the plain. It is then a _vin de plaine_, and is no more like the other than if it had been grown fifty miles away.