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 furze 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 Sèvre, the countryside of Tiffauges remained in perfect harmony with the immense château, 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.
But quite accessible was another part which overhung the Sèvre. There the wings of the castle, overgrown with ivy and white-crested viburnum, were intact. Spongy, dry as pumice stone, silvered with lichen and gilded with moss, the towers rose entire, though from their crenelated collarettes whole blocks were blown away on windy nights.
Within, room succeeded glacial room, cut into the granite, surmounted with vaulted roofs, and as close as the hold of a ship. Then by spiral stairways one descended into similar chambers, joined by cellar passageways into the walls of which were dug deep niches and lairs of unknown utility.
Beneath, those corridors, so narrow that two persons could not walk along them abreast, descended at a gentle slope, and bifurcated so that there was a labyrinth of lanes, leading to veritable cells, on the walls of which the nitre scintillated in the light of the lantern like steel mica or twinkling grains of sugar. In the cells above, in the dungeons beneath, one stumbled over rifts of hard earth, in the centre or in a corner of which yawned now the mouth of an unsealed oubliette, now a well.
Finally, at the summit of one of the towers, that at the left as one entered, there was a roofed gallery running parallel to a circular foothold cut from the rock. There, without doubt, the men-at-arms had been stationed to fire on their assailants through wide loopholes opening overhead and underfoot. In this gallery the voice, even the lowest, followed the curving walls and could be heard all around the circuit.
Briefly, the exterior of the castle revealed a fortified place built to stand long sieges, and the dismantled interior made one think of a prison in which flesh, mildewed by the moisture, must rot in a few months. Out in the open air again, one felt a sensation of well-being, of relief, which one lost on traversing the ruins of the isolated chapel and penetrating, by a cellar door, to the crypt below.
This chapel, low, squat, its vaulted roof upheld by massive columns on whose capitals lozenges and bishop’s croziers were carved, dated from the eleventh century. The altar stone survived intact. Brackish daylight, which seemed to have been filtered through layers of horn, came in at the openings, hardly lighting the shadowed, begrimed walls and the earth floor, which too was pierced by the entrance to an oubliette or by a well shaft.
In the evening after dinner he had often climbed up on the embankment and followed the cracked walls of the ruins. On bright nights one part of the castle was thrown back into shadow, and the other, by contrast, stood forth, washed in silver and blue, as if rubbed with mercurial lusters, above the Sèvre, along whose surface streaks of moonlight darted like the backs of fishes. The silence was overpowering. After nine o’clock not a dog, not a soul. He would return to the poor chamber of the inn, where an old woman, in black, wearing the cornet headdress her ancestors wore in the sixteenth century, waited with a candle to bar the door as soon as he returned.
“All this,” said Durtal to himself, “is the skeleton of a dead keep. To reanimate it we must revisualize the opulent flesh which once covered these bones of sandstone. Documents give us every detail. This carcass was magnificently clad, and if we are to see Gilles in his own environment, we must remember all the sumptuosity of fifteenth century furnishing.
“We must reclothe
