d interior, into
the courts, up the stairways and through the empty galleries. I climbed
to the old towers and put to flight flocks of pigeons, and disturbed the
sleep of bats and owls. On the first floor there was a suite of spacious
rooms, still roofed over, and very dark because of the shuttered
windows. I penetrated into these chambers, and I felt an almost
delicious terror when I heard my footsteps echoing through the
sepulchral stillness of the place. Then I would pass in review before
the strange Gothic paintings and the half-effaced frescoes that still
retained traces of gilt ornamentation; the fabled monsters and garlands
of impossible flowers had been added at the time of the Renaissance.
This magnificent, pictured past, fantastic and barbarous to the point
of being terrible, seemed to me, at that time, very vague and dim and
distant; I could not realize that it had been lighted up by the same
midday sunshine that warmed the red stones of the ruins about me. And
now that I am better able to estimate Castelnau, when I recall it to my
memory, after having seen most of the splendors of this earth, I still
think the enchanted castle of my childhood, as it stands upon its
glorious height, one of the most superb ruins of mediaeval France.

In one of the towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal
blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place
have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower. There alone, in the
silence as of a city of the dead, I would lean out of the little window
cut in the thick wall and contemplate the green verdure lying below me,
and I tried to imagine that I saw coming along the paths, given over to
the flight of birds, a cavalcade of soldiers, or a procession of noble
knights and ladies. . . . And, for me, reared in a level country, one
of the greatest charms of the place was the view I had of blue distances
visible from every loophole and crevice, every gap and opening in the
rooms and towers of Castelnau, for then I realized its extraordinary
height.

CHAPTER XLVI.

My brother's letters, written close on very fine paper, continued to
reach us from time to time; he could only send them to us by sailing
vessels bound in our direction which lay-to in that part of the world
where he was stationed. Some of them were written particularly for me,
and these were long, and filled with never-to-be-forgotten descriptions.
I already knew several wor