“Sarlat in the Dordogne, May 21.—We are still in swelching torrents ... but this is a pleasant little hotel in an old cathedral town, with marvellous streets of houses of fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The weather makes no end of hindrances and discomforts, yet in this tour, as in all others, I have found that expected misfortunes never happen: there are plenty of others, but what one looks for never comes, and I have gone on steadily, missing nothing of the plan marked out, only sometimes delayed. The people are beyond measure pleasant and kind, and the cheapness of everything is a perpetual amazement.”
“Carcassonne, May 28.—On Friday 23rd it poured in torrents, but I could not give in, so went by the earliest train as far into the hills as it penetrated, and then by omnibus to Souillac, one of the grand and glorious abbey churches, now parochial, which are so common in that part of France and nowhere else—full of colour and solemnity, though rugged to a degree, and into which you descend by long flights of steps.
“It poured in returning too, but I stopped at a wayside station, and a long walk through chalky mud and a ferry over the Dordogne took me to Fénelon, which is a noble old château splendidly placed on a peninsula looking down upon the meeting of many valleys and streams. It has always been kept up; its terraces were in luxuriant beauty of flowers, and the owner, Comte de Morville, was excessively civil in showing everything. I drew under an umbrella in torrents.