I had climbed to the ruined Castle of Gurçons, where sloes and blackberries were waiting for the birds in the feudal court strewn with stones. I had left the village of Montpeyroux, with the sound of flails weakening on the wind, and late in the afternoon was drawing near to the Castle of Montaigne, when a small wayside auberge tempted me from the hot road. The woman who waited upon me had a fat body and a hard, firmly inquisitive face—a combination to be distrusted. Having settled down again to her knitting, she inquired of me where I was going, and when I told her that I was on my way to the Château de Montaigne, she asked me if I had any work to do there. I evaded this question, not knowing, or not wishing to know, exactly what she meant. She reflected a few minutes, then, looking at me over her knitting-needles, she said:

'Are you a tiler or a plasterer?'

Now, this was a question that I was quite unprepared for. I had often been set down as a pedlar. I had been suspected of being a travelling musician, and also a colporteur for the Salvation Army; in fact, of being almost everything but a tiler or plasterer. But this shrewd woman had evidently come to the conclusion that, if I did not work upon the housetops, I must perforce be an artist of the trowel. I assured her that I was as incapable of fixing a tile as of making a ceiling; whereupon she said:

'I beg your pardon. I thought you were a workman.'

As I left, I saw by the vivacity with which she scratched the back of her head with a knitting-needle that she was writhing mentally with the torture of unsatisfied curiosity; and I took a malignant pleasure in her suffering. The white flannel that I was wearing was the most agreeable reason I could think of for being associated with plaster, but my resemblance to a tiler continued to perplex me as I trudged along the road.

I now left the broad highway, and took a narrower road that went for some distance through woods up the side of a long hill. The shadows were gathering under the trees, and I was beginning to fear that I should reach the castle too late to carry out my pilgrimage that night, when I saw above me, upon a knoll resting upon rocky buttresses, a modern mansion against a background of trees. This was the very pleasant country residence built by M. Magne, Minister of Finance under the Second Empire, upon the site of the castle of Montaigne, which the author of the 'Essays,' with a better sense of certain distinctions than that which is observed nowadays, preferred to speak of as his manoir. This manor-house still preserved its fifteenth and sixteenth century character, when a fire breaking out destroyed everything but the walls, and gave M. Magne a plausible excuse for the demolition. A part that was spared by the fire, and was therefore suffered to remain intact, was the almost isolated tower, to which Montaigne withdrew for the sake of quiet and meditation, and which is so well known to all readers of his 'Essays.' Had this also disappeared, I should have had no motive for wandering down the long avenue at nearly the end of the day.

I met with a courteous reception at the mansion, and obtained immediate permission to visit the retreat of the sixteenth-century moralist who looked with such clear eyes upon human life.

[Illustration: THE CHÂTEAU DE MONTAIGNE AFTER THE FIRE.]

The tower and its gateway belong to the period when feudalism had lost its vitality, and life was troubled by the vague perception of new motives and principles. Montaigne tells us that his family had occupied the manor a hundred years when he entered into possession, and the style of the fragment that is left bears out this statement: it appears to belong to the middle part of the fifteenth century. Already manorial houses, crenated and often moated, but, like this one at Montaigne, defensive rather for show than the reality, were scattered over France. Speaking generally, they belonged to the small nobility who fell under the category of the arrière-ban in time of war. In this tower Montaigne had his chapel, his bedroom—to which he retired when the yearning for solitude was strong—and his library. The chapel is on the ground-floor, and is very much what it was in Montaigne's time. It is small, but there was room enough to accommodate his household, which was never a large one. Its little cupola connects it with the local style of architecture, to which the high-swelling name of Byzantino-Périgourdin has been given. A small stone altar occupies the apsidal end, and here, as in two or three other places, the arms of Montaigne will be noted with interest by those who have read in the essays: 'Je porte d'azur semé de trèfles d'or, à une patte de lyon de mesme armée de gueules, mise en face.'

A man is often a sceptic on the surface and a believer underneath. Pascal has called Montaigne 'un pur pyrrhonien'; but Pascal himself has been accused of scepticism. Living in an age when the crimes daily committed in the name of religion might so easily have inspired a hater of violence like Montaigne with a horror of creeds, he was no philosopher of the God-denying sort. Moreover, notwithstanding his doubting moods and his fondness of the words 'Que sais-je?' he upheld the practice of religion in his own home, and died a Christian.