I soon left my dark acquaintance, and went forth to roam about Bazas, which, like so many little old towns of Southern France, is in the early hours of a summer afternoon as quiet and deserted as a cemetery. The stones are so heated that a cat that begins to cross the road lazily, stopping to stretch or examine something in the gutter, will suddenly start off at a rush as if a devil had been cast into it.
The interest of Bazas to the traveller lies mainly in its church, which was formerly a cathedral. Its broad and imposing façade, encrusted with ornament, chiefly in the florid Gothic of the fifteenth century, but disfigured by a hideous eighteenth-century fronton that crowns the gable, stands at the top of a broad and rather steep place, of which some of the houses are of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The tower built against the northern end of the front carries a lofty and graceful crocketed spire. Until the Revolution, this west front, ornamented as it was with nearly three hundred statues, was considered the most elaborately decorated in the South of France. Even now, although so many of the niches are vacant, it is exceedingly rich in sculpture. The central doorway is so lofty that it occupies more than half the height of the original façade, and the doorway on each side of it is only a little lower. The central tympanum is divided into five compartments filled with figures in relief. The uppermost panel represents the Last Judgment. The interior admirably combines grandeur and lightness. The nave (without transept) is very long and lofty, and, together with its clerestory, is beautifully proportioned. Finally, the effect of a delightful vista is obtained by the wide sanctuary. With its lofty and airy arcade separating it from the pourlour.
[Illustration: BAZAS.]
All the old part of the town is built upon a rocky hill, and it is still almost surrounded by ruinous ramparts. The church is just within the wall on the side where the rock is precipitous. Looking upward from the bottom of the narrow valley, the view of the ramparts high overhead, tapestried with ivy and other plants, and above these the tabernacle work, the crocketed pinnacles and spire, and the fantastic far-stretching gargoyles of the venerable cathedral, makes one feel that joy of the eye and the spirit which is the wanderer's reward for all the sun-scorch and other petty tribulations he may have to endure in searching for the picturesque.
From Bazas I made my way to Villandraut, a neighbouring town of about 1,000 inhabitants. I had left the vines, and was now in the landes of the Gironde. I was surrounded by pines, gorse, and bracken, which last was as brown as if it had been baked in an oven. Ten summers had nearly passed since I undertook my long walk through the great pine forests of the Landes. I had wandered on and on, and was again drawing near to them. Already the country wore much the same appearance as that farther south, although less wild and desolate. I expected to have a return of the old feelings when I found myself again in the midst of the pines that said so much to me years ago; but somehow the old spirit would not come back, and I felt little besides the heat and the weariness of the way.
Villandraut, ordinarily a very dull place, was exceedingly animated when I walked into it. A fair was being held there, and a fair in a village or rural town is always a reason for being gay, and often an excuse for worse. There was some local colour here. All the young girls wore the Bordelaise coiffure, the handkerchief being generally of white, yellow, green, or crimson silk. Just clinging to the back of a young head, no coif is more graceful or picturesque than this. There was much dancing. Cheeks flushed and dark eyes flashed as the brilliant coifs and light-coloured dresses whirled round and round. I found more feminine beauty in this south-eastern corner of the Bordelais than I had seen for a very long time among the French peasants. The young women here are well and delicately formed, and have an erect and graceful carriage. They are coquettes from their childhood. They have fine eyes and luxuriant tresses, and the face often shows richness of colour. A few blondes are seen among the brunes; but whether fair or dark they have all the same exuberance of nature. The teeth are rarely good after early youth. The cause of this blemish is said to be the water, which, passing through a sandy soil, contains little or no lime.
My motive in coming to this place was to see the ruined castle of Villandraut, the gloomy stronghold built at the commencement of the fourteenth century by Bertrand de Goth (or Got), Archbishop of Bordeaux, who afterwards as Pope Clement V. took the momentous step of transferring the Papal See from Rome to Avignon. I found it a little outside the burg, but near enough to be used by many of the peasants who had come into the fair as a convenient place for putting up their carts and stabling their animals. Each of the towers had been turned into a stable for horses and oxen, and scattered over the weedy space within the walls were vehicles of all sorts and sizes.
The plan of the castle is a vast oblong, with a high cylindrical tower at each angle, and two additional towers on the side of the town. The deep and wide moat that still surrounds it, except where it has been filled up in front of the gateway from which the drawbridge was once raised and lowered, is like a ravine that is choked with brambles and shrubs. The exterior view is very striking. It is impossible to approach this ruin without being impressed by its mournful grandeur. From all these piled-up stones which the wild plants strive to cover, there comes the sentiment of pride in death. A very slow but a certain death it is. One after another the stones will continue to fall as they have been falling for centuries, and will be put to fresh uses. How many houses and pigsties at Villandraut have been built with materials taken from the castle? Nobody knows exactly, but everybody in the place has a shrewd suspicion on the subject. I climbed up the dilapidated spiral staircase of one of the towers, and after passing through two guard-rooms with Gothic vaulting, where the wind, now blowing up for storm, moaned through the loopholes, I came out upon the chemin de ronde, quite overgrown with shrubs and ivy. All around stretched the pine forest, with tints of violet and the purple rose deepening in the misty distance.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE CHÂTEAU DE VILLANDRAUT.]
This bastille on the edge of the sandy desert was a queer sort of fold for a shepherd to build. To judge the past, however, by the present is one of the most mischievous of errors. Nothing is easier than to criticise the actions of men in a bygone age, and nothing is more difficult than to do justice to their motives. The militant bishop is intolerable now even, when he is nothing more formidable than a controversialist. It may have been necessary, however, in the Middle Ages for him to make himself dreaded as well as respected, like the judges of Israel. This Clement V., at any rate, must have believed in the need of the Church to be able to defend itself behind strong walls.