Before reaching Coutras, you come again into the region dominated by poplars. And that they do dominate the district in which they appear, no one can doubt. Poplars give a peculiar character to the land; a special personal note to the scenery. They are atmosphere-making. Presently we came upon Angoulême, upon the slope of a hill; all white and red in vivid contrast.
[CHAPTER VII]
Then, a little later still, we arrived at the end of our journey—St. Emilion.
At St. Emilion, the past insists upon being recognised, and, more than that, on being a potent factor in the present. The modern buildings are in evidence, right enough, but somehow they have an air of not being so much in authority as the ancient ones. Beside its splendid remains, which have lasted through many a long age, the present day town looks but a pigmy.
The day on which we saw the place was one of those quiet, sleepily-sunshiny days; and the very spirit of a gone-by age seemed to be brooding over it. The very pathway leading up to one of its ancient gates has a sacred bit of past history connected with it, for was it not a convent of the Cordeliers, founded by that saint of old, Francis of Assisi, in 1215?
ANCIENT CONVENT DES CORDELIERS, S. EMILION.
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The cloisters and a staircase and some of the walls still remain, trees and shrubs growing wild within its precincts. Beside it are many other ruins of ancient churches, convents and cloisters, amongst which one might name the convent of the Jacobins, the grand, lonely, gaunt fragment of the first convent of the Frêres Prêcheurs or Grandes Murailles, which stands in solitary majesty at the entrance to the town, and which can date back before 1287, and the first church of St. Emilion, which was the underground, rock-hewn collegiate church of the 12th century. Besides these, there is the ruined castle, built by Louis VIII, whose great square keep-tower is the first striking piece of old masonry (among many striking examples) which towers over one on entering the town from the station road; and the crenellated ramparts, watch-doors and gates, built in the days when it was one of the bastides founded by Edward I.