CLIFF CASTLES
membered. Although it had held out against the English, when thus broken up among several, it could not defend itself against the Calvinists, who took, burned and sacked it in 1574. They killed three Sarlat priests. It was retaken by the Royal troops in 1575, but it again fell into the hands of the Calvinists in 1588, and the wreckage of its ecclesiastical buildings dates from those two captures.
The principal castle, that which belonged to the Bishop of Sarlat, occupies one of the profound horizontal furrows in the face of the rock, that are so common in the limestone and chalk formations. It consists of three towers, two of which are square and one round, with curtains uniting them, and a gate-tower, to which a flight of steps cut in the rock gives access for a part of the way. But to reach this flight one has to mount by a series of posts serving as steps driven into sockets in the rock, with only here and there a sustaining iron bar. Below the structure are chambers, possibly prisons, but more probably store rooms dug out of the rock. In this castle one of the Bishops of Sarlat, in stormy times, lived continuously, and there died. How was his body carried down the stair? Probably it was lowered by ropes.
I cannot quit La Roche Gageac without a word on one of its most illustrious natives, Jean Tarde, born there in 1561 the friend of Galileo, and who, the first in France, five years after the great Florentine had begun to search the skies with his telescope, invented one year previously, erected his tube here at one of the openings of this eagle's nest, and during ten consecutive years pursued his astronomic studies. He was a remarkable man in many ways. He was the first to map his native Perigord, and the first to write a chronicle of the diocese of Sarlat, a valuable work for any who would compile a history of the Hundred Years' War, the first also to repudiate the accepted attribution of the dolmens as altars of sacrifice, and to indicate their true character as
150
