Fat bacon is the basis of all cookery in Guyenne and Upper Languedoc, where the winters are too cold for the olive to flourish, and where butter is rarely seen.  The cuisine is substantial, but not refined.

A little beyond Villeneuve I found Trebas, a pleasant river-side village, with a ferruginous spring that has obtained for the place a local reputation for healing.  Here I left the Tarn again, and followed its tributary, the Ranee, for the sake of change.  This stream ran at the bottom of a deep gorge, the sides of which were chiefly clothed with woods, but here and there was a patch of yellow corn-field and green vineyard.  Reapers, men and women, were busy with their sickles, singing, as they worked, their Languedocian songs that troubadours may have been the first to sing; but nature was quiet with that repose which so quickly follows the great festival of flowers.  Already the falling corn was whispering of the final feast of colour.  All the earlier flowers of the summer were now casting or ripening their seed.  I passed a little village on the opposite side of the gorge.  The houses, built of dark stone, even to the roofs, looked scarcely different from their background of bare rock.  Weedy vine-terraces without vines told the oft-repeated story of privation and long-lasting bitterness of heart in many a little home that once was happy.  I found the grandeur of solitude, without any suggestion of human life, where huge rocks of gneiss and schist, having broken away from the sides of the gorge, lay along the margins and in the channel of the stream.  Here I lingered, listening to the drowsy music of the flowing water, and the murmuring of the bees amongst the purple marjoram and the yellow agrimony, until the sunshine moving up the rocks reminded me of the fleet-winged hours.

Continuing my way up the gorge, I presently saw a village clinging to a hill, with a massive and singular-looking church on the highest point.  It was Plaisance, and I knew now that I had left the Albigeois, and had entered the Rouergue.  Having decided to pass the night here, and the auberge being chosen, I climbed to the top of the bluff to have a near view of the church.  It is a remarkable structure representing two architectural periods.  The apse and transept are Romanesque, but the nave is Gothic.  Over the intersection of the transept is a cupola supported by massive piers.  Engaged with these are columns bearing elaborately carved capitals embellished with little figures of the quaintest workmanship.  In the apse are two rows of columns with cubiform capitals carved in accordance with the florid Romanesque taste, as it was developed in Southern France.