After the key had been turned in the lock and the door pushed open with kicks, we entered a dark hallway filled with boards and ladders and wheelbarrows.

This passage led into a little yard enclosed by the thick interior walls of the castle.  It was lighted from the top like a prison yard.  In the corners, drops of humidity dripped from the stones.  We opened another door.  It led into a large, empty, sonorous hall; the floor was cracked in a hundred places, but there was fresh paint on the wainscoting.

The green forest opposite sheds a vivid reflection on the white walls, through the large windows of the castle.  There is a lake and underneath the windows were clusters of lilacs, petunia-blossoms and acacias, which have grown pell-mell in the former parterre, and cover the hill that slopes gradually to the road, following the banks of the lake and then continuing through the woods.

The great, deserted hall, where the child who afterwards wrote Rene, used to sit and gaze out of the windows, was silent.  The clerk smoked his pipe and expectorated on the floor.  His dog, which had followed him, hunted for mice, and its nails clicked on the pavement.

We walked up the winding stairs.  Moss covers the worn stone steps.  Sometimes a ray of light, passing through a crack in the walls, strikes a green blade and makes it gleam in the dark like a star.

We wandered through the halls, through the towers, and over the narrow curtain with its gaping machicolations, which attract the eye irresistibly to the abyss below.

On the second floor is a small room which looks out into the inside courtyard and has a massive oak door that closes with a latch.  The beams of the ceiling (you can touch them), are rotten from age; the whitewashed walls show their lattice-work and are covered with big spots; the window-panes are obscured by cobwebs and their frames are buried in dust.  This used to be Chateaubriand’s room.  It faces the West, towards the setting sun.

We continued; when we passed in front of a window or a loop-hole, we warmed ourselves in the warm air coming from without, and this sudden transition rendered the ruins all the more melancholy and cheerless.  The floors of the apartments are rotting away, and daylight enters through the fireplaces along the blackened slab where rain has left long green streaks.  The golden flowers on the drawing-room ceiling are falling off, and the shield that surmounts the mantelpiece is broken into bits.  While we were looking around, a flight of birds entered, flew around for a few minutes and passed out through the chimney.

In the evening, we went to the lake.  The meadow has encroached upon it and will soon cover it entirely, and wheat will grow in the place of pond-lilies.  Night was falling.  The castle, flanked by its four turrets and framed by masses of green foliage, cast a dark shadow over the village.  The setting sun made the great mass appear black; the dying rays touched the surface of the lake and then melted in the mist on the purplish top of the silent forest.