Autumn

THE EARLY AUTUMN weather at Saint Puy was always magnificent. I can never remember it being anything else. There was a splendid, majestic plenitude about the sunlight which burned all day, and then seemed to switch itself off abruptly in the early evening, when all at once the air became very cold, and dusk fell quickly. The sun had a special warmth which you never felt in summer and which never came again in winter. It was a time when the landscape of the valleys, edged along the tops of the hills by clumps and fringes of golden, autumnal woods, still repeated a summer pattern of green and yellow; though now the green was of the leafy vines almost ready for the vendange, and the yellow came from a blending of stubble fields with the russet, earthy colour of land that had been freshly ploughed. In the warmth, everything was amazingly peaceful and quiet. The noise and disturbance of harvest was over, the fête had been celebrated, and the tourists and holiday-makers with their chatter and their cars had disappeared. The land was at rest; even the first shots of the shooting season sounded slow and lazy, nobody hurried in the streets, and everywhere you could smell the scent of ripe fruit.