We had an expedition before us the next day, and the evening had to be short. However, after dinner we strolled out into the darkness, mellowed by the scent of many roses, and went to have a look at the _vendangeuses_. The ladies had a dining-room apart from the gentlemen, and when we looked in at them, were still sitting over their wine with a fine indifference to the charms of general society in the barn. Mère Mémé, at the end of the long table, with the lamplight deepening her wrinkles into trenches, and sinking her eyes into wells of ink, might have been an over-printed engraving of Rembrandt’s mother. Gathered round her were three or four hardly less ancient ladies, equally suggestive of Rembrandt’s relations, and a long array of dark-haired, white-coifed women and girls were to be seen, more or less dimly in the indifferent light, finishing their jugs of _vin ordinaire_, all talking at the tops of their voices, and all, after the first stare, comporting themselves as if no curious foreign eyes were observing them from the doorway. The evening closed with one dramatic episode. A long low dark room; at one end a bare table; on one side of it an excited group of women; on the wall behind, a smoky lamp, throwing a lurid light on two resolute-looking men, who stood behind the table on which a swarthy victim lay trembling, held tightly by one, while the other hurriedly divested him of all clothing save a fur boa and two pair of boots. Madame A. was having her black poodle clipped. CHAPTER IX. [Illustration] It was market day at Libourne. We were aware of that from a very early hour of the morning, as the complaining utterances of every class of rickety waggon and ungreased wheel were wafted in at the windows of our hotel, blended with the solid, carpet-like whacking of donkeys’ backs, and the screams of their drivers, all ladies of advanced age and leathern lung power. Monsieur and Madame A. called for us at nine, and before setting forth on the legitimate expedition allotted to the day, we drove round the market square. [Illustration: MARKET PLACE, LIBOURNE.] A helpless depression comes over us at the thought of attempting to describe a foreign market-place. It has been so often done, and from such an exhaustive number of points of view, that there seems nothing in the least original left to be said. I do not suppose that any account of journeyings in France is really perfect without a semi-humorous description of an old woman under a great blue or a great red umbrella. It should be dashed with a pathetic brilliancy, and there should, as a rule, be something smouldering and suggestive of ancient coquetry about the eyes of the old woman. We both felt this, and my cousin ran about feverishly, snapping off Kodak plates in the most extravagant way, but failing to find quite the old lady we wanted.