Brackish daylight, which seemed to have been filtered through layers of horn, came in at the openings, hardly lighting the shadowed, begrimed walls and the earth floor, which too was pierced by the entrance to an oubliette or by a well shaft.
In the evening after dinner he had often climbed up on the embankment and followed the cracked walls of the ruins.

On bright nights one part of the castle was thrown back into shadow, and the other, by contrast, stood forth, washed in silver and blue, as if rubbed with mercurial lusters, above the Sevre, along whose surface streaks of moonlight darted like the backs of fishes.

The silence was overpowering.

After nine o'clock not a dog, not a soul.

He would return to the poor chamber of the inn, where an old woman, in black, wearing the cornet head-dress her ancestors wore in the sixteenth century, waited with a candle to bar the door as soon as he returned.
"All this," said Durtal to himself, "is the skeleton of a dead keep.