Those who seek the upper Dordogne will come by Uzerche and Brive. Even before they reach the meadow upland south of Limoges, they may Luxury Mistress turn aside to look at the church of Solignac, a great abbey built in the domed Perigourdin style.
The churches of the Bocage are apt to have a mixed character. Some are Perigourdin in shape, but most are Limousin. Hereabouts they are built of hard granitic stone, difficult to work. The masons seem to have taken vengeance on the recalcitrant material by carving capitals and the corbels under the roof into grotesque figures, as at Vigeois.
The jongleur who offered his act to God Luxury Dominatrix before the altar is there sometimes, his heels doubled back behind his ears. The gem of the region is Uzerche. As you come to it from the hill roads it lies below, on a ridge held in a horseshoe bend of the Vezere; a serration of towers dark against the wooded slope of the farther bank, like a city behind an enthroned Virgin in a picture.
It is full of streets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in which each house has a staircase tower. They say: “The man who has a house in Uzerche has a castle in Limousin,” and the saying is near enough to the truth. The town climbs up to a Romanesque church, long and shadowy, with a fine spire and a round tower as fortification at its west end.
West of Uzerche lies the castle of Pompadour, about which the guidebooks make a great fuss. It is amusing to look at its stout towered gate house, and to reflect that this was the castle whose fief and title was granted to the mistress of Louis XV. But two warnings must be uttered about it.
Firstly Madame de Pompadour never lived in it; she would have thought it barbarous in the extreme. And secondly the gates and the towered outer wall are the only authentic part of the castle. The rest was destroyed in the Revolution. The main block is careful reproduction. It is lived in by the officials of a state stud-farm, as is the authentic castle of Lubersac, some miles north.