Chapter IV: Cathedrals and Chateaux

(_Continued_)

BAYEUX AND ITS FAMOUS TAPESTRIES[A]

[Footnote A: From "A Bibliographical Tour in France and Germany."]

BY THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN

The diligence brought me here from Caen in about two hours and a half. The country, during the whole route, is open, well cultivated, occasionally gently undulating, but generally denuded of trees. Many pretty little churches, with delicate spires, peeped out to the right and left during the journey; but the first view of the cathedral of Bayeux put all the others out of my recollection.

There is, in fact, no proper approach to this interesting edifice. The western end is suffocated with houses. Here stands the post-office; and with the most unsuspecting frankness, on the part of the owner, I had permission to examine, with my own hands, within doors, every letter--under the expectation that there were some for myself. Nor was I disappointed.

But you must come with me to the cathedral, and of course we must enter together at the western front. There are five porticoes; the central one being rather large, and the two, on either side, comparatively small. Formerly, these were covered with sculptured figures and ornaments, but the Calvinists in the sixteenth, and the Revolutionists in the eighteenth century, have contrived to render their present aspect mutilated and repulsive in the extreme. On entering, I was struck with the two large transverse Norman arches which bestride the area, or square, for the bases of the two towers. It is the boldest and finest piece of masonry in the whole building. The interior disappointed me. It is plain, solid, and divested of ornament.

Hard by the cathedral stood formerly a magnificent episcopal palace. Upon this palace the old writers dearly loved to expatiate. There is now, however, nothing but a good large comfortable family mansion; sufficient for the purposes of such hospitality and entertainment as the episcopal revenues will afford.

It is high time that you should be introduced in proper form to the famous Bayeux tapestry. Know then, in as few words as possible, that this celebrated piece of tapestry represents chiefly the Invasion of England by William the Conqueror, and the subsequent death of Harold at the battle of Hastings. It measures about 214 English feet in length, by about nineteen inches in width; and is supposed to have been worked under the particular superintendence and direction of Matilda, the wife of the Conqueror. It was formerly exclusively kept and exhibited in the cathedral; but it is now justly retained in the Town Hall, and treasured as the most precious relic among the archives of the city.

There is indeed every reason to consider it as one of the most valuable historical monuments which France possesses. It has also given rise to a great deal of archeological discussion. Montfauçon, Ducarel, and De La Rue, have come forward successively--but more especially the first and last; and Montfauçon in particular has favored the world with copper-plate representations of the whole. Montfauçon's plates are generally much too small; and the more enlarged ones are too ornamental.

It is right, first of all, that you should have an idea how this piece of tapestry is preserved, or rolled up. You see it here, therefore, precisely as it appears after the person who shows it, takes off the cloth with which it is usually covered. The first portion of the needle-work, representing the embassy of Harold from Edward the Confessor to William Duke of Normandy, is comparatively much defaced--that is to say, the stitches are worn away, and little more than the ground, or fine close linen cloth remains. It is not far from the beginning--and where the color is fresh, and the stitches are, comparatively, preserved--that you observe the portrait of Harold.

You are to understand that the stitches, if they may be so called, are threads laid side by side--and bound down at intervals by cross stitches, or fastenings--upon rather a fine linen cloth; and that the parts intended to represent flesh are left untouched by the needle. I obtained a few straggling shreds of the worsted with which it is worked. The colors are generally a faded or bluish green, crimson, and pink. About the last five feet of this extraordinary roll are in a yet more decayed and imperfect state than the first portion. But the designer of the subject, whoever he was, had an eye throughout to Roman art--as it appeared in its later stages. The folds of the draperies, and the proportions of the figures, are executed with this feeling.

I must observe that, both at top and at bottom of the principal subject, there is a running allegorical ornament, of which I will not incur the presumption to suppose myself a successful interpreter. The constellations, and the symbols of agriculture and of a rural occupation form the chief subjects of this running ornament. All the inscriptions are executed in capital letters of about an inch in length; and upon the whole, whether this extraordinary and invaluable relic be of the latter end of the eleventh, or the beginning or middle of the twelfth century seems to me a matter of rather a secondary consideration. That it is at once unique and important, must be considered as a position to be neither doubted nor denied.

I have learned even here, of what importance this tapestry roll was considered in the time of Bonaparte's threatened invasion of our country: and that, after displaying it at Paris for two or three months, to awaken the curiosity and excite the love of conquest among the citizens, it was conveyed to one or two sea-port towns, and exhibited upon the stage as a most important material in dramatic effect.

THE CHATEAU OF HENRI IV. AT PAU[A]

[Footnote A: From "A Tour Through the Pyrenees." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Copyright, 1873.]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

Pau is a pretty city, neat, of gay appearance; but the highway is paved with little round stones, the side-walks with small sharp pebbles: so the horses walk on the heads of nails and foot-passengers on the points of them. From Bordeaux to Toulouse such is the usage, such the pavement. At the end of five minutes, your feet tell you in the most intelligible manner that you are two hundred leagues away from Paris....

Here are the true countrymen of Henry IV. As to the pretty ladies in gauzy hats, whose swelling and rustling robes graze the horns of the motionless oxen as they pass, you must not look at them; they would carry your imagination back to the Boulevard de Gand, and you would have gone two hundred leagues only to remain in the same place. I am here on purpose to visit the sixteenth century; one makes a journey for the sake of changing, not place, but ideas.... It was eight o'clock in the morning; not a visitor at the castle, no one in the courts nor on the terrace; I should not have been too much astonished at meeting the Béarnais, "that lusty gallant, that very devil," who was sharp enough to get for himself the name of "the good king."

His château is very irregular; it is only when seen from the valley that any graces and harmony can be found in it. Above two rows of pointed roofs and old houses, it stands out alone against the sky and gazes upon the valley in the distance; two bell-turrets project from the front toward the west; the oblong body follows, and two massive brick towers close the line with their esplanades and battlements. It is connected with the city by a narrow old bridge, by a broad modern one with the park, and the foot of its terrace is bathed by a dark but lovely stream.

Near at hand, this arrangement disappears; a fifth tower upon the north side deranges the symmetry. The great egg-shaped court is a mosaic of incongruous masonry; above the porch, a wall of pebbles from the Gave, and of red bricks crossed like a tapestry design; opposite, fixt to the wall, a row of medallions in stone; upon the sides, doors of every form and age; dormer windows, windows square, pointed, embattled, with stone mullions garlanded with elaborate reliefs. This masquerade of styles troubles the mind, yet not unpleasantly; it is unpretending and artless; each century has built according to its own fancy, without concerning itself about its neighbor.

On the first floor is shown a great tortoise-shell, which was the cradle of Henry IV. Carved chests, dressing-tables, tapestries, clocks of that day, the bed and arm-chair of Jeanne d'Albret, a complete set of furniture in the taste of the Renaissance, striking and somber, painfully labored yet magnificent in style, carrying the mind at once back toward that age of force and effort, of boldness in invention, of unbridled pleasures and terrible toil, of sensuality and of heroism. Jeanne d'Albret, mother of Henry IV., crossed France in order that she might, according to her promise, be confined in this castle. "A princess," says D'Aubigné, "having nothing of the woman about her but the sex, a soul entirely given to manly things, a mind mighty in great affairs, a heart unconquerable by adversity."

She sang an old Bearnaise song when she brought him into the world. They say that the aged grandfather rubbed the lips of the new-born child with a clove of garlic, poured into his mouth a few drops of Jurançon wine, and carried him away in his dressing-gown. The child was born in the chamber which opens into the lower tower of Mazères, on the southwest corner.

His mother, a warm and severe Calvinist, when he was fifteen years old, led him through the Catholic army to La Rochelle, and gave him to her followers as their general. At sixteen years old, at the combat of Arnay-le-Duc, he led the first charge of cavalry. What an education and what men! Their descendants were just now passing in the streets, going to school to compose Latin verses and recite the pastorals of Massillon.

Those old wars are the most poetic in French history; they were made for pleasure rather than interest. It was a chase in which adventures, dangers, emotions were found, in which men lived in the sunlight, on horseback, amidst flashes of fire, and where the body, as well as the soul, had its enjoyment and its exercise. Henry carries it on as briskly as a dance, with a Gascon's fire and a soldier's ardor, with abrupt sallies, and pursuing his point against the enemy as with the ladies.

This is no spectacle of great masses of well-disciplined men, coming heavily into collision and falling by thousands on the field, according to the rules of good tactics. The king leaves Pau or Nérac with a little troop, picks up the neighboring garrisons on his way, scales a fortress, intercepts a body of arquebusiers as they pass, extricates himself pistol in hand from the midst of a hostile troop, and returns to the feet of Mlle. de Tignonville. They arrange their plan from day to day; nothing is done unless unexpectedly and by chance. Enterprises are strokes of fortune....

The park is a great wood on a hill, embedded among meadows and harvests. You walk in long solitary alleys, under colonnades of superb oaks, while to the left the lofty stems of the copses mount in close ranks upon the back of the hill. The fog was not yet lifted; there was no motion in the air; not a corner of the blue sky, not a sound in all the country. The song of a bird came for an instant from the midst of the ash-trees, then sadly ceased. Is that then the sky of the south, and was it necessary to come to the happy country of the Béarnais to find such melancholy impressions? A little by-way brought us to a bank of the Gave: in a long pool of water was growing an army of reeds twice the height of a man; their grayish spikes and their trembling leaves bent and whispered under the wind; a wild flower near by shed a vanilla perfume.

We gazed on the broad country, the ranges of rounded hills, the silent plain under the dull dome of the sky. Three hundred paces away the Gave rolls between marshaled banks, which it has covered with sand; in the midst of the waters may be seen the moss-grown piles of a ruined bridge. One is at ease here, and yet at the bottom of the heart a vague unrest is felt; the soul is softened and loses itself in melancholy and tender revery. Suddenly the clock strikes, and one is forced to go and prepare himself to eat his soup between two commercial travelers.

To-day the sun shines. On my way to the Place Nationale, I remarked a poor, half-ruined church, which had been turned into a coach-house; they have fastened upon it a carrier's sign. The arcades, in small gray stones, still round themselves with an elegant boldness; beneath are stowed away carts and casks and pieces of wood; here and there workmen were handling wheels. A broad ray of light fell upon a pile of straw, and made the somber corners seem yet darker; the pictures that one meets with outweigh those one has come to seek.

From the esplanade which is opposite, the whole valley and the mountains beyond may be seen; this first sight of a southern sun, as it breaks from the rainy mists, is admirable; a sheet of white light stretches from one horizon to another without meeting a single cloud. The heart expands in this immense space; the very air is festal; the dazzled eyes close beneath the brightness which deluges them and which runs over, radiated from the burning dome of heaven. The current of the river sparkles like a girdle of jewels; the chains of hills, yesterday veiled and damp, extend at their own sweet will beneath the warming, penetrating rays, and mount range upon range to spread out their green robe to the sun.

In the distance, the blue Pyrenees look like a bank of clouds; the air that bathes them shapes them into aërial forms, vapory phantoms, the farthest of which vanish in the canescent horizon--dim contours, that might be taken for a fugitive sketch from the lightest of pencils. In the midst of the serrate chain the peak Midi d' Ossau lifts its abrupt cone; at this distance, forms are softened, colors are blended, the Pyrenees are only the graceful bordering of a smiling landscape and of the magnificent sky. There is nothing imposing about them nor severe; the beauty here is serene, and the pleasure pure.

The statue of Henry IV., with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of care; he has lost his gayety, his spirit, his confidence in his fortune, his proud bearing. His air is neither that of a great nor a good man, nor of a man of intellect; his face is discontented, and one would say that he was bored with Pau. I am not sure that he was wrong: and yet the city passes for agreeable, the climate is very mild, and invalids who fear the cold pass the winter in it.

CHATEAUX IN THE VALLEY OF THE LOIRE[A]

[Footnote A: From "Outre-Mer." Published by Houghton, Mifflin Co.]

BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

In the beautiful month of October I made a foot excursion along the banks of the Loire, from Orléans to Tours. This luxuriant region is justly called the garden of France. From Orléans to Blois, the whole valley of the Loire is one continued vineyard. The bright green foliage of the vine spreads, like the undulations of the sea, over the landscape, with here and there a silver flash of the river, a sequestered hamlet, or the towers of an old chateau, to enliven and variegate the scene.

The vintage had already commenced. The peasantry were busy in the fields--the song that cheered their labor was on the breeze, and the heavy wagon tottered by, laden with the clusters of the vine. Everything around me wore that happy look which makes the heart glad. In the morning I arose with the lark; and at night I slept where the sunset overtook me.... My first day's journey brought me at evening to a village, whose name I have forgotten, situated about eight leagues from Orléans. It is a small, obscure hamlet, not mentioned in the guide-book, and stands upon the precipitous banks of a deep ravine, through which a noisy brook leaps to turn the ponderous wheel of a thatch-roofed mill. The village inn stands upon the highway; but the village itself is not visible to the traveler as he passes. It is completely hidden in the lap of a wooded valley, and so embowered in trees that not a roof nor a chimney peeps out to betray its hiding-place.

When I awoke in the morning, a brilliant autumnal sun was shining in at my window. The merry song of birds mingled sweetly with the sound of rustling leaves and the gurgle of the brook. The vintagers were going forth to their toil; the wine-press was busy in the shade, and the clatter of the mill kept time to the miller's song. I loitered about the village with a feeling of calm delight. I was unwilling to leave the seclusion of this sequestered hamlet; but at length, with reluctant step, I took the cross-road through the vineyard, and in a moment the little village had sunk again, as if by enchantment, into the bosom of the earth.

I breakfasted at the town of Mer; and, leaving the high-road to Blois on the right, passed down to the banks of the Loire, through a long, broad avenue of poplars and sycamores. I crossed the river in a boat, and in the after part of the day I found myself before the high and massive walls of the château of Chambord. This château is one of the finest specimens of the ancient Gothic castle to be found in Europe. The little river Cosson fills its deep and ample moat, and above it the huge towers and heavy battlements rise in stern and solemn grandeur, moss-grown with age, and blackened by the storms of three centuries. Within, all is mournful and deserted. The grass has overgrown the pavement of the courtyard, and the rude sculpture upon the walls is broken and defaced....

My third day's journey brought me to the ancient city of Blois, the chief town of the department of Loire-et-Cher. This city is celebrated for the purity with which even the lower classes of its inhabitants speak their native tongue. It rises precipitously from the northern bank of the Loire; and many of its streets are so steep as to be almost impassable for carriages. On the brow of the hill, overlooking the roofs of the city, and commanding a fine view of the Loire and its noble bridge, and the surrounding country, sprinkled with cottages and châteaux, runs an ample terrace, planted with trees, and laid out as a public walk. The view from this terrace is one of the most beautiful in France. But what most strikes the eye of the traveler at Blois is an old, tho still unfinished, castle. Its huge parapets of hewn stone stand upon either side of the street; but they have walled up the wide gateway, from which the colossal drawbridge was to have sprung high in air, connecting together the main towers of the building, and the two hills upon whose slope its foundations stand. The aspect of this vast pile is gloomy and desolate. It seems as if the strong hand of the builder had been arrested in the midst of his task by the stronger hand of death; and the unfinished fabric stands a lasting monument both of the power and weakness of man--of his vast desires, his sanguine hopes, his ambitious purposes--and of the unlooked-for conclusion, where all these desires, and hopes, and purposes are so often arrested. There is also at Blois another ancient château, to which some historic interest is attached as being the scene of the massacre of the Duke of Guise.

On the following day, I left Blois for Amboise; and, after walking several leagues along the dusty highway, crossed the river in a boat to the little village of Moines, which lies amid luxuriant vineyards upon the southern bank of the Loire. From Moines to Amboise the road is truly delightful. The rich lowland scenery, by the margin of the river, is verdant even in October; and occasionally the landscape is diversified with the picturesque cottages of the vintagers, cut in the rock along the road-side, and overhung by the thick foliage of the vines above them.

At Amboise I took a cross-road, which led me to the romantic borders of the Cher and the château of Chenonceau. This beautiful château, as well as that of Chambord, was built by the gay and munificent Francis the First. One is a specimen of strong and massive architecture--a dwelling for a warrior; but the other is of a lighter and more graceful construction, and was designed for those soft languishments of passion with which the fascinating Diane de Poitiers had filled the bosom of that voluptuous monarch.

The château of Chenonceau is built upon arches across the river Cher, whose waters are made to supply the deep moat at each extremity. There is a spacious courtyard in front, from which a drawbridge conducts to the outer hall of the castle. There the armor of Francis the First still hangs upon the wall--his shield, and helm, and lance--as if the chivalrous but dissolute prince had just exchanged them for the silken robes of the drawing-room.... Doubtless the naked walls and the vast solitary chambers of an old and desolate château inspire a feeling of greater solemnity and awe; but when the antique furniture of the olden time remains--the faded tapestry on the walls, and the arm-chair by the fire-side--the effect upon the mind is more magical and delightful. The old inhabitants of the place, long gathered to their fathers, tho living still in history, seem to have left their halls for the chase or the tournament; and as the heavy door swings upon its reluctant hinge, one almost expects to see the gallant princes and courtly dames enter those halls again, and sweep in stately procession along the silent corridors....

A short time after candle-lighting, I reached the little tavern of the Boule d'Or, a few leagues from Tours, where I passed the night. The following morning was lowering and sad. A veil of mist hung over the landscape, and ever and anon a heavy shower burst from the overburdened clouds, that were driving by before a high and piercing wind. This unpropitious state of the weather detained me until noon, when a cabriolet for Tours drove up, and taking a seat within it, I left the hostess of the Boule d'Or in the middle of a long story about a rich countess, who always alighted there when she passed that way. We drove leisurely along through a beautiful country, till at length we came to the brow of a steep hill, which commands a fine view of the city of Tours and its delightful environs. But the scene was shrouded by the heavy drifting mist, through which I could trace but indistinctly the graceful sweep of the Loire, and the spires and roofs of the city far below me.

The city of Tours and the delicious plain in which it lies have been too often described by other travelers to render a new description, from so listless a pen as mine, either necessary or desirable. After a sojourn of two cloudy and melancholy days, I set out on my return to Paris, by the way of Vendôme and Chartres. I stopt a few hours at the former place, to examine the ruins of a château built by Jeanne d'Albret, mother of Henry the Fourth. It stands upon the summit of a high and precipitous hill, and almost overhangs the town beneath. The French Revolution has completed the ruin that time had already begun; and nothing now remains, but a broken and crumbling bastion, and here and there a solitary tower dropping slowly to decay. In one of these is the grave of Jeanne d'Albret. A marble entablature in the wall above contains the inscription, which is nearly effaced, tho enough still remains to tell the curious traveler that there lies buried the mother of the "Bon Henri." To this is added a prayer that the repose of the dead may be respected.

Here ended my foot excursion. The object of my journey was accomplished; and, delighted with this short ramble through the valley of the Loire, I took my seat in the diligence for Paris, and on the following day was again swallowed up in the crowds of the metropolis, like a drop in the bosom of the sea.

AMBOISE[A]

[Footnote A: From "Old Touraine." Published by James Pott & Co.]

BY THEODORE ANDREA COOK

The Castle of Amboise stands high above the town, like another Acropolis above a smaller Athens; it rises upon the only height visible for some distance, and is in a commanding position for holding the level fields of Touraine around it, and securing the passage of the Loire between Tours and Chaumont, which is the next link in the chain that ends at Blois.

The river at this point is divided in two by an island, as is so often the case where the first bridge-builders sought to join the wide banks of the Loire, and on this little spot between the waters Clovis is said to have met Alaric before he overthrew the power of the Visigoths in Aquitaine.

Amboise gains even more from the river than the other châteaux of the Loire. The magnificent round tower that springs from the end of Charles VIII.'s façade completely commands the approaches of the bridge, and the extraordinary effect of lofty masonry, produced by building on the summit of an elevation and carrying the stone courses upward from the lower ground, is here seen at its best....

But Amboise has a history before the days of Charles VIII. There was without doubt a Roman camp here, but the traditions of the ubiquitous Caesar must be received with caution. The so-called "Greniers de Caesar," strange, unexplained constructions caverned in the soft rock, are proved to be the work of a later age by that same indefatigable Abbé Chevalier to whom we have been already indebted for so much archeological research. A possible explanation of them is contained in an old Latin history of the castle, which goes down to the death of Stephen of England. According to this, the Romans had held Amboise from the days of Caesar till the reign of Diocletian; the Baugaredi or Bagaudee then put them to flight, but let the rest of the inhabitants remain who, "being afraid to live above ground, tunnelled beneath it, and made a great colony of subterranean dwellings in the holes they had dug out," a custom apparently common in Touraine from the earliest times. The Romans at any rate left unmistakable traces of their presence; many of their architectural remains still exist, and their fort is spoken of by Sulpicius Severus; but they can have built no bridge of alone, for in St. Gregory's time there were only boats available for crossing the river.

Not till the fifteenth century did the castle become royal property, when it was confiscated by Charles VII. as a punishment for treacherous dealings with the invading English very similar to the treason discovered at Chenonceaux just before. But beyond strengthening the fortification of the place this king did little for his new possession.

In a few years the castle is overshadowed by the cruel specter of Louis XI., whose memory has already spoiled several charming views for us. It was to Amboise that the father of this unfilial prince was carried from Chinon on his way north, when wearied out by the annoyance caused by the Dauphin's plots. The castle had become a royal residence, and soon after the whole town turns out to meet the new king with a "morality-play made by Master Étienne for the joyous occasion of his arrival," for Amboise was already famous for those dramatic performances always so dear to the French, and particularly to these citizens, in the old days at any rate. There is no trace of such frivolities now in the sleepy little town....

The two great towers of Amboise with the inclined planes of brickwork, which wind upward in the midst instead of staircases, were the result of the work which Charles set on foot as a distraction of his grief. These strange ascents had been partially restored by the Comte de Paris, the present owner of Amboise, before his exile stopt the work of repairing the chateau, and it is still possible to imagine the "charrettes, mullets, et litières," of which Du Bellay speaks, mounting from the low ground to the chambers above, or the Emperor Charles V., in later years, riding up with his royal host Francis I., always fond of display, amid such a blaze of flambeaux "that a man might see as clearly as at mid-day."

These great towers and the exquisite little chapel were the work of the "excellent sculptors and artists from Naples" who, as Commines tells us, were brought back with the spoils of the Italian wars; for the young king "never thought of death" but only of collecting round him "all the beautiful things which he had seen and which had given him pleasure, from France or Italy or Flanders;" but death came upon him suddenly. At the end of a garden walk, fringed with a mossy grove of limes that rises from the river bank, is the little doorway through which Charles VIII. was passing when he hit his head, never a very strong one, against the low stone arch, and died a few hours afterward. The castle had been fortified before his time; he left it beautiful as well, and the traces of his work are those which are most striking at the present day....

Within the shadow of the lime trees on the terraced garden of Amboise is a small bust of Leonardo da Vinci, for it was near here he died. His remains are laid in the beautiful chapel at the corner of the castle court, and the romantic story of his last moments at Fontainebleau becomes the sad reality of a tombstone covering ashes mostly unknown and certainly indistinguishable; "among which" as the epitaph painfully records, "are supposed to be the remains of Leonardo da Vinci." He had been brought to Paris a weak old man, by Francis, in pursuance of a certain fixt artistic policy, to which it may be noticed this forgotten and uncertain grave does but little credit.

To Francis I., rightly or wrongly, is given the glory of having naturalized in France the arts of Italy; to him is due the architecture built for ease and charm which turned the fortress into a beautiful habitation, which changed Chambord from a feudal stronghold to a country seat, and which left its traces at Amboise, as it did at Chaumont and at Blois. He found in France the highest and most beautiful expression of the work of "the great unnamed race of master-masons," he found the traditions of a national school of painting, the work of Fouquet and the Clouets, but for these he cared not; for him the only schools were those of Rome and Florence, and tho by encouraging their imitation he weakened the vital sincerity of French art, yet from his first exercise of royal power the consistency always somewhat lacking in his politics was shown clearly and firmly in his taste for art.

BLOIS[A]

[Footnote A: From "Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L.C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1908.]

BY FRANCIS MILTOUN

Blois, among all the other cities of the Loire, is the favorite with the tourist. Here one first meets a great château of state; and certainly the Château de Blois lives in one's memory more than any other château in France.

Much has been written of Blois, its counts, its château, and its many and famous hôtels of the nobility, by writers of all opinions and abilities, from those old chroniclers who wrote of the plots and intrigues of other days to those critics of art and architecture who have discovered--or think they have discovered--that Da Vinci designed the famous spiral staircase.

From this one may well gather that Blois is the foremost château of all the Loire in popularity and theatrical effect. Truly this is so, but it is by no manner of means the most lovable; indeed, it is the least lovable of all that great galaxy which begins at Blois and ends at Nantes. It is a show-place and not much more, and partakes in every form and feature--as one sees it to-day--of the attributes of a museum, and such it really is.

All of its former gorgeousness is still there, and all the banalities of the later period when Gaston of Orleans built his ugly wing, for the "personally conducted" to marvel at, and honeymoon couples to envy. The French are quite fond of visiting this shrine themselves, but usually it is the young people and their mammas, and detached couples of American and English birth that one most sees strolling about the courts and apartments where formerly lords and ladies and cavaliers moved and plotted.

The great château of the Counts of Blois is built upon an inclined rock which rises above the roof-tops of the lower town quite in fairy-book fashion. Commonly referred to as the Château de Blois, it is really composed of four separate and distinct foundations; the original château of the counts; the later addition of Louis XII.; the palace of Francis I., and the most unsympathetically and dismally disposed pavilion of Gaston of Orleans.

The artistic qualities of the greater part of the distinct edifice which go to make up the château as it stands to-day are superb, with the exception of that great wing of Gaston's, before mentioned, which is as cold and unfeeling as the overrated palace at Versailles.

The Comtes de Chatillon built that portion just to the right of the present entrance; Louis XII., the edifice through which one enters the inner court and which extends far to the left, including also the chapel immediately to the rear; while François I., who here as elsewhere let his unbounded Italian proclivities have full sway, built the extended wing to the left of the inner court and fronting on the present Place du Château, formerly the Place Royale....

As an architectural monument the château is a picturesque assemblage of edifices belonging to many different epochs, and, as such, shows, as well as any other document of contemporary times, the varying ambitions and emotions of its builders, from the rude and rough manners of the earliest of feudal times through the highly refined Renaissance details of the imaginative brain of François, down to the base concoction of the elder Mansart, produced at the commands of Gaston of Orleans.

In the earliest structure were to be seen all the attributes of a feudal fortress, towers and walls pierced with narrow loopholes, and damp, dark dungeons hidden away in the thick walls. Then came a structure which was less of a fortress and more habitable, but still a stronghold, tho having ample and decorative doorways and windows, with curious sculptures and rich framings. Then the pompous Renaissance with "escaliers" and "balcons á jour," balustrades crowning the walls and elaborate cornices here, there, and everywhere--all bespeaking the gallantry and taste of the knightly king. Finally came the cold, classic features of the period of the brother of Louis XIII.

In plan the Château de Bois forms an irregular square situated at the apex of a promontory high above the surface of the Loire, and practically behind the town itself. The building has a most picturesque aspect, and, to those who know, gives practically a history of the château architecture of the time. Abandoned, mutilated and dishonored, from time to time, the structure gradually took on new forms until the thick walls underlying the apartment known to-day as the Salle des États--probably the most ancient portion of all--were overshadowed by the great richness of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

From the platform one sees a magnificent panorama of the city and the far-reaching Loire, which unrolls itself southward and northward for many leagues, its banks covered by rich vineyards and crowned by thick forests.

The building of Louis XII. presents its brick-faced exterior in black and red lozenge shapes, with sculptured window-frames, squarely upon the little tree-bordered place of to-day, which in other times formed a part of that magnificent terrace which looked down upon the roof of the Église St. Nicholas, and the Jesuit church of the Immaculate Conception, and the silvery bell of the Loire itself.

The murders and other acts of violence and treason which took place here are interesting enough, but one can not but feel, when he views the chimney-piece before which the Due de Guise was standing when called to his death in the royal closet, that the men of whom the bloody tales of Blois are told quite deserved their fates.

One comes away with the impression of it all stamped only upon the mind, not graven upon the heart. Political intrigue to-day, if quite as vulgar, is less sordid. Bigotry and ambition in those days allowed few of the finer feelings to come to the surface, except with regard to the luxuriance of surroundings. Of this last there can be no question, and Blois is as characteristically luxurious as any of the magnificient edifices which lodged the royalty and nobility of other days throughout the valley of the Loire.

The interior court is partly surrounded by a colonnade, quite cloister-like in effect. At the right center of the François I. wing is that wonderful spiral staircase, concerning the invention of which so much speculation has been launched.

The apartments of Catherine de Medici were directly beneath the guard-room where the Balafré was murdered, and that event, taking place at the very moment when the queen-mother was dying, can not be said to have been conducive to a peaceful demise.

Here, on the first floor of the François I. wing, the queen-mother, held her court, as did the king his. The great gallery over-looked the town on the side of the present Place du Château. It was, and is, a truly grand apartment, with diamond-paned windows, and rich, dark wall decorations on which Catherine's device, a crowned C and her monogram in gold, frequently appears. There was, moreover, a great oval window, opposite which stood her altar, and a doorway led to her writing-closet, with its secret drawers and wall panels, which well served her purpose of intrigue and deceit.

A hidden stair-way led to the floor above, and there was a chambre-à-coucher, with a deep recess for the bed, the same to which she called her son Henri, as she lay dying, admonishing him to give up the thought of murdering Guise. "What," said Henri, on this embarrassing occasion, "spare Guise, when he, triumphant in Paris, dared lay his hand on the hilt of his sword. Spare him who drove me a fugitive from the capital. Spare them who never spared me. No, mother, I will not."

As the queen-mother drew near her end, and was lying ill at Blois, great events for France were culminating at the château. Henry III. had become King of France, and the Balafré, supported by Rome and Spain, was in open rebellion against the reigning house, and the word had gone forth that the Duc de Guise must die.

The States-General were to be immediately assembled, and De Guise, once the poetic lover of Marguerite, through his emissaries canvassed all France to ensure the triumph of the party of the church against Henri de Navarre and his queen--the Marguerite whom De Guise once profest to love--who soon were to come to the throne of France.

The uncomfortable Henri III. had been told that he would never be king in reality until De Guise had been made away with.

The final act of the drama between the rival houses of Guise and Valois came when the king and his council came to Blois for the assembly. The sunny city of Blois was indeed to be the scene of a momentous affair, and a truly sumptuous setting it was, the roof-tops of its houses sloping downward gently to the Loire, with its chief accessory, the coiffed and turreted chateau itself, high above all else.

Details had been arranged with infinite pains, the guard doubled, and a company of Swiss posted around the courtyard and up and down the gorgeous staircase. Every nook and corner has its history in connection with this greatest event in the history of the château of Blois.

As Guise entered the council chamber he was told that the king would see him in his closet, to reach which one had to pass through the guard-room below. The door was barred behind him that he might not return, when the trusty guards of the Forty-fifth, under Dalahaide, already hidden behind the wall-tapestry, sprang upon the Balafré and forced him back upon the closed door through which he had just passed. Guise fell stabbed in the breast by Malines, and "lay long uncovered until an old carpet was found in which to wrap his corpse."

Below, in her own apartments, lay the queen-mother, dying, but listening eagerly for the rush of footsteps overhead, hoping and praying that Henri--the hitherto effeminate Henri who played with his sword as he would with a battledore, and who painted himself like a woman, and put rings in his ears--would not prejudice himself at this time in the eyes of Rome by slaying the leader of the church party....

It was under the régime of Gaston d'Orléans that the gardens of the Château de Blois came to their greatest excellence and beauty. In 1653, Abel Brunyer, the first physician of Gaston's suite, published a catalog of the fruit and flowers to be found here in these gardens, of which he was also director. More than five hundred varieties were included, three-quarters of which belonged to the flora of France.

Among the delicacies and novelties of the time to be found here was the Prunier de Reine Claude, from which those delicious green plums known to all the world to-day as "Reine Claudes" were propagated, also another variety which came from the Prunier de Monsieur, somewhat similar in taste, but of a deep purple color. The potato was tenderly cared for and grown as a great novelty and delicacy long before its introduction to general cultivation by Parmentier. The tomato was imported from Mexico, and even tobacco was grown....

In 1793 all the symbols and emblems of royalty were removed from the château and destroyed. The celebrated bust of Gaston, the chief artistic attribute of that part of the edifice built by him, was decapitated, and the statue of Louis XII. over the entrance gateway was overturned and broken up. Afterward the château became the property of the "domaine" and was turned into a mere barracks. The pavilion of Queen Anne became a military magazine, the Tour de l'Observatoire, a powder-magazine, and all the indignities imaginable were heaped upon the château.

In 1814 Blois became the last capital of Napoleon's empire, and the château walls sheltered the prisoners captured by the imperial army.

CHAMBORD[A]

[Footnote A: From "Old Touraine." Published by James Pott & Co.]

BY THEODORE ANDREA COOK

The road that leads from Blois to Chambord crosses the Loire by a fine stone bridge, which the inscription sets forth to be the first public work of Louis Philippe.

For some distance the rails of a small tramway followed the road by which our carriage was slowly rolling toward the level plains of the Cologne, but we gradually left such uncompromising signs of activity, and came into a flat country of endless vineyards, with here and there a small plaster tower showing its slated roof above the low green clusters of the vines. We passed through several villages, whose inhabitants that day seemed to have but one care upon their minds, like the famous Scilly Islanders, to gain a precarious livelihood by taking each other's washing. On every bush and briar fluttered the household linen and the family apparel, of various textures and in different states of despair; and with that strict observance of utility which is the chief characteristic of the French peasant, the inevitable blouses, of faded blue were blown into shapeless bundles even along the railings of the churchyard tombs.

At last we came to an old moss-grown wall, and through a broken gateway entered what is called the Park of Chambord. There is very little of it to be seen now, the trees have been ruthlessly cut down and mutilated, and of the wild boars, which Francis I. was so fond of hunting there is left only the ghostly quarry that Thibault of Champagne chases through the air, while the sound of his ghostly horn echoes down the autumn night as the fantom pack sweeps by to Montfrault.

It is impossible for the uninstructed mind to grasp the plan or method of this mass of architecture; yet it is unsatisfactory to give it up, with Mr. Henry James, "as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth." M. Viollet-le-Duc, with a sympathetic denial of any extreme and over-technical admiration, gives just that intelligible account of the château which is a compromise between the unmeaning adulation of its contemporary critics and the ignorance of the casual traveler.

"Chambord," says he, "must be taken for what it is; for an attempt in which the architect sought to reconcile the methods of two opposite principles, to unite in one building the fortified castle of the Middle Ages and the pleasure-palace of the sixteenth century." Granted that the attempt was an absurd one, it must be remembered that the Renaissance was but just beginning in France; Gothic art seemed out of date, yet none other had established itself to take its place. In literature, in morals, as in architecture, this particular phase in the civilization of the time has already become evident even in the course of these small wanderings in a single province, and if only this transition period is realized in all its meaning, with all the "monstrous and inform" characteristics that were inevitably a part of it, the mystery of this strange sixteenth century in France is half explained, of this "glorious devil, large in heart and brain, that did love beauty only" and would have it somewhere, somehow, at whatever cost.

Francis I. had passed his early years at Cognac, at Amboise, or Romorantin, and when he first saw Chambord it was only the old feudal manor-house built by the Counts of Blois. He transformed it, not by the help of Primaticcio, with whose name it is tempting to associate any building of this king's, for the methods of contemporary Italian architecture were totally different; but, as Mr. de la Saussaye proves, by the skill of that fertile school of art particularly of one Maitre Pierre Trinqueau, or Le Nepveu, whose name is connected with more successful buildings at Amboise and Blois. The plan is that of the true French château; in the center is the habitation of the seigneur and his family, flanked by four angle towers; on three sides is a court closed by buildings, also with towers at each angle, and like most feudal dwellings the central donjon has one of its sides on the exterior of the whole ...

It may well be imagined that Chambord is the parody of the old castles, just as the Abbey of Thélème parodies the abbeys of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both heaped a fatal ridicule upon the bygone age, but what Rabelais could only dream Francis could realize, yet not with the unfettered perfection that was granted to the vision of Gargantua; for surely never was the spirit of the time, seized and smitten into incongruous shapes of stone at so unfortunate a moment, just when the old Renaissance was striving to take upon itself the burden which was too heavy for the failing Gothic spirit, just when success was coming, but had not yet come.

It is only from within the court, where the great towers fling their shadows over the space, where pinnacles and gables soar into the air, and strange gargoyles and projectures shoot from the darkness into light, that it is possible to realize the admiration which Chambord roused when it was first created. Brantôme waxes enthusiastic over its wonders, and describes how the king had drawn up plans (mercifully never carried out) to divert the waters of the Loire to his new palace, not content with the slender stream of Cosson, from which the place derived its name. Others compare it to a palace put of the Arabian Nights raised at the Prince's bidding by a Genie, or like Lippomano, the Venetian ambassador, to "the abode of Morgana or Alcinous"; but this topheavy barrack is anything rather than a "fairy monument"; it might with as much humor be called a "souvenir of first loves," as M. de la Saussaye has it. Both descriptions fit Chenonceaux admirably; when used of Chambord they are out of place.

CHENONCEAUX[A]

[Footnote A: From "Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L.C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1906.]

BY FRANCIS MILTOUN

Chenonceaux is noted chiefly for its château, but the little village itself is charming. The houses of the village are not very new, nor very old, but the one long street is most attractive throughout its length, and the whole atmosphere of the place, from September to December, is odorous with the perfume of red and purple grapes. The vintage is not equal to that of the Bordeaux region, perhaps, nor of Chinon, nor Saumur, but "vin du pays" of the Cher and the Loire, around Tours, is not to be despised.

Most tourists come to Chenonceaux by train from Tours; others drive over from Amboise, and yet others come by bicycle or automobile. They are not as yet so numerous as might be expected, and accordingly here, as elsewhere in Touraine, every facility is given for visiting the château and its park.

If you do not hurry off at once to worship at the abode of the fascinating Diane, one of the brightest ornaments of the court of François I. and his son Henri, you will enjoy your dinner at the Hôtel du Bon Laboureur, tho most likely it will be a solitary one, and you will be put to bed in a great chamber over-looking the park, through which peep, in the moonlight, the turrets of the château, and you may hear the purling of the waters of the Cher as it flows below the walls.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, like François I., called Chenonceaux a beautiful place, and he was right. It is all of that and more. Here one comes into direct contact with an atmosphere which, if not feudal, or even medieval, is at least that of several hundred years ago.

Chenonceaux is moored like a ship in the middle of the rapidly running Cher, a dozen miles or more above where that stream enters the Loire. As a matter of fact, the château practically bridges the river, which flows under its foundations and beneath its drawbridge on either side, besides filling the moat with water. The general effect is as if the building were set in the midst of a stream and formed a sort of island château. Round about is a gentle meadow and a great park, which gives to this turreted, architectural gem of Touraine a setting equalled by no other château.

What the château was in former days we can readily imagine, for nothing is changed as to the general disposition. Boats came to the water-gate, as they still might do if such boats still existed, in true, pictorial legendary fashion. To-day the present occupant has placed a curiosity on the ornamental waters in the shape of a gondola. It is out of keeping with the grand fabric of the château, and it is a pity that it does not cast itself adrift some night. What has become of the gondolier, who was imported to keep the craft company, nobody seems to know. He is certainly not in evidence, or, if he is, has transformed himself into a groom or a chauffeur.

The château of Chenonceaux is not a very ample structure; not so ample as most photographs would make it appear. It is not tiny, but still it has not the magnificent proportions of Blois, of Chambord, or even of Langeais. It was more a habitation than it was a fortress, a country house, as indeed it virtually became when the Connétable de Montmorency took possession of the structure in the name of the king, when its builder, Thomas Bohier, the none too astute minister of finance in Normandy, came to grief in his affairs.

Francis I came frequently here to hunt, and his memory is still kept alive by the Chambre François I. François held possession till his death, when his son made it over to the "admired of two generations," Diane de Poitiers.

Diane's memory will never leave Chenonceaux. To-day it is perpetuated in the Chambre de Diane de Poitiers; but the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, which was supposed to best show her charms, has now disappeared from the Long Gallery at the château. This portrait was painted at the command of François, before Diane transferred her affections to his son.

No one knows when or how Diane de Poitiers first came to fascinate François, or how or why her power waned. At any rate at the time François pardoned her father, the witless Comte de St. Vallier, for the treacherous part he played in the Bourbon conspiracy, he really believed her to to be the "brightest ornament of a beauty-loving court."

Certainly, Diane was a powerful factor in the politics of her time, tho François himself soon tired of her. Undaunted by this, she forthwith set her cap for his son Henri, the Duc d'Orléans, and won him, too. Of her beauty the present generation is able to judge for itself by reason of the three well-known and excellent portraits of contemporary times.

Diane's influence over the young Henri was absolute. At his death her power was, of course, at an end and Chenonceaux, and all else possible, was taken from her by the orders of Catherine, the long-suffering wife, who had been put aside for the fascinations of the charming huntress.

It must have been some satisfaction, however, to Diane, to know that, in his fatal joust with Montgomery, Henri really broke his lance and met his death in her honor, for the records tell that he bore her colors on his lance, besides her initials set in gold and gems on his shield.

Catherine's eagerness to drive Diane from the court was so great, that no sooner had her spouse fallen--even tho he did not actually die for some days--than she sent word to Diane "who sat weeping alone," to quit the court instantly; to give up the crown jewels--which Henri had somewhat inconsiderately given her; and to "give up Chenonceaux in Touraine," Catherine's Naboth's vineyard, which she had so long admired and coveted.

She had known it as a girl, when she often visited it in company with her father-in-law, the appreciative but dissolute François, and had ever longed to possess it for her own, before even her husband, now dead, had given it to "that old hag Diane de Poitiers, Duchesse de Valentinois."

Diane paid no heed to Catherine's command. She simply asked: "Is the king yet dead?"

"No, madame," said the messenger, "but his wound is mortal; he can not live the day."

"Tell the queen, then." replied Diane, "that her reign is not yet come; that I am mistress still over her and the kingdom as long as the king breathes the breath of life."

The château of Chenonceaux, so greatly coveted by Catherine when she first came to France, and when it was in the possession of Diane, still remains in all the regal splendor of its past. It lies in the lovely valley of the Cher, far from the rush and turmoil of cities and even the continuous traffic of great thoroughfares, for it is on the road to nowhere unless one is journeying crosscountry from the lower to the upper Loire. This very isolation resulted in its being one of the few monuments spared from the furies of the Revolution, and, "half-palace and half-château," it glistens with the purity of its former glory, as picturesque as ever, with turrets, spires, and roof-tops all mellowed with the ages in a most entrancing manner.

Even to-day one enters the precincts of the château proper over a drawbridge which spans an arm of the Loire, or rather, a moat which leads directly from the parent stream. On the opposite side are the bridge piers supporting five arches, the work of Diane when she was the fair chatelaine of the domain. This ingenious thought proved to be a most useful and artistic addition to the château. It formed a flagged promenade, lovely in itself, and led to the southern bank of the Cher, whence one got charming vistas of the turrets and roof-tops of the château through the trees and the leafy avenues which converged upon the structure.

When Catherine came she did not disdain to make the best use of Diane's innovation that suggested itself to her, which was simply to build the Long Gallery over the arches of this lovely bridge, and so make of it a veritable house over the water. A covering was made quite as beautiful as the rest of the structure, and thus the bridge formed a spacious wing of two stories. The first floor--known as the Long Gallery--was intended as a banqueting-hall, and possest four great full-length windows on either side looking up and down the stream, from which was seen--and is to-day--an outlook as magnificently idyllic as is possible to conceive. Jean Goujon had designed for the ceiling one of those wonder-works for which he was famous, but if the complete plan was ever carried out, it has disappeared, for only a tiny sketch of the whole scheme remains to-day.

Catherine came in the early summer to take possession of her long-coveted domain. Being a skilful horsewoman, she came on horseback, accompanied by a little band of feminine charmers destined to wheedle political secrets from friends and enemies alike--a real "flying squadron of the queen," as it was called by a contemporary.

It was a gallant company that assembled here at this time--the young King Charles IX., the Duc de Guise, and the "two cardinals mounted on mules"--Lorraine, a true Guise, and D'Este, newly arrived from Italy, and accompanied by the poet Tasso, wearing a "gabardine and a hood of satin." Catherine showed the Italian great favor, as was due a countryman, but there was another poet among them as well, Ronsard, the poet laureate of the time. The Duc de Guise had followed in the wake of Marguerite, unbeknown to Catherine, who frowned down any possibility of an alliance between the houses of Valois and Lorraine.

A great fête and water-masque had been arranged by Catherine to take place on the Cher, with a banquet to follow in the Long Gallery in honor of her arrival at Chenonceaux.

When twilight had fallen, torches were ignited and myriads of lights blazed forth from the boats on the river and from the windows of the château. Music and song went forth into the night, and all was as gay and lovely as a Venetian night's entertainment. The hunting-horns echoed through the wooded banks, and through the arches above which the château was built passed great highly colored barges, including a fleet of gondolas to remind the queen-mother of her Italian days--the ancestors perhaps of the solitary gondola which to-day floats idly by the river-bank just before the grand entrance to the château. From parterre and balustrade, and from the clipt yews of the ornamental garden, fairy lamps burned forth and dwindled away into dim infinity, as the long lines of soft light gradually lost themselves in the forest. It was a grand affair and idyllic in its unworldliness ...

Catherine bequeathed Chenonceaux to the wife of Henry III., Louise de Vaudémont, who died here in 1601. For a hundred years it still belonged to royalty, but in 1730 it was sold to M. Dupin, who, with his wife, enriched and repaired the fabric. They gathered around them a company so famous as to be memorable in the annals of art and literature. This is best shown by the citing of such names as Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Buffon, Bolingbroke, Voltaire, and Rousseau, all of whom were frequenters of the establishment, the latter being charged with the education of the Dupins' only son.

Chenonceaux to-day is no whited sepulcher. It is a real living and livable thing, and moreover, when one visits it, he observes that the family burn great logs in their fireplaces, have luxurious bouquets of flowers on their dining-table, and use wax candles instead of the more prosaic oil-lamps, or worse--acetyline gas.

FOIX[A]

[Footnote A: From "Castles and Châteaux of Old Navarre." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, L.C. Page & Co. Copyright, 1907.]

BY FRANCIS MILTOUN

Above the swift flowing Ariège in their superb setting of mountain and forest are the towers and parapets of the old château, in itself enough to make the name and fame of any city.... The actual age of the monument covers many epochs. The two square towers and the main edifice, as seen to-day, are anterior to the thirteenth century, as is proved by the design in the seals of the Comtes de Foix of 1215 and 1241 now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In the fourteenth century these towers were strengthened and enlarged with the idea of making them more effective for defense and habitation.

The escutcheons of Foix, Beam and Comminges, to be seen in the great central tower, indicate that it, too, goes back at least to the end of the fourteenth century, when Eleanore de Comminges, the mother of Gaston Phoebus, ruled the Comté. The donjon or Tour Ronde arises on the west to a height of forty-two meters; and will be remarked by all familiar with these sermons in stones scattered all over France as one of the most graceful. Legend attributes it to Gaston Phoebus; but all authorities do not agree as to this. The window-and door-openings, the moldings, the accolade over the entrance doorway, and the machicoulis all denote that they belong to the latter half of the fifteenth century. These, however, may be later interpolations.

Originally one entered the château from exactly the opposite side from that used to-day. The slope leading up to the rock and swinging around in front of the town is an addition of recent years. Formerly the plateau was gained by a rugged path which finally entered the precincts of the fortress through a rectangular barbican.

Finally, to sum it up, the pleasant, smiling, trim little city of Foix, and its château rising romantically above it, form a delightful prospect. Well preserved, well protected and forever free from further desecration, the château de Fois is as nobly impressive and glorious a monument of the Middle Ages as may be found in France, as well as chief record of the gallant days of the Comtes de Foix. Foix' Palais de Justice, built back to back with the rock foundation of the château, is itself a singular piece of architecture containing a small collection of local antiquities. This old Maison des Gouverneurs, now the Palais de Justice, is a banal, unlovely thing, regardless of its high-sounding titles....

It was that great hunter and warrior, Gaston Phoebus, who gave the Château de Foix its greatest lustre. It was here that this most brilliant and most celebrated of the counts passed his youth; and it was from here that he set out on his famous expedition to aid his brother knights of the Teutonic Order in Prussia. At Gaston's orders the Comte d'Armagnac was imprisoned here, to be released after the payment of a heavy ransom. As to the motive for this particular act, authorities differ as to whether it was the fortune of war or mere brigandage.

They lived high, the nobles of the old days, and Froissart recounts a banquet at which he had assisted at Foix, in the sixteenth century, as follows:

"And this was what I saw in the Comté de Foix: The Comte left his chamber to sup at midnight, the way to the great 'salle' being led by twelve varlets, bearing twelve illumined torches. The great hall was crowded with knights and equerries, and those who would supped, saying nothing meanwhile. Mostly game seemed to be the favorite viand, and the legs and wings only of fowl were eaten. Music and chants were the invariable accompaniment and the company remained at table until after two in the morning. Little or nothing was drunk."