Clisson raises its battered roof above the tree-tops. Everything around
it is calm and peaceful. The little dwellings seem to smile as if they
had been built under softer skies; the waters sing their song, and
patches of moss cover a stream over which hang graceful clusters of
foliage. The horizon extends on one side into a tapering perspective of
meadows, while on the other it rises abruptly and is enclosed by a
wooded valley, the trees of which crowd together and form a green ocean.

After one crosses the bridge and arrives at the steep path which leads
to the Château, one sees, standing upreared and bold on the moat on
which it is built, a formidable wall, crowned with battered
machicolations and bedecked with trees and ivy, the luxuriant growth of
which covers the grey stones and sways in the wind, like an immense
green veil which the recumbent giant moves dreamily across his
shoulders. The grass is tall and dark, the plants are strong and hardy;
the trunks of the ivy are twisted, knotted, and rough, and lift up the
walls as with levers or hold them in the network of their branches. In
one spot, a tree has grown through the wall horizontally, and, suspended
in the air, has let its branches radiate around it. The moats, the steep
slope of which is broken by the earth which has detached itself from the
embankments and the stones which have fallen from the battlements, have
a wide, deep curve, like hatred and pride; and the portal, with its
strong, slightly arched ogive, and its two bays that raise the
drawbridge, looks like a great helmet with holes in its visor.

When one enters, he is surprised and astonished at the wonderful mixture
of ruins and trees, the ruins accentuating the freshness of the trees,
while the latter in turn, render more poignant the melancholy of the
ruins. Here, indeed, is the beautiful, eternal, and brilliant laughter
of nature over the skeleton of things; here is the insolence of her