With its triple enclosure, its dungeons, its interior court-yards, its
machicolations, its underground passages, its ramparts piled one upon
the other, like a bark on a bark and a shield on a shield, the ancient
Château of the Clissons rises before your mind and is reconstructed. The
memory of past existences exudes from its walls with the emanations of
the nettles and the coolness of the ivy. In that castle, men altogether
different from us were swayed by passions stronger than ours; their
hands were brawnier and their chests broader.

Long black streaks still mark the walls, as in the time when logs blazed
in the eighteen-foot fireplaces. Symmetrical holes in the masonry
indicate the floors to which one ascended by winding staircases now
crumbling in ruins, while their empty doors open into space. Sometimes a
bird, taking flight from its nest hanging in the branches, would pass
with spread wings through the arch of a window, and fly far away into
the country.

At the top of a high, bleak wall, several square bay-windows, of unequal
length and position, let the pure sky shine through their crossed bars;
and the bright blue, framed by the stone, attracted my eye with
surprising persistency. The sparrows in the trees were chirping, and in
the midst of it all a cow, thinking, no doubt, that it was a meadow,
grazed peacefully, her horns sweeping over the grass.

There is a window, a large window that looks out into a meadow called
_la prairie des chevaliers_. It was there, from a stone bench carved in
the wall, that the high-born dames of the period watched the knights
urge their iron-barbed steeds against one another, and the lances come
down on the helmets and snap, and the men fall to the ground. On a fine