to turn at our approach and flee in terror through the bushes; not a
song-bird, not a nest, not a sound! This castle is like a ghost: mute
and cold, it stands abandoned in this deserted place, and looks accursed
and replete with terrifying recollections. Still, this melancholy
dwelling, which the owls now seem to avoid, was once inhabited. In the
dungeon, between four walls as livid as the bottom of an old
drinking-trough, we were able to discover the traces of five floors. A
chimney, with its two round pillars and black top, has remained
suspended in the air at a height of thirty feet. Earth has accumulated
on it, and plants are growing there as if it were a jardinière.

Beyond the second enclosure, in a ploughed field, one can recognise the
ruins of a chapel by the broken shafts of an ogive portal. Grass has
grown around it, and trees have replaced the columns. Four hundred years
ago, this chapel was filled with ornaments of gold cloth and silk,
censers, chandeliers, chalices, crosses, precious stones, gold vessels
and vases, a choir of thirty singers, chaplains, musicians, and children
sang hymns to the accompaniment of an organ which they took along with
them when they travelled. They were clad in scarlet garments lined with
pearl grey and vair. There was one whom they called archdeacon, and
another whom they called bishop, and the Pope was asked to allow them to
wear mitres like canons, for this chapel was the chapel, and this castle
one of the castles of Gilles de Laval, lord of Rouci, of Montmorency, of
Retz and of Craon, lieutenant-general of the Duke of Brittany and
field-marshal of France, who was burned at Nantes on the 25th of October,
1440, in the Prée de la Madéleine for being a counterfeiter, a murderer,
a magician, an atheist and a Sodomite.

He possessed more than one hundred thousand crowns' worth of furniture;
an income of thirty thousand pounds a year, the profits of his fiefs and