rough the haze of flickering leaves, seemed to stand
still. It was the most peaceful of landscapes: but there was endless
fighting thereabouts in former times. In an Early Christian way the
archbishops of Vienne ravaged among the Protestants; between whiles the
robber-counts, without respect to creed, ravaged among the travelling
public with a large-minded impartiality; and, down in the lowest rank of
ravagers, the road-agents of the period stole all that their betters
left for them to steal. As we passed the little town of Condrieu--where
a lonely enthusiast stood up on the bank and waved a flag at us--we saw
overtopping it, on a fierce little craggy height, the ruined stronghold
of its ancient lords. Already, in the thirty miles or thereabouts that
we had come since leaving Lyons, we had passed a half-dozen or more
warlike remnants of a like sort; and throughout the run to Avignon they
continued at about the rate of one in every five miles.

Singly, the histories of these castles are exceedingly interesting
studies in Mediaeval barbarism; but collectively they become a
wearisomely monotonous accumulation of horrors. Yet it is unfair to
blame the lords of the castles for their lack of originality in crime.
With the few possible combinations at their command, the Law of
Permutation literally compelled them to do the same things over and over
again: maintaining or sustaining sieges ending in death with or without
quarter for the besieged; leading forays for the sake of plunder, with
or without the incentive of revenge; crushing peasant rebellions by
hanging such few peasants as escaped the sword; and at all times robbing
every unlucky merchant who chanced to come their way. It was a curious
twist, that reversion to savagery, from the Roman epoch: when the Rhone
Valley was inhabited by a civilized people who encouraged commerce and
who had a genuine love for the arts. And, after all--unless they had
some sort of pooling arrangement--the robber lords in the mid-region of
the Rhone could not have found their business very profitable. Merchants
travelling south from Lyons must have been poor booty by the time that
they had passed Vienne; and merchants travelling north from Avignon,
similarly, must have been well fleeced by the time that they were come
to the Pont-Saint-Esprit. Indeed, the lords in the middle of the run
doubtless were hard put to it at times to make any sort of a living at
all. Nor could the little local steal