to be a stone on a stone:
and it was so. Gaston of Bearn slapped his thigh when he heard of this:
'Now,' he said, 'now at last I know what ails my King. He has seen his
lost mistress.'

He did so ruthlessly in Normandy that he went far to make his power a
standing dread to the fair duchy. On the rock at Les Andelys he built a
huge castle, to hang there like a thunder-cloud scowling over the flats
of the Seine. He called it, what his temper gave no hint of (so dry with
fever he was), the galliard hold. 'Let me see Chastel-Gaillard stand
ready in a year,' he said. 'Put on every living man in Normandy if need
be.' He planned it all himself; rock of the rock it was to be, making
the sheer yet more sheer. He called it again his daughter, daughter of
his conception of Death. 'Build,' said he, 'my daughter Gaillarda. As I
have conceived her let the great birth be.' And it was so. For a bitter
christening, when all was done, he had his French prisoners thrown down
into the fosse; and they say that it rained blood upon him and his
artificers as they stood by that accursed font. The man was mad. Nothing
stayed him: for the first time since they who still loved him had had
him back, they heard him laugh, when his daughter Gaillarda was brought
forth. And, 'Spine of God,' he cried, 'this is a saucy child of mine,
and saucily shall she do by the French power.' Then his face was
wrenched by pain, as with a sob he said, 'I had a son Fulke.' Gaillarda
did saucily enough, to tyrannise over ten years of Philip's life; in the
end, as all know, she played the strumpet, and served the enemies of her
father's house, but not while Richard lived to rule her.

He drove Philip into a truce of years, pushed down into Touraine, and
thence went to Anjou, but not to sit still. He was never still, never
seemed to sleep, or get any of the solace of a man. He ate voraciously,
but was not nourished, drank long, but was never drunken, revelled
without mirth, hunted, fought, but got no joy. He utterly refused to see
the Queen, who was at Cahors in the south. 'She is no wife of mine,' he
said; 'let her go home.' Tentative messages were brought by very
tentative messengers from his brother John. Good service, such and such,
had been done in Languedoc; so and so had been hanged, or gibbeted, so
and so rewarded: what had our dear and royal brother to say? To each he
said the same thing: 'Let my good brother come.' But John never came.

No one knew what to m