nebut was sheltered. A
wall with several doors opening on the woods enclosed the chateau, the
farm and the lower part of the park, and a wide morass, stretching from
the foot of the terrace to the Seine, rendered access impossible from
that side.

By the marriage of Genevieve de Bois-l'Eveque, Lady of Tournebut, this
mansion had passed to the family of Marillac, early in the seventeenth
century. The Marshal Louis de Marillac--uncle of Mme. Legras,
collaborator of St. Vincent de Paul--had owned it from 1613 to 1631, and
tradition asserted that during his struggle against Cardinal Richelieu
he had established there a plant for counterfeiting money. To him was
due the construction of the brick wing which remained unfinished, his
condemnation to death for peculation having put a stop to the
embellishments he had intended to make.

There are very few chateaux left in France like this romantic manor of a
dead and gone past, whose stones have endured all the crises of our
history, and to which each century has added a tower, or a legend.
Tournebut, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was a perfect
type of these old dwellings, where there were so many great halls and so
few living rooms, and whose high slate roofs covered intricacies of
framework forming lofts vast as cathedrals. It was said that its thick
walls were pierced by secret passages and contained hiding-places that
Louis de Marillac had formerly used.

In 1804 Tournebut was inhabited by the Marquise de Combray, born
Genevieve de Brunelles, daughter of a President of the Cour des Comptes
of Normandy. Her husband, Jean-Louis-Armand-Emmanuel Helie de Combray,
had died in 1784, leaving her with two sons and two daughters, and a
great deal of property in the environs of Falaise, in the parishes of
Donnay, Combray, Bonnoeil and other places. Madame de Combray had
inherited Tournebut from her mother, Madeleine Hubert, herself a
daughter of a councillor in the Parliament of Normandy. Besides the
chateau and the farm, which were surrounded by a park well-wooded with
old trees, the domain included the woods that covered the hillside, at
the extremity of which was an old tower, formerly a wind-mill, built
over deep quarries, and called the "Tower of the Burned Mill," or "The
Hermitage." It figures in the ancient plans of the country under the
latter name, which it owes to the memory of an old hermit who lived in
the quarries for many years and died there towards the