e bleak walls of the
castle lighted up by the glare of the torches that flared amid bumpers
of rare wines and gipsy jugglers, and blushed hotly under the unceasing
breath of magical bellows. The inhabitants invoked the devil, joked with
death, murdered children, enjoyed frightful and atrocious pleasures;
blood flowed, instruments played, everything echoed with voluptuousness,
horror, and madness.

When he expired, four or five damsels had his body removed from the
stake, laid out, and taken to the Carmelites, who, after performing the
customary services, buried him in state.

On one of the bridges of the Loire, relates Guepin, opposite the Hotel
de la Boule-d'Or, an expiatory monument was erected to his memory. It
was a niche containing the statue of the _Bonne Vierge de cree lait_,
who had the power of creating milk in nurses; the good people offered
her butter and similar rustic products. The niche still exists, but the
statue is gone; the same as at the town-house, where the casket which
contained the heart of Queen Anne is also empty. But we did not care to
see the casket; we did not even give it a thought. I should have
preferred gazing upon the trousers of the marshal of Retz to looking at
the heart of Madame Anne de Bretagne.

CHAPTER III.

CARNAC.

The field of Carnac is a large, open space where eleven rows of black
stones are aligned at symmetrical intervals. They diminish in size as
they recede from the ocean. Cambry asserts that there were four thousand
of these rocks and Freminville has counted twelve hundred of them. They
are certainly very numerous.

What was their use? Was it a temple?

One day Saint Cornille, pursued along the shore by soldiers, was about
to jump into the ocean, when he thought of changing them all into stone,
and forthwith the men were petrified. But this explanation was good only
for fools, little children, and poets. Other people looked for better
reasons.

In the sixteenth century, Olaues Magnus, archbishop of Upsal (who,
banished to Rome, wrote a book on the antiquities of his country that
met with widespread success except in his native land, Sweden, where it
was not translated), discovered that, when these stones form one long,
straight row, they cover the bodies of warriors who died while fighting
duels; that those arranged in squares are consecrated to heroes that
perished in battle; that those disposed in a circle are family graves,
while those that form cor