ce, yet gentry are."

The distance from Paris to this place is about 24 miles: the road of
course excellent, as is uniformly the case in the route to Chalons; but
the only thing during the stage which remains on my recollection, is an
obelisk inscribed, "Dieu, le Roi, et les dames;" a melange perhaps
compounded in compliment to Louis XV. who greatly improved a part of
this road, which was once nearly impassable. Corbeil, a neat flourishing
town within half a mile of Essonne, and possessing large cotton
manufactories, derives some interest from the celebrated siege it
sustained during the war of the league. Two miles beyond Essonne we
remarked, at a short distance to the right, Chateau Moncey, once the
seat of the gay and brilliant Duke de Villeroi and his descendants; and
on a hill to the left, Chateau Coudray, the former residence of the
Prince de Chalot. Both the possessors of these estates were guillotined
during the reign of terror, and their places are filled by Marechal
Jourdan, and some _nouveau riche_, whose very name the peasants seemed
never to have heard, or to have forgotten from want of interest.

We found the Hotel de la Ville de Lyon at Fontainebleau a good inn, and
fair in its charges. The old palace, though not intrinsically worth a
visit in point of architecture, yet conveys one of those "sermons in
stones," in which the Fauxbourg de St. Germain so much abounds; and
presents also more pleasing recollections of Louis Quatorze (a prince
possessing many of the good points of the _bon Henri_) than the
bombastic personification of him as Jupiter Tonans, in the palace of
Versailles, which is on a par as a painting with Tom Thumb as a tragedy.

April 27.--To Fossard, eighteen miles: the first six through the forest,
just sufficiently sylvan to suffer by a comparison with that of Windsor.
At the end of two more miles we crossed the valley, in which is situated
the town of Moret, to which is attached a history equally curious, as
Anquetil observes, with that of the Iron Mask. The following is the
extract from the Duke de St. Simon's Memoirs, which he introduces as
relative to it.

"Il y avoit a Moret, petite ville aupres de Fontainebleau, un petit
couvent, ou etoit professe une Mauresse inconnue, et qu'on ne montroit a
personne. Bontemps, Gouverneur de Versailles, par qui passoient les
choses du secret domestique du roi, l'y avoit mise toute jeune, avoit
paye une dot assez considerable, et continuoit a lui p