s in. She was the daughter of
the _gardien_, she told us. It was almost a shock to see something so
fresh and young living in such a forbidding, torture-haunted den as
Louis' Chateau of Loches. She was like one of the little bright-coloured
winter blossoms springing out from a cranny of the grey walls. When she
had lighted rather a smelly lantern, we prepared to follow into the
"fastnesses" of the castle. If ever that good old double-dyed word could
be appropriate, it is to Loches. I never thoroughly realised before the
awful might of kings in feudal and mediaeval days. To think that Louis
XI. had the power to build such a place, and to hustle his enemies away
for ever out of the sunshine, behind those tremendous walls, and bury
them in the yard-square cells hollowed in the thickness of the stone! I
used to wish I'd lived in those stirring times, but I changed my mind
to-day--temporarily.

In the middle of the fortress is an enormous square, white keep, so
heavy, solid, and imposing that it seems more like the slow work of
Nature than of man. Down steep, winding steps in a tower, we followed
our guide into the dungeons where that unspeakable Louis shut up the
people he was afraid to leave in the world. Waving her lantern in the
dusk, the girl showed us where the wretched prisoners had tried to keep
themselves from madness by painting on the roof and walls. In one cell a
bishop had cut into the solid wall a little altar, just where a slanting
ray of sunshine stole through a grating and occasionally laid a small
patch of light for a few minutes, only to snatch it away again. Several
of the cells were just black holes scooped out of the rock, and there it
seemed to have been Louis' delight to put some of the most important
prisoners--men who had lived like princes, and had power over life and
death in their own countries.

Oh, do you remember wily Cardinal Balue? I've been refreshing my memory
of him in _Quentin Durward_, hating him dreadfully; but I did have a
spasm of pity when I saw the big, well-like place where he was suspended
for so many years, like an imprisoned canary, in a wooden cage, because
he betrayed Louis' secrets to the Duke of Burgundy. Henry James says, in
a fascinating Tauchnitz volume I bought in Tours (_A Little Tour in
France_), that Cardinal Balue "survived much longer than might have been
expected this extraordinary mixture of seclusion and exposure." Isn't
that just the _cunningest_ way of expres