atian Jew named Deutz.
For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an
interstice behind a fireplace, and by the time she was drawn forth into
the light she had been ominously scorched. The man who showed me the
castle indicated also another historic spot, a house with little
_tourelles_ on the Quai de la Fosse, in which Henry IV. is said to have
signed the Edict revoked by Louis XIV. I am, however, not in a position
to answer for this pedigree.

There is another point in the history of the fine old houses which
command the Loire, of which, I suppose, one may be tolerably sure; that
is their having, placid as they stand there to-day, looked down on the
horrors of the Terror of 1793, the bloody reign of the monster Carrier
and his infamous _noyades_. The most hideous episode of the Revolution
was enacted at Nantes, where hundreds of men and women, tied together in
couples, were set afloat upon rafts and sunk to the bottom of the Loire.
The tall eighteenth-century house, full of the _air noble_, in France
always reminds me of those dreadful years--of the street-scenes of the
Revolution. Superficially, the association is incongruous, for nothing
could be more formal and decorous than the patent expression of these
eligible residences. But whenever I have a vision of prisoners bound on
tumbrels that jolt slowly to the scaffold, of heads carried on pikes, of
groups of heated _citoyennes_ shaking their fists at closed
coach-windows, I see in the background the well-ordered features of the
architecture of the period--the clear grey stone, the high pilasters,
the arching lines of the _entresol_, the classic pediment, the
slate-covered attic. There is not much architecture at Nantes except the
domestic. The cathedral, with a rough west front and stunted towers,
makes no impression as you approach it. It is true that it does its best
to recover its reputation as soon as you have passed the threshold.
Begun in 1434 and finished about the end of the fifteenth century, as I
discover in Murray, it has a magnificent nave, not of great length, but
of extraordinary height and lightness. On the other hand, it has no
choir whatever. There is much entertainment in France in seeing what a
cathedral will take upon itself to possess or to lack; for it is only
the smaller number that have the full complement of features. Some have
a very fine nave and no choir; others a very fine choir and no nave.
Some have a rich outside an