wn flood, of uncertain
temper, which has never taken time to forget that it is a child of the
mountain and the glacier, and that such an origin carries with it great
privileges. Later, at Avignon, I observed it in the exercise of these
privileges, chief among which was that of frightening the good people of
the old papal city half out of their wits.

The chateau of King Rene serves to-day as the prison of a district, and
the traveller who wishes to look into it must obtain his permission at
the Mairie of Tarascon. If he have had a certain experience of French
manners, his application will be accompanied with the forms of a
considerable obsequiosity, and in this case his request will be granted
as civilly as it has been made. The castle has more of the air of a
severely feudal fortress than I should suppose the period of its
construction (the first half of the fifteenth century) would have
warranted; being tremendously bare and perpendicular, and constructed
for comfort only in the sense that it was arranged for defence. It is a
square and simple mass, composed of small yellow stones and perched on a
pedestal of rock which easily commands the river. The building has the
usual circular towers at the corners and a heavy cornice at the top, and
immense stretches of sun-scorched wall relieved at wide intervals by
small windows, heavily cross-barred. It has, above all, an extreme
steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as
sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle has kept its large
moat, which is now a hollow filled with wild plants. To this tall
fortress the good Rene retired in the middle of the fifteenth century,
finding it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a dominion
which had included Naples and Sicily, Lorraine and Anjou. He had been a
much-tried monarch and the sport of a various fortune, fighting half
his life for thrones he didn't care for, and exalted only to be quickly
cast down. Provence was the country of his affection, and the memory of
his troubles did not prevent him from holding a joyous court at Tarascon
and at Aix. He finished the castle at Tarascon, which had been begun
earlier in the century--finished it, I suppose, for consistency's sake,
in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in
accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his
old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante,
addicted