to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in
the image that he has imprinted on the page of history. He was both
clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not embittered
him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet
Provence, and his sweet Provence has been grateful; it has woven a light
tissue of legend around the memory of the good King Rene.

I strolled over his dusky habitation--it must have taken all his good
humour to light it up--at the heels of the custodian, who showed me the
usual number of castle-properties: a deep, well-like court; a collection
of winding staircases and vaulted chambers, the embrasures of whose
windows and the recesses of whose doorways reveal a tremendous thickness
of wall. These things constitute the general identity of old castles;
and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of
step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and
remember, and contents one's self with consigning them to the honourable
limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not in the
least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects Tarascon with
Beaucaire, in

[Illustration: TARASCON--THE CASTLE]

order to examine the old fortress whose ruins adorn the latter city. It
stands on a foundation of rock much higher than that of Tarascon, and
looks over with a melancholy expression at its better-conditioned
brother. Its position is magnificent and its outline very gallant. I was
well rewarded for my pilgrimage; for if the castle of Beaucaire is only
a fragment, the whole place, with its position and its views, is an
ineffaceable picture. It was the stronghold of the Montmorencys, and its
last tenant was that rash Duke Francois whom Richelieu, seizing every
occasion to trample on a great noble, caused to be beheaded at Toulouse,
where we saw, in the Capitol, the butcher's knife with which the
cardinal pruned the crown of France of its thorns. The castle, after the
death of this victim, was virtually demolished. Its site, which nature
to-day has taken again to herself, has an extraordinary charm. The mass
of rock that it formerly covered rises high above the town and is as
precipitous as the side of the Rhone. A tall, rusty iron gate admits you
from a quiet corner of Beaucaire to a wild tangled garden covering the
side of the hill--for the whole place forms the public promenade of the
townsfolk--a garden witho