ifty years!' exclaimed the damsel; 'is it possible! And
still the same queen! Ah! they are well behaved the English; no wonder
they are rich. They are not such babies as we are!'

After passing through the well-built and neatly kept _cites ouvrieres_
of the Chauny branch of the Company of St.-Gobain, and the little suburb
of Autreville, the highway to Coucy-le-Chateau, and to the once royal
city of Soissons, runs through such fine woodlands, alternating with
parks and highly-cultivated fields, that one seems to be traversing a
great private domain. The trees are as well-grown as any you see in
England; the hedges are luxuriant, the roadway is admirably made and
perfectly well kept. The Comte de Brigode has a handsome chateau here,
standing well in a large park; and there is a good deal of hunting and
shooting here in the season.

Near by, too, is the pleasant chateau of Lavanture, long the home of a
branch established here of the once famous Dauphinese family of De
Theis. It was brought here from the land of Bayard and of De Comines by
a stalwart soldier, one of the lansquenet officers of Francis I., but
its renown in Picardy is of a gentler and more humane type; and after
giving a long succession of kindly and learned men to the public service
through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it finally died out
with Constance de Theis, Princesse de Salm, who was known under the
Directory and the Empire in Paris as the 'Muse of Reason,' and the
'Boileau of Women,' and with her nephew, the last Baron de Theis, one of
the most charming of men, and one of the most conscientious and accurate
of archaeologists and collectors. The baron died in 1874. The 'objets
d'art et de haute curiosite,' brought together by him with infinite
pains and unerring taste into his chateau of Lavanture, were dispersed
under the hammer of the auctioneer, and Lavanture itself passed into the
possession of another race.

This whole region of the Laonnais and the Soissonnais is full of
historic souvenirs. It may be almost called the cradle of the French
monarchy. Its reasonably well authenticated annals go back to the Roman
domination. Its mediaeval monasteries were among the richest; its
mediaeval monks among the most learned and industrious and useful of
France, draining the marsh-lands, reclaiming the wastes, clearing the
forests. Its feudal barons were typical men of their order, alike in
their virtues and in their vices. The seigneurs of Liz