rches, and more than a hundred and fifty priories, nunneries, and
other religious communities, and it will be seen what a grand field of
enterprise and speculation was thrown open in the Laonnais and the
Soissonnais to the disciples of Brissot de Warville and of Condorcet by
the seizure of the Church property alone.

Scarcely less numerous than the religious edifices in this region were
the chateaux. Of these comparatively few are now standing, either as
picturesque ruins or as residences. The bas-reliefs and tapestry of the
ancient buildings of La Ferte-Milon, the birthplace of Racine, are still
worthy of a visit. Of Nanteuil, a fine chateau of the time of Francis
I., a single tower remains. The magnificent manor-house of the Ducs de
Valois at Villers-Cotterets (a little beyond the limits of the region I
am now treating of) was made an historic monument by Napoleon III.; but
it is none the better for base uses against which it surely ought to
have been protected as the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas by the ghosts
of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis! The towers and the donjon of the Chateau
of Nesle on the Somme, whence sallied forth, in the time of Louis XV.,
the four much too famous sisters De Mailly, were not so maltreated in
1793 as to be quite uninhabitable when the first Napoleon passed a night
there, during his final struggle for empire; and there still is to be
seen the old Lombard-Roman church of St.-Leger, wherein was held a
council strong enough to coerce Philip Augustus into doing what Henry
VIII. refused, three centuries afterwards, to do, and to make him take
back his divorced queen Ingelburga of Denmark. Braisnes, planted upon a
peak, overlooks what is left of the exquisite twelfth-century church of
St.-Yved, ruthlessly battered and abused in 1793, and robbed of certain
matchless monuments in enamelled copper for the benefit of a syndicate
of patriotic rogues. The Chateaux de Gandelu, de Neuville, de
St.-Lambert are ruins. The lordly cradle of the great House of Guise;
the tower of Marchais in which, tradition tells us, the League was first
conceived by which the princes of Lorraine were backed in their struggle
for the throne of France; the keep of Beaurevoir, one of the prisons of
the Maid of Orleans--these may be seen. Of how many others, the names of
which ring out as from a chronicle of French history, nothing but the
names is left! Caulincourt, Coeuvres d'Estrees, de Bohain de
Luxembourg, d'Armentieres, de