V.,
and of Gabrielle d'Estrees, Duchesse de Beaufort.'

Not far from this house is the ancient belfry of Coucy, wherein swings a
bell of dolorous prestige, the tradition of Coucy averring that,
whenever a citizen of Coucy is about to die, this bell tolls of itself,
and is heard by him alone.

Doubtless the communal schoolmaster will ere long drive this tradition
out of the mind of the rising generation in Coucy. If so I trust, though
I hardly expect, that he will drive out with it another and more
mischievous tradition, born within the precincts of the ancient castle.
Not once, but a dozen times, this year in different parts of France, I
have seen allusions made, in political journals, to the monstrous right
which the seigneurs of old possessed and exercised of hanging small boys
for snaring and killing rabbits within their parks and woods. The old
game laws of France, like the old game laws, and indeed like many other
old laws, of England and of other countries, were not over-mild. Was not
a woman first strangled and then burned in England for 'coining' in the
year 1789, while the States-General were performing at Paris their
fantastic overture to the ghastly drama of the Terror? Yet England in
1789 knew a great deal more of personal liberty than France knows now in
1889. The tradition of the seignorial right of hanging boys for killing
rabbits originated, it is probable, with Enguerrand IV., Sire de Coucy,
of whom it is told that, exasperated by three young lads, scholars of
the monastic school of Saint-Nicolas-aux-Bois, whom he found shooting at
rabbits and hares in his woods with bows and arrows, he had the lads
seized and hanged. So far from doing this within his seignorial rights,
however, was the Sire de Coucy, that the monks proceeded against him
vigorously, and Saint-Louis had him arrested for it, and was with much
difficulty restrained by the barons of the realm from hanging him in his
turn. He was only pardoned on very severe conditions, one of which was
that he should do penance for a number of years in his own castle of
Coucy, where, the chroniclers tell us, he died 'in shame and
repentance.' His successor, Enguerrand V., took the matter so much to
heart that he led the life of an anchorite at Coucy, and had himself
buried in the Abbey of Premontre near the doorway; like Alonzo de Ojeda
the Conquistador, the slab upon whose grave I saw some years ago at the
entrance of the ruined church of San Francisco in