d by the heirs
of his blood and of his name, not only here in the Catholic Calvados
which gave the great Protestant statesman so staunch a support through
all his years of power, and surrounded him with affection and respect
down to the last days of his long and illustrious life, but in Southern
France also, and in the home of his Protestant ancestors.

Val Richer will be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of liberty in the
twentieth century, as La Brede is in the nineteenth.

But the genius of the spot is more purely personal in the home of
Guizot than in the birthplace of Montesquieu.

The stately rectangular library at La Brede with its thousands of
soberly-clad volumes, standing as he left them on its shelves, annotated
by his own hand; the manuscripts still unfinished of the 'Lettres
Persanes; the grave silent cabinet, with his chair beside his
study-table, as if he had quitted it a moment before you came--all these
are eloquent, indeed, of the great thinker whose 'Esprit des Lois,' too
rich in ripe wisdom to be heeded by the headlong and haphazard political
'plungers' of 1789 in his own country, illuminated for Washington the
problem of constituting a new nationality beyond the Atlantic.

But La Brede has also a positive physiognomy of its own which takes you
back to ages long before his birth. The frowning donjon of the
thirteenth century, the machicolated round tower, the moat with its
running water, the drawbridge, the vestibule with its columns of twisted
oak, even the grand salon with the stately courtiers and captains, the
gracious dames and damsels of the family of Secondat gazing down from
the walls, all these distract the eye and the mind. The distraction is
agreeable, but still it is a distraction. It leads you from the
biographical into the social and historical mood. You are delighted as
at Meillant or Chenonceaux with a corner of ancient France, marvellously
rescued from the red ruin of the Revolution.

Val Richer, on the contrary, like Abbotsford, is the creation of the
master whose spirit haunts the place. Like Abbotsford, it has an earlier
history and older associations, but of these there are few or no
material signs. Here stood the great abbey of which Thomas a-Becket once
was abbot, and where he found a refuge during that exile from which, in
his own words, he went back to England 'to play a game in which the
stakes were heads!' From Bures, near Bayeux, in this department, where
Henry was the