orical memories.

Wars and rumors of war kept Compiegne in a turmoil for centuries, but
the most theatrical episode was the famous "_sortie_" made by Jeanne
d'Arc when she was attempting to defend the city against the combined
English and Burgundian troops. It was an episode in which faint heart,
perhaps treason, played an unwelcome part, for while the gallant maid
was taking all manner of chances outside the gates the military
governor, Guillaume de Flavy, ordered the barriers of the great portal
closed behind her and her men.

Near the end of the Pont de Saint Louis Jeanne d'Arc fell into the hands
of the besiegers. An archer from Picardy captured her single handed,
and, for a round sum in silver or in kind, turned her over to her
torturer, Jean de Luxembourg. A statue of the maid is found on the
public "Place," and the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, a great circular donjon of
the thirteenth century, is near by. Another souvenir is to be found in
the ancient Hotel de Boeuf, at No. 9 Rue de Paris, where the maid
lodged from the eighteenth to the twenty-third of August, 1429, awaiting
the entry of Charles VII.

With the era of Francis I that gallant and fastidious monarch came to
take up his residence at Compiegne. He here received his "friend and
enemy," Charles V, but strangely enough there is no monument in
Compiegne to-day which is intimately associated with the stay here of
the art-loving Francis. He preferred, after all, his royal manor at
Villers-Cotterets near by. There was more privacy there, and it formed
an admirable retreat for such moments when the king did not wish to bask
in publicity, and these moments were many, though one might not at first
think so when reading of his affairs of state. There were also affairs
of the heart which, to him, in many instances, were quite as important.
This should not be forgotten.

In 1624 a treaty was signed at Compiegne which assured the alliance of
Louis XIII with the United Provinces, and during this reign the court
was frequently in residence here. In 1631 Marie de Medici, then a
prisoner in the palace, made a notable escape and fled, doomed ever
afterwards to a vagabond existence, a terrible fall for her once proud
glory, to her death in a Cologne garret ten years later.

In 1635 the Grand Chancellor of Sweden signed a treaty here which
enabled France to mingle in the affairs of the Thirty Years' War.

During the Fronde, that "Woman's War," which was so entirely
unnecessa