indifferently. The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the
female prebends of Château-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters,
filled a considerable place in the history of the Comté from the
Crusades downwards, and known as _les Fols de Chissey_, the brave[29]
and dashing, and witty De Chisseys--qualities which no doubt were
possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the
Val d'Amour.

As we drew nearer to Besançon, each turn of the small streams, and each
low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Cæsar's
'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a
battle, there was always a _proximus collis_ for the conquered party to
retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for
the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of
grass-land between their foot and the stream.

The Frenchman knew his Cæsar, but he put that general in the fourth
century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily
detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the
indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the
nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of
small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besançon, and was
greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him
Cæsar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the
amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this
denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besançon, some even
thinking it necessary to explain the difference between an amphitheatre
and an arch of triumph, the latter still existing in the town. The
Jesuit Dunod relates that the amphitheatre was to be seen at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, in the ruined state in which the