Madame Adélaïde. The present reigning family has a craze for being
portrayed on canvas. It is the bad taste of a parvenu, the mania of a
grocer who has accumulated money and who enjoys seeing himself in red,
white, and yellow, with his watch-charms dangling over his stomach, his
bewhiskered chin and his children gathered around him.

On one of the towers, and in spite of the most ordinary common sense,
they have built a glass rotunda which is used for a dining-room. True,
the view from it is magnificent. But the building presents so shocking
an appearance from the outside, that one would, I should think, prefer
to see nothing of the environs, or else to eat in the kitchen.

In order to go back to the city, we came down by a tower that was used
by carriages to approach the Château. The sloping gravelled walk turns
around a stone axle like the steps of a staircase. The arch is dark and
lighted only by the rays that creep through the loop-holes. The columns
on which the interior end of the vault rests, are decorated with
grotesque or vulgar subjects. A dogmatic intention seems to have
presided over their composition. It would be well for travellers to
begin the inspection at the bottom, with the _Aristoteles equitatus_ (a
subject which has already been treated on one of the choir statues in
the Cathedral of Rouen) and reach by degrees a pair embracing in the
manner which both Lucretius and _l'Amour Conjugal_ have recommended. The
greater part of the intermediary subjects have been removed, to the
despair of seekers of comical things, like ourselves; they have been
removed in cold blood, with deliberate intent, for the sake of decency,
and because, as one of the servants of his Majesty informed us
convincingly, "a great many were improper for the lady visitors to see."