During breakfast I had many opportunities to appreciate the good
taste, tact, and intelligence of Madame de Gabry, who told me that
the chateau had its ghosts, and was especially haunted by the "Lady-
with-three-wrinkles-in-her-back," a prisoner during her lifetime,
and thereafter a Soul-in-pain. I could never describe how much wit
and animation she gave to this old nurse's tale. We took out, coffee
on the terrace, whose balusters, clasped and forcibly torn away from
their stone coping by a vigorous growth of ivy, remained suspended
in the grasp of the amorous plant like bewildered Athenian women in
the arms of ravishing Centaurs.

The chateau, shaped something like a four-wheeled wagon, with a turret
at each of the four angles, had lost all original character by
reason of repeated remodellings. It was merely a fine spacious
building, nothing more. It did not appear to me to have suffered
much damage during its abandonment of thirty-two years. But when
Madame de Gabry conducted me into the great salon of the ground-
floor, I saw that the planking was bulged in and out, the plinths
rotten, the wainscotings split apart, the paintings of the piers
turned black and hanging more than half out of their settings. A
chestnut-tree, after forcing up the planks of the floor, had grown
tall under the ceiling, and was reaching out its large-leaved
branches towards the glassless windows.

This spectacle was not devoid of charm; but I could not look at it
without anxiety as I remembered that the rich library of Monsieur
Honore de Gabry, in an adjoining apartment, must have been exposed
for the same length of time to the same forces of decay. Yet, as I
looked at the young chestnut-tree in the salon, I could not but
admire the magnificent vigour of Nature, and that resistless power