that of frightening the good people of the old papal
city half out of their wits.

The chateau of King Rene serves to-day as the
prison of a district, and the traveller who wishes to
look into it must obtain his permission at the _Mairie
of Tarascon_. If he have had a certain experience of
French manners, his application will be accompanied
with the forms of a considerable obsequiosity, and in
this case his request will be granted as civilly as it
has been made. The castle has more of the air of a
severely feudal fortress than I should suppose the
period of its construction (the first half of the fifteenth
century) would have warranted; being tremendously
bare and perpendicular, and constructed for comfort
only in the sense that it was arranged for defence. It
is a square and simple mass, composed of small yellow
stones, and perched on a pedestal of rock which easily
commands the river. The building has the usual cir-
cular towers at the corners, and a heavy cornice at
the top, and immense stretches of sun-scorched wall,
relieved at wide intervals by small windows, heavily
cross-barred. It has, above all, an extreme steepness
of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls
are as sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle
has kept its large moat, which is now a hollow filled
with wild plants. To this tall fortress the good Rene
retired in the middle of the fifteenth century, finding
it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a
dominion which had included Naples and Sicily,