lifted by the light breeze, as might a priest's vestment; it would move
and waver, as if the building were a human frame, changing its posture
to ease its long standing. Between this church of stone and this church
of vines there were signs of the fight that had gone on for ages
between them. The stones were obviously fighting decay, fighting ruin,
fighting annihilation; the vines were also struggling, but both time
and the sun were on their side. The stone edifice was now, it is true,
as Renard told us, protected by the Government--it was classed as a
"monument historique"--but the church of greens was protected by the
god of nature, and seemed to laugh aloud, as if with conscious gleeful
strength. This gay, triumphant laugh was reflected, as if to emphasize
its mockery of man's work, in the tranquil waters of a little pond,
lily-leaved, garlanded in bushes, that lay hidden beyond the roadway.
Through the interstices of the vines one solitary window from the
tower, like a sombre eye, looked down into the pond; it saw there,
reflected as in a mirror, the old, the eternal picture of a dead ruin
clasped by the arms of living beauty.

This Criqueboeuf church presents the ideal picturesque accessories. It
stands at the corner of two meeting roadways. It is set in an ideal
pastoral frame--a frame of sleeping fields, of waving tree-tops, of an
enchanting, indescribable snarl of bushes, vines, and wild flowers. In
the adjoining fields, beneath the tree-boughs, ran the long, low line
of the ancient manoir--now turned into a museum.

We glanced for a few brief moments at the collection of antiquities
assembled beneath the old roof--at the Henry II. chairs, at the
Pompadour-wreathed cabinets, at the long rows of panels on which are
presented the whole history of France--the latter an amazing record of
the industry of a certain Dr. Le Goupils.