and he can do no more."

So pleased was the King with this saying that it made the speaker's
fortune.

We climb two flights of dark, narrow stone stairs reaching a bare
chamber having small apertures, enlargements of the mere slits formerly
admitting light and air. The man-cage occupies one corner. It is made of
stout oaken ribs strongly bound together with iron, its proportions just
allowing the captive to lie down at full length and take a turn of two
or three steps. De Commines tells us that the cage invented by Cardinal
Balue, and in which he languished for eleven years, was narrower still.
An average sized man could not stand therein upright.

The bolts and bars are still in perfect order. Nothing more brings home
to us the abomination of the whole thing than to see the official draw
these Brobdingnagian bolts and turn these gigantic keys. The locksmith's
art was but too well understood in those days. By whom and for whom this
living tomb was made or brought hither local records do not say.

From a stage higher up a magnificent panorama is obtained, Moret, old
and new, set round with the green and the blue, its greenery and bright
river, far away its noble aqueduct, further still looking eastward the
valley of the Loing spread out as a map, the dark ramparts of
Fontainebleau forest half framing the scene.

The town itself is a trifle unsavoury and unswept. Municipal authorities
seem particularly stingy in the matter of brooms, brushes and
water-carts. Such little disagreeables must not prevent the traveller
from exploring every corner. But the real, the primary attraction of