Hautecoeur, upon the flagstones of a little room whose tumble-down walls
towered far above the Ligneul, which rolled gently among the willows
fifty yards below them.

She was enthusiastic over these crumbling ruins, and the scattered
blocks of stone among the brambles, which showed how enormous the
colossal structure must have been as, when first built, it commanded
the two valleys. The donjon remained, nearly two hundred feet in height,
discoloured, cracked, but nevertheless firm, upon its foundation pillars
fifteen feet thick. Two of its towers had also resisted the attacks
of Time--that of Charlemagne and that of David--united by a heavy wall
almost intact. In the interior, the chapel, the court-room, and certain
chambers were still easily recognised; and all this appeared to have
been built by giants, for the steps of the stairways, the sills of the
windows, and the branches on the terraces, were all on a scale far out
of proportion for the generation of to-day. It was, in fact, quite a
little fortified city. Five hundred men could have sustained there a
siege of thirty months without suffering from want of ammunition or of
provisions. For two centuries the bricks of the lowest story had been
disjointed by the wild roses; lilacs and laburnums covered with blossoms
the rubbish of the fallen ceilings; a plane-tree had even grown up in
the fireplace of the guardroom. But when, at sunset, the outline of the
donjon cast its long shadow over three leagues of cultivated ground,
and the colossal Chateau seemed to be rebuilt in the evening mists, one
still felt the great strength, and the old sovereignty, which had made
of it so impregnable a fortress that even the kings of France trembled
before it.

"And I am sure," continued Angelique, "that it is inhabited by the souls
of the dead, who return at night. All kinds of noises are heard there;