r horror--one of those places of evil association
which, without our knowing why, always arouse a feeling of repulsion and
of dread. It was in the dark old Tour de Nesle, on the bank of the Seine
opposite the Louvre, that, said the Parisian horror-mongers, the wicked
queens had held high revel. The legend was not only enduring, but, like
most legends, endowed with the faculty of gathering new matter as the
years went by. Francois Villon, that great repository of the quaint
beliefs of the people of the purlieus of the Sorbonne, tells of the
great queen "who had Jean Buridan cast in the Seine in a sack" from the
high walls of the Tour de Nesle. Brantome, in his _Dames galantes_,
records the same popular story of a queen "who dwelt in the Hotel de
Nesle, at Paris, and lay in wait for passers-by; and those who pleased
and suited her best, whatever class of people they might be, she had
them summoned and made them come to her by night; and after she had had
her pleasure of them she had them cast into the water from the top of
the high tower, and had them drowned." Other historians are even more
definite in their statements--which, nevertheless, are
unfounded,--naming the queen who is said to have been the Parisian
Messalina and to have given a tragic end to the celebrated legist, Jean
Buridan; she was, they say, Jeanne de Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel.

Jeanne, who died in 1307, was a violent and savage woman, but there is
no proof that she was at all immoral. She it was who manifested such
savage virulence against the Flemish women during the revolt of 1302:
"When you kill these Flemish boars," she said to the soldiers, "do not
spare the sows; them I would have spitted;" and she it was who did her
best to ruin the minister Guichard, who had incurred her enmity by
saving an unfortunate creditor whom she was resolved to destroy. She
pursued Guichard with such relentless fury, indeed, that he had resort
to the black art, seeking at first to win back the queen's favor by his
enchantments, then seeking to compass her death by the favorite method
of constructing a waxen image, representing his enemy, and causing it to
melt slowly away, in the belief that she would waste as the image
wasted. But Jeanne did not die of witchcraft, though Guichard was
imprisoned and long persecuted as a sorcerer. We have given these few
facts about her to show that she was a person of ill repute, which will
partly account for the substitution of he