ng before we came abreast of it by the windings of the river we saw
high up against the sky-line, a clear three hundred feet above the
water, all that is left of the stronghold of Crussol--still called by
the Rhone boatmen "the Horns of Crussol," although the two towers no
longer shoot out horn-like from the mountain-top with a walled war-town
clinging about their flanks. One Geraud Bartet, a cadet of the great
house of Crussol--of which the representative nowadays is the Duc
d'Uzes--built this eagle's nest in the year 1110; but it did not become
a place of importance until more than four hundred years later, in the
time of the religious wars.

On the issue of faiths the Crussols divided. The head of the house was
for the Pope and the King; the two cadets were for God and the Reform.
Then it was that the castle (according to an over-sanguine chronicler of
the period) was "transformed into an unconquerable stronghold"; and
thereafter--always for the advancement of Christianity of one sort or
another--a liberal amount of killing went on beneath its walls. In the
end, disregarding the fact that it was unconquerable, the castle was
captured by the Baron des Adrets--who happened at the moment to be on
the Protestant side--and in the interest of sound doctrine all of its
defenders were put to the sword. Tradition declares that "the streams of
blood filled one of the cisterns, in which this terrible Huguenot had
his own children bathed 'in order,' as he said, 'to give them strength
and force and, above all, hatred of Catholicism.'" And then "the castle
was demolished from its lowest to its highest stone."

This final statement is a little too sweeping, yet essentially it is
true. All that now remains of Crussol is a single broken tower, to which
some minor ruins cling; and a little lower are the ruins of the
town--whence the encircling ramparts have been outcast and lie in
scattered fragments down the mountain-side to the border of the Rhone.

It was on this very mountain--a couple of thousand years or so earlier
in the world's history--that a much pleasanter personage than a battling
baron had his home: a good-natured giant of easy morals who was the
traditional founder of Valence. Being desirous of founding a town
somewhere, and willing--in accordance with the custom of his time--to
leave the selection of a site a little to chance, he hurled a javelin
from his mountain-top with the cry, "Va lance!": and so gave Valence its