tness to the wrath of
heaven against that heretical Abbess and her heretical followers, is the
Cursed Tower!

While the Abbess of Soyons, being still untried by the stress of battle,
went sinless upon her still orthodox way, there lived just across the
river on the Manor of l'Etoile a sinner of a gayer sort--Diane de
Poitiers. The Castle of the Star dates from the fifteenth century; when
Louis XI. dwelt there as Governor of Dauphiny and was given lessons in
how to be a king. Diane the beautiful--"the most beautiful," as Francis
I. gallantly called her--transformed the fortress into a bower, and gave
to it (or accepted for it) the appropriately airy name of the Chateau de
Papillon. There she lived long after her butterfly days were over; and
in a way--although the Castle of the Butterfly is a silk-factory
now--she lives there still: just as another light lady beautiful, Queen
Jeanne of Naples, lives on in Provence. To this day her legend is vital
in the country-side; and the old people still talk about her as though
she were alive among them; and call her always not by her formal title
of the Duchesse de Valentinois, but by her love title of "la belle dame
de l'Etoile." Of this joyous person's family there is found a ghastly
memento at the little town of Lene--a dozen miles down the river, beyond
the great iron-works of Le Pouzin. It is the Tour de la Lepreuse:
wherein a leper lady of the house of Poitiers was shut up for many years
in awful solitude--until at last God in his goodness permitted her to
die. I suppose that this story would have pointed something of a
moral--instead of presenting only another case of a good moral gone
wrong--had Diane herself been that prisoner of loathsome death in life.

But aboard the _Gladiateur_ our disposition was to take the world easily
and as we found it--since we found it so well disposed toward us--and
not to bother our heads a bit about how moral lessons came off. With
cities effervescing in our honour, with Mayors attendant upon us hat in
hand, with brazen-helmeted firemen playing champagne upon us to
stimulate our poetic fires, with _boites_ and bands exploding in our
praise--and all under that soul-expanding sun of the Midi--'tis no
wonder that we wore our own bays jauntily and nodded to each other as
though to say: "Ah, you see now what it is to be a poet in these latter
days!" And we were graciously pleased to accept as a part of the tribute
that all the world just then wa