ve. A lake separated the two chateaux, and the young man
not unfrequently returned by water rather late in the evening; and so it
fell out that one night he was drowned. The lady naturally grieved
sorely for her loss, and put in train all possible means for recovering
her lover's body. Time, however, passed on, and no success attended her
efforts, till at length she caused the hills which dammed up the waters
to be pierced, and then De Chissey was found. A village sprang up near
the outlet thus made, and took thence its name Percee, or, as men now
spell it, Parcey; and the rich vegetation which speedily covered the
valley, where once the lake had been, gave it such an air of happiness
and beauty, that the people remembered its origin, and called it the
Valley of Love. It is a fact that Parcy was not always so spelled, for
Noble Constantin Thiehault, Sieur de Perrecey, was a witness to the
treaty for the transference of a miraculous host from Faverney to Dole
in 1608, and old maps and books give it as Perrecey and Parrecey
indifferently. The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the
female prebends of Chateau-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters,
filled a considerable place in the history of the Comte from the
Crusades downwards, and known as _les Fols de Chissey_, the brave[29]
and dashing, and witty De Chisseys--qualities which no doubt were
possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the
Val d'Amour.

As we drew nearer to Besancon, each turn of the small streams, and each
low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Caesar's
'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a
battle, there was always a _proximus collis_ for the conquered party to
retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for
the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of
grass-land between their foot and the stream.

The Frenchman knew his Caesar, but he put that general in the fourth
century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily
detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the
indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the
nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of
small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besancon, and was
greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him
Caesar's description of his native town.