in old Bibles, spare of foliage,
thick and clumsy, bearing blossoms and fruit but no leaves; the
symbolical, theological, and devout trees that are almost fantastical on
account of their impossible ugliness. A little further, Saint
Christopher is carrying Jesus on his shoulders; Saint Antony is in his
cell, which is built on a rock; a pig is retiring into its hole and
shows only its hind-quarters and its corkscrew tail, while a rabbit is
sticking its head out of its house.

Of course, it is all a little clumsy and the moulding is not faultless.
But there is so much life and movement about the figure and the animals,
so much charm in the details, that one would give a great deal to be
able to carry it away and take it home.

Inside of the Chateau, the insipid Empire style is reproduced in every
apartment. Almost every room is adorned with busts of Louis-Philippe and
Madame Adelaide. The present reigning family has a craze for being
portrayed on canvas. It is the bad taste of a parvenu, the mania of a
grocer who has accumulated money and who enjoys seeing himself in red,
white, and yellow, with his watch-charms dangling over his stomach, his
bewhiskered chin and his children gathered around him.

On one of the towers, and in spite of the most ordinary common sense,
they have built a glass rotunda which is used for a dining-room. True,
the view from it is magnificent. But the building presents so shocking
an appearance from the outside, that one would, I should think, prefer
to see nothing of the environs, or else to eat in the kitchen.

In order to go back to the city, we came down by a tower that was used
by carriages to approach the Chateau. The sloping gravelled walk turns
around a stone axle like the steps of a staircase. The arch is dark and
lighted only by the rays that creep through the loop-holes. The columns
on which the interior end of the vault rests, are decorated with
grotesque or vulgar subjects. A dogmatic intention seems to have
presided over their composition. It would be well for travellers to
begin the inspection at the bottom, with the _Aristoteles equitatus_ (a
subject which has already been treated on one of the choir statues in
the Cathedral of Rouen) and reach by degrees a pair embracing in the
manner which both Lucretius and _l'Amour Conjugal_ have recommended. The
greater part of the intermediary subjects have been removed, to the
despair of seekers of comical things, like ourselves; they hav