y the railway the castle hardly shows at all.
We pass through the streets of the town; the eye is caught by the
splendid church of St. Gervase, but of the castle we get only the
faintest glimpse, nothing at all to suggest the full glory of its
position. We pass on by the fine but very inferior church of the Holy
Trinity; we contemplate the statue of the local hero; we pass through
the castle gate; we pass by a beautiful desecrated chapel of the twelfth
century; we feel by the rise of the ground and by the sight of the walks
below that we are ascending, but it is not till we are close to the keep
itself, till we have reached the very edge of the precipice, that we
fully realise there is a precipice at all. At last we are on the brow;
we see plainly enough the _falaises_, the _felsen_--the honest Teutonic
word still surviving, and giving its name to the town itself, and to its
distinguishing feature. The castle stands on the very edge of the
steep and rugged rock; opposite to it frowns another mass of rocks, not
sharp and peaked, but chaotic, like a mass of huge boulders rolled close
together. From this point the English cannon played successfully on the
ancient keep, which, under the older conditions of warfare, must have
been well nigh impregnable. It is from this opposing height that the
castle is now best surveyed by the peaceful antiquary. Between the two
points tumbles along the same little beck in which the pretty feet are
said to have twinkled, and not far off the trade of the damsel's father
is still plied, perhaps on the very spot where that unsavoury craft, of
old the craft of the demagogue, was so strangely to connect itself with
the mightiest of Norman warriors and princes.

What, it may be asked, is the condition of this most interesting
monument of an age which has utterly passed away? If there is any
building in the world which belongs wholly to the past, towards which
the duty of the present is simply to preserve, to guard every stone, to
prop if need be, but to disturb nothing, to stay from falling as long as
human power can stay it, but to abstain from supplanting one jot or one
tittle of the ancient work by the most perfect of modern copies--it is
surely the donjon-keep of Falaise. But, like every other building in
France, the birthplace of the Conqueror is hopelessly handed over to the
demon of restoration. They who have turned all the ancient monuments of
France upside down have come to Falaise also.