be
slipping down the slope on which it lies, though it has in the middle an
ugly _halle_, or circular market-house, to keep it in position. At Le
Mans, as at Bourges, my first business was with the cathedral, to which
I lost no time in directing my steps. It suffered by juxtaposition to
the great church I had seen a few days before; yet it has some noble
features. It stands on the edge of the eminence of the town, which falls
straight away on two sides of it, and makes a striking mass, bristling
behind, as you see it from below, with rather small but singularly
numerous flying buttresses. On my way to it I happened to walk through
the one street which contains a few ancient and curious houses, a very
crooked and untidy lane, of really mediaeval aspect, honoured with the
denomination of the Grand Rue. Here is the house of Queen Berengaria--an
absurd name, as the building is of a date some three hundred years later
than the wife of Richard Coeur de Lion, who has a sepulchral monument in
the south aisle of the cathedral. The structure in question--very
sketchable, if the sketcher could get far enough away from it--is an
elaborate little dusky facade, overhanging the street, ornamented with
panels of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance sculpture.
A fat old woman standing in the door of a small grocer's shop next to
it--a most gracious old woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming
manner--told me what the house was, and also indicated to me a
rotten-looking brown wooden mansion in the same street, nearer the
cathedral, as the Maison Scarron. The author of the "Roman Comique" and
of a thousand facetious verses enjoyed for some years, in the early part
of his life, a benefice in the cathedral of Le Mans, which gave him a
right to reside in one of the canonical houses. He was rather an odd
canon, but his history is a combination of oddities. He wooed the comic
muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and in the same position--he was
unable even to go down on his knees--prosecuted that other suit which
made him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV. was to be the
second. There was little of comedy in the future Madame de Maintenon;
though, after all, there was doubtless as much as there need have been
in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose for his tomb such an
epitaph as this, which I quote from the "Biographie Universelle":

"Celui qui cy maintenant dort,
Fit plus de pitie que d'