Over Strand and Field | Page 8

it stands abandoned in this deserted place, and looks accursed and
replete with terrifying recollections. Still, this melancholy dwelling,
which the owls now seem to avoid, was once inhabited. In the dungeon,
between four walls as livid as the bottom of an old drinking-trough, we
were able to discover the traces of five floors. A chimney, with its two
round pillars and black top, has remained suspended in the air at a
height of thirty feet. Earth has accumulated on it, and plants are
growing there as if it were a jardinière.
Beyond the second enclosure, in a ploughed field, one can recognise
the ruins of a chapel by the broken shafts of an ogive portal. Grass has
grown around it, and trees have replaced the columns. Four hundred
years ago, this chapel was filled with ornaments of gold cloth and silk,
censers, chandeliers, chalices, crosses, precious stones, gold vessels and
vases, a choir of thirty singers, chaplains, musicians, and children sang
hymns to the accompaniment of an organ which they took along with
them when they travelled. They were clad in scarlet garments lined
with pearl grey and vair. There was one whom they called archdeacon,
and another whom they called bishop, and the Pope was asked to allow
them to wear mitres like canons, for this chapel was the chapel, and this
castle one of the castles of Gilles de Laval, lord of Rouci, of
Montmorency, of Retz and of Craon, lieutenant-general of the Duke of
Brittany and field-marshal of France, who was burned at Nantes on the
25th of October, 1440, in the Prée de la Madéleine for being a
counterfeiter, a murderer, a magician, an atheist and a Sodomite.
He possessed more than one hundred thousand crowns' worth of
furniture; an income of thirty thousand pounds a year, the profits of his
fiefs and his salary as field-marshal; fifty magnificently appointed
horsemen escorted him. He kept open house, served the rarest viands
and the oldest wines at his board, and gave representations of mysteries,
as cities used to do when a king was within their gates. When his
money gave out, he sold his estates; when those were gone, he looked

around for more gold, and when he had destroyed his furnaces, he
called on the devil. He wrote him that he would give him all that he
possessed, excepting his life and his soul. He made sacrifices, gave
alms and instituted ceremonies in his honour. At night, the bleak walls
of the castle lighted up by the glare of the torches that flared amid
bumpers of rare wines and gipsy jugglers, and blushed hotly under the
unceasing breath of magical bellows. The inhabitants invoked the devil,
joked with death, murdered children, enjoyed frightful and atrocious
pleasures; blood flowed, instruments played, everything echoed with
voluptuousness, horror, and madness.
When he expired, four or five damsels had his body removed from the
stake, laid out, and taken to the Carmelites, who, after performing the
customary services, buried him in state.
On one of the bridges of the Loire, relates Guépin, opposite the Hôtel
de la Boule-d'Or, an expiatory monument was erected to his memory. It
was a niche containing the statue of the Bonne Vierge de crée lait, who
had the power of creating milk in nurses; the good people offered her
butter and similar rustic products. The niche still exists, but the statue is
gone; the same as at the town-house, where the casket which contained
the heart of Queen Anne is also empty. But we did not care to see the
casket; we did not even give it a thought. I should have preferred
gazing upon the trousers of the marshal of Retz to looking at the heart
of Madame Anne de Bretagne.
CHAPTER III.
CARNAC.
The field of Carnac is a large, open space where eleven rows of black
stones are aligned at symmetrical intervals. They diminish in size as
they recede from the ocean. Cambry asserts that there were four
thousand of these rocks and Fréminville has counted twelve hundred of
them. They are certainly very numerous.
What was their use? Was it a temple?

One day Saint Cornille, pursued along the shore by soldiers, was about
to jump into the ocean, when he thought of changing them all into stone,
and forthwith the men were petrified. But this explanation was good
only for fools, little children, and poets. Other people looked for better
reasons.
In the sixteenth century, Olaüs Magnus, archbishop of Upsal (who,
banished to Rome, wrote a book on the antiquities of his country that
met with widespread success except in his native land, Sweden, where
it was not translated), discovered that, when these stones form one long,
straight row, they cover the bodies of warriors who died while fighting
duels; that