An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery, 291 



decided than her refusal. And they talk of the tender- 

 heartedness of women ! 



How and where I passed that night shall be a mystery. 

 How do vagrants and vagabonds pass theirs ? 



This castle is the Castle of Chaseux, a picturesque old 

 ruin by the river-side, in a charming situation. The 

 effect is more picturesque in the etching than in the 

 reality, because he who only sees the drawing does not 

 realize the curiously small scale of the towers. They 

 are decidedly the tiniest towers I ever saw in any castle 

 of feudal times ; but they looked larger, no doubt, when 

 they had their pepper-box roofs. For the rest the place 

 is not without grandeur, and it has some literary interest 

 as an occasional residence of Madame de Sevigne* with 

 that cousin of hers, Roger de Rabutin, Count de Bussy, 

 commonly called Bussy Rabutin. How she could ever 

 forgive him his offences against decency, and his slan- 

 ders against herself, is one of the mysteries of the 

 womanly heart. I never had the curiosity to read any 

 thing of Bussy' s except a few of his brevities. One does 

 not care to plunge into dirty water ; it is enough for me 

 that Bussy shocked Louis XIV. (not an eminent model 

 of virtue) to such a degree that the indignant monarch 

 first put him into the Bastile, and afterwards banished 

 him to his estates in Burgundy. Here, at Chaseux, he 

 spent part of his seventeen years of exile ; and it is one 

 of the most extraordinary instances of the irony of fate, 

 that the portrait of this wretched noble, who disgraced 

 his family and his age, actually now hangs in the little 

 village church where he heard mass, — hangs over the 



