A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE
cliffs, and then sweeps out below the height on which Cœur-de-Lion planted his subtly calculated bastions.
Ah—poor fluttering rag of a ruin, so thin, so time-worn, so riddled with storm and shell, that it droops on its rock like a torn banner with forgotten victories in its folds! How much more eloquently these tottering stones tell their story, how much deeper into the past they take us, than the dapper weather-tight castles—Pierrefonds, Langeais, and the rest—on which the archrestorer has worked his will, reducing them to mere museum specimens, archaeological toys, from which all the growths of time have been ruthlessly stripped! The eloquence of the Château Gaillard lies indeed just there—in its telling us so discursively, so plaintively, the whole story of the centuries—how long it has stood, how much it has seen, how far the world has travelled since then, and to what a hoarse, cracked whisper the voice of feudalism and chivalry has dwindled. . .
The town that once cowered under the protection of those fallen ramparts still groups its stout old houses about a church so grey and
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