are attributed to Le Notre, the garden-maker of Versailles. This may or may not be so, the assertion is advanced cautiously, because the claim has so often falsely been made of other chateau properties. The gardens here, however, were certainly conceived after Le Notre’s magnificent manner. There is a great ornamental water environing the chateau some sixty metres in length and twelve metres in width, and this of itself is enough to give great distinction to any garden-plot.
CHAPTER VI
“CHASTILLON AU NOBLE DUC” (The War Cry of the Bourguignons)
THE importance of the ancient Chastillon on the banks of the Seine was entirely due to the prominence given to it by the Burgundian dukes of the first race who made it their preferred habitation.
The place was the ancient capital of the Bailliage de la Montague, the rampart and keep to the Burgundian frontier from the tenth to the fifteenth century.
The origin of the Chateau des Ducs is blanketed in the night of time. Savants, even, can not agree as to the date of its commencement. One says that it and its name were derived from Castico, a rich Sequanais; and another that it comes from Castell, an enclosed place; or from Castellio – a small fortress. Each seems plausible in the absence of anything more definite, though according to the castle’s latest historian it owes its actual inception to the occupation of the Romans who did build a castrum here in their time.
During the pourparlers between Henri IV and the League, the inhabitants of the city demanded of Nicolas de Gellan, governor of the place, the giving up of the castle which had for years been the cause of so much misery and misfortune. The place had been the culminative point of the attacks of centuries of warriors, and the inhabitants believed that they had so suffered that it was time to cry quits.
When the surrender, or the turning over, of the castle took place, all the population, including women and children, marched en masse upon the structure, and wall by wall and stone by stone dismantled it, leaving it in the condition one sees it to-day. A castle of sorts still exists, but it is a mere wraith of its former self. There is this much to say for it, however, and that is that its stern, grim walls which still stand remain as silent witnesses to the fact that it was not despoiled from without but demolished from within. Peace came soon after, and the people in submitting to the new régime would not hear of the rebuilding of the chateau, and so for three hundred years its battered walls and blank windows have stood the stresses of rigorous winters and broiling summers, a silent and conspicuous monument to the rights of the people.
The majestic tower of the chateau, for something more than the mere outline of the ground-plan still exists, is bound to two others by a very considerable expanse of wall of the donjon, and by the courtines which formerly joined the bastions with the main structure.
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