Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/127

 country is very beautiful we drive slowly, and save our "spurts" for the uninteresting parts.

I know you've read Balzac's Duchesse de Langeais, in English, for it was I who gave it to you. I don't suppose she ever lived, really, at the Château de Langeais or anywhere else; but the thought of her made Langeais even more interesting to me than it would have been if she'd been erased from the picture.

It's a great, grey, frowning, turreted and crenelated fortress-house, and I felt so much obliged to it for having kept its practicable drawbridge. We drove almost up to the door, through a clean, very old little town, and just opposite the entrance was a quaint house where Brown said Rabelais had lived. I don't believe Aunt Mary knew anything about Rabelais. However, she eagerly Kodaked the house, and later, when I gravely mentioned to her that Rabelais was the kind you wouldn't allow me to read, but of course she might, if she liked, she gave a squeak of dismay, and threatened to waste all her films rather than let a photographer see that one when they went to be developed. I do hope I shan't be an old maid!

The Parisian millionaire who owns the Château, and lives in it part of the year, must be a wonderfully generous, public-spirited man. Only think, he has spent thousands and thousands in restoring the castle, in keeping up the lovely garden, and hi having all the rooms exquisitely furnished and decorated exactly in the period of wicked Louis the Eleventh and Charles the Eighth. But instead of