Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/368

342 way. Below the cliff on which the fortress stands are remains of outworks covering a passage to the river—reached from above by a stairway and a tunnel cut in

the rock. Across the river, or across a part of it, extended a barring line of piles.

Richard was his own master-workman as well as his own engineer. Guillaume le Breton tells that he was among the laborers constantly—driving them in his own dashing devil way, and even working with them with his own hands: so fiercely eager was he to hurry to a finish his defiance of his brother king. Actually, he made a record in castle-building that still holds. The Château Gaillard was built (1197-1198) within a twelvemonth; and in his delight over his accomplished stone miracle of haste the King cried out joyfully: "Qu'elle est belle, ma fille d'un an!"—"How beautiful is she, my daughter of a year!"

In his own epigrammatic fashion Richard also gave his castle its name. "C'est un château gaillard!" he said of it when it was finished—and the phrase fitted so nicely with the facts that it stuck fast. Devil-may-care, impudent, jaunty, gayly defiant, saucy, cheeky, were the characteristics of that castle set upon the edge of Normandy under the nose of the King of France—and all of those meanings, and several more, are in the word gaillard. Cheeky Castle, to my mind, comes closest to the spirit of Richard's phrase; but Saucy Castle is the usual rendering—influenced, no doubt, by the fact that sauciness is a not displeasing girlish quality and therefore is in harmony with the King's prettily turned designation of his work as his beautiful daughter of a year.

In Richard's own time, and in the time of John his successor, Château Gaillard was not the name by which the castle was known officially. In the Acts of those kings it is styled "le nouveau château de la roche," "le beau château de la roche," or simply "la roche d'Andeli." Not until the year 1261, when Saint Louis dated an Act "in castro nostro gaillard," is there a known record of the serious use of Richard's gay soubriquet. But the contemporary chroniclers—Guillaume le Breton, Gautier de Gisebourne, and the rest—all reflected the popular usage by writing Château Gaillard from the very start. I am very much obliged to them. Had they not fixed in their records Richard's happy christening of his beautiful saucy daughter the delightful name very well might have been lost.

As was only natural, Philip was in a proper rage over the building of this impudently defiant castle. Being himself a king accustomed to carry through his undertakings with a lively energy, and being touched with the braggart customs