Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/373

Rh Château Gaillard after a gallant struggle, the province passed without a struggle into the French king's hands. On its loss hung the destinies of England; and the interest that attaches one to the grand ruin on the heights of Les Andelys is that it represents the ruin of a system as well as of a camp. From its dark donjon and broken walls we see not merely the pleasant vale of Seine, but the sedgy flats of our own Runnymede."

For an American, there is an even farther outlook from the tower of that broken fortress: to the American city in which, in the fulness of the flowing centuries, another Great Charter—directly outgrowing from King John's Great Charter—was signed. Assuredly, the deep main root of our Declaration of Independence may be traced back through Runnymede to the Château Gaillard.

Through the four hundred years that the fighting life of Richard's defiant castle lasted—until its dismantlement was ordered by Henry IV. in the year 1603—the strong romantic note struck at its founding rang clear. There is scarce a placid page in all its history; and some of its pages are as lurid as they well can be.

Quite the most lurid of them all is the one that tells about the murder of Marguerite, wife of Louis le Hutin, by her husband's command. As the result of what the chroniclers—who write, as Monsieur Brossard de Ruville puts it, with "beaucoup de réserve" of the matter—term "scandalous disorders" in the royal family, Marguerite was cast a prisoner into the Château Gaillard in the year 1314, along with her sister-in-law, Blanche de Burgogne, wife of Charles le Bel. With a courteous consideration, Charles let matters run with Blanche—content with keeping her locked fast—until his accession. Being come to the throne, he compromised the situation by obtaining from the Pope an annulment of his marriage "on the ground of consanguinity"—and so gave Blanche the opportunity to die an edifying death, "en grand pénitence," some years later in the Abbey of Maubuisson. Louis was both precipitate and brutal. By his order, Marguerite was strangled in her prison on the eve of the Feast of the Ascension in the year 1315—and was strangled, so runs the story, with her own beautiful long hair. The young cavaliers who were associated with this