When we had reached the city where the Kings of France are buried, it was determined to sleep at Senlis, which was only four posts further, the little town that we visited with so much satisfaction in 1827.  This deviation from the more direct road led us by Gonesse, and through a district of grain country, that is less monotonous than most of the great roads that lead from Paris.  We got a good view of the chateau of Ecouen, looking vast and stately, seated on the side of a distant hill.  I do not know into whose hands this princely pile has fallen since the unhappy death of the last of the Condes, but it is to be hoped into those of the young Duc D’Aumale, for I believe he boasts the blood of the Montmorencies, through some intermarriage or other; and if not, he comes, at least, of a line accustomed to dwell in palaces.  I do not like to see these historical edifices converted into manufactories, nor am I so much of a modern utilitarian as to believe the poetry of life is without its correcting and useful influences.  Your cold, naked utilitarian, holds a sword that bruises as well as cuts; and your sneaking, trading aristocrat, like the pickpocket who runs against you in the crowd before he commits his theft, one that cuts as well as bruises.

We were at Ecouen not long before the death of its last possessor, and visited its wide but untenanted halls with strong interest.  The house was first erected by some Montmorency, or other, at or near the time of the crusades, I believe; though it has been much altered since.  Still it contains many curious vestiges of the taste of that remote age.  The old domestic who showed us through the building was as quaint a relic as anything about the place.  He had accompanied the family into exile, and passed many years with them in England.  In courtesy, respect, and delicate attention, he would have done credit to the court of Louis XIV; nor was his intelligence unworthy of his breeding.  This man, by the way, was the only Frenchman whom I ever knew address an Englishman (or, as in my case, one whom he mistook for an Englishman), by the old appelation of milord.  The practice is gone out, so far as my experience extends.

I remember to have learned from this courteous old servant, the origin of the common term croisee, which is as often used in large houses as that of fenetre.  At the period when every man’s heart and wishes were bound up in the excitement and enterprise of the crusades, and it was thought that heaven was to be entered sword in hand, the cross was a symbol used as a universal ornament.  Thus the aperture for a window was left in the wall, and a stone cross erected in the centre.  The several compartments in the casements came from the shape of the cross, and the term croisee from croix.  All this is plain enough, and perhaps there are few who do not know it; but gazing at the ornaments of Ecouen, my eyes fell on the doors, where I detected