his place accordingly.  Now houses stretch down to the level of the plain, but it was not always so.  Halfway through the village the road passes through a gateway of solid stone, flanked by towers pierced for defense, and the wall through which this gate gives entrance remains, broken in places, lichen-covered, yet still eloquent of its former strength and purpose.  Within the gate the village widens into an open square rising toward the chateau, and this square is surrounded by old houses picturesque and with histories.  Many a time Beauvais has stood siege, its lord holding it against some neighbor stirred by pride or love tragedy to deadly feud.  In these ancient houses his retainers lived, his only so long as he was strong enough to make himself feared, fierce men gathered from all points of the compass, soldiers of fortune holding their own lives and the lives of others cheaply.  From such men, brilliant in arms, have sprung descendants who have made their mark in a politer epoch, men and women who have become courtiers, companions of kings, leaders of men, pioneers of learning.  Carved into these ancient houses in Beauvais are crests and mottoes which are the pride of these descendants now scattered over Europe.  Such is the village of Beauvais, asleep for many years, the home of peasants chiefly, mountaineers and tenders of cattle, still with the fighting spirit in them, but dormant, lacking the necessity.  A fair place, but to the exile, only through a veil does the fairest land reveal its beauty.  Its sunlit hills, its green pastures, the silver sheen of its streams, the blue of its sky, he will see through a mist of regret, through tears perchance.  No beauty can do away with the fact that it is only a land of exile, to be endured and made the best of for a while, never to be really loved.  There is coming an hour in which he may return home, and he is forever looking forward, counting the days.  The present must be lived, but reality lies in the future.

The Marquise de Rovere, brilliant, witty, proud as any woman in France, daughter of ancestors famous during the time of the fourteenth and fifteenth Louis, had in the long past a forbear who was lord of this chateau of Beauvais.  Since then there had been other lords with whom she had nothing to do, but her grandfather having grown rich, unscrupulously, it was said, bought Beauvais, restored it, added to it and tried to forget that it had ever passed out of the hands of his ancestors.  In due time his granddaughter inherited it, and after that terrible day at Versailles when the mob had stormed the palace, when many of the nobility foresaw disaster and made haste to flee from it into voluntary exile, what better place could the Marquise choose than this chateau of Beauvais?  Hither she had come with her niece Jeanne St. Clair, and others had followed.  In Paris the Marquise had been the center of a brilliant coterie, she would still be a center in Beauvais and the chateau should be open to every emigre of distinction.