The staircase is long, for the tower is high.  The bright daylight passes through the loop-holes like an arrow.  When you put your head through one of these openings, you can see the ocean, which seems to grow wider and wider, and the crude colour of the sky, which seems to grow larger and larger, till you are afraid you will lose yourself in it.  Vessels look like launches and their masts like walking-sticks.  Eagles must think we look like ants.  I wonder whether they really see us.  Do they know that we have cities and steeples and triumphal arches?

When we arrived on the platform, and although the battlement reached to our chest, we could not help experiencing the sensation one always feels at a great height from the earth.  It is a sort of voluptuous uneasiness mingled with fear and delight, pride and terror, a battle between one’s mind and one’s nerves.  You feel strangely happy; you would like to jump, fly, spread out in the air and be supported by the wind; but your knees tremble and you dare not go too near the edge.

Still, one night, in olden times, men climbed this tower with ropes.  But then, it is not astonishing for those times, for that wonderful sixteenth century, the epoch of fierce convictions and frantic loves!  How the human instrument vibrated then in all its chords!  How liberal-minded, productive, and active men were!  Does not this phrase of Fenelon apply wonderfully well to that period:  “A sight well calculated to delight the eye?” For, without making any reference to the foreground of the picture,—­beliefs crumbling at their foundation like tottering mountains, newly discovered worlds, lost worlds brought to light again, Michael-Angelo beneath his dome, laughing Rabelais, observant Shakespeare, pensive Montaigne,—­where can be found a greater development in passions, a greater violence in courage, a greater determination in willpower, in fine, a more complete expansion of liberty struggling against all native fatalities?  And with what a bold relief the episode stands out in history, and still, how wonderfully well it fits in, thereby giving a glimpse of the dazzling brightness and broad horizons of the period.  Faces, living faces, pass before your eyes.  You meet them only once; but you think of them long afterwards, and endeavour to contemplate them in order that they may be impressed more deeply upon your mind.  Was not the type of the old soldiers whose race disappeared around 1598, at the taking of Vervins, fine and terrible?  It was a type represented by men like Lamouche, Heurtand de Saint-Offange, and La Tremblaye, who came back holding the heads of his enemies in his hand; also La Fontenelle, of whom so much has been said.  They were men of iron, whose hearts were no softer than their swords, and who, attracting hundreds of energies which they directed with their own, entered towns at night, galloping madly at the heads of their companies, equipped corsairs, burned villages, and were dealt with like kings!  Who has thought of