required fretted him to waste, that every violent act allowed gave him little solace.  It appeared that he was living desperately fast, straining to fill up time, rather than use it, towards some unknown, but (to him) certain end.  His first act in Normandy, after new coronation, was to besiege the border castles which the French had filched in his absence.  One of these was Gisors.  He would not go near Gisors; but conducted the leaguer from Rouen, as a blindfold man plays chess; and from Rouen he reduced the great castle in six weeks.  One thing more he did there, which gave Gaston a clue to his mood.  He sent a present of money, a great sum, to an old priest, curate of Saint-Sulpice; and when they told him that the man was dead, and a great part of the church he had served burnt out by King Philip, his face grew bleak and withered, and he said, ’Then I will burn Philip out.’  He had Gisors, castle, churches, burgher-holds, the whole town, burned level with the ground.  There was not to be a stone on a stone:  and it was so.  Gaston of Bearn slapped his thigh when he heard of this:  ‘Now,’ he said, ’now at last I know what ails my King.  He has seen his lost mistress.’

He did so ruthlessly in Normandy that he went far to make his power a standing dread to the fair duchy.  On the rock at Les Andelys he built a huge castle, to hang there like a thunder-cloud scowling over the flats of the Seine.  He called it, what his temper gave no hint of (so dry with fever he was), the galliard hold.  ’Let me see Chastel-Gaillard stand ready in a year,’ he said.  ’Put on every living man in Normandy if need be.’  He planned it all himself; rock of the rock it was to be, making the sheer yet more sheer.  He called it again his daughter, daughter of his conception of Death.  ‘Build,’ said he, ’my daughter Gaillarda.  As I have conceived her let the great birth be.’  And it was so.  For a bitter christening, when all was done, he had his French prisoners thrown down into the fosse; and they say that it rained blood upon him and his artificers as they stood by that accursed font.  The man was mad.  Nothing stayed him:  for the first time since they who still loved him had had him back, they heard him laugh, when his daughter Gaillarda was brought forth.  And, ‘Spine of God,’ he cried, ’this is a saucy child of mine, and saucily shall she do by the French power.’  Then his face was wrenched by pain, as with a sob he said, ‘I had a son Fulke.’  Gaillarda did saucily enough, to tyrannise over ten years of Philip’s life; in the end, as all know, she played the strumpet, and served the enemies of her father’s house, but not while Richard lived to rule her.