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AVALLON owes its origin to the construction of a chateau-fort. It was built by Robert-le-Pieux, the son of Hugues Capet, in the tenth century. Little by little the fortress has crumbled and very nearly disappeared. All that remains are the foundation walls on what is locally called the Rocher d’Avallon, virtually the pedestal upon which sits the present city.

Avallon, like neighbouring Semur and Vezelay, sits snugly and proudly behind its rampart of nature’s ravines and gorges, a series of military defences ready-made which on more than one occasion in mediæval times served their purpose well.

It was in the old Chateau d’Avallon that Jacques d’Epailly, called “Forte Épice,” was giving a great ball when Philippe-le-Bon beseiged the city. Jacques treated the inhabitants with the utmost disrespect, even the ladies, and secretly quitted the ball just before the city troops surrendered. History says that the weak-hearted gallant sold out to the enemy and saved himself by the back door, and in spite of no documentary evidence to this effect the long arm of coincidence points to the dastardly act in an almost unmistakable manner.

Near Avallon are still to be seen extensive Roman remains. A Roman camp, the Camp des Alleux, celebrated in Gaulish and Roman history, was here, and the old Roman road between Lyons and Boulogne in Belgica Secundus passed near by.

It is not so much with reference to Avallon itself, quaint and picturesque as the city is, that one’s interest lies hereabouts. More particularly it is in the neighbouring chateaux of Chastellux and Montréal.

The Seigneur de Chastellux was one of the most powerful vassals of the Duc de Bourgogne. By hereditary custom the eldest of each new generation presented himself before the Bishop of Auxerre clad in a surplice covering his military accoutrements, and wearing a falcon at his wrist. In this garb he swore to support Church and State, and for this devotion was vested in the title of Chanoin d’Auxerre, a title which supposedly served him in good stead in case of military disaster. It was thus that the Maréchal de Chastellux, a famous warrior, was, as late as 1792, also a canon of the cathedral at Auxerre. It was, too, in this grotesque costume that the Chanoin-Comte d’Chastellux welcomed Louis XIV on a certain visit to Auxerre. At Auxerre, in the cathedral, one sees a monument commemorative of the Sires de Chastellux. It was erected by César de Chastellux under the Restoration, to replace the tomb torn down by the Chapter in the fifteenth century. This desecration, by churchmen themselves, one must remember, took place in spite of the fact that a Chastellux was even then a dignitary of the church.

Chastellux, beyond its magnificent chateau, is an indefinable, unconvincing little bourg, but from the very moment one sets foot within its quaintly named Hotel de Maréchal de Chastellux he, or she, is permeated with the very spirit of romance and mediævalism. The bridge which crosses the Cure in the middle of the village owns to the ripe old age of three hundred and fifty years, and is still rendering efficient service. This is something mature for a bridge, even in France, where many are doing their daily work as they have for centuries. Will the modern “suspension” affairs do as well? That’s what nobody knows! The hotel, or

Chateau de Chastellux

auberge rather, can not be less aged than the bridge, though the manner in which it is conducted is not at all antiquated.

A rocky, jagged pedestal, of a height of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet, holds aloft the fine mass of the Chateau de Chastellux. For eight centuries this fine old pile was in the making and, though manifestly non-contemporary as to its details, it holds itself together in a remarkably consistent manner and presents an ensemble and silhouette far more satisfactory to view than many a more popular historic monument of its class. Its great round towers, their coiffes and the pignons and gables of the roof, give it all a cachet which is so striking that one forgives, or ignores the fact that it is after all a work of various epochs.

Visitors here are welcome. One may stroll the corridors and apartments, the vast halls and the courtyard as fancy wills, except that one is always discreetly ciceroned by a guardian who may be a man, a woman, or even a small child. There is none of the espionage system about the surveillance, however, and one can but feel welcome. Blazons in stone and wood and tapestries are everywhere. They are the best, or the worst, of their kind; one really doesn’t stop to think which; the effect is undeniably what one would wish, and surely no carping critic has any right to exercise his functions here. There is not the least cause to complain if the furnishings are of non-contemporary periods like the exterior adornments, because the certain stamp of sincerity and genuineness over all defies undue criticism.

The Chateau de Chastellux dates, primarily, from the thirteenth century, with many fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century restorations or additions which are readily enough to be recognized. From its inception, the chateau has belonged to the family of Beauvoir-de-Chastellux, the cadet branch of Anseric-de-Montréal.

Practically triangular in form, as best served its original functions of a defensive habitation, this most theatrical of all Burgundian chateaux is flanked by four great attached towers. The Tour de l’Horloge is a massive rectangular pile of the fifteenth century; the Tour d’Amboise is a round tower dating from 1592; the Tour de l’Hermitage and the Tour des Archives, each of them, also round, are of the sixteenth century. In the disposition and massiveness of these towers alone the Chateau de Chastellux is unique. Another isolated tower, even more stupendous in its proportions, is known as the Tour Saint Jean, and is a donjon of the ideally acceptable variety, dating from some period anterior to the chateau proper.

Moat-surrounded, the chateau is only to be entered by crossing an ornamental waterway. One arrives at the actual entrance by the usual all-eyed roadway ending at the perron of the chateau where a simple bell-pull silently announces the ways and means of gaining entrance. The domestic appears at once and without questioning your right proceeds to do the honours as if it were for yourself alone that the place were kept open.

The chief and most splendid apartment is the Salle des Gardes, to a great extent restored, but typical of the best of fifteenth century workmanship and appointments. Its chimney-piece, as splendid in general effect as any to be seen in the Loire chateaux, is but a re-made affair, but follows the best traditions and encloses moreover fragments of fifteenth century sculptures which are authentically of that period. The cornice of this majestic apartment bears the Chastellux arms and those of their allied families, interwoven with the oft repeated inscription, Monréal à Sire de Chastellux. In this same Salle des Gardes are hung a pair of ancient Gobelins, and set into the floor is a dainty morsel of an antique mosaic found nearby.

The modern billiard-room, also shown to the inquisitive, contains portraits of the Chancelier d’Aguesseau and his wife, and its fittings—aside from the green baize tables and their accessories—are well carried out after the style of Louis XIII. Good taste, or bad, one makes no comment, save to suggest that the billiard tables look out of place.

In what the present dweller calls the Salon Rouge are portraits and souvenirs of a military ancestor Comte César de Chastellux, who, judging from his dress and cast of countenance, must have been a warrior bold of the conventional type.

After the Salle des Gardes the Grand Salon is the most effective apartment. Its wall and ceiling decorations are the same that were completed in 1696, and incorporated therein are fourteen portraits of the Sires and Comtes who one day lived and loved within these castle walls. These portraits are reproductions of others which were destroyed by the unchained devils of the French Revolution who made way with so much valuable documentary evidence from which one might build up French mediæval history anew. The village church contains several tombal monuments of the Chastellux.

The Chateau de Montréal, or Mont-Royal, so closely allied with the fortunes of the Chastellux, between Avallon and Chastellux, is built high on a mamelon overlooking the Seruin, and is one of the most ancient and curious places in Burgundy. The little town, of but five hundred inhabitants, is built up mostly of the material which came from one of the most ancient of the feudal chateaux of mid-France. This chateau was originally a primitive fortress, once the residence of Queen Brunhaut, the wife of the Roi d’Austrasie in 566. It was from this hill-top residence that the name Montréal has been evolved.

The sparse population of the place were benefited by special privileges from the earliest times and the cité movenageuse itself was endowed with many admirable examples of administrative and domestic architecture.

Of the Renaissance chateaux of the later seigneurs, here and there many portions remain built into other edifices, but there is no single example left which, as a whole, takes definite shape as a noble historical monument. There are a dozen old Renaissance house-fronts, with here and there a supporting tower or wall which is unquestionably of mediæval times and might tell thrilling stories could stones but speak.

In Renaissance annals Montréal was celebrated by the exploit of the Dame de Ragny (1590), who recaptured the place after it had been taken possession of by the Ligeurs during the absence of her husband, the governor.

At the entrance of the old bourg is a great gateway which originally led to the seigneurial enclosure. It is called the Port d’en Bas and has arches dating from the thirteenth century. Montréal and its Mediæval chateau was the cradle of the Anseric-de-Montréal family, who were dispossessed in 1255 to the profit of the Ducs de Bourgogne. It was to the cadet branch of this same family Chastellux once belonged.

To the west lies Vezelay, one of the most remarkable conglomerate piles of ancient masonry to be seen in France to-day. It was a most luxurious abode in mediæval times, and its great church, with its ornate portal and façade, ranks as one of the most celebrated in Europe.

Vezelay is on no well-worn tourist track; it is indeed chiefly unknown except to those who know well their ecclesiastical history. It was within this famous church that Saint Bernard awakened the fervour of the Crusade in the breast of Louis-le-Jeune. The abbey church saw, too, Philippe-Auguste and Richard Cœur-de-Lion start for their Crusades, and even Saint Louis came here before setting out from Aigues Mortes for the land of the Turk. This illustrious church quite crushes anything else in Vezelay by its splendour, but nevertheless the history of its other monuments has been great, and the part played by the miniscule city itself has been no less important in more mundane matters. Its mediæval trading-fairs were famous throughout the provinces of all France, and even afar.

In the middle ages Vezelay had a population of ten thousand souls; to-day a bare eight hundred call it their home town.

The seigneurial chateau at Vezelay is hardly in keeping to-day with its former proud estate. One mounts from the lower town by a winding street lined on either side by admirably conserved Renaissance houses of an unpretentious class. The chateau, where lodged Louis-le-Jeune, has embedded in its façade two great shot launched from Huguenot cannon during the siege of 1559. Another seigneurial “hôtel privée” has over its portal this inscription:

“Comme Colombe humble et simple seray Et à mon nom mes mœurs conformeray.”

Here in opulent Basse-Bourgogne, where the vassals of a seigneur were often as powerful as he, their dwellings were frequently quite as splendid as the official residence of the overlord. It is this genuinely unspoiled mediæval aspect of seemingly nearly all the houses of this curious old town of Vezelay which give the place its charm.

The Porte Neuve is a great dependent tower which formerly was attached to the residence of the governor—the chateau-fort in fact—and it still stands militant as of old, supported on either side by two enormous round towers and surmounted by a machicoulis and a serrated cornice which tells much of its efficiency as a mediæval defence. To the right are still very extensive remains of the fourteenth and fifteenth century ramparts.

Near Vezelay is the Chateau de Bazoche, which possesses a profound interest for the student of military architecture in France by reason of its having been the birthplace of Maréchal Vauban, who became so celebrated as a fortress-builder that he, as much as anybody, may be considered the real welder of modern France. Vauban’s body is buried in the local churchyard, but his heart had the distinction of being torn from his body and given a glorious (?) burial along with countless other fragments of military heroes in the Hotel des Invalides at Paris.

Bazoches is not a name that is on the tip of the tongue of every mentor and guide to French history, though the appearance of its chateau is such that one wonders that it is not more often cited by the guide-books which are supposed to point out the quaint and curious to vagabond travellers. There are many such who had rather worship at a shrine such as this than to spend their time loitering about the big hotels of the flash resorts with which the Europe of the average tourist is becoming overcrowded. Makers of guide-books and the managers of tourist agencies do not seem to know this.

Bazoches is a townlet of five hundred inhabitants, and not one of them cares whether you come or go. They do not even marvel that the chateau is the only thing in the place that ever brings a stranger there—they ignore the fact that you are there, so by this reckoning one puts Bazoches, the town and the chateau, down as something quite unspoiled. Half the population lives in fine old Gothic and Renaissance houses which, to many of us, used to living under another species of rooftree, would seem a palace.

What the Chateau de Bazoches lacks in great renown it makes up for in imposing effect. Each angle meets in a svelt round tower of the typical picture-book and stage-carpenter fashion. Each tower is coiffed with a peaked candle-snuffer cap and a row of machicoulis which gives the whole edifice a warlike look which is unmistakable. The finest detail of all is “La Grande Tour” supporting one end of the principle mass of the chateau, and half built into the hillside which backs it up on the rear. Vauban bought an old feudal castle in 1663 and added to it after his own effective manner, thus making the chateau, as one sees it to-day, the powerful bulwark that it is.

The chateau belongs to-day to the Vibrave family, who keep open house for the visitor who would see within and without. The principle apartment is entirely furnished with the same belongings which served Vauban for his personal use.

Another neighbouring chateau, bearing also the name Chateau de Vauban, was also the property of the Maréchal. It dates from the sixteenth century, and though in no way historic, has many architectural details worthy of observation and remark.