And as for the Thirty Years’ War, they could have told tales of the Swedish invasion scarcely to be beaten by certain tales of our days. Indeed, so complicated is the history of those times, every shade and branch of combatant having fought against every other shade and branch, in kaleidoscopic changes, that when Turenne, allied with the Spaniards, revolted against the king, Louis XIV, it was a Swede, Rosen by name, who helped the Maréchal du Plessis Praslin to conquer him at Réthel. Rosen, who with his brothers had come originally from Livonia with the armies of Gustavus Adolphus, then promptly put on his standard a tower falling on a rose-bush in full bloom, with the device, _Malgré la Tour les Roses fleuriront_.[11] In turning over pages concerning the involved chronicles of this borderland, I feel once again that history is, of all things, the most difficult to write, because of having to do with facts, and what more elusive than facts, eternally subjective? Even this simplest record of historic days is as different from one that another might have written about the same things as if it dealt, instead, let us say, with the genial suggestion of letting the Hottentots and the Zulus have their own government. It is that fantasy-awakening thing called temperament that is forever at work with facts, one thing always suggestive of another, rather than explanatory of itself, and I frankly rejoice that the “primrose by the river’s brim” _is_ to me something more than a primrose. I am now such a long way from the history of the Chapter that there is scarcely time to get back, and so I will finish quickly by saying that in the epoch preceding the Revolution it found itself entangled in various temporal affairs, especially lawsuits with the inhabitants concerning their convenient but disappearing feudal rights. Otherwise life was probably not too strenuous for the _chanoinesses_. As nothing escapes the influence of its hour and age, why should one think the Chapter entirely escaped those of that light, pervading, charming, inconsequent, rich thing known as the eighteenth century, where everything seems to have finished by a song, or a witty quatrain, or by delicious angels holding up holy-water founts in the shape of lovely shells. _To the popote at 12.15._—Its windows look out on the unmistakably plain timepiece in the church tower, and everybody knows when anybody is late, and just how late, and there’s a nice little green box on the table designed for fines, but only intermittently insisted on. Commandant Poulet greets me with the words, “At three o’clock to-day Austria ceases hostilities.” Something cruel and red seemed suddenly rolled away.