From this house of frivolity and good cooking--the chef had been seven months at the Carlton--hence enough quite incomprehensible jargon to warrant the legend "English spoken" on the hotel omnibus--we made some good excursions over the undulating country that lies around Arnay; through miles of spring woods where brave nightingales sang on a spray before your very eyes; by lofty green uplands, through plateaux, suggestive of Normandy, where the cattle and the lady's-smock dapple with splashes of white and mauve the rich green meadows; where the cloudless skies are mirrored in bluer than English ponds, and peasants' sabots clatter through the most tangle-wood villages of France; wide silences where your eye can roam all ways, along the distant hills shimmering in silver and blue, quivering with living light, to majestic Château-Neuf of Philippe Pot, and the tower-crowned castles of other lords of ancient Burgundy. FOOTNOTES: [136] Godefroy de Bouillon left France for the crusade in 1096. [137] Hugues le Pacifique, one of the worthiest of the Capetian Dukes of Burgundy, died in 1142. [138] The spring that marks the site of this incident is still called the _Fontaine-Cheval_. It runs into the rivulet De Larvot, by the "Pré de l'Etang." See l'Abbé B---- s "Tebsima," p. 179. [139] Tebsima, p. 185. [140] Ibid, p. 220. [141] The spot was called originally Tres Valles--The Three Valleys. [142] He did not use the word abeille, but the prettier mediæval form, _avette_, from the Latin _apicula_ little bee. "Labussière et Citeaux," p. 233 of Tebsima, by l'Abbé B----. [Illustration: Heading, chapter XIII; Dijon] CHAPTER XIII THE CITY OF THE DUKES Of the thousand who pass through the town annually, on their way to Switzerland or the Riviera, only a small percentage, probably, know Dijon as the ancient capital of the Duchy of Burgundy; fewer still have any conception of the vanished glories it stands for; or could name the three commodities--if I may so describe them--and the principal industry upon which the prosperity of the modern city is based. From the early middle ages to the closing years of the Capetian Dukes, from 1032 to 1364, the essential history of Burgundy is centred rather round the religious communities of Cluny and Citeaux, than in the ducal courts of Auxerre or of Dijon. But upon the advent in that year, of the royal house of Valois, with Philippe le Hardi, the full light of the most glorious, and by far the most highly coloured, period of Burgundian history is turned upon the capital of the Duchy.