As we climbed the road that winds up the hill to Talant, whose old Castle, by the way, was the scene of a hundred memorable events, that I have no time to remember now, we saw on our right another wooded spur of the Côte d'Or, crowned with a big church and a little one. We knew it at once for Fontaine, the home of St. Bernard--a spot not to be missed. The next day found us there. Passing through the village, we came to a small, round pool at the foot of the steep, shaded with a ring of poplars and walnut trees. This must be the very pool in which St. Bernard plunged, when, in the hey-day of youth, he felt his blood glowing too warmly within him. I wonder that the peasants, or the priests, have not made holy water of it before this. We climbed the hill, and, sitting on a broken stone wall, caught glimpses, across the changing vines, of distant Dijon towers, while those improvident grasshoppers, who should have been harvesting against a coming winter, just sang and sang, as though they would out-sing the larks. Then I wandered through the little Burgundian church, and the tangled wilderness of a churchyard, while my wife, sitting enthroned in lilac bushes, and eating blackberries of her own picking, watched the western sun gilding, height beyond height, the distant hills, and dreamed of Bernard, her chosen patron saint. How often must he, torn between chivalry and church, have wrestled with his spirit upon that very spot. This great building near us, on the crest of the hill, is built on the site of Tescelin le Roux's castle; and contains, I believe, some remnants of it; but it has no longer any attraction for us. Restoration and modern additions[178] have stolen away its hoary age. We may be foolish in these matters; but we got more pleasure from a wooden bust of St. Bernard, that we bought for three francs from a white-winged sister, in the pilgrimage shop beside the basilica. We still look at it daily, and believe it--quite wrongly, no doubt--to be a perfect likeness of Tescelin's perfect son. * * * * * Before we part from Dijon, there is one other episode in its history to which I should like to refer. Leaving the town by the southward road that leads to the ancient village of Rouvres--Philippe le Hardi, by the way, before his accession to the dukedom, was Philippe de Rouvres--you come upon a vast plain traversed by many poplar-fringed roads.