Curiously enough, the same opinion was adopted, after a long examination and discussion, by that mighty hunter, and amateur antiquary, Francis I., when he came here, in August, 1521, accompanied by his mother, Louise de Savoie, and by his wife, Claude de France. While the ladies visited the Churches and Convents, which, to them, were the superior attraction, the merry monarch did the round of the Roman monuments, and afterwards restored his jaded faculties with a day's hunting in the neighbouring forest of Planoise, where he lost himself, and might have passed the night in the wilds had he not happened upon the old castle of Porcheresse, whose lord, Celse de Traves, led him back to Autun. The delighted populace, anxious over their lost king, received him with "chiming bells and flaming torches."[20] Yet, however great the preparations and rejoicings with which the inhabitants received their monarch--as, five years earlier, they had welcomed his predecessor, Charles VIII.--it was neither a flourishing nor a cheerful town that Francis looked down upon, from the Pierre de Couhard, on that summer day, nearly four hundred years ago. He saw the towers, spires, and gables of a mediæval city--one might almost say, of two mediæval cities--built upon the ruins of the much larger Roman town, the silent immensity of whose shattered walls, palaces, temples, and amphitheatre, dwarfed into insignificance the small houses amongst which they stood, and chilled, with a nameless fear, the hearts of those who watched the shadows of evening falling about them, and heard the spirit voices of the past calling, in the moonlight, from among the haunted stones. "Ou ses temples estoient a chaque coin de vue Les buissons herissez presque y donnent la terreur; Ou les riches palais furent, le laboureur Y couple ses taureaux pour trainer la charrue."[21] Less fortunate than Dijon and other towns of Burgundy, Autun had suffered a sequence of disasters. When Francis I. saw the town, neither the Roman walls nor the Roman buildings had recovered from the ravages of Tetricus, King of the Gauls, who, about the year 269, after a siege of seven months, sacked Augustodunum, leaving it in such a pitiable condition that the emperor Constantine, when he came from Rome in 310, could not restrain his tears at the sight of the wasted country and ruined towns through which he had passed; nor could the banners of the corporation, the statues of the gods, nor the groups of musicians at the secret corners, blind the emperor to the real poverty hidden beneath official pomp.[22]