Situated as it was on the main highway between Paris and Dijon, Villeneuve occupied a most important strategic position. It spanned this old Route Royale with its two city gates, and its ramparts stretched out on either side in a determinate fashion which allowed no one to enter or pass through it that might not be welcome. These graceful towered gateways which exist even to-day were the models from which many more of their kind were built in other parts of the royal domain, as at Magny-en-Vexin, at Moret-sur-Loing, and at Mâcon. A dozen kilometres from Villeneuve-sur-Yonne is Joigny, almost entirely surrounded by a beautiful wildwood, the Forêt National de Joigny. Joigny was one of the last of the local fiefs to give up its ancient rights and privileges. The fief took rank as a Vicomté. Jeanne de Valois founded a hospice here--the predecessor of the present Hotel Dieu--and the Cardinal de Gondi of unworthy fame built the local chateau in the early seventeenth century. The Chateau de Joigny, as became its dignified state, was nobly endowed, having been built to the Cardinal's orders by the Italian Serlio in 1550-1613. To-day the structure serves the functions of a schoolhouse and is little to be remarked save that one hunts it out knowing its history. There is this much to say for the schoolhouse-chateau at Joigny; it partakes of the constructive and decorative elements of the genuine local manner of building regardless of its Italian origin, and here, as at Villeneuve, there is a distinct element of novelty in all domestic architecture which is quite different from the varieties to be remarked a little further north. There, the town houses are manifestly town houses, but at Joigny, as often as not, when they advance beyond the rank of the most humble, they partake somewhat of the attributes of a castle and somewhat of those of a palace. This is probably because the conditions of life have become easier, or because, in general, wealth, even in mediæval times, was more evenly distributed. Certainly the noblesse here, as we know, was more numerous than in many other sections. Any one of a score of Joigny's old Renaissance houses, which line its main street and the immediate neighbourhood of its market-place, is suggestive of the opulent life of the seigneurs of old to almost as great a degree as the Gondi chateau which has now become the École-Communal.