The Maréchal de Marmont, one of Châtillon's most illustrious sons, would have transformed his native city into a Burgundian Versailles, or at least a "Garden City." He did found a great agricultural enterprise, of which the chateau, its gardens and its park, formed the pivot. Too enterprising for his times, the Duc de Raguse saw himself ruined, and then came the German invasion of '71, when, in a combat with the Garibaldians, the chateau was burned. Châtillon has perpetuated the name of its great man in the public _place_, and also by naming one of the principal streets for him, but has not yet erected a statue to him. This indeed may be a blessing in disguise. Statues in trousers are seldom dignified, and this noble duke lived too late for cloak and sword or suit armour. The Chateau de Marmont, so called even to-day, was rebuilt after the fire and now serves a former Maire of the city as his private residence. Châtillon-sur-Seine was--though all the world seems to have forgotten or ignored it--the seat of a convention in 1814 which proposed leaving France its original territorial limits of 1792, a proposition of the ambassadors which was utterly rejected by Napoleon. Albeit that Châtillon lies on the banks of the Seine it is well within the confines of Burgundy. Roundabout is a most fascinating and little exploited region. Thirty kilometres to the north is Bar-sur-Seine and to the northwest Brienne-le-Chateau, where the Corsican first learned the rudiments of the art of war. "_La grand'ville de Bar-sur-Seine a fait trembler Troyes en Champaigne!_" Poor _grand'ville_! To-day it is withered and all but dried up and blown away. Poor grand'ville! It is the same of which Froissart recounts that it lost in one day the houses of nine hundred "_nobles et de riches bourgeois_" by fire. Without doubt these houses were of wooden frames and offered but little resistance to fire, as the period was 1359. Afterwards the town was rebuilt and became again populous and rich. Then began the decadence, until to-day it is the least populous "_chef-lieu_" of the department. Its population is, and ever has been, part Bourguignon and part Champagnois, the latter province being but a league to the northward, where, on the actual boundary, is found the curiously named little village of Bourguignons. South from Châtillon, across the great forest of the same name, one of the great national forests of France so paternally cared for by the Minister for Agriculture, is the actual source of the Seine. Here is what the engineers call a "Chateau d'Faux," though there is little enough of the real chateau of romance about it. It is simply a head-house with an iron _grille_ and various culverts and canals and what not which lead the bubbling waters of the Seine to a wider bed lower down, there to continue their way, via Paris, to the sea.