Richelieu and the Fronde destroyed many a mediæval fane whose ruins were afterwards rebuilt by some later seigneur into a Renaissance palace of great splendour. The Italian builder lent his aid and his imported profusion of detail until there grew up all over France a distinct variety of dwelling which quite outdistanced anything that had gone before. This was true in respect to its general plan as well as with regard to the luxury of its decorative embellishments. Fortresses were razed or remodelled, and the chateau--the French chateau as we know it to-day, distinct from the _chastel_--then first came into being. Any review of the castle, chateau and palace architecture of France, and of the historic incident and the personages connected therewith, is bound to divide itself into a geographical or climatic category. To begin with the manner of building of the southland was only transplanted in northern soil experimentally, and it did not always take root so vigorously that it was able to live. The Renaissance glories of Touraine and the valley of the Loire, though the outcome of various Italian pilgrimages, were of a more florid and whimsical fashioning than anything in Italy itself, either at the period of their inception or even later, and so they are to be considered as something distinctly French,--indeed, it was their very influence which was to radiate all over the chateau-building world of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By contrast, the square and round donjon towers of the fortress-chateaux--like Arques, Falais and Coucy--were more or less an indigenous growth taking their plan from nothing alien. Midi and the centre of France, Provence, the Pyrenees and the valleys of the Rhône and Saône, gave birth, or development, to still another variety of mediæval architecture both military and domestic, whilst the Rhine provinces developed the species along still other constructional lines. There was, to be sure, a certain reminiscence, or repetition of common details among all extensive works of mediæval building, but they existed only by sufferance and were seldom incorporated as constructive elements beyond the fact that towers were square or round, and that the most elaborately planned chateaux were built around an inner courtyard, or were surrounded by a _fosse_, or moat.