The Chateau de Vizille, in a wooded park bordering upon the little industrial suburb of Grenoble bearing the same name, is a most imposing pile, and is fairly reminiscent of its eighteenth century contemporaries in Touraine and elsewhere in mid-France. It was the place of meeting of the États Généraux of Dauphiny in 1788, one of the momentous preambles to the French Revolution, a chapter of the great drama which was vigorously spoken and acted. It was on July 21, 1788, under the presidency of the Comte de Marges, that were voted the preliminary paragraphs of the famous "Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen." The occasion is perpetuated in memory by a monument erected in the town to "La Gloire de l'Assemblée de Vizille ... et prepare la Revolution Française." This was the first parliamentary vote against the sustaining of aristocratic hereditary government in favour of popular representation--really the general signal for revolution, a year before the convention at Versailles. The massive pile, ornate but not burdensome, with its mansards, its towers and terraces, composes with its environment in a most agreeable manner. Known originally as the Chateau des Lesdiguières, for it was built originally by that celebrated Constable, Vice-Roi du Dauphiné, the Chateau de Vizille was formerly the property of the family of Casimir Perier, that which gave a president to the later Republic. In the early part of the seventeenth century a German traveller, Abraham Goelnitz, "greatly admired" the chateau, and compared it to that of the Duc d'Epernon at Cadillac, which contained seventy rooms. That of the Maréchal Lesdiguières had a hundred and twenty-five, among them (at that time) a picture gallery, an arsenal with six hundred suits of armour, two thousand pikes and ten thousand muskets, as the inventory read. No wonder Richelieu would have reduced the power of the local seigneurs when they could get, and keep together, such a store as that. Vizille abounds in historical memories the most exciting; the very fact that it was the home of Lesdiguières, the terrible companion of the Baron des Adrets--a Dauphinese tyrant, a warrior-pillager and much more that history vouches for--explains this.