Beyond a _balustrade à jour_ is the Jardin de la Duchesse, communicating with the park by a graceful bridge over an ornamental water. In general the apartments are furnished in the style of the First Empire, an epoch memorable in the annals of Valençay. [Illustration: _Château de Valençay_] By the orders of Napoleon many royalties and ambassadors here received hospitality, and in 1808-14 it became a gilded cage--or a "golden prison," as the French have it--for the Prince of the Asturias, afterward Ferdinand VII. of Spain, who consoled himself during his captivity by constructing wolf-traps in the garden and planting cauliflowers in the great urns and vases with which the terrace was set out. There is a great portrait gallery here, where is gathered a collection of portraits in miniature of all the sovereigns who treated with Talleyrand during his ministerial reign, among others one of the Sultan Selim, painted from life, but in secret, since the reproduction of the human form is forbidden by the Koran. In the Maison de Charité, in the town, beneath the pavement of the chapel, is found the tomb of the family of Talleyrand, where are interred the remains of Talleyrand and of Marie Thérèse Poniatowska, sister of the celebrated King of Poland who served in the French army in 1806. In this chapel also is a rare treasure in the form of a chalice enriched with precious stones, originally belonging to Pope Pius VI., the gift of the Princess Poniatowska. The Pavillon de la Garenne,--what in England would be called a "shooting-box,"--a rendezvous for the chase, built by Talleyrand, is some distance from the château on the edge of the delightful little Forêt de Gatine. Varennes, just above Valençay, is thought by the average traveller through the long gallery of charms in the château country to be wholly unworthy of his attention. As a matter of fact, it does not possess much of historical or artistic interest, though its fine old church dates from the twelfth century. Ascending the Cher from its juncture with the Loire, one passes a number of interesting places. St. Aignan, with its magnificent Gothic and Renaissance château; Selles; Romorantin, a dead little spot, dear as much for its sleepiness as anything else; Vierzon, a rich, industrial town where they make locomotives, automobiles, and mechanical hay-rakes, copying the most approved American models; and Mehun-sur-Yevre, all follow in rapid succession. Mehun-sur-Yevre, which to most is only a name and to many not even that, is possessed of two architectural monuments, a grand ruin of a Gothic fortress of the time of Charles VII. and a feudal gateway of two great rounded cone-roofed towers, bound by a ligature through which a port-cullis formerly slid up and down like an act-drop in a theatre. [Illustration: GATEWAY OF MEHUN-SUR-YEVRE] Wonderfully impressive all this, and the more so because these magnificent relics of other days are unspoiled and unrestored.