Near Chartres there are two small towns which might well be taken in a day’s excursion; both are connected with Chartres historically and both have a certain interest of their own certainly not devoid of attraction to one in search of antiquities. One is Châteaudun, whose fall during the war of 1870 was, as has been quoted above, the signal for the surrender of Chartres; the other is Vendôme, the township of the ancient feudal county. From Chartres it is Châteaudun that lies first in our road. It is a straight, neat little town--most of the streets cut one another at right angles--and the smoke of the Franco-Prussian war still seems to hover about the place; one of its chief memories, indeed, is the great fight in October, 1870, when a bare thousand _franc-tireurs_ of the national guard kept the town for half a day against a Prussian army of ten times their strength, and the quiet market-square--now called the Place du 18 Octobre--was transformed into a battle-field. All the heroism that the day called forth, however, could not save the town from being sacked and burnt--the last of a long series of conflagrations, lasting from the sixth to the nineteenth century, that has won for the little town its cheerful, hopeful motto: “Extincta revivisco.” Certainly Châteaudun has risen from the flames with a fresh lease of its quiet life, but it has been completely modernised, and except for a few narrow alleys sloping down towards the river, which would seem to have escaped the general devastation, there is little that does not belong to to-day. This is, however, making an exception of the Château overlooking the Loire; a great exception, since at present all that there is to see in Châteaudun consists in this square pile on the brow of the hill; the rest, whatever it may once have been, is only a memory; and even the Château itself hardly seems a part of the town, since it is not until we have left the little white-painted streets behind that we realise its existence, and then it comes as a gigantic surprise; a huge, square, turreted mass, on its platform of rock, looking away over the rolling meadow lands, untroubled through all the years of siege and conflagration. Thibaut le Tricheur, Count of Champagne, built it in the tenth century; it was rebuilt in the twelfth century, and again by its seigneur, the famous “Bastard of Orléans,” one of the most devoted followers of Joan the Maid. Finally, under Louis XII., François d’Orléans-Longueville applied himself to fresh renovations, and built the splendid façade overhanging the Loire.