"'I am desirous of having an estate by the seaside in Normandy--for instance, between Havre and Boulogne. You see, I give you a wide range. It will be absolutely necessary that the place you may select have a small harbour, creek, or bay, into which my vessel can enter and remain at anchor. She merely draws fifteen feet water. She must be kept in constant readiness to sail immediately I think proper to give the signal. Make the requisite inquiries for a place of this description, and when you have met with an eligible spot, visit it, and if it possess the advantages desired, purchase it at once in your own name. The corvette must now, I think, be on her way to Fécamp, must she not?'" With Brittany, Dumas is quite as familiar. In "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne," he gives minute, though not wearisome, details of Belle Ile and the Breton coast around about. Aramis, it seems, had acquired Belle Ile, and had risen to high ecclesiastical rank, making his home thereon. [Illustration: NÔTRE DAME DE CHARTRES] Dumas' love and knowledge of gastronomy comes to the fore again here. When D'Artagnan undertook his famous journey to Belle Ile, on the coast of Brittany, as messenger of Louis XIV., whom he called his sun, after he had bought that snuff-coloured _bidet_ which would have disgraced a corporal, and after he had shortened his name to Agnan,--to complete his disguise,--he put in one night at La Roche-Bernard, "a tolerably important city at the mouth of the Vilaine, and prepared to sup at a hotel." And he did sup; "off a teal and a _torteau_, and in order to wash down these two distinctive Breton dishes, ordered some cider, which, the moment it touched his lips, he perceived to be more Breton still." On the route from Paris to the mouth of the Loire, where D'Artagnan departed for Belle Ile, is Chartres. Its Cathedral de Nôtre Dame has not often appeared in fiction. In history and books of travel, and of artistic and archæological interest, its past has been vigorously played. Dumas, in "La Dame de Monsoreau," has revived the miraculous legend which tradition has preserved. It recounts a ceremony which many will consider ludicrous, and yet others sacrilegious. Dumas describes it thus: