seigneur_ by a cunning landlord. This trouble after all may be taken by a servant, and need not subject the master to the necessity of entering every inn like an angry terrier, with his bristles up and ready for battle; and the settlement of preliminaries does not lead to any want of attention on the part of the people of the inn. We neglected this precaution at Essonne, where we breakfasted on leaving Paris, and where accordingly we paid about double the charge which Tortoni or the Cafe Hardy would have made. It appears, in truth, that at the Croissant d'Or, as at the Emperor Joseph's memorable German inn, "though eggs are not scarce, yet gentry are." The distance from Paris to this place is about 24 miles: the road of course excellent, as is uniformly the case in the route to Chalons; but the only thing during the stage which remains on my recollection, is an obelisk inscribed, "Dieu, le Roi, et les dames;" a melange perhaps compounded in compliment to Louis XV. who greatly improved a part of this road, which was once nearly impassable. Corbeil, a neat flourishing town within half a mile of Essonne, and possessing large cotton manufactories, derives some interest from the celebrated siege it sustained during the war of the league. Two miles beyond Essonne we remarked, at a short distance to the right, Chateau Moncey, once the seat of the gay and brilliant Duke de Villeroi and his descendants; and on a hill to the left, Chateau Coudray, the former residence of the Prince de Chalot. Both the possessors of these estates were guillotined during the reign of terror, and their places are filled by Marechal Jourdan, and some _nouveau riche_, whose very name the peasants seemed never to have heard, or to have forgotten from want of interest. We found the Hotel de la Ville de Lyon at Fontainebleau a good inn, and fair in its charges. The old palace, though not intrinsically worth a visit in point of architecture, yet conveys one of those "sermons in stones," in which the Fauxbourg de St. Germain so much abounds; and presents also more pleasing recollections of Louis Quatorze (a prince possessing many of the good points of the _bon Henri_) than the bombastic personification of him as Jupiter Tonans, in the palace of Versailles, which is on a par as a painting with Tom Thumb as a tragedy. April 27.--To Fossard, eighteen miles: the first six through the forest, just sufficiently sylvan to suffer by a comparison with that of Windsor. At the end of two more miles we crossed the valley, in which is situated the town of Moret, to which is attached a history equally curious, as Anquetil observes, with that of the Iron Mask. The following is the extract from the Duke de St. Simon's Memoirs, which he introduces as relative to it.