It is as needless to apologize for devoting a whole chapter to local circumstances connected with Madame de Sevigne's life, as it would be to detail the well-known social virtues which have erected this amiable and unpretending woman into a sort of household deity in the eyes of so large a class of persons, while the Lauzuns, the Montespans, and other gay and brilliant favourites of that period, are only recollected with disgust. CHAP. VI. ORANGE--AVIGNON. OUR road to La Palud lay along the rocky vale first discovered from the heights above Chateau Grignan, which in fact is not so much a vale as a high plateau of ground enclosed between hills, like many parts of Castille. To the latter country, indeed, the Comtat Grignan bears a striking resemblance in the characteristic features which prevail through the greater part of it. The insulated grey rocks have forced themselves through the starved soil, like projecting bones; the parched fields are more full of pebbles than corn; and the stunted evergreen oaks, with their diminutive tough leaves of a dingy grey, though well enough adapted to the inhospitable ground in which they grow, present an appearance quite repugnant to our English ideas of verdure and vegetation. The immediate neighbourhood of Chateau Grignan, indeed, seems tolerably fertile, but it is difficult nevertheless to conceive from whence the adequate supplies for the Count's immense table were procured, or how the feudal contributions of such a country could have supported in earlier days the number of castles and towers, whose ruins we saw on the summits of every detached rock. These, from their resemblance to the "antiguas obras de Moros," which the muleteers used to point out, presented another feature strongly reviving my Spanish recollections. In the days of romance, this country must have been the Utopia of Troubadours, where each might in the compass of a short walk have taken morning draught, breakfast, nooning, dinner, and supper, at the strong holds of different barons. The first of these fortalices, called Chamaret le Maigre, presents a striking landmark from the town of Grignan; but, on a nearer approach, consists of little more than a tall slender tower upon an insulated rock; the rest is in ruins. At a short distance beyond this spot stands Montsegur, a little old fortified town upon a hill, which, from its name and appearance, may have been one of those cradles of civil liberty, where the "bon homme Jacques" first found refuge from his haughty feudal oppressors. A ruin of a more lordly description close to it, is called, as we understood, the Chateau Beaume: but the number of less important ruins, which occurred in this day's journey, is too great to admit of a particular description. A turn to the right between a couple of commanding heights, brought us out of this barren country into the wide and fertile plain of the Rhone, and under the walls of St. Paul de Trois Chateaux, the ancient Augusta Tricastinorum.