I recall how, just two hours later, we crossed the bridge over the river Meuse, and rolled through the old gateway into the ancient city, and how, shortly after, we were chatting with Professor Victor d’Alembert, the head schoolmaster. “I have brought my cousin to see the city,” said Albert. “Ah! Mouzon is a quaint place,” responded the professor, his face lighting up with interest. “It is a small city, but a very old one, and so very romantic. Come with me. I will show it to you.” Then he took us up and down crooked streets, lined with mediæval buildings, heavily walled, with projecting stories, possessing all the quaintness of former ages, and it was while passing through a narrow street to a square in the heart of the city, where the houses seemed the oldest, the oddest and the grayest, that he pointed to a heavy oaken door set in a wall of unusual thickness. “Look!” he said. “At what?” inquired Albert. “That is said to have been the home of Maugis, the famous warrior sorcerer.” “Very interesting,” exclaimed I, “cannot we see the interior?” “No, no!” replied the professor somewhat emphatically, “that would never do, its occupant resents intrusion bitterly.” I can remember now, how a strange and unaccountable desire possessed me to see behind that door, but it was almost forgotten, when, a few minutes later, we were seated in the dim interior of the ancient cathedral with its lofty gothic arches floating over us in the obscurity, while the schoolmaster eloquently unrolled a story of vicissitude and romance rarely equaled, for he was a master of his subject. Said he: “Begun by barbarians, built, beset, beleaguered, burned, built, beset, burned, and rebuilt, again and again; such is the alliterative history of this old city of Mouzon; the theater of wars barbarous, of wars religious, of wars civil, and wars international; besides of plague, pest, and famine. “Mouzon has a history commencing far back into the shadows of the past and terminating the day before the battle of Sedan, when Colonel de Contrenson, at the head of the Fifth Regiment of French Cuirassiers, charged the entire German army on these heights nearby; charged time and again in the very teeth of their cannon, in the vain attempt to stop their resistless onward course to Sedan, five miles away, and only desisted when the gallant Fifth were literally reduced to a few shreds of shattered humanity; but that was only thirty years ago.” “Oh! rare, old Mouzon!” exclaimed he, “do you not claim the highest regard of the lover of romance? the home of Maugis, the great warrior sorcerer, and the scene of the rebellious warfares of those gallant sons d’Aymon, those immortal knights Renaud, Alard, Guichard and Richard, and of their redoubtable enemy, the princely Roland, all of them men whose names are now a byword in history!”