There stood in the town of Beaugency, near the stream, a strong and simple castle, flanked with huge round towers. Many men have passed into possession of it, have rebuilt, and changed, and blazoned, and pulled down its stones in seven hundred years, but some of those towers still stand. It was, in this year 1152, Church land. It held of Amiens; and hither the Archbishop of Sens had summoned the Court and the king, Louis, and his queen, Eleanor, many lawyers and many barons, and the great prelates like himself--of Rheims, of Rouen, of Bordeaux. Their tenants for assessors, their squires and hosts of serving men and troops of horse and mules came crowding into the little place, turning for a moment this half-forgotten town into a capital; and the innkeepers were still dreaming of gold, and every house was making itself a sort of crowded hostelry; every barn was a stable. The matter upon which this writ of the archbishop’s had gone out to his king and the Court, to the Queen Eleanor, and all their train, and to his fellow bishops, and to the barons of France and of Aquitaine, was the great divorce. For now that Louis, the king, had come back shamefully defeated from the Crusade (tortured by rumours that were more than rumours of the queen’s contempt and unfaithfulness, heavily warned that no son had been born of her to continue the Capetian line), he was for ridding himself of his burden. And this, although that burden meant the mastery of half the south, and rule direct from Paris over whatever lay between the Pyrenees and the garden of the Loire; between the mountains of Auvergne and the sea. For Eleanor had Aquitaine for her dower. The king was a man of thirty. He was the heir to that constant effort of the monarchy to turn province by province from a proud fief into an immediate possession of the Crown. No wider sweep of that net had been thrown than when, in his boyhood, there had been brought to Rheims, as a wife for him, the girl who was heiress of all Aquitaine. He could also remember how, so many years before, that marriage had filled all his thoughts and all his heart in the new discovery of the south coming upon his cloistered mind. But life had turned sour. * * * * *