From there we passed into what had been a seminary until 1914, and one of the rooms with rows of _lavabos_ (not of the eighteenth century, as the colonel observed) looked out on the great plain of La Woèvre, and again the fateful panorama was unrolled before us. In what had been a council-room there was an old choir high up over the door, with a little balcony giving a Spanish effect. Coming out, at the north side of the church, an ancient Romanesque statue of Adam and Eve on the outer hemicycle of the apse and some little windows, also of pure Romanesque, were pointed out to us. In the ground underneath the statue of Adam and Eve a great shell had opened up a Roman foundation and walls, formed of immense square blocks of stone, hidden during ages. Near the church is the great Cour d’Honneur, once the house of the bishop, a very perfect example of Louis XIV, making me think of Versailles; but it, too, has received many a blow in its lovely heart. One longed so to bandage up all those wounds of war, preserve in being those lovelinesses of another age. We then visited the house of Pope Julius II (I forget what he was doing at Verdun), which, fortunately, has not suffered much up to now, though it, too, is at the mercy of a shot—to-night, to-morrow, or the next day. It would make a perfect museum, with its beautiful old door, bearing inscription and date, through which one passes into a tiny V-shaped court with a flowering linden-tree, and there are two romantic winding stone stairways, with something Boccaccioesque about them, leading to the upper stories. Though it wasn’t an occasion in which to think how one felt, the flesh _was_ weary by this time, and we went gladly back to the colonel’s mess-room, where we had tea, or rather, to be exact, some ice-cold champagne _coupé d’eau_, and some sort of madeleine, a specialty of Verdun, which gave us the little flip-up that we needed. Another specialty of Verdun is the _dragées_ (hard, sugared almonds), but the factory, so one of the officers said, had been destroyed the year before in one of the bombardments. Generations of tourists having broken their teeth on them, however, we wasted no regrets. The colonel begged us to stay for dinner, and the cinematograph representation after, but we were obliged to regretfully decline, as we had to pay our respects to the general at Y——, to whose courtesy M. de S. owed the safe-conducts to Verdun. As we passed by we looked into the long, narrow hall where the representations are given, the sight of which the colonel offered as further inducement. It would have ennobled for me forever that most boresome of modern things, had I assisted at one underneath the citadel of Verdun. The hall was hung with flags of the Allies. With sudden tears I saluted, ours waving among them.