playmate, Charles III., fresh to his ducal coronet, as she was to the second crown which decked her head--for she was newly married to Francis II., newly crowned Queen of France at Rheims. The daughter of Marie de Lorraine, brought up in Lorrain Condé, she reckoned herself a Lorraine princess, and as a Lorraine princess the Lorrains have ever regarded, and idolised, her. To the memory of this unhappy queen, round which time had gathered a bright halo of romance, not least was due that hearty welcome which the Lorrains readily extended to her exiled kinsman. Most picturesque must the castle have been in olden days, when those seventeen medieval towers (removed by order of Louis XIV. in 1670) still stood round about it like sturdy sentries, each laden with historic memories. Even now the view of the hill is pleasing enough--with its winding roads, its steep steps, its antique clock-tower, its terraced gardens and rambling lanes, with that rather imposing convent-school raising its walls perpendicularly many storeys high, the quaint church of St Peter[2] topping the southern summit with its tower flattened to resist the wind, with those delightfully green and shady Pâquis just beyond, densely wooded with trees, including the two largest elms in France--the Pâquis which, with their _paslemaile_, formed the favourite resort of James while at Bar, and in the shady seclusion of which he spun his web of deceiving flattery round the guileless heart of the girl whom he betrayed. Only to please him, we read in the archives, it was that the town council put up benches in that shade, which cost the town nine livres.