At that time France was not the big country it is now. Normandy belonged to the English Crown, and the Kings of France were always trying to conquer it for their own. So Richard built this strong fortress on the river Seine, at the most important point where the dominion of France joined that of Normandy. He planned it all himself, and, it is said, even helped to put up the stones with his own hands. It was begun and finished in one year, and when the last stone was placed in the big central tower, King Richard cried out: "Behold my beautiful daughter of a year." Then he named it Château Gaillard, which is the French for "Saucy Castle," and stood on its high walls and defied the French king, Philippe-Auguste, who was encamped across the river, to come and take it from him,--just as a naughty boy puts a chip on his shoulder and dares another boy to knock it off. Well, the French king took his dare, but he also took care to wait until the great, brave Richard had been killed by an arrow in warfare. Then for five months he and his army besieged the castle, and a desperate fight it was on both sides. At last the French forced an entrance. After that, for several hundred years, its story was one of bloody deeds and fierce fights, until another French king, Henri IV., practically destroyed it, in order to show his power over the Norman barons whom he feared; and so it stands to-day only a big ruin--but one of the most splendid in France. Germaine often wondered why it was called "Saucy," for it did not look so to her now. The big central tower with its broken windows seemed to her like an old face, with half-shut eyes and great yawning mouth, weary with its struggles, leaning with a tired air against the few jagged walls that still stood around it. But it looked very grand for all that, and Germaine was fond of it, and she with her cousin Jean often played about its crumbling walls. Jean would stand in the great broken window and play he was one of the archers of King Richard's time, with a big bow six feet long in his hand, and arrows at his belt, and that he was watching for the enemy who always travelled by the river, for in those days there were few roads, and journeying by boat on the river was the most convenient way to come and go. There is no finer outlook in all France than from King Richard's castle at Petit Andelys, for one can look ten miles up the river on one side and ten miles down on the other. Thus no one could go from France into Normandy without being seen by the watchman on the tower of the Château Gaillard. Three hundred feet below is the tiny village of Petit Andelys, looking like a lot of toy houses.