Near the end of the Pont de Saint Louis Jeanne d'Arc fell into the hands of the besiegers. An archer from Picardy captured her single handed, and, for a round sum in silver or in kind, turned her over to her torturer, Jean de Luxembourg. A statue of the maid is found on the public "Place," and the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, a great circular donjon of the thirteenth century, is near by. Another souvenir is to be found in the ancient Hotel de Boeuf, at No. 9 Rue de Paris, where the maid lodged from the eighteenth to the twenty-third of August, 1429, awaiting the entry of Charles VII. With the era of Francis I that gallant and fastidious monarch came to take up his residence at Compiegne. He here received his "friend and enemy," Charles V, but strangely enough there is no monument in Compiegne to-day which is intimately associated with the stay here of the art-loving Francis. He preferred, after all, his royal manor at Villers-Cotterets near by. There was more privacy there, and it formed an admirable retreat for such moments when the king did not wish to bask in publicity, and these moments were many, though one might not at first think so when reading of his affairs of state. There were also affairs of the heart which, to him, in many instances, were quite as important. This should not be forgotten. In 1624 a treaty was signed at Compiegne which assured the alliance of Louis XIII with the United Provinces, and during this reign the court was frequently in residence here. In 1631 Marie de Medici, then a prisoner in the palace, made a notable escape and fled, doomed ever afterwards to a vagabond existence, a terrible fall for her once proud glory, to her death in a Cologne garret ten years later. In 1635 the Grand Chancellor of Sweden signed a treaty here which enabled France to mingle in the affairs of the Thirty Years' War. During the Fronde, that "Woman's War," which was so entirely unnecessary, Anne d'Autriche held her court in the Palace of Compiegne and received Christine de Suede on certain occasions when that royal lady's costume was of such a grotesque nature, and her speech so _chevaleresque_, that she caused even a scandal in a profligate court. Anne d'Autriche, too, left Compiegne practically a prisoner; another _menage a trois_ had been broken up. The most imposing event in the history of Compiegne of which the chronicles tell was the assembling of sixty thousand men beneath the walls by Louis XIV, in order to give Madame de Maintenon a realistic exhibition of "playing soldiers." At all events the demonstration was a bloodless one, and an immortal page in Saint-Simon's "Memoires" consecrates this gallantry of a king in a most subtle manner.