“I am wet, but not out of breath,” adding, “It’s nothing but a harmless shower, the rain has not even penetrated my coat.” “Let us go in,” said Madame de Bonmont. This was her home, this château of Montil, built in 1508 by Bernard de Paves, Grand-Master of Artillery, for Nicolette de Vaucelles, his fourth wife. “The house of Paves flourished for nine hundred years,” writes Perrin du Verdier, in the first volume of his _Trésor des généalogies_. “And the Royal Families of Europe were all connected by marriage at some time or other with the said house, more especially the kings of Spain, England, Sicily and Jerusalem, the dukes of Brittany, Alençon, Vendôme, and others, as well as the Orsini, the Colonnas and the Cornaros.” And Perrin du Verdier discourses both lengthily and complacently on the celebrity of this “tant inclite maison” which gave to the Church eighteen cardinals and two popes, and to the throne of France three constables, six marshals and a king’s mistress. From the reign of Louis XII down to the Revolution the heads of the elder branch of Paves had resided at the château of Montil. Philippe VIII, prince of Paves, lord of Montil, Toche, Les Ponts, Rougeain, La Victoire, Berlogue, and other places, first Lord in Waiting to the King, was the last of that branch of the family. He died in 1795, in London, whither he had emigrated, to set up as a perruquier in a little shop in Whitecross Street. His estates, which had been totally neglected during his lifetime, were, at the time of the Directoire, sold as national property, and divided among a number of peasants who lived there, and founded a line of bourgeois. The rogues who had acquired the château in exchange for a mere handful of paper money, decided in 1813 to demolish it. However, soon after the destruction of the Galerie des Faunes, their work of demolition was interrupted and never completed. For two years the country people helped themselves, when so inclined, to the lead roofing of the château. In 1815 M. de Reu, an old officer of the King’s navy and a secret agent of the Comte de Provence in Holland--it is said that he was also an accomplice of George in the affair of the Rue Saint-Nicaise--desirous of ending his days in his native country, managed to extort a few hundred crowns from the ungrateful Prince, and purchased the château of Montil. There, poor and unsociable, he with his eleven children, both legitimate and illegitimate, lived within the walls which threatened to fall in and bury them all beneath the ruins. After his death, one of his daughters, who never married, lived there, and filled those halls of beauty and glory with plums picked in the castle gardens, which she placed there to dry. In the year 1875 Mademoiselle Reu, aged ninety-nine years and three months, was found one winter’s morning lying dead upon a torn and rotting mattress, in the room adorned with monograms, devices, and emblems in the honour of Nicolette de Vaucelles.