The market is in full swing when we throw our shutters open in the morning, and the gay wide square is full of booths and country-people, clustered round the bronze statue of Joan of Arc. (It was here, you know, we took her--worse luck to us!--at the gate of Compiègne. But it was at Rouen she made her entry, and that exit for which, alas! we stand ashamed throughout history.) Nothing could look cheerfuller than the market-place this morning. It tempts us out; and then we find that we could not see the best of it from the windows. For cheek by jowl with our hotel stands the fine Hôtel de Ville, with its fretted, Flemish-looking front and its tall belfry for the chimes. It was finished in 1510, when Louis XII. was king. There he rides, on the large arcade on the first story, every inch a king; but the statue is modern. Gay, bright, with charming environs, Compiègne is a pleasant county town; but it has not that look of age, of historic continuity, which are the charm of smaller places, such as Crépy and Senlis. No sign is left of the great palace of the Merovingian kings, no relic of that stalwart fortress whence are dated so many of the acts of Charles the Wise; that castle of Compiègne where, says Eustache Deschamps, “Tel froid y fait en yver que c’est raige,” built against the river bridge-- “Le Chastel que se lance Dessus Aysne, lez le pont du rivaige.” Bit by bit one discovers, lost in the modern prosperity of the place, here and there a souvenir of the more illustrious past. Here and there, on the limits of the town, a towered wall rises in some private garden, and we recognize a fragment [Illustration: VIEUX MOULIN] of the fortifications raised under Joan of Arc. Certain roads in the forest were planned and laid out by Francis the First. Then there is the city gate, built by Philibert Delorme in 1552, with the initials of Henry and Diana interlaced. A few old houses still remain from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and among them that “Hôtel des Rats” where Henri IV. lived with Gabrielle d’Estrées in 1591. There are one or two old churches, too much restored. And then, of course, there is the great uninteresting palace, the very twin of the Palais Royal, which Gabriel built for Louis XV., and which we remember for the sake of the two Napoleons.