Built against the castle’s outer wall, looking from its upper windows across the open country, the keep sometimes has pleasant views. An island castle, defended by a wide expanse of water, or lifted high above the plain upon a granite needle, could afford the luxury of light and air, could indulge in large windows, grouped three or four together in a space of dead wall, on which they make a lacework of pointed arch and separating columns. But the huge moated castle of the plain was less fortunate. The windows were rare, narrow, far apart. The walls, ten feet thick, made a deep and dark recess for the long lancet holes, more often closed with oiled and painted linen than with glass, and placed very high for the sake of safety. Sometimes they were as much as five feet above the floor. A few years ago in Florence, at the Palazzo Alessandri, I remember seeing windows of this sort, high-perched recesses, the size and shape of an opera-box, reached by a staircase cut in the stone of the wall. On the granite window-benches, heap embroidered cushions; lay a Saracen carpet on the floor; and set in this narrow shrine some fair young woman, lily-slender in her tight brocaded gown. She is playing chess with a squire still younger than herself. Or perhaps she is alone, singing to her lute some ballad of the Round Table-- “La reine chante doucement, La voix accorde à l’estrument, Les mains sont belles, li laiz bons, Douce la voix et bas li tons.” III Even nobles of some pretensions used in their daily life little more than the great hall of justice (where the movable trestle-tables were brought in at dinner-time), the gallery which answered to our modern drawing-room, the chapel, the chamber, and the garde-robe, where the young maids-of-honour learned to embroider amid their waiting-women. These halls and chambers were furnished with some splendour. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the walls were no longer ornamented with the mere stencil-pattern in white and yellow ochre, which sufficed for the princely keep of Coucy. There is a frieze painted, with knights and goddesses, with “Vénus la Dieuesse d’Amour,” or else adorned in fresco or mosaic by “generations of Christians and Saracens painted in battle,” such as the Seigneur de Caumont admired on the walls of Mazières.[51] Lower down, the walls were often wainscotted like that-- “Rice sale à lambres Et d’or musique painturée Et de fin or tout listée”--