Seen from the side of the park, the Château de Maintenon, surrounded by moats filled from the waters of the Eure, presents on the left a square tower of bluish stone, on the right a round tower of red brick. The square tower is connected, by a block of buildings, with the surbased archway which opens from the outer yard to the inner yard of the castle. Above this, archway rises a mass of turrets from which starts a building which is attached transversely to another block coming from the round tower. These three lines of buildings contain a space closed on three sides and open only on the park. The seven or eight towers of different thickness, height and shape are capped with priests' bonnets, which mix with a church-window, placed outside, towards the village. The façade of the castle on the village side is of the Renascence period. The fancifulness of this style of architecture gives the Château de Maintenon a special character, as who should say of a town of olden time or a fortified abbey, with its spires and steeples, grouped at hap-hazard. To complete the medley of periods, there is a great aqueduct, the work of Louis XIV.; one would think it a labour of the Cæsars. One goes down from the drawing-room of the castle into the garden by a bridge, lately put up, which partakes of the architecture of the Rialto. Thus are Ancient Rome and the Italian Cinquecento associated with the French sixteenth century. Memories of Bianca Capello[461] and de' Medici, of the Duchesse d'Étampes[462] and Francis I. rise up through memories of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, while all this is swayed and completed by the recent catastrophe of Charles X. The castle was rebuilt by Jean Cottereau[463] Treasurer to Louis XII. Marot, in his _Cimetière_, maintains that Cottereau was too honest a man for a financier. One of Cottereau's daughters brought the Maintenon domain into the d'Angennes family. In 1675, this domain was bought by Françoise d'Aubigné, who became Madame de Maintenon. Maintenon reverted to the Noailles family, in 1698, through the marriage of a niece[464] of the wife of Louis XIV. with Adrien Maurice Duc de Noailles[465]. The park has something of the calm and gravity of the Great King. Near the middle, the first tier of arcades of the aqueduct crosses the bed of the Eure and connects the two hills on opposite sides of the valley, so that at Maintenon a branch of the Eure would have flowed in the air above the Eure. "In the air" is the word: for the first arcades, as they exist, are eighty-four feet high and they were to have been surmounted by two other tiers of arcades.