crossed, and about nine miles farther one reaches the interesting town of [Illustration: No. 4. EVREUX TO CHARTRES.] DREUX The most conspicuous feature is the Hôtel de Ville, a large square tower-like building, with slightly projecting circular turrets at each corner. It was built between 1512 and 1537, and is a most interesting example of the transition from Flamboyant Gothic to Classic forms. The tall conical roof is broken with dormers, and ends in a bell-turret. Inside there is a beautiful staircase, a Renaissance fireplace, several fine rooms, a library, and old armour. Built on the steep hill that dominates the town on the north side, where the ruins of the keep and towers of the Castle dismantled in 1593 still stand, is the Chapelle Royale, erected in 1816 by the Duchesse d’Orléans. After suffering imprisonment and banishment during the Revolution, she returned to France in 1814, and resided at Ivry, a few miles to the north of Dreux. The tombs of her father and the Princes of her family in the vaults of the old collegiate church at Dreux had been broken open during the Revolution, but certain pious folk having hidden the bones, the Duchess decided to build a chapel in which they could be preserved. It was completed in 1820, and her son Louis Philippe afterwards built a larger structure. Lenotre describes how Louis refused to have any assistance in the work of sorting up the confused heap of the bones of his ancestors. ‘These poor dead people,’ he said, ‘have already been sufficiently tormented. Leave me alone with them’; and, shut up by himself for a great part of a night, he laid out the bones on cloths, measuring, examining, and sorting them by the light of a lamp. The tombs include those of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the foundress of the chapel, of Louis Philippe and his queen and their young children, and the Duchesse de Bourbon Condé, mother of the unfortunate Duc d’Enghien. The Church of St. Pierre, with its odd-looking unfinished towers, has a somewhat severe interior, relieved by the beauty of its sixteenth-century glass. The nave is fifteenth century and the choir and transepts twelfth or thirteenth. A holy-water basin, or _bénitier_, of the twelfth century is of great interest, and so is the chapel on the south side of the nave, containing wall-paintings of the inhabitants of the town who made the pilgrimage of St. James of Compostella (Santiago in Spain) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The beautiful ambulatory has graceful pillars without capitals, and the sounding-board of the pulpit rests on palm-tree supports, as at Louviers.