“Come, come! You haven’t seen the château. You must see it--all of you. Oh, I will show you ‘la Louve’ another time. It is the only gloomy corner in the place. It is horrible--so cold and dismal. It makes me shiver. But, do you know I love to shiver! Oh, M. Rouletabille, you’ll tell me stories that will make me shiver some day, won’t you?” And chattering thus, she glided in front of us in her white gown. She walked like an actress. She made a singularly pretty picture in this garden of the Orient, between the threatening old tower and the carved stone flowers of the ruined chapel. The vast court which we were crossing was so completely covered on every side with grass, shrubs and foliage plants, with cactus and aloes, mountain laurel, wild roses and marguerites that one might have sworn that an eternal spring had found its habitation in this enclosure, formerly the drilling ground of the château when the soldiers assembled in time of war. This court, through the help of the winds of heaven and the neglect of man had naturally become a garden, a beautiful wild garden in which one saw that the chatelaine had interfered as little as possible and which she had in no way attempted to restore to the beaten track. Behind all this verdure and this wealth of bloom one could see the most exquisite sight which could be imagined in dead architecture. Figure to yourself the perfect arches of gothic brought up to the doors of the old Roman chapel; the pillars twined with climbing plants, rose geranium and vervain uniting their sweet perfume and raising to the azure heavens their broken arch, which nothing seems to support. There is no longer a roof on the chapel. And there are no more walls. There remains of it only the bit of lace work in stone, which a miracle of equilibrium keeps suspended in the air. And at our left is the immense tower of the Twelfth Century, which, Mme. Edith tells us, the natives call “la Louve” and which nothing--neither time, nor man, nor peace, nor war, nor cannon, nor tempest has ever been able to destroy. It is just as it appeared in 1107, when the Saracens, who sowed devastation in their wake, were able to make no headway in their attacks upon the château of Hercules,--just as it was seen by Salageri and his corsairs of Genoa, when, after they had seized the fort and the Square Tower and even the castle itself, it resisted attack and its defenders held it until the arrival of the troops of the Princes of Provence, who delivered them. It was there that Mme. Edith had chosen to have her own rooms. [Illustration: The Plan of the Fort of Hercules.]