Returning to the terrace on the other side of the castle, which dominates the houses, the towers and the gardens of the village, I find myself before the framework of a great tent which is being erected for the approaching performance by the Comédie française, and find myself brought back from the Middle Ages to Racine. These juxtapositions no longer surprise us, since we are now so accustomed to ramble through history and literature as through a great second-hand store, stopping at all the curiosities which amuse our eclectic taste. I imagine, however, that a man of the seventeenth century, a contemporary of Racine, would have been stupified to think that any one could enjoy the verses of Bérénice and at the same time be sensitive to the charm of the old Gothic images, carved upon the wall of this "barbarous" donjon. Time has done its work; it has effaced the prejudices of centuries; it has allowed us to perceive that the sculptor of the Coronation of the Virgin and the poet who wrote Bérénice were, after all, sons of the same race and servants of the same ideal. No, this is not a vain dream; there is something Racinian in the statues of La Ferté-Milon. They possess purity, nobility and elegance. Has not this Virgin, kneeling before the throne of the Lord, while two angels ceremoniously hold up the train of her royal mantle, has she not, I say, the attitude and the touching grace of Racine's Esther at the feet of Ahasuerus? At the edge of this terrace, I have before me the delightful landscape of the little hills of the Ourcq valley, and, as I contemplate the soft and beautiful undulations covered by the forest of Retz, I am more and more struck by the harmony of this charming spot. I think of the pages which Taine placed at the beginning of his essay on La Fontaine, in which he discovers in the French landscape the very qualities of the Gallic mind. You remember this picture of the land of Champagne: "The mountains had become hills; the woods were no longer more than groves.... Little brooks wound among bunches of alders with gracious smiles.... All is medium-sized here, tempered, inclined rather toward delicacy than toward strength." How exact all this is! There is a perfect concordance between the genius of La Fontaine and the aspect of the country of his birth. In the valley of the Marne, if we follow one of those long highways which stretch, straight and white, between two ranks of trembling poplars, it seems unnatural not to see the animals leave the fields and come to talk to us upon the roadway.