Two leagues across a pleasant and slightly undulating country, the road crosses the Marne by a stone bridge. In the seventeenth century there was only a ferry. On the left bank appears the little village of Germigny with its few houses dotted pleasantly along the hillside. The landscape has the grace and freshness which is characteristic of the whole valley of the Marne: a horizon of tiny hills, humble and smiling, a fertile and regularly cultivated plain, an old mill lost among the willows, a line of great poplars, a sluggish, grassy rivulet, resigned to continual detours, and finally, spread over all these things, a somewhat humid light which imparts to them a delicate charm--a lovable spectacle of which the eye cannot tire, since its subtle seductiveness lies wholly in the changes of the height and the flight of the clouds. From the twelfth century, the pleasure house of the Bishops of Meaux was at Germigny, on the banks of the Marne. Kings often stopped there when they came to hunt in the neighboring forests. Bossuet's predecessor, M. de Ligny, spent fifty thousand crowns in transforming the old house into a veritable château. The domain was sold at the time of the Revolution. But Msr. de Briey has bought back a part of it and has thus renewed the tradition of the former bishops of Meaux. What remains of the old château? The park has been cut up. Of the gardens a lawn and a few alleys remain. The buildings have been ruined. A dovecote and an old turret are still standing, and the wreckers have respected the long terrace whose foot was formerly bathed by the Marne; it is today separated from the river by a highway. This is shaded by great trees, a charming place which seems to have been made especially for the meditative promenade of an orator or the relaxation of a theologian. Bossuet loved Germigny. In his letters he often celebrated the charm of "his solitude." He even sung it in Latin in a hymn which he composed in honor of Saint Barthélémy, the patron of his parish. Every year he came to his country house to realize that dream of his youth which he had ingenuously expressed in a sermon: "What an agreeable diversion to contemplate how the works of nature advance to perfection by insensible increase! How much pleasure we can have in observing the success of the trees which we have grafted in a garden, the growth of the wheat, the flow of a river!" For he was sensitive to the spectacles of nature.