We stop before a singular chapel, shut off by a vilely daubed wooden grating: to look at the rags and strange accessories which hang on the walls, we might at first take it for the property room of a theater. The paintings with which it is afflicted represent sepulchral things, thigh bones, tears and death's heads. The wall which faces the altar is covered with the portraits of a large number of persons dressed in black, and covered with a sort of bonnet with tumed-up edges. This is the chapel of the Charity of Vetheuil, a lay brotherhood, whose function is to assist the dying and bury the dead. It doubtless dates from the Middle Ages, like other brotherhoods of the same type, which were formed in the Vexin, the remembrance of which is not yet totally lost at Mantes, at La Roche-Guyon, at Vetheuil, at Rosny. Like them also, it was restored by a bull of Gregory XIII at the end of the sixteenth century, as a result the frightful ravages of the plague at Milan. The Charities of Rosny, of La Roche and of Mantes have been dissolved. That of Yetheuil has survived. The costumes of the brothers, great robes of black serge with a blue collar, are what we see hung on the chapel wall; and here are also the lanterns and the crosses which are carried before the bier, the bell of the bell-ringer, and his dalmatica sprinkled with skulls and bones, as well as the insignia of the chief banner bearer. [17] Each time that I have returned hither I have feared to see this little chapel abandoned and to learn that this touching trumpery had been banished to an attic. Till now the people of Yetheuil have preserved their Charity. But how much longer will these vestiges of the rites and the customs of the past endure? Below Yetheuil a torn and ravined promontory presses close to the sudden bend of the river. No trees; a handful of vines; tufts of stunted vegetation dotting the chalky slope. Nature has not been alone in tormenting and tearing this strange wall. Men have carved their habitations in this soft stone; and a subterranean village has been built in the hillside, like those villages which we find in the tufa of the river banks of the Loire. The men have deserted these troglodyte homes, which are now no longer used save as cellars and stables. But the spot has retained a singular picturesqueness. A little church tower springs from the rock and sometimes we may still see the chimney of a cavern sending its smoke through the vines or the thickets. The village is called Haute-Isle. Formerly the manor house, surrounded by walls, was the only one which stood in the open. In the seventeenth century it sheltered "the illustrious M. Dongois, chief registrar of parliament." Now this illustrious M. Dongois was the uncle of the not less illustrious M. Nicolas Despréaux. And it was thus that Haute-Isle (then written Hautile) had the honor of being sung, if I dare say it, by Boileau himself: It is a tiny village, or rather a hamlet,