The ancient Château of Coucy furnished them with considerable valuable booty, and here four officers burned and broke up all the furniture they could not carry away. The château was in the form of a rectangle flanked at each corner by a round tower, and with great square towers on the north and east. The round tower at the northeast angle which rose from the canal was the work of Louis de Luxembourg in 1490. and was called the "Tour du Connetable," and bore above the portal the motto of its founder, "Mon Myeul." Its walls were of tremendous thickness and strength. The whole lower story was an immense hall of hexagonal form, and it had a number of strange pits, called furnaces, which were to be used to blow up the castle in case of capture. In this château many notable personages had been confined; for instance, Jeanne d'Arc; Condé, the Huguenot leader; Jacques Cassard of Nantes; and Prince Napoleon, after his failure and capture at Boulogne in 1840. This great and historical château they wantonly destroyed; after sacking it they blew it up with cases of explosives placed in the walls. The officers took away from their sleeping quarters in the town all chairs, bed clothing and even the smallest toilet articles. Some of the soldiers excused their acts to the townspeople by informing them that all this was done "by order of the Emperor." General von Fleck, commanding officer of the army corps stationed at Ham, took everything in the house he occupied from the cellar to the roof, using a wagon to carry away the objects. "After the wagon had gone with the last chair in the house, the general found himself in need of one on which to write a letter, so an orderly was dispatched to get one at the Mairie." MEAUX |THE little town of Meaux on the banks of the Marne is only thirty miles or so from Paris, and was remarkable for its old mills on the bridge over the river bed, behind the Hôtel de Ville, as well as for the beautiful cathedral of St. Etienne. The beauties of the town could best be appreciated from the shady walk along the river side. Here were great shade trees overhanging the roadway, through the branches of which one got glimpses of the cream colored tower of the old cathedral, above the red tiled roofs of the town, all against a summer sky of pale blue. Upon reaching the town, there were the two bridges over the Marne, both of them covered with some old mills with high wooden walls and quaint buttresses; almost theatrical and unbelievable in these practical days.