For two and one-half years these walls have sheltered wounded from the battlefields of Picardie and Lorraine, nursed back to health by the Comtesse who, as "infirmière Majeure," does all the dressing of wounds herself—50 beds in all. She has three assistant nurses and a doctor, but all the expense of this private hospital is borne by the Comte and Comtesse de Durfort. No small item, when everything has doubled in price, and hospital supplies, as well as food, are necessarily difficult to obtain. The question of lighting and heating alone is a hard one. No coal to be found anywhere, so trees are sacrificed in the Park. Candles and kerosene lamps being the only way of lighting, these immense halls must be gloomy and depressing enough in the long dark afternoons of winter, with the wind howling around the towers and the rain lashing the casements. [Illustration: Interior of Castle—The Chatelaine and a Few of the Wounded] [Illustration: Group in Front of Castle] The great dining-room and salons (in feudal times the "Salle des Gardes") have been turned into dormitories, white cots stand in rows beneath the painted beams of the ceilings; frescoed knights, bishops and ladies gaze down from the lofty walls on the broken soldiers of today; hooded chimneys of stone, heavily carved with armorial bearings, still burn, in their black depths, logs from the neighboring forest. Through cross-barred windows, cut in eighteen feet of masonry, one catches glimpses of white and blue skies, of seas of verdant leaves, of sunlight glinting on yellow lichen roofs far below. A pale blue smoke drifts upward, the voices of children, the clang of forge, the lowing of cattle in the market place, sound faintly through the autumn air, and gazing downwards from this elevation, one realizes vaguely how great was the distance, socially and morally, separating in the middle ages the serf from his overlord! After a most excellent luncheon of chicken "en casserole," venison, fresh vegetables and salads, a pastry and some fine Burgundy (all furnished by the estate, except the wine), the host and hostess, the singer, my husband and I, climbed around the upper turrets, gazed down through the "Machiacoli" whence boiling oil was hurled on the besieger in the Dark Ages, scrambled through low stone arches, up corkscrew-stairs to the bedroom of the famous Comte de Chateaubriand, great-uncle of the present owner, and from whom she inherited the property. Here he spent his lonely childhood, full of dreams and fears; in one of his books, complaining of the bats circling and flapping outside his window, in the moonlight, around this white-washed room high up in this silent tower! What a dreary abode for an imaginative boy!