We were not impressed with the town of Chartres and so after a good dinner and much whiskey for the frozen youth of the orchids, we bid it farewell. While there we met some friends who had come from Naples in their own car, a new one, and had spent a thousand dollars for it in tires alone. It was now on the way to the shops in Paris, to be "thoroughly overhauled" and it is not two months old. My red car is not so gorgeous, but I enter it with every satisfaction, and my enjoyment of my tour is not rendered any the less by the knowledge that though I keep it a year or for ever, I shall have no such items to pay when it leaves me, nor shall I have an old car on my hands, and that means much, for the fashions of these machines change so from year to year that a "last year's car" is worth little when you try to sell it. However, as I have stated before, Jean says that this car is of such sturdy make that it should last for years with small additional expense. [Illustration: THE VIADUCT OF MAINTENON, NEAR CHARTRES By permission of Messrs. Neurdein] As we near again the aqueduct of Louis XIV. its arches frame most picturesquely the Château de Maintenon, which stands some distance beyond it, on the river's bank. Built by Cocquereau, the treasurer of Louis XI., the castle was given by Louis XIV. to de Maintenon, and here in 1685 in its little chapel, he is supposed to have married her, though it is generally conceded that that ceremony occurred at Versailles but that they came here immediately afterwards. The King was but forty-seven and she fifty years of age, so that he lived with her thirty years. She certainly possessed charms past understanding to have enchained such a man at that comparatively youthful age, to have enchained and held him as she did for thirty years. We picture the widow Scarron as a pinched-nose, pale-faced woman of sour expression. She must have been far different and far more to have held this Louis, who probably was as nearly natural as it was possible for him to be, here in these rooms which to-day are, so they tell us, as she left them. If so, how did the Terrorists overlook them? Here is the sitting-room with its frayed green satin furniture, and yonder the bedroom and several other apartments. There was no great state maintained in Maintenon and I doubt not that the worthy couple often strolled down the banks of this placid river to look at the work on yonder aqueduct outlined against the sky.