by the garrison.  This line of outer wall and the circular tower is of much later date than the keep, and the greater portion of them is not older than the fourteenth or fifteenth century, when the castle had to withstand attacks from the English.  In the keep (it is said) William the Conqueror was born, and they pretend to show the remains of the very room where this event took place, as well as the identical window from which his father “Duke Robert the Magnificent,” first saw Arlette, the daughter of the Falaise tanner.’

Here, under the shadow of ‘Talbot’s tower,’ we might prefer to muse historically, and gather up our memories of facts connected with the place; but we are treading again upon ‘the footsteps of the Conqueror,’ and must pay for our indiscretion.  From the moment we approach the precincts of the castle, we are pounced upon by the inevitable spider (in this instance, in the shape of a very rough and ignorant custodian) who is in hiding to receive his prey.  Before we have time for remonstrance, we have paid our money, we have ascended the smooth round tower (one hundred feet high, with walls fifteen feet thick) by a winding staircase, we have been taken out on to the modern zinc-covered roof, and shown the view therefrom; and the spots where the various sieges and battles took place, including the breach made by Henry IV. after seven days’ cannonade, a breach that two or three shots from an Armstrong gun would have effected in these days.

We are shewn, of course, ’the room where William the Conqueror was born,’ and from the windows of the castle keep we have just time to make a sketch of the beautiful Val d’Ante,[38] and of the women, with their curiously-shaped baskets, washing in the stream; and to listen to the thrice-told tale of the tanner’s daughter, and to the deeds of valour wrought on these heights—­when the performance is declared to be over, and we find ourselves once more on the ramparts outside the castle.

We are so full of historical associations at Falaise—­every nook and corner of the castle telling of its nine sieges—­that we are glad to be able to examine the building thoroughly from without, and to remind ourselves of the method of defensive warfare in the fifteenth century.  The whole of the precincts of the castle, the walls, ramparts, and the principal towers, are (at the time we write, August, 1869) strewn with mason’s work, as if a new castle of Falaise were being built; everything looks fresh and new, it is only here and there we discover anything old, the remnants of a carved window, and the like.  But, as a Frenchman observed to us, if it had not been for all this nineteenth-century work, the present generation would never have seen the castle of Falaise.  The work of restoration appears to be carried on in rather a different spirit from the ecclesiastical restorations at Caen and Bayeux; here the prevailing idea seems to be, ‘prop up your antique any how’ (with timber beams, and a zinc roof to Talbot’s tower, such as we might put over a cistern), so long as devotees will come and worship, with francs, at the shrine; whilst at Bayeux, as we have seen, the old work is handled with reverence and fear, and the nineteenth-century mason puts out all his power to imitate, if not to excel, the work of the twelfth.