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Nevertheless, he perceived the roof of the castle which they surrounded, an old Louis XIII. roof, surmounted by very slender bell-turrets arranged corbel-wise around a higher steeple which ran to a point. Beautrelet did no more that day. He felt the need to reflect and to prepare his plan of attack without leaving anything to chance.
For Quiquendone possessed a theatre a really fine edifice, in truth the interior and exterior arrangement of which combined every style of architecture. It was at once Byzantine, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, with semicircular doors, Pointed windows, Flamboyant rose-windows, fantastic bell-turrets, in a word, a specimen of all sorts, half a Parthenon, half a Parisian Grand Café.
Above two rows of pointed roofs and old houses, it stands out alone against the sky and gazes upon the valley in the distance; two bell-turrets project from the front toward the west; the oblong body follows, and two massive brick towers close the line with their esplanades and battlements.
One year after the publication of the book and the imprisonment of the Iron Mask! Everything was now explained: Louis XIV., foreseeing that the secret might be noised abroad, had built and named that castle so as to offer the quidnuncs a natural explanation of the ancient mystery. The Hollow Needle! A castle with pointed bell-turrets standing on the bank of the Creuse and belonging to the King.
Four of five other churches have campaniles, of which S. Andrea is the best, apparently twelfth-century work, as are the three apses at the eastern end. S. Giustina has a curious bulbous top, plastered and painted red. The churches generally have a semicircular apse and flat wooden ceilings; those without campanili have bell-turrets on the west wall, many of them no longer in use.
The comparison is a homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was irresistibly suggested at the moment, nevertheless. Padua is an ancient city and exhibits a rather respectable appearance against the horizon with its bell-turrets, its domes, and its old walls upon which myriads of lizards run and frisk in the sun.
Then again it sprung from the earth as if in ecstasy, erect, with the piers and flying buttresses of the choir finished and ornamented two centuries after in the fullest flamboyant Gothic, charged with its bell-turrets, spires, and pinnacles. A balustrade had been added, ornamented with trefoils, bordering the terrace on the chapels of the apse.
Silver plate sparkled in the jeweller's windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds; the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting paper round bunches of violets.
Hundreds of swallows had constructed their nests under the borders of trefoil, and even in the hollows of the bell-turrets and the pinnacles, and they were continually brushing their wings against the flying buttresses and the piers which they inhabited.
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