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Updated: May 31, 2025
Well, some day it may comfort you, when your own courage has reached its limits, to know that even Etienne Gerard has known what it was to be afraid. I will tell you now how this experience befell me, and also how it brought me a wife. For the moment France was at peace, and we, the Hussars of Conflans, were in camp all that summer a few miles from the town of Les Andelys in Normandy.
He adds that two daughters of King Anna of East Anglia, "though strangers, were for their virtue made abbesses of the monastery of Brie." Little is known of Andelys, except that it was founded by Queen Clotilda. At Chelles, founded by Queen Bathilda in 662, ten miles from Paris, on the river Marne, many famous persons, both men and women, received their education.
It is not a very gay place by itself, but we of the Light Cavalry make all places gay which we visit, and so we passed our time very pleasantly. Many years and many scenes have dulled my remembrance, but still the name Les Andelys brings back to me a huge ruined castle, great orchards of apple trees, and above all, a vision of the lovely maidens of Normandy.
Their builder was the greatest, as he was the last, of the "great builders" of Anjou; and his "fair castle on the Rock of Andelys" was at once the supreme outcome of their architectural genius, and the earliest and most perfect example in Europe of the new development which the crusaders' study of the mighty works of Byzantine or even earlier conquerors, quickened and illuminated as it was by the exigencies of their own struggle with the infidels, had given to the science of military architecture in the East.
These things seem to have been done toward the end of August. On the 27th and 28th of that month John was at Montfort, a castle some five-and-twenty miles from Rouen, held by one of his few faithful barons, Hugh of Gournay. On the 30th, if not the 29th, he and all his available forces were back at Rouen, ready to attempt on that very night the relief of Les Andelys.
He sighed for his native breeze at Andelys, and still more for his mother's embrace his good and tender mother, whose letters to him were so often rendered almost illegible by her tears, and whose memory had been his sweetest comfort during the weary nights of sickness.
The poet Cowper sings of Berries that emboss The bramble black as jet; and truly a plant which diffuses so many benefits, even under the least advantageous circumstances, may well deserve encomium. Nicholas Poussin was born at Andelys, in Normandy, in June 1593.
On the rock at Les Andelys he built a huge castle, to hang there like a thunder-cloud scowling over the flats of the Seine. 'Let me see Chastel-Gaillard stand ready in a year, he said. 'Put on every living man in Normandy if need be. He planned it all himself; rock of the rock it was to be, making the sheer yet more sheer. He called it again his daughter, daughter of his conception of Death.
Richard fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its banks.
The girl was certainly sweet and pretty, but she had no dowry except numerous aristocratic prejudices and romantic illusions, and her father thought he was fortunate in getting rid of her on such favorable terms. M. Godefroy, who was the son of an avowed old miser of Andelys, had always remained a man of the people, and intensely vulgar. In spite of his improved circumstances, he had not improved.
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