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Updated: June 11, 2025
Here has been none of the Vandalism of Vauban, Cohorn, and those mechanical-pated fellows, who, with their Dutch dyke-looking parapets, made such havoc of donjons and picturesque turrets in Europe. Here is every variety of mediaeval battlement; so perfect is the illusion, that one wonders the waiter's horn should be mute, and the walls devoid of bowman, knight, and squire.
The towers are rectangular donjons of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, one being nearly a hundred and fifty feet high. The castle was raised upon a table of calcareous rock; but only the towers, a portion of the outer wall built of enormous blocks of stone, and a ruined archway marking the spot where the drawbridge once hung, remain to tell the tale of the past.
Observing Den-Brao's aptitude, the artisan taught him to hew stone, and soon confided to him the plans of buildings and the overseership in the construction of several fortified donjons that King Henry I ordered to be erected on the borders of his domains in Compiegne. Den-Brao, being of a mild and industrious disposition and resigned to servitude, had a passionate love for his trade.
Here at Vincennes a certain massiveness is noted in connection with the donjon, though the actual ground area which it covers is not very great; it was not like many donjons of the time, which were virtually smaller chateaux or fortresses enclosed within a greater.
Philip Withers had not; for he had been a munificent patron of elegant pleasures abroad, and since his return had erected an addition to his father's house in the shape of a pair of handsome mortgages, as a proprietor of romantic tastes in architecture might flank his front door with mediaeval donjons. Mrs. Marmaduke made much of that good-looking and delightful Withers.
That young nobleman was, as Mr. Brock hinted in the little autobiographical sketch which we gave in a former chapter, incarcerated for a certain period, and for certain other debts, in the donjons of Shrewsbury; but he released himself from them by that noble and consolatory method of whitewashing which the law has provided for gentlemen in his oppressed condition; and he had not been a week in London, when he fell in with, and overcame, or put to flight, Captain Wood, alias Brock, and immediately seized upon the remainder of his property.
Sometimes we had to cross streams of considerable depth; at other places the oaks, arching over head, almost excluded the light: at length, on doubling a precipitous promontory of rock, a wide open valley burst upon us, at the extremity of which we saw the donjons and crenellated towers of a perfect feudal castle surrounding and fencing in the domes of an antique church.
It was all towers and donjons and ramparts, and might, in its mediaeval perfection, have been taken bodily out of one of Sir Walter Scott's novels.
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