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Updated: May 7, 2025
Pontesordo, though perhaps as ancient as Donnaz, was but a fortified manor in the plain; but here was the turreted border castle, bristling at the head of the gorge like the fangs in a boar's throat: its walls overhung by machicolations, its portcullis still dropped at nightfall, and the loud stream forming a natural moat at its base.
After one crosses the bridge and arrives at the steep path which leads to the Château, one sees, standing upreared and bold on the moat on which it is built, a formidable wall, crowned with battered machicolations and bedecked with trees and ivy, the luxuriant growth of which covers the grey stones and sways in the wind, like an immense green veil which the recumbent giant moves dreamily across his shoulders.
This picturesque incongruity reaches its climax in the lofty round tower upon which a dovecot has been grafted, whose extinguisher-roof, with long drooping eaves, is quite out of keeping with the machicolations which remain a little below the line of the embattled parapet that has disappeared.
You could swear you caught the glint of a long gun over the machicolations; but it is only a casement fired by the westering sun. And the country blushes for her as you draw near, for all the vineyards are dotted with burning willows in the autumn osier-bushes flaming at the heart. Let it be night when you arrive the dead vast and middle of a still night.
With its triple enclosure, its dungeons, its interior court-yards, its machicolations, its underground passages, its ramparts piled one upon the other, like a bark on a bark and a shield on a shield, the ancient Château of the Clissons rises before your mind and is reconstructed. The memory of past existences exudes from its walls with the emanations of the nettles and the coolness of the ivy.
Kerouséré has retained its three turrets with machicolations; in the courtyard can still be seen the deep furrows of the trenches that have been filled up little by little, and are now on level with the ground; they are like the track of a bark, which spreads and spreads over the water till it finally disappears.
All along the wall there was a protected pathway for the defenders to stand, and machicolations through which boiling oil or lead, or heated sand could be poured on the heads of the attacking force.
One could there distinguish, very well, though cleverly united with the principal building by long galleries, decked with painted glass and slender columns, the three Hotels which Charles V. had amalgamated with his palace: the Hotel du Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful border to its roof; the Hotel of the Abbe de Saint-Maur, having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial bearings of the abbe, between the two mortises of the drawbridge; the Hotel of the Comte d' Etampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit, was rounded and notched like a cock's comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like enormous cauliflowers; gambols of swans, in the clear water of the fishponds, all in folds of light and shade; many courtyards of which one beheld picturesque bits; the Hotel of the Lions, with its low, pointed arches on short, Saxon pillars, its iron gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the scale-ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hotel Saint-Pol, properly speaking, with its multiplied facades, its successive enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences, with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during the last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like those pointed caps which have their edges turned up.
It is not so vast as the papal palace at Avignon, but its feudal and defensive character has been better preserved, for, unlike the fortress by the Rhône, it has not been adapted to the requirements of soldiers' barracks. At each of the angles is a round tower, pierced with loopholes, and upon the intervening walls are far-descending machicolations.
The archway of each spans the road over the bridge, so that an enemy who forced the portcullis of the first, and ran the gauntlet of the hot lead from the machicolations, would have to repeat the same performance twice before reaching the bank on which the town is built. This bridge was raised at the commencement of the fourteenth century.
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