Was the cruel nest of superstition!
There formerly, frightening the shadows every evening,
The Druid, surrounded by a hundred funereal torches,
Strangled a mortal at the foot of Theutatès.
It is probable that the vision of human sacrifices obsessed neither the Princess of Monaco nor her friends, when they came to rest themselves in this sort of belvedere. But Cérutti is a philosopher; and from the Druids his indignation spreads to all theocracies—Hebrew, Scandinavian, Roman. The priests of Theutatès force him to think of the fagot fires of the Inquisition, of the crimes of monasticism and of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.... So much so that he can no longer restrain himself and passes to other structures:
Cursing the incense bearer, I leave the fatal hill.
Not far from the Druid Temple rose the ruin of a "Feudal Tower." It still stands. Time has somewhat enlarged the breaches provided by Hubert Robert when he drew the plan. But the ivy has grown for more than a century and it has given an almost venerable aspect to this factitious ruin. Everything here is imagined to show the ravage of centuries: the battlements have crumbled; the interior is empty, and we still see the traces of the floors which separated the various stories; the stone fireplaces still remain attached to the walls. Over the lintel of a door, we may read in Gothic characters an inscription in the purest "old French" of the eighteenth century. Below the tower there are dungeons. We love to imagine the blonde princess for whom this romantic ruin had been erected, coming to sit at the foot of her tower, and, in order to put her thoughts in harmony with the melancholy of this legendary site, reading, in a nice little book published by Sieur Cazin, bookseller of Rheims, some chivalrous romance by M. de Mayer, for example Geneviève de Cornouailles et le Dameisel sans nom. Even for us, this imitation is not without charm; its picturesqueness is agreeable; then we surprise here the first awakening of the romantic imagination, the birth of the modern taste for the Middle Ages, and we regret a little the time when people amused themselves by fabricating entirely new ruins, without thinking of restoring and completing the true ruins, those which are the work of time.... As to Cérutti, the spectacle of this false donjon cannot distract him from his folly:
Oh, castles of the oppressors! Oh, insulting palaces!
Walls of tyranny, asylum of rapine,
May you henceforth exist only in ruins!