In the Salle des Empereurs Romains are a series of paintings of Roman Emperors which makes one think that Tanlay’s sculptured Roman busts must have set the fashion hereabouts or vice versa.
The Bibliothèque contains a remarkable folio showing plans and views of the chateaux of Ancy-le-Franc and Tonnerre, the latter since destroyed as we have found.
In the Chapel, dedicated to Sainte Cécile, are a series of admirable painted panels of the apostles and prophets, a favourite religious decorative motif in these parts, as one readily recalls by noting the Puits de Moise and the tomb of the Burgundian dukes at Dijon, the inspiration doubtless of all other similar works since.
The Grand Salon of to-day was once the sleeping apartment of Louis XIV when one day he honoured the chateau with his presence.
A dozen kilometres south from Ancy-le-Franc is Nuits-sous-Ravières. Nuits, curiously enough, a name more frequently seen on the wine-lists of first class restaurants than elsewhere, here in the heart of Burgundy, is supposedly of German origin. Its original inhabitants were Germans coming from Neuss in Prussia, whose inhabitants are called Nuychtons, whilst those of Nuits are known as Nuitons. Again, near Berne, in Switzerland, is a region known as Nuitland, which would at least add strength to the assertion of a Teuton origin for this smiling little wine-growing community of the celebrated Cote d’Or.
Nuits possesses a minor chateau which to all intents and purposes fulfils, at a cursory glance, its object admirably. It is a comfortably disposed and not unelegant country house of the sixteenth century, sitting in a fine, shady park and looks as habitable as it really is, though it possesses no historical souvenirs of note.
A fortified gateway leads from the north end of the town towards Champagne, Nuits being on the borderland between the possessions of the Ducs de Bourgogne and those of the Comtes de Champagne.
