Any one seeking change and rest will certainly find what he is looking for at Châteaubriant. It is somnolently dull all through the week and doubly so on Sundays, but, in spite of all this, it is delightful, and a romantic novelist—or even a writer of romantic novels—could hardly find a more inspiring background than the country round about.
There is a legend, too, in connection with the old château that might be worked up into a first-class romance, either for the stage or as a sword and cloak novel. After all, it is not exactly legend either, though it is almost too horrible to appear true. The reader may judge for himself, for here it is:
In the old château lived for a time that unfortunate Frances de Foix whom Francis I. had created Countess de Châteaubriant. To-day much of the luxury with which this mistress of the royal lover had surrounded herself has disappeared, though enough remains, through restoration and preservation, to suggest the very splendid appointments of a former time. The young Frances de Foix, herself of the house that once possessed the crown of Navarre, married the old Count of Laval, who soon brooded himself into a passion of jealousy over the affair of his wife and her princely lover, particularly as it was said that she had gone to visit Francis while he was in prison after his capture at Pavia. “The countess found the king’s prison very dismal,” said the chroniclers of the time. This last act proved too much for the elderly spouse, who speedily “shut up his young wife in a darkened and padded cell, and finally had her cut into pieces by two surgeons,” as the story goes. After this horrible event the murderer fled the country, as might have been expected, in order, say the chroniclers again, “to escape the vengeance of the king.”
Redon, just to the north, is an unattractive place. Most folk know it only as the railway official calls out: “Forty-five minutes’ stop for luncheon, refreshments, and all the rest.”
Very amusing are these railway lunch-rooms seen throughout France. But withal they are most excellently appointed, although the passengers, like their kind the world over, eat as though they had not a minute to lose, and have a good fifteen left on their hands when they have finished their repast.
The meals are usually divided into three categories: the public table at a set price, the table for the aristocracy at three francs, the table with set portions, the frugal repast at half as much, and the service “to order,” which is the most costly of all.
