(From a Miniature taken from a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century.)
Placed, in most cases, on natural or artificial eminences, it is not without a sort of eloquent boldness that the towers and the donjons shoot into the air, succeed each other at intervals, command and support each other. It is frequently not without a sort of fantastic grace that the walls scale the rising ground, making an infinity of the strangest bends, or coiling themselves about with the supple ease of a serpent.
Fig. 318.—The Castle of Vincennes, as it was in the Seventeenth Century.
Evidently, if the castle raises its gloomy head high into the air, it has no other object in doing so than to secure to itself the advantages of distance and height; but not the less on that account does it stand out on the sky a grand object. The masses of its walls unsymmetrically pierced with sombre loop-holes present an abrupt and naked appearance; but the monotony of their lines is picturesquely broken by the projection of overhanging turrets, by the corbels of the machicolated arches, and by the embrasures of the battlements.
A vast amount of civilisation still exists for him who recalls the past in the multitude of ruins which were the witnesses of bloody feudal divisions; and we must add to the system of isolated castles that often commanded the most deserted valleys, the apparatus of strength and defence of cities and towns—gates, ramparts, towers, citadels, &c., immense works which, although inspired solely by the genius of strife and dissension, did not fail nevertheless, in many instances, to combine harmony and variety of detail with the general grandeur of the whole.
Fig. 319.—Tour de Nesle, which occupied the site of the Exchange on the banks of the Seine, Paris.
(From an Engraving of the Seventeenth Century.)
We may cite, as examples of architecture purely feudal, the castles of Coucy ([Fig. 317]), Vincennes ([Fig. 318]), Pierrefonds, the old Louvre, the Bastille, the Tour de Nesle ([Fig. 319]), the Palais de Justice, Plessis-les-Tours, &c.; and as specimens of the fortified town in the Middle Ages, Avignon and the city of Carcassonne. Let us add that Aigues-Mortes, in Provence; Narbonne, Thann (Haut-Rhin), Vendôme, Villeneuve-le-Roi, Moulins, Moret ([Fig. 320]), Provins ([Fig. 321]), afford yet again the most characteristic remains of analogous fortifications.