In legend, as well as in history, Berzé has played its part. A Seigneur of the castle, it is said, piqued by a morbid curiosity, shut up in the lowest donjon an ox and a man, that he might know which would die first. Tradition avers that his passion for knowledge remained unsatisfied, since both died together. In 1315, Geoffrey de Berzé, tiring of his diurnal occupations, namely, hunting in the morning and beating his servants at night, raised an impious hand against, and let it descend upon, the archdeacon of Mâcon, who, through the chapter, brought a complaint before parliament; with the result that Geoffrey and his successors were condemned, in perpetuity, to burn, every year, a candle of fifty pounds weight in the choir of the cathedral of Mâcon. This fine was still being paid, up to the close of the eighteenth century, when it was customary to set forth in bad verses, on a card at the foot of the chandelier that carried the candle, an explanation of this "amende honorable."
Berzé-le Chatel was prominent, too, in those bloody wars of the Armagnacs and Bourguignons, which, for more than thirty years, drenched the stricken land of France in the blood of her bravest men. Later on, it fell into the hands of the Dauphin, afterwards Charles VII., who, by magnificent promises, succeeded in inducing the governor to betray the Duke of Burgundy. It did not remain long in the hands of the French; for local knowledge of the subterranean passages soon effected its recapture by the Burgundians, who, to the terror of the French soldiers, seemed to have arisen mysteriously from the earth. The last siege of the castle took place in 1591, when the Duc de Namours after making a breach in the walls with artillery, captured it for the Huguenots, whose attacks it had resisted hitherto.[94]
A path leads off the road, down through the vines, and up to the cottages at the castle foot, where you can climb, by another steep stony way, to the great, double-towered gate, guarded by machicolations and portcullis, and bearing the coat-of-arms of the house of Berzé. Within is a lawn, encircling a little pond, and an ivied avenue of ancient firs, whose sombre hues set off, in summer, the vivid scarlet of the geraniums, and the soft tints of the laburnum. Crossing this grassy, stoutly-walled terrace, you pass beneath another fortified gate, where scarlet creepers cling, to the court yard of the castle, bright with beds of fuschias, and masses of ball-shaped white flowers. Shade is given by a great walnut-tree; and here, too, is an adjunct, indispensable now, as in mediæval times,—a well. The façade of the house shows, upon its soft, gray stone, the typical cupid's bow windows of the fifteenth century. Across the dwarf wall, the view extends away, eastward, over a lower terrace, to the trimly-kept kitchen gardens, and ancient out-buildings; westward to the vine-clad hills. This is a castle of enchantment, in whose flowery courts one can recall visions of the purple past that has floated over the towers of Berzé.
Leaving the castle, and passing down the great double avenue of walnuts and sycamores which connect it with the romanesque church of the Village of Berzé, I stood, looking at the curious staircase that leads, between roofed-in buttresses, to the church tower. An old woman passed me, carrying, by a yoke on her shoulders, two large buckets of water.
"Whose castle is this, Madame?"
"This is Monsieur le Comte de Milly's, monsieur," and she bowed slightly; whether to me or to the great name, I do not know. Two jets of water splashed over her sabots.
We went our ways; she looking down at her wet feet, and I thinking of the Marquis of Carabas—not by reason of any legendary connection between that potentate and the château of Berzé, but because the turn of her phrase had recalled my first reading of "Puss in Boots."