Miniatures of French history

It was the women who made Marseilles, and through women did there first come to this land writing and the living record of heroes, and wine, and building with stone, and a knowl...

He felt, as his mind so wandered, a strong horse beneath him, and he was upon that western road which came up to the western gate of Amiens, straight from the Beauvaisis. He was...

Now one day passed and another, and nothing was done; but at night each of the hosts could see the fires of the other, murky in the damp autumn weather, red against the low mist...

It had so happened that in this same week of Candle Mass the melting of the snows up in the Morvan, under a breath of milder wind, had swollen the Seine high, and the flood of i...

William the Bastard of Falaise, thus standing in the ante-chamber of the presence by the chapel door, was taller than his servitors, yet he looked short, so round and bull-like...

Then in one critical moment (it was just three o’clock) the desperation of those cries turned into a very different roar of cheers, and it was apparent that the wall was gained....

On this side Jordan, over against the Saracen camp of cavalry (with its white tents marking the as yet unburnt sward), the land that rose hundreds of feet up to the other limest...

So he spoke, as the evening lengthened, after the time of vespers, upon that Thursday, the 2nd of July. No one believed him. Though none said it in his presence, he felt it in t...

One day in that good thirteenth century, when all was new, amid the new white buildings, upon the new ordered roads, when even the grass was new (for it was Pentecost), the king...

As the last man said this, the youngest of the Templars there present showed in his face at once so great a terror and so great a pain that the speaker sneered. That young man w...

They had marched, I say, through the night. Richemont the Constable, and Dunois with him: Dunois, who had been through all those battles with Joan, and was now to see their last...

The child was married to a child-wife, the daughter of the King of Scotland, Mary Stuart. It was she, in part, already masterful, that had called to that Court her mother’s brot...

Twelve pavilions or lodges stood in formal order round behind the main building, the lawns between. They were habitations for men and women favoured of the king. Before one of t...

It was Thursday, the 16th of October, in the palace of Fontainebleau. The Court of France had withdrawn thither for the autumn’s hunting. Its concern was with its own splendour...

By the year 1912--so oddly do human things turn about in the short unit of one lifetime--his career, his verse, his rhetoric, his perpetual insistence, had become a sort of inst...