Emerging from the few yards of obscurity, we were again on the bank of the rapid Rhone, the frontier fortress of Pierre Châtel crowning the high grand cliff opposite, and before us the light suspension bridge gracefully crossing the river, uniting Savoy to France. Half way up the cliff side and imbedded in it, a picturesque object among trees and briars which spring round, is a loopholed wall flanked by two low towers, the private entrance to the fort, to which conducts a stair cut in the living rock. Arrived at the bridge, two stupid Savoy douaniers detained us twenty minutes ere they could understand our non-possession of receipts for horse-duty, taken from us when the money was returned. On the French shore, the men said, that being a festival, they could not tell whether Monsieur would or would not descend from his pavilion to give the acquit à caution. We observed that, if that were the case, he would do well to build an inn. The old gentleman appeared on his terrace shrugging his shoulders in sign of impatience, but at last thought proper to come down, and the horses being measured and the fifty-five francs paid, we were allowed to ride on, having lost an hour.
Pierre Châtel, now a fortress, was once a fortified monastery, raised by Amedée the Sixth, in the fourteenth century, who founded the order of the collar of Savoy, now named of the Annonciade, the Chartreuse of Pierre Châtel serving as chapel and place of assembly for the knights of the order. It was only when Bresse and Bugey had been ceded by Charles Emmanuel to Henry the Fourth of France, that the meetings of the knights of the order were transferred to Montmeillan, and not very long since the armorial bearings of those received during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were still hung in one of the vast halls.
The road passing from the bridge beneath the crag on which the fortress stands, though quitting the Rhone here, continues very beautiful as far as Bellay, bold in the distance and wooded near,--but the hills are frequent and fatiguing, and the last the worst, as the town is perched on a pinnacle. The miserable inn is on the Place, and the window of our bedroom looked on the closed office of the notary Peytel. You may remember that the 31st of October twelvemonth, driving home in his cabriolet from Bourg, to obtain sole command of her fortune, he murdered his young wife, having first shot the servant, (a man of irreproachable character,) as on him was to lie the weight of the crime. The story Peytel told was at first believed, but his forgetfulness had left his servant's still loaded pistols on his person, and his guilt came strangely to light. His fellow notaries, not liking the stain of an execution on their brotherhood, drew up a petition in his favour. It appears that notwithstanding his double murder, he excited sympathy, and himself believed in the possibility of pardon; and bearing out the assertion "that all the world is a stage and the men merely players," to obtain a last dramatic effect he embraced the gaoler's wife ere he went to execution, and bade her mark that his countenance had undergone no change. The servant, while lighting my fire, said his sister had gone to Paris to petition the king, but had done so in vain, because it was said that Peytel was not a _brave homme_, as this was not his _première fois_. So that, according to Fanchette's code of morality, a man may be a _brave homme_ who commits murder only a _première fois_. Bad dinner and bad beds.