The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the
female prebends of Chateau-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters,
filled a considerable place in the history of the Comte from the
Crusades downwards, and known as _les Fols de Chissey_, the brave[29]
and dashing, and witty De Chisseys--qualities which no doubt were
possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the
Val d'Amour.
As we drew nearer to Besancon, each turn of the small streams, and each
low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Caesar's
'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a
battle, there was always a _proximus collis_ for the conquered party to
retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for
the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of
grass-land between their foot and the stream.
The Frenchman knew his Caesar, but he put that general in the fourth
century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily
detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the
indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the
nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of
small boys.
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