'At an inn in this village (St.Germains en Lay) is an host who treats all the greate persons in princely lodgings for furniture and plate, but they pay well for it, as I have don.

Indeede the entertainment is very splendid, and not unreasonable, considering the excellent manner of dressing their meate, and of the service.

Here are many debauches and excessive revellings, as being out of all noise and observance.' Wherever he visited the royal gardens and villas, or those of the great nobles and other magnates, he writes rapturously of what he saw.

Sometimes, though, his joyous optimism rather leads one to doubt the quality of his taste, as when, writing of Richelieu's villa at Ruell, he says 'This leads to the Citroniere, which is a noble conserve of all those rarities; and at the end of it is the Arch of Constantine, painted on a wall in oyle, as large as the real one at Rome, so well don that even a man skilled in painting may mistake it for stone and sculpture.

The skie and hills which seem to be between the arches are so naturall that swallows and other birds, thinking to fly through, have dashed themselves against the wall.