Excerpt from The Chevaliers of France: From the Crusaders to the Marechals of Louis XIV

It wanted an hour or two perhaps of sunset, on a lowering September evening, when a small group of men and horses were assembled on an elevated knoll, commanding an extensive view of the country, which at that period was mostly covered by unbroken forest, although a large and seemingly much-travelled road could be seen at intervals, for a distance of many miles, with here and there the dark square outlines of a church-tower, or of some castellated mansion, distinctly visible above the trees, among which the causeway wandered devious. All else was wild and savage. The huge beech forest, a portion of the great wood of Ardennes, which, little circumscribed in that day of its limits as described by the great Roman, swept off in solid masses to the eastward, to join beyond the Rhine the vaster solitudes of the Hercynian forest - clothed every hill and hollow for many a league around with dense and shadowy woodland.

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