The city was sleeping.

One by one the lights went out in the windows, and the lighthouses shone red in the darkness, which was quite blue above us and glittering with myriads of twinkling stars.

We could not see the ocean, but we could hear and smell it, and the breakers that lashed the walls flung drops of foam over us through the big apertures of the machicolations.
In one place, between the wall and the city houses, a quantity of cannon-balls are piled up in a ditch.

From that point you can see these words written on the second floor of one of the dwellings: "Chateaubriand was born here." Further on, the wall ends at the foot of a tower called Quiquengrogne; like its sister, La Generale, it is high, broad, and imposing, and is swelled in the middle like a hyperbola.
Though they are as good as new and absolutely intact, these towers would no doubt be improved if they lost some of their battlements in the sea and if ivy spread its kindly leaves over their tops.

Indeed, do not monuments grow greater through recollection, like men and like passions?
And are they not completed by death?
We entered the castle.