The castle is fine, and its stables are the best I have ever seen either in France or Italy, vaulted, and big enough to contain two hundred horses. The city is strongly Catholic, and it is populous, finely built, and busy. Since the day after we quitted Augsburg we could reckon the cost of man and horse to be four livres a day, and forty sous for a footman at the lowest. Here we found curtains in the chambers, and though there were no testers to the beds, everything belonging thereto was exceedingly well found. They clean the floors with sawdust boiled. Everywhere in these parts they slice the radishes and turnips with as great care and attention as if they were threshing corn. Seven or eight men, each one with a big knife in his hand, will set to work on the same with regular stroke, as they work in our wine-presses. These vegetables, like their great-headed cabbages, are salted for winter use, and they plant them in their fields in the country, rather than their gardens, and harvest them. The duke, who was at this time in the city, has to wife the sister of M. de Lorene,79 and has by her two sons, big boys, and a daughter. The two brothers live also in the city, but they, together with the ladies and all the rest, were gone hunting the day we were there. On the Friday morning we went our way, and, as we passed through the duke’s forests, we saw countless red deer in flocks like sheep. We went in one stretch to Kinief, an insignificant village, about six leagues distant.

The Jesuits, who sway the government mightily in this country, have made a movement which has roused against them the hatred of the people;80 to wit, that they have put constraint on the priests to make them send away their concubines under severe penalties. To judge from the complaints made thereanent, it appears that this licence was formerly granted to them so freely that they treated it as a legitimate thing; moreover, they are now about to address a remonstrance to the duke. It was here for the first time in Germany that they served us eggs on a fast-day in any other way than quartered in a salad. At table we had, amongst the silver, some wooden goblets made of pipe staff and hooped. A young lady, the daughter of a gentleman of this village, sent some wine to M. de Montaigne. Early on the Saturday we set out and, after seeing on our right hand the river Yser and a great lake81 lying at the foot of the Bavarian mountains, and ascending by road for an hour, we came to the summit of the pass, where we found an inscription, recording how some hundred years ago a duke of Bavaria had cleft this way through the rocks. Then we plunged straight into the bowels of the Alps by an easy, convenient, and charmingly made road, the fine calm weather being greatly in our favour. As we descended from the summit aforesaid, we passed a very lovely lake82 about a Gascon league in length and the same in width, surrounded by high and inaccessible mountains; and, keeping always the same road at the base of the mountains, we came now and again upon small pleasant level meadows with dwellings thereon, and arrived without halting at Mittevol,83 a little Bavarian village, pleasantly placed on the bank of the Yser. Here we ate the first chestnuts we had seen in Germany, served raw. In the hostelry there is a hot room, in which travellers go to get sweated for a charge of a batz and a half. I myself went to see it, while Messieurs were at supper, and found there several Germans, who were being cupped and bled. On the morrow, Sunday, October 23rd, we set forth on the same path amongst the mountains, and soon came to a house and a gate which barred the passage. This was the entrance to the country of Tirol, belonging to the Archduke of Austria, and after travelling three leagues we arrived in time for dinner at Seefelden,84 a small village with an abbey standing in a very pleasant site.

The church there is a very fair one, and famous for a miracle. In 1384 a certain man, whose name has been preserved there by adequate and unbroken record, refused to content himself on Easter day with the Eucharist as offered to the people, and demanded to receive that which was wont to be given to the priesthood alone. While he had this in his mouth the earth beneath him opened and swallowed him up to the neck, and while he held on for a moment to the corner of the altar the priest withdrew the Host from his mouth. They still exhibit the hole covered with an iron grating, the altar which bears the impress of this man’s fingers, and the Host of a reddish hue like drops of blood. We found there, written in recent Latin, an account how a certain Tiroler, who had swallowed some days before a bit of flesh which stuck in his throat and could neither be swallowed nor vomited, made a vow and repaired to this church, where he was healed forthwith. On quitting this place we found on the high land several nice villages, and after half-an-hour’s descent, we perceived at the foot of the hill a fair hamlet finely placed, and high above it on a cloven and seemingly inaccessible rock, a magnificent castle commanding the road we had come down, which is narrow and cut in the mountain side. The road is scarcely wide enough to let pass a common cart, as in divers other places amongst these mountains, so much so that the carters hereabout are wont to reduce the size of their carts a foot at the least. Beyond this we came upon a valley of great extent through which the Inn flows to join the Danube at Vienna. In Latin it is called Œnus. It is five or six days’ journey by water from Insprug to Vienna. To M. de Montaigne this valley seemed the fairest country he had ever seen, now narrowing itself with the mountains pressing close on it, now spreading out wide on our side of the river—the left—and forming a space meet for cultivation on the very slopes of the mountains, which were not too steep for this, and now expanding on the other bank. Next it would reveal to the eye platforms on two or three different levels, one above the other, and everywhere fair houses of noblemen and churches. And all this in a country shut and walled in on every side by mountains of immeasurable height. On our side of the valley we espied in a rocky place a crucifix, set up where no man could have gone save by being let down by cords from above.85 They say that the Emperor Maximilian, grandfather of Charles V., lost himself one day while hunting in these mountains; and, as a witness of the danger he escaped, he erected this image, a story which is recorded by a painting in the hall of the Arquebusiers at Augsburg. We arrived that evening, after travelling three leagues, at Insprug.86