the old royal residences of this part of France, and I suppose it should
have all the honours of my description. As you cross its threshold you
step straight into the sunshine and storm of the French Renaissance. But
it is too rich to describe--I can only pick out the high lights. It must
be premised that in speaking of it as we see it to-day we speak of a
monument unsparingly restored. The work of restoration has been as
ingenious as it is profuse, but it rather chills the imagination. This
is perhaps almost the first thing you feel as you approach the castle
from the streets of the town. These little streets, as they leave the
river, have pretensions to romantic steepness; one of them, indeed,
which resolves itself into a high staircase with divergent wings (the
_escalier monumental_), achieved this result so successfully as to
remind me vaguely--I hardly know why--of the great slope of the Capitol,
beside the Ara Coeli, at Rome. The view of that part of the castle which
figures to-day as the back (it is the only aspect I had seen reproduced)
exhibits the marks of restoration with the greatest assurance. The long
façade, consisting only of balconied windows deeply recessed, erects
itself on the summit of a considerable hill, which gives a fine,
plunging movement to its foundations. The deep niches of the windows are
all aglow with colour. They have been repainted with red and blue,
relieved with gold figures; and each of them looks more like the royal
box at a theatre than like the aperture of a palace dark with memories.
For all this, however, and in spite of the fact that, as in some others
of the châteaux of Touraine (always excepting the colossal Chambord,
which is not in Touraine), there is less vastness than one had expected,
the least hospitable aspect of Blois is abundantly impressive. Here, as
elsewhere, lightness and grace are the keynote; and the recesses of the
windows, with their happy proportions, their sculpture and their colour,
are the hollow sockets of the human ornament. They need the figure of a
Francis I. to complete them, or of a Diane de Poitiers, or even of a
Henry III. The stand of this empty gilt cage emerges from a bed of light
verdure which has been allowed to mass itself there and which
contributes
[Illustration: BLOIS--THE CHÂTEAU]
to the springing look of the walls; while on the right it joins the most
modern portion of the castle, the building erected, on foundations of
enormous height and solidity, in 1635, by Gaston d'Orléans. This fine
frigid mansion--the proper view of it is from the court within--is one
of the masterpieces of François Mansard, whom a kind providence did not
allow to make over the whole palace in the superior manner of his
superior age. That had been a part of Gaston's plan--he was a blunderer
born, and this precious project was worthy of him. This execution of it
would surely have been one of the great misdeeds of history. Partially
performed, the misdeed is not altogether to be regretted; for as one
stands in the court of the castle and lets one's eye wander from the
splendid wing of Francis I.--which is the last word of free and joyous
invention--to the ruled lines and blank spaces of the ponderous pavilion
of Mansard, one makes one's reflections upon the advantage, in even the
least personal of the arts, of having something to say, and upon the
stupidity of a taste which had ended by becoming an aggregation of
negatives. Gaston's wing, taken by itself, has much of the _bel air_
which was to belong to the architecture of Louis XIV.; but, taken in
contrast to its flowering, laughing, living neighbour, it marks the
difference between inspiration and calculation. We scarcely grudge it
its place, however, for it adds a price to the rest of the pile.
We have entered the court, by the way, by jumping over the walls. The
more orthodox method is to follow a modern terrace which leads to the
left, from the side of the edifice that I began by speaking of, and
passes round, ascending, to a little square on a considerably higher
level, a square not, like the rather prosaic space on which the back (as
I have called it) looks out, a thoroughfare. This small empty _place_,
oblong in form, at once bright and quiet, and which ought to be
grass-grown, offers an excellent setting to the entrance-front of the
palace--the wing of Louis XII. The restoration here has been lavish; but
it was perhaps but an inevitable reaction against the injuries, still
more lavish, by which the unfortunate building had long been
overwhelmed. It had fallen into a state of ruinous neglect, relieved
only by the misuse proceeding from successive generations of soldiers,
for whom its charming chambers served as barrack-room. Whitewashed,
mutilated, dishonoured, the castle of Blois may be said to have escaped
simply with its life. This is the history of Amboise as well, and is to
a certain extent the history of Chambord. Delightful, at any rate, was
the refreshed façade of Louis XII. as I stood and looked at it one
bright September morning. In that soft, clear, merry light of Touraine,
everything shows, everything speaks. Charming are the taste, the happy
proportions, the colour of this beautiful front, to which the new
feeling for a purely domestic architecture--an architecture of security
and tranquillity, in which art could indulge itself--gave an air of
youth and gladness. It is true that for a long time to come the castle
of Blois was neither very safe nor very quiet; but its dangers came from
within, from the evil passions of its inhabitants, and not from siege or
invasion. The front of Louis XII. is of red brick, crossed here and
there with purple; and the purple slate of the high roof, relieved with
chimneys beautifully treated and with the embroidered caps of pinnacles
and arches, with the porcupine of Louis, the ermine and the festooned
rope which formed the devices of Anne of Brittany--the tone of this
decorative roof carries out the mild glow of the wall. The wide, fair
windows open as if they had expanded to let in the rosy dawn of the
Renaissance. Charming, for that matter, are the windows of all the
châteaux of Touraine, with their squareness corrected (as it is not in
the Tudor architecture) by the curve of the upper corners, which gives
this line the look, above the expressive aperture, of a pencilled
eyebrow. The low door of this front is crowned by a high, deep niche, in
which, under a splendid canopy, stiffly astride of a stiffly-draped
charger, sits in profile an image of the good King Louis. Good as he had
been--the father of his people, as he was called (I believe he remitted
various taxes)--he was not good enough to pass muster at the Revolution;
and the effigy I have just described is no more than a reproduction of
the primitive statue demolished at that period.
Pass beneath it into the court, and the sixteenth century closes round
you. It is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces
of an age in which human passions lay very near the surface seem to peep
out at you from the windows, from the balconies, from the thick foliage
of the sculpture. The portion of the wing of Louis XII. that fronts
toward the court is supported on a deep arcade. On your right is the
wing erected by Francis I., the reverse of the mass of building which
you see on approaching the castle. This exquisite, this extravagant,
this transcendent piece of architecture is the most joyous utterance of
the French Renaissance. It is covered with an embroidery of sculpture in
which every detail is worthy of the hand of a goldsmith. In the middle
of it, or rather a little to the left, rises the famous winding
staircase (plausibly, but I believe not religiously, restored), which
even the ages which most misused it must vaguely have admired. It forms
a kind of chiselled cylinder, with wide interstices, so that the stairs
are open to the air. Every inch of this structure, of its balconies, its
pillars, its great central columns, is wrought over with lovely images,
strange and ingenious devices, prime among which is the great heraldic
salamander of Francis I. The salamander is everywhere at Blois--over the
chimneys, over the doors, on the walls. This whole quarter of the castle
bears the stamp of that eminently pictorial prince. The running cornice
along the top of the front is like an unfolded, an elongated bracelet.
The windows of the attic are like shrines for saints. The gargoyles, the
medallions, the statuettes, the festoons are like the elaboration of
some precious cabinet rather than the details of a building exposed to
the weather and to the ages. In the interior there is a profusion of
restoration, and it is all restoration in colour. This has been,
evidently, a work of great energy and cost, but it will easily strike
you as overdone. The universal freshness is a discord, a false note; it
seems to light up the dusky past with an unnatural glare. Begun in the
reign of Louis Philippe, this terrible process--the more terrible always
the better case you conceive made out for it--has been carried so far
that there is now scarcely a square inch of the interior that preserves
the colour of the past. It is true that the place had been so coated
over with modern abuse that something was needed to keep it alive; it is
only perhaps a pity the clever doctors, not content with saving its
life, should have undertaken to restore its bloom. The love of
consistency, in such a business, is a dangerous lure. All the old
apartments have been rechristened, as it were; the geography of the
castle has been re-established. The guard-rooms, the bedrooms, the
closets, the oratories have recovered their identity. Every spot
connected with the murder of the Duke of Guise is pointed out by a
small, shrill boy, who takes you from room to room and who has learned
his lesson in perfection. The place is full of Catherine de'Medici, of
Henry III., of memories, of ghosts, of echoes, of possible evocations
and revivals. It is covered with crimson and gold. The fireplaces and
the ceilings are magnificent; they look like expensive "sets" at the
grand opera.
I should have mentioned that below, in the court, the front of the wing
of Gaston d'Orléans faces you as you enter, so that the place is a
course of French history. Inferior in beauty and grace to the other
portions of the castle, the wing is yet a nobler monument than the
memory of Gaston deserves. The second of the sons of Henry IV.--who was
no more fortunate as a father than as a husband--younger brother of
Louis XIII. and father of the great Mademoiselle, the most celebrated,
most ambitious, most self-complacent and most unsuccessful _fille à
marier_ in French history, passed in enforced retirement at the castle
of Blois the close of a life of clumsy intrigues against Cardinal
Richelieu, in which his rashness was only equalled by his pusillanimity
and his ill-luck by his inaccessibility to correction, and which, after
so many follies and shames, was properly summed up in the
project--begun, but not completed--of demolishing the beautiful
habitation of his exile in order to erect a better one. With Gaston
d'Orléans, however, who lived there without dignity, the history of the
Château de Blois declines. Its interesting period is that of the wars of
religion. It was the chief residence of Henry III., and the scene of the
principal events of his depraved and dramatic rule. It has been restored
more than enough, as I have said, by architects and decorators; the
visitor, as he moves through its empty rooms, which are at once
brilliant and ill-lighted (they have not been refurnished), undertakes a
little restoration of his own. His imagination helps itself from the
things that remain; he tries to see the life of the sixteenth century in
its form and dress--its turbulence, its passions, its loves and hates,
its treacheries, falsities, sincerities, faith, its latitude of personal
development, its presentation of the whole nature, its nobleness of
costume, charm of speech, splendour of taste, unequalled
picturesqueness. The picture is full of movement, of contrasted light
and darkness, full altogether of abominations. Mixed up with them all is
the great theological motive, so that the drama wants little to make it
complete. What episode was ever more perfect--looked at as a dramatic
occurrence--than the murder of the Duke of Guise? The insolent
prosperity of the victim; the weakness, the vices, the terrors, of the
author of the deed; the perfect execution of the plot; the accumulation
of horror in what followed it--render it, as a crime, one of the classic
things.
But we must not take the Château de Blois too hard: I went there, after
all, by way of entertainment. If among these sinister memories your
visit should threaten to prove a tragedy, there is an excellent way of
removing the impression. You may treat yourself at Blois to a very
cheerful afterpiece. There is a charming industry practised there, and
practised in charming conditions. Follow the bright little quay down the
river till you get quite out of the town and reach the point where the
road beside the Loire becomes sinuous and attractive, turns the corner
of diminutive headlands and makes you wonder what is beyond. Let not
your curiosity induce you, however, to pass by a modest white villa
which overlooks the stream, enclosed in a fresh little court; for here
dwells an artist--an artist in faience. There is no sort of sign, and
the place looks peculiarly private. But if you ring at the gate you will
not be turned away. You will, on the contrary, be ushered upstairs into
a parlour--there is nothing resembling a shop--encumbered with specimens
of remarkably handsome pottery. The ware is of the best, a careful
reproduction of old forms, colours, devices; and the master of the
establishment is one of those completely artistic types that are often
found in France. His reception is as friendly as his work is ingenious;
and I think it is not too much to say that you like the work better
because he has produced it. His vases, cups and jars, lamps, platters,
_plaques_, with their brilliant glaze, their innumerable figures, their
family likeness and wide variations, are scattered through his occupied
rooms; they serve at once as his stock-in-trade and as household
ornament. As we all know, this is an age of prose, of machinery, of
wholesale production, of coarse and hasty processes. But one brings away
from the establishment of the very intelligent M. Ulysse the sense of a
less eager activity and a greater search for perfection. He has but a
few workmen and he gives them plenty of time. The place makes a little
vignette, leaves an impression--the quiet white house in its garden on
the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the
ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It struck me as an effort
Mr. Ruskin might have inspired and Mr. William Morris--though that be
much to say--have forgiven.
[Illustration]
Chapter v
[Chambord]
The second time I went to Blois I took a carriage for Chambord, and came
back by the Château de Cheverny and the forest of Russy--a charming
little expedition, to which the beauty of the afternoon (the finest in a
rainy season that was spotted with bright days) contributed not a
little. To go to Chambord you cross the Loire, leave it on one side and
strike away through a country in which salient features become less and
less numerous and which at last has no other quality than a look of
intense and peculiar rurality--the characteristic, even when it be not
the charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This is not the
appearance of wildness, for it goes with great cultivation; it is simply
the presence of the delving, drudging, economising peasant. But it is a
deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape; not, as in
England, a landlord's. On the way to Chambord you enter the flat and
sandy Sologne. The wide horizon opens out like a great _potager_,
without interruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a long,
low stretch of wood. There is an absence of hedges, fences, signs of
property; everything is absorbed in the general flatness--the patches of
vineyard, the scattered cottages, the villages, the children (planted
and staring and almost always pretty), the women in the fields, the
white caps, the faded blouses, the big sabots. At the end of an hour's
drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend
double that time), I passed through a sort of gap in a wall which does
duty as the gateway of the domain of a proscribed pretender. I followed
a straight avenue through a disfeatured park--the park of Chambord has
twenty-one miles of circumference; a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy
plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and
is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so many spots in
France, the traveller perceives that he is in a land of revolutions.
Nevertheless its great extent and the long perspective of its avenues
give this frugal shrubbery a certain state; just as its shabbiness
places it in agreement with one of the strongest impressions awaiting
you. You pursue one of these long perspectives a proportionate time, and
at last you see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise apparently
out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide moats that formerly
surrounded it has, in vulgar parlance, let it down and given it a
monstrous over-crowned air that is at the same time a magnificent
Orientalism. The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables, the
lanterns, the chimneys look more like the spires of a city than the
salient points of a single building. You emerge from the avenue and
find yourself at the foot of an enormous fantastic mass. Chambord has a
strange mixture of society and solitude. A little village clusters
within view of its liberal windows, and a couple of inns near by offer
entertainment to pilgrims. These things of course are incidents of the
political proscription which hangs its thick veil over the place.
Chambord is truly royal--royal in its great scale, its grand air, its
indifference to common considerations. If a cat may look at a king, a
tavern may look at a palace. I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary
structure as much as if I had been a legitimist; and indeed there is
something interesting in any monument of a great system, any bold
presentation of a tradition.
You leave your vehicle at one of the inns, which are very decent and
tidy and in which every one is very civil, as if in this latter respect
the neighbourhood of a Court veritably set the fashion, and you proceed
across the grass and the gravel to a small door, a door infinitely
subordinate and conferring no title of any kind on those who enter it.
Here you ring a bell, which a highly respectable person answers (a
person perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old regime), after which
she ushers you over a vestibule into an inner court. Perhaps the
strongest impression I got at Chambord came to me as I stood in this
court. The woman who admitted me did not come with me; I was to find my
guide somewhere else. The specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round
towers. There are, I believe, no less than eight of them, placed at each
angle of the inner and outer square of buildings; for the castle is in
the form of a larger structure which encloses a smaller one. One of
these towers stood before me in the court; it seemed to fling its
shadow
[Illustration: CHAMBORD]
over the place; while above, as I looked up, the pinnacles and gables,
the enormous chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place was
empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extraordinary projections,
were thrown across the clear grey surfaces. One felt that the whole
thing was monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young man in a
rather shabby livery, and led me about with a mixture of the impatient
and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to
understand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I do not even desire
to do so; for it is much more entertaining to think of it, as you can so
easily, as an irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within it is a
wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic barrack. The exiled
prince to whom it gives its title has not the means to keep up four
hundred rooms; he contents himself with preserving the huge outside. The
repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb a large part of his
revenue. The great feature of the interior is the celebrated double
staircase, rising straight through the building, with two courses of
steps, so that people may ascend and descend without meeting. This
staircase is a truly majestic piece of humour; it gives you the note, as
it were, of Chambord. It opens on each landing to a vast guard-room, in
four arms, radiations of the winding shaft. My guide made me climb to
the great open-work lantern which, springing from the roof at the
termination of the rotund staircase (surmounted here by a smaller one),
forms the pinnacle of the bristling crown of the pile. This lantern is
tipped with a huge _fleur-de-lis_ in stone--the only one, I believe,
that the Revolution did not succeed in pulling down. Here, from narrow
windows, you look over the wide, flat country and the tangled,
melancholy park, with the rotation of its straight avenues. Then you
walk about the roof in a complication of galleries, terraces, balconies,
through the multitude of chimneys and gables. This roof, which is in
itself a sort of castle in the air, has an extravagant, fabulous
quality, and with its profuse ornamentation--the salamander of Francis
I. is a constant motive--its lonely pavements, its sunny niches, the
balcony that looks down over the closed and grass-grown main entrance, a
strange, half-sad, half-brilliant charm. The stonework is covered with
fine mould. There are places that reminded me of some of those quiet
mildewed corners of courts and terraces into which the traveller who
wanders through the Vatican looks down from neglected windows. They show
you two or three furnished rooms, with Bourbon portraits, hideous
tapestries from the ladies of France, a collection of the toys of the
_enfant du miracle_, all military and of the finest make. "Tout cela
fonctionne," the guide said of these miniature weapons; and I wondered,
if he should take it into his head to fire off his little cannon, how
much harm the Comte de Chambord would do.