romantic houses in France and of an episode that must have counted as
one of the most agreeable in his uncomfortable career. The eighteenth
century contented itself with general epithets; and when Jean-Jacques
has said that Chenonceaux was a "beau lieu," he thinks himself absolved
from further characterisation. We later sons of time have, both for our
pleasure and our pain, invented the fashion of special terms, and I am
afraid that even common decency obliges me to pay some larger tribute
than this to the architectural gem of Touraine. Fortunately I can
discharge my debt with gratitude. In going from Tours you leave the
valley of the Loire and enter that of the Cher, and at the end of about
an hour you see the turrets of the castle on your right, among the
trees, down in the meadows, beside the quiet little river. The station
and the village are about ten minutes' walk from the château, and the
village contains a very tidy inn, where, if you are not in too great a
hurry to commune with the shades of the royal favourite and the jealous
queen, you will perhaps stop and order a dinner to be ready for you in
the evening. A straight, tall avenue leads to the grounds of the castle;
what I owe to exactitude compels me to add that it is crossed by the
railway-line. The place is so arranged, however, that the château need
know nothing of passing trains--which pass, indeed, though the grounds
are not large, at a very sufficient distance. I may add that the trains
throughout this part of France have a noiseless, desultory, dawdling,
almost stationary quality, which makes them less of an offence than
usual. It was a Sunday afternoon and the light was yellow save under the
trees of the avenue, where, in spite of the waning of September, it was
duskily green. Three or four peasants, in festal attire, were strolling
about. On a bench at the beginning of the avenue sat a man with two
women. As I advanced with my companions he rose, after a sudden stare,
and approached me with a smile in which (to be Johnsonian for a moment)
certitude was mitigated by modesty and eagerness was embellished with
respect. He came toward me with a salutation that I had seen before, and
I am happy to say that after an instant I ceased to be guilty of the
brutality of not knowing where. There was only one place in the world
where people smile like that, only one place where the art of salutation
has that perfect grace. This excellent creature used to crook his arm,
[Illustration: CHENONCEAUX]
in Venice, when I stepped into my gondola; and I now laid my hand on
that member with the familiarity of glad recognition; for it was only
surprise that had kept me even for a moment from accepting the genial
Francesco as an ornament of the landscape of Touraine. What on
earth--the phrase is the right one--was a Venetian gondolier doing at
Chenonceaux? He had been brought from Venice, gondola and all, by the
mistress of the charming house, to paddle about on the Cher. Our meeting
was affectionate, though there was a kind of violence in seeing him so
far from home. He was too well dressed, too well fed; he had grown
stout, and his nose had the tinge of good claret. He remarked that the
life of the household to which he had the honour to belong was that of a
_casa regia_; which must have been a great change for poor Checco, whose
habits in Venice were not regal. However, he was the sympathetic Checco
still; and for five minutes after I left him I thought less about the
little pleasure-house by the Cher than about the palaces of the
Adriatic.
But attention was not long in coming round to the charming structure
that presently rose before us. The pale yellow front of the château, the
small scale of which is at first a surprise, rises beyond a considerable
court, at the entrance of which a massive and detached round tower, with
a turret on its brow (a relic of the building that preceded the actual
villa), appears to keep guard. This court is not enclosed--or is
enclosed at least only by the gardens, portions of which are at present
in process of radical readjustment. Therefore, though Chenonceaux has no
great height, its delicate façade stands up boldly enough. This façade,
one of the most finished things in Touraine, consists of two storeys,
surmounted by an attic which, as so often in the buildings of the
French Renaissance, is the richest part of the house. The high-pitched
roof contains three windows of beautiful design, covered with
embroidered caps and flowering into crocketed spires. The window above
the door is deeply niched; it opens upon a balcony made in the form of a
double pulpit--one of the most charming features of the front.
Chenonceaux is not large, as I say, but into its delicate compass is
packed a great deal of history--history which differs from that of
Amboise and Blois in being of the private and sentimental kind. The
echoes of the place, faint and far as they are to-day, are not
political, but personal. Chenonceaux dates, as a residence, from the
year 1515, when the shrewd Thomas Bohier, a public functionary who had
grown rich in handling the finances of Normandy and had acquired the
estate from a family which, after giving it many feudal lords, had
fallen into poverty, erected the present structure on the foundations of
an old mill. The design is attributed, with I know not what justice, to
Pierre Nepveu, _alias_ Trinqueau, the audacious architect of Chambord.
On the death of Bohier the house passed to his son, who, however, was
forced, under cruel pressure, to surrender it to the Crown in
compensation for a so-called deficit in the official accounts of this
rash parent and predecessor. Francis I. held the place till his death;
but Henry II., on ascending the throne, presented it out of hand to that
mature charmer, the admired of two generations, Diana of Poitiers. Diana
enjoyed it till the death of her protector; but when this event occurred
the widow of the monarch, who had been obliged to submit in silence, for
years, to the ascendency of a rival, took the most pardonable of all the
revenges with which the name of Catherine de'Medici is associated and
turned her out of doors. Diana was not in want of refuges, Catherine
went through the form of giving her Chaumont in exchange; but there was
only one Chenonceaux. Catherine devoted herself to making the place more
completely unique. The feature that renders it sole of its kind is not
appreciated till you wander round to either side of the house. If a
certain springing lightness is the characteristic of Chenonceaux, if it
bears in every line the aspect of a place of recreation--a place
intended for delicate, chosen pleasures--nothing can confirm this
expression better than the strange, unexpected movement with which, from
behind, it carries itself across the river. The earlier building stands
in the water; it had inherited the foundations of the mill destroyed by
Thomas Bohier. The first step therefore had been taken upon solid piles
of masonry; and the ingenious Catherine--she was a _raffinée_--simply
proceeded to take the others. She continued the piles to the opposite
bank of the Cher, and over them she threw a long, straight gallery of
two tiers. This part of the château, which mainly resembles a house
built upon a bridge and occupying its entire length, is of course the
great curiosity of Chenonceaux. It forms on each floor a charming
corridor, which, within, is illuminated from either side by the
flickering river-light. The architecture of these galleries, seen from
without, is less elegant than that of the main building, but the aspect
of the whole thing is delightful. I have spoken of Chenonceaux as a
"villa," using the word advisedly, for the place is neither a castle nor
a palace. It is a very exceptional villa, but it has the
villa-quality--the look of being intended for life in common. This look
is not at all contradicted by the wing across the Cher, which only
suggests indoor perspectives and intimate pleasures--walks in pairs on
rainy days; games and dances on autumn nights; together with as much as
may be of moonlighted dialogue (or silence) in the course of evenings
more genial still, in the well-marked recesses of windows.
It is safe to say that such things took place there in the last century,
during the kindly reign of Monsieur and Madame Dupin. This period
presents itself as the happiest in the annals of Chenonceaux. I know not
what festive train the great Diana may have led, and my imagination, I
am afraid, is only feebly kindled by the records of the luxurious
pastimes organised on the banks of the Cher by that terrible daughter of
the Medici whose appreciation of the good things of life was perfectly
consistent with a failure to perceive why others should live to enjoy
them. The best society that ever assembled there was collected at
Chenonceaux during the middle of the eighteenth century. This was
surely, in France at least, the age of good society, the period when the
"right people" made every haste to be born in time. Such people must of
course have belonged to the fortunate few--not to the miserable many;
for if a society be large enough to be good, it must also be small
enough. The sixty years that preceded the Revolution were the golden age
of fireside talk and of those amenities that proceed from the presence
of women in whom the social art is both instinctive and acquired. The
women of that period were, above all, good company; the fact is attested
in a thousand documents. Chenonceaux offered a perfect setting to free
conversation; and infinite joyous discourse must have mingled with the
liquid murmur of the Cher. Claude Dupin was not only a great man of
business, but a man of honour and a patron of knowledge; and his wife
was gracious, clever, and wise. They had acquired this famous property
by purchase (from one of the Bourbons, as Chenonceaux, for two centuries
after the death of Catherine de'Medici, remained constantly in princely
hands), and it was transmitted to their son, Dupin de Francueil,
grandfather of Madame George Sand. This lady, in her Correspondence,
lately published, describes a visit that she paid more than thirty years
ago to those members of her family who were still in possession. The
owner of Chenonceaux to-day[a] is the daughter of an Englishman
naturalised in France. But I have wandered far from my story, which is
simply a sketch of the surface of the place. Seen obliquely, from either
side, in combination with its bridge and gallery, the structure is
singular and fantastic, a striking example of a wilful and capricious
conception. Unfortunately all caprices are not so graceful and
successful, and I grudge the honour of this one to the false and
blood-polluted Catherine. (To be exact, I believe the arches of the
bridge were laid by the elderly Diana. It was Catherine, however, who
completed the monument.) Within, the house has been, as usual, restored.
The staircases and ceilings, in all the old royal residences of this
part of France, are the parts that have suffered least; many of them
have still much of the life of the old time about them. Some of the
chambers of Chenonceaux, however, encumbered as they are with modern
detail, derive a sufficiently haunted and suggestive look from the deep
setting of their beautiful windows, which thickens the shadows and makes
dark corners. There is a charming little Gothic chapel, with its apse
hanging over the water, fastened to the left flank of the house. Some of
the upper balconies, which look along the outer face of the gallery and
either up or down the river, are delightful protected nooks. We walked
through the lower gallery to the other bank of the Cher; this fine
apartment appeared to be for the moment a purgatory of ancient
furniture. It terminates rather abruptly; it simply stops, with a blank
wall. There ought, of course, to have been a pavilion here, though I
prefer very much the old defect to any modern remedy. The wall is not so
blank, however, but that it contains a door which opens on a rusty
drawbridge. This drawbridge traverses the small gap which divides the
end of the gallery from the bank of the stream. The house, therefore,
does not literally rest on opposite edges of the Cher, but rests on one
and just fails to rest on the other. The pavilion would have made that
up; but after a moment we ceased to miss this imaginary feature. We
passed the little drawbridge, and wandered awhile beside the river. From
this opposite bank the mass of the château looked more charming than
ever; and the little peaceful, lazy Cher, where two or three men were
fishing in the eventide, flowed under the clear arches and between the
solid pedestals of the part that spanned it, with the softest, vaguest
light on its bosom. This was the right perspective; we were looking
across the river of time. The whole scene was deliciously mild. The moon
came up; we passed back through the gallery and strolled about a little
longer in the gardens. It was very still. I met my old gondolier in the
twilight. He showed me his gondola, but I hated, somehow, to see it
there. I don't like, as the French say, to _mêler les genres_. A gondola
in a little flat French river? The image was not less irritating, if
less injurious, than the spectacle of a steamer in the Grand Canal,
which had driven me away from Venice a year and a half before. We took
our way back to the Bon Laboureur, and waited in the little inn-parlour
for a late train to Tours. We were not impatient, for we had an
excellent dinner to occupy us; and even after we had dined we were still
content to sit awhile and exchange remarks upon the superior
civilisation of France. Where else, at a village inn, should we have
fared so well? Where else should we have sat down to our refreshment
without condescension? There were a couple of countries in which it
would not have been happy for us to arrive hungry, on a Sunday evening,
at so modest an hostelry. At the little inn at Chenonceaux the _cuisine_
was not only excellent, but the service was graceful. We were waited on
by mademoiselle and her mamma; it was so that mademoiselle alluded to
the elder lady as she uncorked for us a bottle of Vouvray mousseux. We
were very comfortable, very genial; we even went so far as to say to
each other that Vouvray mousseux was a delightful wine. From this
opinion indeed one of our trio differed; but this member of the party
had already exposed herself to the charge of being too fastidious by
declining to descend from the carriage at Chaumont and take that
back-stairs view of the castle.
[a] 1884.
[Illustration]
Chapter viii
[Azay-le-Rideau]
Without fastidiousness it was fair to declare on the other hand that the
little inn at Azay-le-Rideau was very bad. It was terribly dirty and it
was in charge of a fat _mégère_ whom the appearance of four trustful
travellers--we were four, with an illustrious fourth, on that
occasion--roused apparently to fury. I attached great importance to this
incongruous hostess, for she uttered the only uncivil words I heard
spoken (in connection with any business of my own) during a tour of some
six weeks in France. Breakfast not at Azay-le-Rideau therefore, too
trustful traveller; or if you do so, be either very meek or very bold.
Breakfast not, save under stress of circumstance; but let no
circumstance whatever prevent your going to see the great house of the
place, which is a fair rival to Chenonceaux. The village lies close to
the gates, though after you pass these gates you leave it well behind. A
little avenue, as at Chenonceaux, leads to the castle,
[Illustration: AZAY-LE-RIDEAU]
making a pretty vista as you approach the sculptured doorway. Azay is a
most perfect and beautiful thing; I should place it third in any list of
the great houses of this part of France in which these houses should be
ranked according to charm. For beauty of detail it comes after Blois and
Chenonceaux, but it comes before Amboise and Chambord. On the other
hand, of course it is inferior in majesty to either of these vast
structures. Like Chenonceaux, it is a watery place, though it is more
meagrely moated than the small château on the Cher. It consists of a
large square _corps de logis_, with a round tower at each angle, rising
out of a somewhat too slumberous pond. The water--the water of the
Indre--surrounds it, but it is only on one side that it bathes its feet
in the moat. On one of the others stretches a little terrace, treated as
a garden, and in front prevails a wide court formed by a wing which, on
the right, comes forward. This front, covered with sculptures, is of the
richest, stateliest effect. The court is approached by a bridge over the
pond, and the house would reflect itself in this wealth of water if the
water were a trifle less opaque. But there is a certain stagnation--it
affects more, senses than one--about the picturesque pools of Azay. On
the hither side of the bridge is a garden overshadowed by fine old
sycamores--a garden shut in by greenhouses and by a fine last-century
gateway flanked with twin lodges. Beyond the château and the standing
waters behind it is a so-called _parc_, which, however, it must be
confessed, has little of park-like beauty. The old houses--a large
number--remain in France; but the old timber does not remain, and the
denuded aspect of the few acres that surround the châteaux of Touraine
is pitiful to the traveller who has learned to take the measure of such
things from the country of "stately homes." The garden-ground of the
lordly Chaumont is that of an English suburban villa; and in that and in
other places there is little suggestion, in the untended aspect of walk
and lawns, of the gardener the British Islands know. The manor as we see
it dates from the early part of the sixteenth century; and the
industrious Abbé Chevalier, in his very entertaining though slightly
rose-coloured book on Touraine,[b] speaks of it as "perhaps the purest
expression of the _belle Renaissance françoise_." "Its height," he goes
on "is divided between two storeys, terminating under the roof in a
projecting entablature which imitates a row of machicolations. Carven
chimneys and tall dormer windows, covered with imagery, rise from the
roofs; turrets on brackets, of elegant shape, hang with the greatest
lightness from the angles of the building. The soberness of the main
lines, the harmony of the empty spaces and those that are filled out,
the prominence of the crowning parts, the delicacy of all the details,
constitute an enchanting whole." And then the Abbé speaks of the
admirable staircase which adorns the north front and which, with its
extension inside, constitutes the principal treasure of Azay. The
staircase passes beneath one of the richest of porticos--a portico over
which a monumental salamander indulges in the most decorative
contortions. The sculptured vaults of stone which cover the windings of
the staircase within, the fruits, flowers, ciphers, heraldic signs, are
of the noblest effect. The interior of the château is rich, comfortable,
extremely modern; but it makes no picture that compares with its
external face, about which, with its charming proportions, its profuse
yet not extravagant sculpture, there is something very tranquil and
pure.
[b] "Promenades pittoresques en Touraine." Tours: 1869.
I took a particular fancy to the roof, high, steep, old, with its slope
of bluish slate, and the way the weather-worn chimneys seemed to grow
out of it--living things in a deep soil. The single defect of the house
is the blankness and bareness of its walls, which have none of that
delicate parasitic deposit that agrees so well--to the eye--with the
surface of old dwellings. It is true that this bareness results in a
kind of silvery whiteness of complexion which carries out the tone of
the quiet pools and even that of the scanty and shadeless park.
[Illustration]
Chapter ix
[Langeais]
I hardly know what to say about the tone of Langeais, which, though I
have left it to the end of my sketch, formed the objective point of the
first excursion I made from Tours. Langeais is rather dark and grey; it
is perhaps the simplest and most severe of all the castles of the Loire.
I don't know why I should have gone to see it before any other, unless
it be because I remembered that Duchesse de Langeais who figures in
several of Balzac's novels, and found this association very potent. The
Duchesse de Langeais is a somewhat transparent fiction; but the castle
from which Balzac borrowed the title of his heroine is an extremely
solid fact. My doubt just above as to whether I should pronounce it
exceptionally grey came from my having seen it under a sky which made
most things look dark. I have, however, a very kindly memory of that
moist and melancholy afternoon, which was much more autumnal than many
of the days that followed it. Langeais lies down the Loire, near the
river, on the opposite side from Tours, and to go to it you will spend
half an hour in the train. You pass on the way the Château de Luynes,
which, with its round towers catching the afternoon light, looks
uncommonly well on a hill at a distance; you pass also the ruins of the
castle of Cinq-Mars, the ancestral dwelling of the young favourite of
Louis XIII., the victim of Richelieu, the hero of Alfred de Vigny's
novel, which is usually recommended to young ladies engaged in the study
of French. Langeais is very imposing and decidedly sombre; it marks the
transition from the architecture of defence to that of elegance. It
rises, massive and perpendicular, out of the centre of the village to
which it gives its name and which it entirely dominates; so that as you
stand before it in the crooked and empty street there is no resource for
you but to stare up at its heavy overhanging cornice and at the huge
towers surmounted with extinguishers of slate. If you follow this street
to the end, however, you encounter in abundance the usual embellishments
of a French village: little ponds or tanks, with women on their knees on
the brink, pounding and thumping a lump of saturated linen; brown old
crones, the tone of whose facial hide makes their nightcaps (worn by
day) look dazzling; little alleys perforating the thickness of a row of
cottages and showing you behind, as a glimpse, the vividness of a green
garden. In the rear of the castle rises a hill which must formerly have
been occupied by some of its appurtenances and which indeed is still
partly enclosed within its court. You may walk round this eminence,
which, with the small houses of the village at its base, shuts in the
castle from behind. The enclosure is not defiantly guarded, however; for
a small, rough path, which you presently reach, leads up to an open
gate. This gate admits you to a vague and rather limited _parc_, which
covers the crest of the hill and through which you may walk into the
gardens of the castle. These gardens, of small extent, confront the dark
walls with their brilliant parterres and, covering the gradual slope of
the hill, form, as it were, the fourth side of the court. This is the
stateliest view of the structure, which looks to you sufficiently grim
and grey as, after asking leave of a neat young woman who sallies out to
learn your errand, you sit there on a garden bench and take the measure
of the three tall towers attached to this inner front and forming
severally the cage of a staircase. The huge bracketed cornice (one of
the features of Langeais), which is merely ornamental, as it is not
machicolated, though it looks so, is continued on the inner face as
well. The whole thing has a fine feudal air, though it was erected on
the ruins of feudalism.
The main event in the history of the castle is the marriage of Anne of
Brittany to her first husband, Charles VIII., which took place in its
great hall in 1491. Into this great hall we were introduced by the neat
young woman--into this great hall and into sundry other halls, winding
staircases, galleries, chambers. The cicerone of Langeais is in too
great a hurry; the fact is pointed out in the excellent Guide-Joanne.
This ill-dissimulated vice, however, is to be observed, in the country
of the Loire, in every one who carries a key. It is true that at
Langeais there is no great occasion to indulge in the tourist's weakness
of dawdling; for the apartments, though they contain many curious odds
and ends of antiquity, are not of first-rate interest. They are cold and
musty indeed, with that touching smell of old furniture, as all
apartments should be through which the insatiate American wanders in
the rear of a bored domestic, pausing to stare at a faded tapestry or to
read the name on the frame of some simpering portrait.
To return to Tours my companion and I had counted on a train which (as
is not uncommon in France) existed only in the "Indicateur des Chemins
de Fer;" and instead of waiting for another we engaged a vehicle to take
us home. A sorry _carriole_ or _patache_ it proved to be, with the
accessories of a lumbering white mare and a little wizened, ancient
peasant, who had put on, in honour of the occasion, a new blouse of
extraordinary stiffness and blueness. We hired the trap of an energetic
woman, who put it "to" with her own hands; women in Touraine and the
Blésois appearing to have the best of it in the business of letting
vehicles, as well as in many other industries. There is, in fact, no
branch of human activity in which one is not liable, in France, to find
a woman engaged. Women, indeed, are not priests; but priests are, more
or less, women. They are not in the army, it may be said but then they
_are_ the army. They are very formidable. In France one must count with
the women. The drive back from Langeais to Tours was long, slow, cold;
we had an occasional spatter of rain. But the road passes most of the
way close to the Loire, and there was something in our jog-trot through
the darkening land, beside the flowing river, which it was very possible
to enjoy.
[Illustration]
Chapter x
[Loches]