CHENONCEAUX AND AMBOISE
(From my notebook)
This morning we got away from Tours, but it was after a
strenuous time. It was one of those sweltering mornings, and
to forward matters at the garage I helped put on all those
repaired tires and appliances, and by the time we were
through I was a rag. Narcissa photographed me, because she
said she had never seen me look so interesting before. She
made me stand in the sun, bareheaded and holding a tube in
my hand, as if I had not enough to bear already.
Oh, but it was cool and delicious gliding along the smooth, shaded road
toward Chenonceaux! One can almost afford to get as hot and sweltering
and cross and gasping as I was for the sake of sitting back and looking
across the wheel down a leafy avenue facing the breeze of your own
making, a delicious nectar that bathes you through and cools and rests
and soothes--an anodyne of peace.
By and by, being really cool in mind and body, we drew up abreast of a
meadow which lay a little below the road, a place with a brook and
overspreading shade, and with some men and women harvesting not far
away. We thought they would not mind if we lunched there, and I think
they must have been as kind-hearted as they were picturesque, for they
did not offer to disturb us. It was a lovely spot, and did not seem to
belong to the present-day world at all. How could it, with the home of
Diana of Poitiers just over there beyond the trees, with nesting places
of Mary, Queen of Scots, all about, and with these haymakers, whose
fashion in clothes has not much minded the centuries, to add the living
human note of the past that makes imagination reality?
Chenonceaux, the real heart of the royal district, like Chinon, is not
on the Loire itself, but on a small tributary, the Cher. I do not
remember that I noticed the river when we entered the grounds, but it is
a very important part of the chateau, which indeed is really a bridge
over it--a supremely beautiful bridge, to be sure, but a bridge none the
less, entirely crossing the pretty river by means of a series of high
foundation arches. Upon these arches rises the rare edifice which Thomas
Bohier, a receiver-general of taxes, began back in 1515 and Catherine
de' Medici finished after she had turned out Diana of Poitiers and
massacred the Huguenots, and needed a quiet place for retirement and
religious thought. Bohier did not extend Chenonceaux entirely across the
river. The river to him merely served as a moat. The son who followed
him did not have time to make additions. Francis I came along, noticed
that it was different from the other chateaux he had confiscated, and
added it to his collection. Our present-day collectors cut a poor figure
by the side of Francis I. Think of getting together assortments of bugs
and postage stamps and ginger jars when one could go out and pick up
chateaux!
It was Francis's son, Henry II, that gave it to Diana of Poitiers. Henry
had his own kind of a collection and he used his papa's chateaux to keep
it in. As he picked about the best one for Diana, we may believe that he
regarded her as his choicest specimen. Unfortunately for Diana, Henry's
queen, the terrible Catherine, outlived him; and when, after the
funeral, Catherine drove around by Chenonceaux and suggested to Diana
that perhaps she would like to exchange the place for a very excellent
chateau farther up the road, Chaumont, we may assume that Diana moved
with no unseemly delay. Diana tactfully said she liked Chaumont ever so
much, for a change, that perhaps living on a hilltop was healthier than
over the water, anyway. Still, it must have made her sigh, I think, to
know that her successor was carrying out the plan which Diana herself
had conceived of extending Chenonceaux across the Cher.
We stopped a little to look at the beautiful facade of Chenonceaux, then
crossed the drawbridge, or what is now the substitute for it, and were
welcomed at the door by just the proper person--a fine, dignified woman
of gentle voice and perfect knowledge. She showed us through the
beautiful home, for it is still a home, the property to-day of M.
Meunier of chocolate fame and fortune. I cannot say how glad I am that
M. Meunier owns Chenonceaux. He has done nothing to the place to spoil
it, and it is not a museum. The lower rooms which we saw have many of
the original furnishings. The ornaments, the tapestries, the pictures
are the same. I think Diana must have regretted leaving her fine
private room, with its chimney piece, supported by caryatids, and its
rare Flemish tapestry. We regretted leaving, too. We do not care for
interiors that have been overhauled and refurbished and made into
museums, but we were in no hurry to leave Chenonceaux. There is hardly
any place, I think, where one may come so nearly stepping back through
the centuries.
We went out into the long wing that is built on the arches above the
river, and looked down at the water flowing below. Our conductor told us
that the supporting arches had been built on the foundations of an
ancient mill. The beautiful gallery which the bridge supports must have
known much gayety; much dancing and promenading up and down; much
lovemaking and some heartache.
Jean Jacques Rousseau seems to have been everywhere. We could not run
amiss of him in eastern France and in Switzerland; now here again he
turns up at Chenonceaux. Chenonceaux in the eighteenth century fell to
M. Claude Dupin, farmer-general, who surrounded himself with the
foremost artists and social leaders of his time. He engaged Rousseau to
superintend the education of his son.
"We amused ourselves greatly at this fine place," writes Rousseau; "the
living was of the best, and I became as fat as a monk. We made a great
deal of music and acted comedies."
The period of M. Dupin's ownership, one of the most brilliant, and
certainly the most moral in the earlier history of Chenonceaux, has left
many memories. Of the brief, insipid honeymoon of the puny Francis II
and Mary Stuart no breath remains.
* * * * *
Amboise is on the Loire, and there is a good inn on the quay. It was
evening when we got there, and we did nothing after dinner but sit on
the high masonry embankment that buttresses the river, and watch the men
who fished, while the light faded from the water; though we occasionally
turned to look at the imposing profile of the great chateau on the high
cliff above the Loire.
We drove up there next morning--that is, we drove as high as one may
drive, and climbed stairs the remaining distance. Amboise is a splendid
structure from without, but, unlike Chenonceaux, it is interesting
within only for what it has been. It is occupied by the superannuated
servants of the present owner, one of the Orleans family, which is fine
for them, and proper enough, but bad for the atmosphere. There are a
bareness and a whitewashed feeling about the place that are death to
romance. Even the circular inclined plane by which one may ride or drive
to the top of the great tower suggested some sort of temporary structure
at an amusement park rather than a convenience for kings. I was more
interested in a low doorway against the lintel of which Charles VIII
knocked his head and died. But I wish I could have picked Charles VII
for that accident, to punish him for having abandoned Joan of Arc.
Though about a hundred years older, Amboise, like Chenonceaux, belongs
mainly to the period of Francis I, and was inhabited by the same
society. The Francises and the Henrys enjoyed its hospitality, and
Catherine de' Medici, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Also some twelve or
fifteen hundred Huguenots who were invited there, and, at Catherine's
suggestion, butchered on the terrace just in front of the castle
windows. There is a balcony overlooking the terrace, and it is said that
Catherine and Mary, also Mary's husband and his two brothers, sat on the
balcony better to observe the spectacle. Tradition does not say whether
they had ices served or not. Some of the Huguenots did not wait, and the
soldiers had to drown what they could catch of them in the Loire,
likewise in view from the royal balcony. When the show was over there
was suspended from the balcony a fringe of Huguenot heads. Those were
frivolous times.
There is a flower garden to-day on the terrace where the Huguenots were
murdered, and one may imagine, if he chooses, the scarlet posies to be
brighter for that history. But then there are few enough places in
France where blossoms have not been richened by the human stain.
Consider those vivid seas of poppies! Mary Stuart, by the way, seems
entitled to all the pity that the centuries have accorded her. There
were few influences in her early life that were not vile.
On the ramparts at Amboise we were shown a chapel, with the grave of
Leonardo Da Vinci, who was summoned to Amboise by Francis I, and died
there in 1519. There is a question about da Vinci's ashes resting here,
I believe, but it does not matter--it is his grave.
If I were going back to Amboise I would view it only from the outside.
With its immense tower and its beautiful Gothic and Renaissance facade
surmounting the heights above the Loire, nothing--nothing in the world
could be more beautiful.