CHAMBORD AND CLERY
Francis I had a fine taste for collecting chateaux picturesquely
located, but when he built one for himself he located it in the most
unbeautiful situation in France. It requires patience and talent to find
monotony of prospect in France, but our hero succeeded, and discovered a
dead flat tract of thirteen thousand acres with an approach through as
dreary a level of unprosperous-looking farm district as may be found on
the continent of Europe.
It is not on the Loire, but on a little stream called the Cosson, and
when we had left the Loire and found the country getting flatter and
poorer and less promising with every mile, we could not believe that we
were on the right road. But when we inquired, our informants still
pointed ahead, and by and by, in the midst of nowhere and surrounded by
nothing, we came to a great inclosure of undersized trees, with an
entrance. Driving in, we looked down a long avenue to an expanse of
architecture that seemed to be growing from a dead level of sandy park,
and to have attained about two thirds its proper height.
An old man was raking around the entrance and we asked him if one was
allowed to lunch in the park. He said, "Oh yes, anywhere," and gave a
general wave that comprehended the whole tract. So we turned into a
side road and found a place that was shady enough, but not cool, for
there seemed to be no large overspreading trees in this park, but only
small, close, bushy ones. It is said that Francis built Chambord for two
reasons, one of them being the memory of an old sweetheart who used to
live in the neighborhood, the other on account of the abundant game to
be found there. I am inclined to the latter idea. There is nothing in
the location to suggest romance; there is everything to suggest game.
The twenty square miles of thicket that go with Chambord could hardly be
surpassed as a harbor for beast and bird.
If Chambord was built, so to speak, as a sort of hunting lodge, it is
the largest one on record. Francis kept eighteen hundred men busy at it
for twelve years, and then did not get it done. He lived in it, more or
less, for some seven years, however; then went to Rambouillet to die,
and left his son, Henry II, to carry on the work. Henry did not care for
Chambord--the marshy place gave him fever, but he kept the building
going until he was killed in a tourney, when the construction stopped.
His widow, the bloody Catherine de' Medici, retired to Chambord in her
old age, and set the place in order. She was terribly superstitious and
surrounded herself with astrologers and soothsayers. At night she used
to go up to the great lantern tower to read her fortune in the stars. It
is my opinion that she did not go up there alone, not with that record
of hers.
Mansard, who laid a blight on architecture that lasted for two hundred
years, once got hold of Chambord and spoiled what he could, and had
planned to do worse things, but something--death, perhaps--interfered.
That was when Louis XIV brought Queen Maria Theresa to Chambord, and
held high and splendid court there, surrounding himself with brilliant
men and women, among them Moliere and the widow of the poet Scarron,
Francoise d'Aubigne, the same that later became queen, under the title
of Madame de Maintenon. That was the heyday of Chambord's history. A
large guardroom was gilded and converted into a theater. Moliere gave
first presentations there and received public compliment from the king.
Diversion was the order of the day and night.
"The court is very gay--the king hunts much," wrote Maintenon; "one eats
always with him; there is one day a ball, and the next a comedy."
Nothing very startling has happened at Chambord since Louis' time. Its
tenants have been numerous enough, and royal, or distinguished, but they
could not maintain the pace set by Louis XIV. Stanislas Leckzinski, the
exiled Polish king, occupied it during the early years of the eighteenth
century, and succeeded in marrying his daughter to the dissolute Louis
XV. Seventy years later the revolution came along. An order was issued
to sell the contents of Chambord, and a greedy rabble came and stripped
it clean. There was a further decree to efface all signs of royalty, but
when it was discovered that every bit of carving within and without the
vast place expressed royalty in some manner, and that it would cost
twenty thousand dollars to cut it away, this project was happily
abandoned. Chambord was left empty but intact. Whatever has been done
since has been in the way of restoration.
There is not a particle of shade around Chambord. It stands as bare and
exposed to the blazing sky to-day as it did when those eighteen hundred
workmen laid down their tools four hundred years ago. There is hardly a
shrub. Even the grass looks discouraged. A location, indeed, for a royal
palace!
We left the car under the shade of a wall and crossed a dazzling open
space to the entrance of a court where we bought entrance tickets. Then
we crossed the blinding court and were in a cool place at last, the wide
castle entrance. We were surprised a little, though, to find a ticket
box and a registering turnstile. Things are on a business basis at
Chambord. I suppose the money collected is used for repairs.
The best advertised feature of Chambord is the one you see first, the
great spiral double stairway arranged one flight above the other, so
that persons may be ascending without meeting others who are descending
at the same moment. Many persons would not visit Chambord but for this
special show feature. Our conductor made us ascend and descend to prove
that this unrivaled attraction would really work as advertised. It is
designed on the principle of the double stripes on a barber pole.
But there are other worth-while features at Chambord. We wandered
through the great cool rooms, not furnished, yet not empty, containing
as they do some rare pictures, old statuary and historic furniture,
despoiled by the revolutionists, now restored to their original
setting. Chambord is not a museum. It belongs to a Duke of Parma, a
direct descendant from Louis XIV. Under Louis XVIII the estate was sold,
but in 1821 three hundred thousand dollars was raised by public
subscription to purchase the place for the remaining heir of the Bourbon
dynasty, the Duke of Bordeaux, who accepted with the gift the title of
the Count of Chambord. But he was in exile and did not come to see his
property for fifty years; even then only to write a letter renouncing
his claim to the throne and to say once more good-by to France. He
willed the property to the children of his sister, the Duchess of Parma,
and it is to the next generation that it belongs to-day. Our conductor
told us that the present Duke of Parma comes now and then for the
shooting, which is still of the best.
We ascended to the roof, which is Chambord's chief ornament. It is an
architectural garden. Such elaboration of turrets with carved leafwork
and symbolism, such richness of incrustation and detail, did, in fact,
suggest some fantastic and fabulous culture. If it had not been all
fairly leaping with heat I should have wished to stay longer.
But I would not care to go to Chambord again. As we drove down the long
drive, and turned a little for a last look at that enormous frontage,
those immense low towers, that superb roof structure--all that
magnificence dropped down there in a dreary level--I thought, "If ever a
house was a white elephant that one is, and if one had to rename it it
might well be called Francis's Folly."
I suppose it was two hours later when we had been drifting drowsily up
the valley of the Loire that we stopped in a village for water. There
was an old church across the way, and as usual we stepped inside, as
much for the cool refreshment as for anything, expecting nothing else
worth while.
How easily we might have missed the wealth we found there. We did not
know the name of the village. We did not recognize Clery, even when we
heard it, and the guidebook gives it just four lines. But we had been
inside only a moment when we realized that the Church of Our Lady of
Clery is an ancient and sacred shrine. A great tablet told us that since
1325 kings of France, sinners and saints have made pilgrimages there;
Charles IV, Philippe VI, Charles VII, St. Francois Xavier, and so down
the centuries to Marshal MacMahon of our own time. But to us greater
than all the rest are the names of Dunois and Joan of Arc. Joan had
passed this way with her army, of course; for the moment we had
forgotten that we were following her footsteps to Orleans.
The place was rich in relics. Among these the tomb of Louis XI and a
column which inclosed the heart of Charles VIII. There could hardly have
been a shrine in France more venerated in the past than this forgotten
church by the roadside, in this forgotten village where, I suppose,
tourists to-day never stop at all. It was hard to believe in the reality
of our discovery, even when we stood there. But there were the tablets
and inscriptions--they could not be denied.
We wandered about, finding something new and precious at every turn,
until the afternoon light faded. Then we crossed a long bridge over the
Loire to the larger village of Meung, where there was the Hotel St.
Jacques, one of the kind we like best and one of the best of the kind.