V.

The second time I went to Blois I took a carriage

for Chambord, and came back by the Chateau 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 be-

come 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 is 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, economizing 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 Cham-

bord you enter the flat and sandy Sologne. The wide

horizon opens out like a great _potager,_ without inter-

ruptions, 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 ab-

sorbed in the general flatness, - the patches of vine-

yard, 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 an exiled pretender. I drove along 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 revolutoins. Nevertheless, its great ex-

tent and the long perspective of its avenues give this

desolate boskage a certain majesty; just as its shabbi-

ness places it in agreement with one of the strongest

impressions of the chateau. You follow one of these

long perspectives a proportionate time, and at last you

see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise ap-

parently out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide

moats that formerly surrounded it has, in vulgar par-

lance, let it down, bud given it an appearance of top-

heaviness that is at the same time a magnificent Orien-

talism. 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 stately windows, and a couple

of inns near by offer entertainment to pilgrims. These

things, of course, are incidents of the political pro-

scription 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 palace may lock at a

tavern. I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary struc-

ture 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 influence of

the old regime pervaded the neighborhood, and you

walk 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 per-

son perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old regime),

after which she ushers you across 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 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 extra-

ordinary projections, were thrown across the clear

gray 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 con-

descension and humility. I do not profess to under-

stand 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

humor; 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 Cham-

bord. 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, faboulus quality, and with its profuse

ornamentation, - the salamander of Francis I. is a con-

tant 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 stone-work is covered with fine

mould. There are places that reminded me of some

of those quiet, mildewed corners of courts and ter-

races, 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 fonc-

tionne," the guide said of these miniature weapons;

and I wondered, if he should take it into his head to

fire off his little canon, how much harm the Comte de

Chambord would do.

From below, the castle would look crushed by

the redundancy of its upper protuberances if it were

not for the enormous girth of its round towers, which

appear to give it a robust lateral development. These

towers, however, fine as they are in their way, struck

me as a little stupid; they are the exaggeration of

an exaggeration. In a building erected after the days

of defence, and proclaiming its peaceful character from

its hundred embroideries and cupolas, they seem

to indicate a want of invention. I shall risk the ac-

cusation of bad taste if I say that, impressive as it is,

the Chateau de Chambord seemed to me to have al-

together a little of that quality of stupidity. The

trouble is that it represents nothing very particular;

it has not happened, in spite of sundry vicissitudes,

to have a very interesting history. Compared with

that of Blois and Amboise, its past is rather vacant;

and one feels to a certain extent the contrast between

its pompous appearance and its spacious but some-

what colorless annals. It had indeed the good for-

tune to be erected by Francis I., whose name by itself

expresses a good deal of history. Why he should

have built a palace in those sandy plains will ever

remain an unanswered question, for kings have never

been obliged to give reasons. In addition to the fact

that the country was rich in game and that Francis

was a passionate hunter, it is suggested by M. de la

Saussaye, the author of the very complete little history

of Chambord which you may buy at the bookseller's

at Blois, that he was govemed in his choice of the

site by the accident of a charming woman having

formerly lived there. The Comtesse de Thoury had

a manor in the neighborhood, and the Comtesse de

Thoury had been the object of a youthful passion on

the part of the most susceptible of princes before his

accession to the throne. This great pile was reared,

therefore, according to M. de la Saussaye, as a _souvenir

de premieres amours!_ It is certainly a very massive

memento; and if these tender passages were propor-

tionate to the building that commemorates them, they

were tender indeed. There has been much discus-

sion as to the architect employed by Francis I., and

the honor of having designed this splendid residence

has been claimed for several of the Italian artists who

early in the sixteenth century came to seek patronage

in France. It seems well established to-day, however,

that Chambord was the work neither of Primaticcio,

of Vignola, nor of Il Rosso, all of whom have left

some trace of their sojourn in France; but of an

obscure yet very complete genius, Pierre Nepveu,

known as Pierre Trinqueau, who is designated in the

papers which preserve in some degree the history of

the origin of the edifice, as the _maistre de l'oeuvre de

maconnerie._ Behind this modest title, apparently, we

must recognize one of the most original talents of

the French Renaissance; and it is a proof of the vigor

of the artistic life of that period that, brilliant pro-

duction being everywhere abundant, an artist of so

high a value should not have been treated by his con-

temporaries as a celebrity. We manage things very

differently to-day.

The immediate successors of Francis I. continued

to visit, Chambord; but it was neglected by Henry IV.,

and was never afterwards a favorite residence of any

French king. Louis XIV. appeared there on several

occasions, and the apparition was characteristically

brilliant; but Chambord could not long detain a

monarch who had gone to the expense of creating a

Versailles ten miles from Paris. With Versailles, Fon-

tainebleau, Saint-Germain, and Saint-Cloud within easy

reach of their capital, the later French sovereigns had

little reason to take the air in the dreariest province

of their kingdom. Chambord therefore suffered from

royal indifference, though in the last century a use

was found for its deserted halls. In 1725 it was oc-

cupied by the luckless Stanislaus Leszczynski, who

spent the greater part of his life in being elected

King of Poland and being ousted from his throne,

and who, at this time a refugee in France, had found

a compensation for some of his misfortunes in marry-

ing his daughter to Louis XV. He lived eight years

at Chambord, and filled up the moats of the castle.

In 1748 it found an illustrious tenant in the person

of Maurice de Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, who, how-

ever, two years after he had taken possession of it,

terminated a life which would have been longer had

he been less determined to make it agreeable. The

Revolution, of course, was not kind to Chambord.

It despoiled it in so far as possible of every vestige

of its royal origin, and swept like a whirlwind through

apartments to which upwards of two centuries had

contributed a treasure of decoration and furniture. In

that wild blast these precious things were destroyed

or forever scattered. In 1791 an odd proposal was

made to the French Government by a company of

English Quakers who had conceived the bold idea of

establishing in the palace a manufacture of some

peaceful commodity not to-day recorded. Napoleon

allotted Chambord, as a "dotation," to one of his

marshals, Berthier, for whose benefit it was converted,

in Napoleonic fashion, into the so-called principality

of Wagram. By the Princess of Wagram, the marshal's

widow, it was, after the Restoration, sold to the

trustees of a national subscription which had been

established for the purpose of presenting it to the in-

fant Duke of Bordeaux, then prospective King of

France. The presentation was duly made; but the

Comte de Chambord, who had changed his title in

recognition of the gift, was despoiled of his property

by the Government of Louis Philippe. He appealed

for redress to the tribunals of his country; and the

consequence of his appeal was an interminable litiga-

tion, by which, however, finally, after the lapse of

twenty-five years, he was established in his rights. In

1871 he paid his first visit to the domain which had

been offered him half a century before, a term of

which he had spent forty years in exile. It was from

Chambord that he dated his famous letter of the 5th

of July of that year, - the letter, directed to his so-

called subjects, in which he waves aloft the white

flag of the Bourbons. This amazing epistle, which is

virtually an invitation to the French people to re-

pudiate, as their national ensign, that immortal tricolor,

the flag of the Revolution and the Empire, under

which they have, won the glory which of all glories

has hitherto been dearest to them, and which is as-

sociated with the most romantic, the most heroic, the

epic, the consolatory, period of their history, - this

luckless manifesto, I say, appears to give the measure

of the political wisdom of the excellent Henry V. It

is the most factitious proposal ever addressed to an

eminently ironical nation.

On the whole, Chambord makes a great impression;

and the hour I was, there, while the yellow afternoon

light slanted upon the September woods, there was a

dignity in its desolation. It spoke, with a muffled

but audible voice, of the vanished monarchy, which

had been so strong, so splendid, but to-day has be-

come a sort of fantastic vision, like the cupolas and

chimneys that rose before me. I thought, while I

lingered there, of all the fine things it takes to make

up such a monarchy; and how one of them is a su-

perfluity of mouldering, empty, palaces. Chambord is

touching, - that is the best word for it; and if the

hopes of another restoration are in the follies of the

Republic, a little reflection on that eloquence of ruin

ought to put the Republic on its guard. A sentimental

tourist may venture to remark that in the presence of

several chateaux which appeal in this mystical manner

to the retrospective imagination, it cannot afford to be

foolish. I thought of all this as I drove back to Blois

by the way of the Chateau de Cheverny. The road

took us out of the park of Chambord, but through a

region of flat woodland, where the trees were not

mighty, and again into the prosy plain of the Sologne,

- a thankless soil, all of it, I believe, but lately much

amended by the magic of cheerful French industry

and thrift. The light had already begun to fade, and

my drive reminded me of a passage in some rural

novel of Madame Sand. I passed a couple of timber

and plaster churches, which looked very old, black,

and crooked, and had lumpish wooden porches and

galleries encircling the base. By the time I reached

Cheverny, the clear twilight had approached. It was

late to ask to be allowed to visit an inhabited house;

but it was the hour at which I like best to visit almost

anything. My coachman drew up before a gateway,

in a high wall, which opened upon a short avenue,

along which I took my way on foot; the coachmen in

those parts being, for reasons best known to them-

selves, mortally averse to driving up to a house. I

answered the challenge of a very tidy little portress,

who sat, in company with a couple of children, en-

joying the evening air in, front of her lodge, and who

told me to walk a little further and turn to the right.

I obeyed her to the letter, and my turn brought me

into sight of a house as charming as an old manor in

a fairy tale. I had but a rapid and partial view of

Cheverny; but that view was a glimpse of perfection.

A light, sweet mansion stood looking over a wide green

lawn, over banks of flowers and groups of trees. It

had a striking character of elegance, produced partly

by a series of Renaissance busts let into circular niches

in the facade. The place looked so private, so reserved,

that it seemed an act of violence to ring, a stranger

and foreigner, at the graceful door. But if I had not

rung I should be unable to express - as it is such a

pleasure to do - my sense of the exceeding courtesy

with which this admirable house is shown. It was

near the dinner-hour, - the most sacred hour of the

day; but I was freely conducted into the inhabited

apartments. They are extremely beautiful. What I

chiefly remember is the charming staircase of white

embroidered stone, and the great _salle des gardes_ and

_chambre a coucher du roi_ on the second floor. Che-

verny, built in 1634, is of a much later date than the

other royal residences of this part of France; it be-

longs to the end of the Renaissance, and has a touch

of the rococo. The guard-room is a superb apartment;

and as it contains little save its magnificent ceiling

and fireplace and certain dim tapestries on its walls,

you the more easily take the measure of its noble

proportions. The servant opened the shutters of a

single window, and the last rays of the twilight slanted

into the rich brown gloom. It was in the same pic-

turesque fashion that I saw the bedroom (adjoining) of

Henry IV., where a legendary-looking bed, draped in

folds long unaltered, defined itself in the haunted

dusk. Cheverny remains to me a very charming, a

partly mysterious vision. I drove back to Blois in the

dark, some nine miles, through the forest of Russy,

which belongs to the State, and which, though con-

sisting apparently of small timber, looked under the

stars sufficiently vast and primeval. There was a damp

autumnal smell and the occasional sound of a stirring

thing; and as I moved through the evening air I

thought of Francis I. and Henry IV.