Unlike so many other _châteaux_ of Blaissons and Touraine,
Chenonceaux awakens only gay and happy thoughts. Chambord possesses the
calm gravity of a monastery; Ambroise is a prison; Blois bears upon
its face its blot of blood. All the other retreats of the royal Valois
and all the _châteaux_ of their courtiers, grouped in such number
upon the banks of the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire--Loches, Chinon,
Plessis-lez-Tours, Luynes, Saumur, Brissac,--speak of treachery,
perfidy, revenge, conspiracy and all the wicked tendencies of human
nature. Chenonceaux alone recalls only memories of youth, elegance,
poetry, and love. There is no blood upon its stones. The gentlest and
the most charming figures of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century,
Diane de Poitiers, Mary Stuart, Gabrielle and Françoise de’Mercœur come
in succession to animate that smiling nature and to reflect their fair
faces in its clear waters. Catherine de Medicis, in passing through
this beautiful place, here dropped a little of her cold and imperious
gravity: she has left only the memory of that orgy-like and splendid
banquet that cost more than a million of our money, and where Madame de
Sauve, half naked, was the stewardess.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU DE CHENONCEAUX, FRANCE.]
The widow of Henri III., promenading in her long robes of mourning,
lent it another charm,--that of melancholy; and when Rousseau, at last
raised that voice there which could gather together tempests, it was
not philosophy, nor social conditions, nor the rights of man of which
he spoke: it was still love and poetry.
Chenonceaux, by means of its position, its architecture, and its
history, is so near the other _châteaux_ on the banks of the
Loire, neighbouring and contemporary pearls, that it is impossible to
detach it from that jewel-case. However, it is not on the Loire, the
river of severe horizons and majestic wearisomeness; it is on a less
proud and more smiling little river, the Cher, three leagues from
Amboise, that this palace of Armida was built. It rears itself upon the
bosom of this charming stream which stops here in a lazy curve as if
to linger and bathe its walls, delighting in reflecting those graceful
towers and enchanted gardens in its liquid depths. No other palace that
I know rises thus, like Venus from the breast of the waves, without any
link to the earth save a single bridge at one of its extremities. It
was a woman who had this charming idea that gives to the _château_
a somewhat fairy-like and supernatural effect: for Chenonceaux is not,
as is too often believed, the work of Thomas Bohier, but of his wife,
who consecrated to this work, conceived in love, the treasures that
her husband sent her from Italy. There are two other women, Diane de
Poitiers and Catherine de’Medici who completed while enlarging the
thought of Catherine Briçonnet. It seems that women only could possess
a sufficiently light hand to touch such a delicate work and to design
the plan.
It was at the north-east corner of the court of honour, between the
stream and the gardener’s house, that MM. Sechan and Déplechein placed
themselves to paint the picture used for the scenery in the second act
of _Les Huguenots_. This choice proved a familiar general view. No
other spot shows Chenonceaux in a more complete and picturesque aspect.
Seen from this point, the _château_ presents itself obliquely,
which enables the eye to embrace at the same time the principal façade
and the entire construction of the western side, from the apsis of the
chapel to the end of the gallery that crosses the Cher.
The foreground of the picture is charming.
At the right and in the corner, the court of honour precedes its royal
avenue of plantains and ends with its stone balustrades. Behind this
balustrade, stands the beautiful tower with a roof like a pepper box,
which is used as the porter’s lodge, and which, built upon the firm
ground, seems like a timid sister watching her big sisters bathing
their feet in the river without daring to follow them.
In the middle distance, is the bridge with its three unequal arches
and its heavy buttresses alongside of their half moons in brackets.
Beyond the bridge, is the principal façade, flanked with two corbelled
towers presenting under a flying buttress its large caryatides, its
two balconies in hemicycle, and three charming dormer windows that
crown it. Farther along in the centre of the picture, is the apsis of
the chapel with its long lancets flaming in the sun, supported, like
the principal front, by those heavy courses of stone in which are the
kitchen offices of the castle; then comes the beautiful eastern front
that surmounts the great arch and occupies the centre of the stream
which, as well as the whole corresponding western front, must certainly
be attributed to Diane de Poitiers, for its windows, its architrave and
all the details of its entablature bear the mark of the reign of Henri
II.
Finally, to the left of the picture, are the five arches of the
bridge built for Diane to connect the left bank of the Cher with the
great pavilion and, above this bridge, the two stages of galleries
constructed by Androuet du Cerceau for Catherine de’Medici, with their
little turrets with arched windows corresponding to the peers, and
forming so many terraces for the second gallery.
All this, with the river for the foreground and with the large trees on
both banks for a frame, and the trees of the gardens for perspective,
and the tops, formerly gilded, of the gallery and the large pavilion,
the ornamented chimneys, the peaked roofs and the vanes of the
turrets, peaks, dormer windows, chimneys and weather-vanes, vaporously
melting into the beautiful sky of Touraine; all this, I say, forms a
complete whole that would ravish any painter and one that in truth is
worthy of the honour paid to it by M. Scribe at the Opéra. No false
tone and no ungraceful nor violent line disturbs the harmony of this
beautiful picture. Minds that love parallelism and symmetry may regret
undoubtedly that the enthusiasm of political life did not permit
Catherine de’Medici to complete that beautiful conception and build
upon the left bank of the Cher a large pavilion similar to that on the
right bank: the gallery, which does not come to-day any further than
the steep bank of the river, would then have occupied the centre of the
building. But, perhaps, there is in this incompleteness of Chenonceaux,
which permits everybody to finish it in dreams according to his
pleasure, something that saves it from banality; perhaps it gains,
instead of losing, by exciting that admiration mingled with regrets and
also with criticism which the greater number of men, by an inherent
weakness of nature, prefer to the enthusiasm without reservation that
is the right of a perfect work.