The Castle of Amboise is placed at the entrance of Touraine like the
jealous sentinel guarding the entrance to the Garden of the Hesperides.
It is not a palace like the castle of Blois, nor a villa of a royal
mistress like Chenonceaux, nor a sort of immense convent full of
mysterious cells like Chambord: it is a military place, a veritable
fortress of the Middle Ages upon which is grafted a castle of the
Fifteenth Century.
This formidable military position has been at all times the key of this
beautiful province. When Cæsar marched against the Armoricans, there
lodged here a Roman garrison. From the height of these impregnable
rocks, the counts of Anjou, and later the Plantagenets, their
descendants, these worthy sons of the Black Falcon restrained within
their talons the slightest movements of Touraine, while they kept a
jealous watch over the counts of Blois and Champagne, who possessed
but a few leagues away the sombre fortress of Chaumont. Amboise and
Chaumont were the two advanced sentinels of these two impregnable
neighbours. These solid walls served under Charles VII. as the rampart
for the monarchy menaced by the English invasion; they protected the
Catholic royalty of Francis II. against the stroke of Renaudie; they
have enclosed turn by turn the illustrious victims of royal ingratitude
like the Marshall de Gié, powerful rebels like the princes of Vendôme,
accomplices of Chalais, state prisoners like Fouquet and Lauzun, and
the vanquished like Abd-el-Kader. When you interrogate these enormous
towers, these menacing battlements, and these inaccessible walls, you
draw from them no memories of joy, peace, or love; nothing but bloody
deeds spring from them; nothing but memories of mourning are evoked.
Buildings have, even more than mankind, their own physiognomy upon
which their history is reflected. History and physiognomy are here in
perfect union. No romancer, even were he possessed with Melusine’s
enchanted ring, would dare to place an intrigue of love behind these
walls impressed with deep wounds of gun-shots, or, if he did so, it
would doubtless be on account of that law of contrasts, so loved of
Nature, that places the nests of the warbler in the mouths of deserted
cannon.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU D’AMBOISE, FRANCE.]
Stop upon this old bridge constructed by Hugues d’Amboise, one of the
heroes of Tasso. From here you will take in the entire imposing and
truly Roman view of the powerful citadel, from the Gate of the Lions,
which opens upon the moat dug by Cæsar, as far as the two towers, now
decapitated, of the ancient donjon above the trunks of which rises
the slender spire of the Chapel of St. Hubert. Remove by imagination
the narrow and common dwellings that encroach upon the old castle.
Throw into the Loire the modern levee and quay that obstruct it
here, and picture the noble river freely beating the base of the
fortress. The great tower erected by Charles VIII. casts its shadow
upon the Loire, on which opens a door that forms on this side the only
entrance to the castle. Further back, and as if lost in the shadow of
the immense tower, is the principal building of this habitation, the
base of which dates from the counts of Amboise and whose five windows
pierced at a considerable height on the side overlooking the Loire,
although they are on the ground floor on the side of the court, seem
like vigilant eyes upon the country. Then by mental effort throw down
the terrace in front of these windows, the work of Louis-Philippe, who
caused this façade to lose some of its crabbed countenance; close up
the five rounded bay windows, also the work of the same King, which
light the kitchens; in a word, leave nothing that juts out upon that
straight and perpendicular façade except the balcony that overhangs
the five casements of which we shall speak, and upon which open the
large windows of the royal apartment. You will then have an approximate
idea of what Amboise was in the time of Henri III., when Du Cerceau
conceived the plan in 157–.
This balcony from which you look upon the Loire, is the work of Louis
XII.: it is an historical monument. Nothing could be less complicated,
nothing could be more formidable in its simplicity. It was upon this
balcony that the chief ringleaders of the conspiracy against Amboise
were hanged. The bodies, attached to these solid bars, hung in the
open air; the stroke of a poignard cut the rope and they fell into the
Loire: a means of burial as rapid as had been the judgment and the
execution. Such is the Castle of Amboise seen from the Loire.
The tunnel, the stairway, and even the vault are modern works, which
in moulding this old castle to our ideas of comfort deprive it of its
feudal character. It is by the southern tower that we must ascend if we
wish to be deeply impressed by this character. In the time of Charles
VIII., this tower was the only entrance for knights and litters, for
the one on the north corresponding to it bathes its foot in the Loire,
as we have said. It was through the southern tower that Charles V.
entered when he crossed France in 1539. This solid and immovable work
is certainly the largest construction of the kind in France. The thick
masonry that forms the nucleus of it is in itself a respectable size.
The stairway turns four times from the base to the summit around this
hollowed-out centre, and reaches a height of more than 600 feet.
This stairway, or rather these steps in helix, rest upon an ogival
vault. Carvings sustain the points from which the large arches spring
and terminate the nerves of the little arches. These carvings present
all kinds of little figures, some of which are fantastic, others
grotesque, and others again indecent, for the artists of the late
Gothic period were willing enough to execute the latter to please their
patrons who enjoyed these grotesques and the laughter they caused far
more than fine arabesques. Monks abound in these sculptures. This
one holds his stomach in both hands, like a gastronome punished by
his exploits; this one, suffering from a terrible toothache, makes a
grimace like one possessed. Most of these figures have been mutilated
with blows of the bayonet by the prisoners who for about fifteen
years were shut up in this tower in 1815. Louis-Philippe began its
restoration.
About one-third of the way up, a little stone step, pierced in the
outer wall, leads to a kind of hollowed-out rostrum, where, if we may
believe tradition, Louis XII. harangued the multitude, when an attack
on the municipal franchise aroused the inhabitants of the town of
Amboise, or Petit-Fort. Happy time! when revolutionary uprisings could
be calmed by orations!
At the top of this tower you see the gigantic horns of a stag that
formerly ornamented the base of the Chapel of Saint Hubert. This is
more than ten feet high, and was made at the order of Charles VIII.
with such art and truthfulness of imitation that allows the guide
to show it to unsophisticated tourists for the natural horns of a
full-grown and gigantic stag killed in some forest in the Brobdinagian
country.
The donjon, the first dwelling of the lords of Amboise, occupied the
west, the space comprised between the two little headless towers which
still exist.
On the side of the Loire, opposite the building of the Sept-Vertues,
there rise other buildings belonging to Amboise, but they were restored
by Charles VIII. and completely changed by Louis XII. and Francis I.
There are to be found the apartment of the King and Queen, due to
the last prince, and close beside it, that curious chamber which was
supported by four massive pillars of masonry, and to which no entrance
was possible except by a single opening pierced through the floor. This
was the work of Catharine de’Medici, after one of her astrologers had
forewarned her of the fall of a great edifice. She thought that, by
means of these material precautions, she could escape the menace of
Fortune which allowed her to see the fall of quite a different edifice
to Amboise: that of the Valois dynasty, so laboriously restored by her
efforts.
The chapel is the perfect antithesis of the castle.
Just as the one is sombre, severe, dominating and sinistrously
beautiful, on account of its mass and size, the other is bright,
efflorescent, and smiling, delicately embroidered and pierced like lace.
This charming chapel, proudly encamped upon a rocky peak, is one of the
best products of the third ogival style of that period of Flamboyant
Gothic that immediately preceded the Renaissance. But it is not, as
has been believed until now, the work of Italian artists brought
from Naples by Charles VIII. That is an error in which even M. Jules
Quicherat shared, but which was obliterated at the recent discovery of
an itemized account of all the expenses of furnishing and decorating
the Chapel of Amboise and for the contiguous apartments in the towers.
This precious document states that the expenses commenced in 1490
and continued until 1494. Now the year 1494, in which Charles VIII.
finished ornamenting and furnishing the Chapel of Amboise, is precisely
the one in which he started on his expedition to Italy. The honour of
this charming conception then reverts wholly to native artists.
The façade is entirely occupied by a large ogival entrance, the top
of which presents one of those great, circular rose-windows,--the
characteristic sign of the Flamboyant Gothic. An authority no less
exact for the construction of this façade is shown in the form of
the two doors cut in the entrance, these showing that surbased arch
so common in the English buildings of the reigns of Henry VII. and
Henry VIII., and which derives from them the name of the Tudor arch.
These two doors, separated by a pilaster and niche, support a stone
bas-relief, the principal motive of which is the conversion of Saint
Hubert.
A gigantic stag stands in the centre of the composition. Between his
horns there rises a flamboyant cross. The ardent huntsman stops in
terror at this sight, he bends one knee, and with one hand restrains
his horse, while with the other he salutes the miraculous sign destined
to convert him to Christianity: instead of the Aquitaine Nimrod, the
persecutor of the forests of Ardennes, he is only an apostle, the
successor of Saint Lambert. A host of wild animals form the accessories
of this picture, as if the entire population of the forests is taking
part in the conversion of the patron of huntsmen. Saint Anthony, in a
corner to the left, contemplates Saint Christopher bearing his divine
burden.
This bas-relief, somewhat clumsy in workmanship, does not give the
slightest idea of the charming delicacy of the interior. The banal and
rather strained comparison of lace woven by the fays, is more than a
truthful one here. Imagine two rows of _point d’ Alençon_, half a
metre high, festooned the entire length of the walls to form a series
of canopies and niches in corbelling, diversified by graceful little
columns with prismatic arches. Carvings and figures, inexhaustible in
variety, terminate the pendentives of these niches. Not one of these
motives is repeated a second time: vine leaves, acanthus leaves, holly
leaves, oak leaves, cabbage leaves, and thistle leaves,--the entire
architectural flora of the Fifteenth Century is here under our eyes
mingled with a host of real and fantastic animals. There are also some
human figures: a little monk in a corner by the side of the altar blows
the trumpet in a whimsical manner, exactly like the one that serves for
a reading-desk in the _Temptation_ by Callot.
Upon this profusion of lace, of foliage, of crockets, and stags’ horns,
upon this mass of curled leaves, pinked leaves, and leaves turned and
twisted in a hundred fashions, there falls a glowing light, sifted
through the windows, where vermilion, orpiment and ultramarine are the
dominating colours. These windows, upon which saints are represented
in life-size, were made in Sèvres, some of them after the designs of
the Princess Marie d’Orléans. Perhaps there is a slight false note in
the selection of these strong colours. Light tones and yellowish and
whitish tints were generally preferred at the end of the Fifteenth
Century. It was this gradual abandoning of colour that fifty years
later engendered the _grisailles_.
Before it was restored by Louis-Philippe, this church had been used for
twenty years as the hall for the castle’s police. One may judge by that
alone of the seriousness of the mutilations.