Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine and the Loire Country
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Title: Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine and the Loire Country
Author: M. F. Mansfield
Illustrator: Blanche McManus
Release date: August 25, 2011 [eBook #37211]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CASTLES AND CHATEAUX OF OLD TOURAINE AND THE LOIRE COUNTRY ***
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Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine
and the Loire Country
_WORKS OF FRANCIS MILTOUN_
_The following, each 1 vol., library 12mo, cloth, gilt top,
profusely illustrated, $2.50_
_Rambles on the Riviera_
_Rambles in Normandy_
_Rambles in Brittany_
_The Cathedrals and Churches of the Rhine_
_The Cathedrals of Northern France_
_The Cathedrals of Southern France_
_The Cathedrals of Italy_ (_In preparation_)
_The following, 1 vol., square octavo, cloth, gilt top, profusely
illustrated. $3.00_
_Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine and the Loire Country_
_L. C. PAGE & COMPANY New England Building, Boston, Mass._
[Illustration: A PEASANT GIRL OF TOURAINE]
Castles and Chateaux
OF
OLD TOURAINE
AND THE LOIRE COUNTRY
BY FRANCIS MILTOUN
Author of "Rambles in Normandy," "Rambles in Brittany,"
"Rambles on the Riviera," etc.
_With Many Illustrations
Reproduced from paintings made on the spot_
BY BLANCHE MCMANUS
[Illustration]
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
1906
_Copyright, 1906_
BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(Incorporated)
_All rights reserved_
First Impression, June, 1906
_COLONIAL PRESS_
_Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co._
_Boston, U. S. A._
[Illustration: Ed VELAY]
By Way of Introduction
This book is not the result of ordinary conventional rambles, of
sightseeing by day, and flying by night, but rather of leisurely
wanderings, for a somewhat extended period, along the banks of the Loire
and its tributaries and through the countryside dotted with those
splendid monuments of Renaissance architecture which have perhaps a more
appealing interest for strangers than any other similar edifices
wherever found.
Before this book was projected, the conventional tour of the chateau
country had been "done," Baedeker, Joanne and James's "Little Tour" in
hand. On another occasion Angers, with its almost inconceivably real
castellated fortress, and Nantes, with its memories of the "Edict" and
"La Duchesse Anne," had been tasted and digested _en route_ to a certain
little artist's village in Brittany.
On another occasion, when we were headed due south, we lingered for a
time in the upper valley, between "the little Italian city of Nevers"
and "the most picturesque spot in the world"--Le Puy.
But all this left certain ground to be covered, and certain gaps to be
filled, though the author's note-books were numerous and full to
overflowing with much comment, and the artist's portfolio was already
bulging with its contents.
So more note-books were bought, and, following the genial Mark Twain's
advice, another fountain pen and more crayons and sketch-books, and the
author and artist set out in the beginning of a warm September to fill
those gaps and to reduce, if possible, that series of rambles along the
now flat and now rolling banks of the broad blue Loire to something like
consecutiveness and uniformity; with what result the reader may judge.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION v
I. A GENERAL SURVEY 1
II. THE ORLEANNAIS 30
III. THE BLAISOIS AND THE SOLOGNE 56
IV. CHAMBORD 94
V. CHEVERNY, BEAUREGARD, AND CHAUMONT 110
VI. TOURAINE: THE GARDEN SPOT OF FRANCE 128
VII. AMBOISE 148
VIII. CHENONCEAUX 171
IX. LOCHES 188
X. TOURS AND ABOUT THERE 203
XI. LUYNES AND LANGEAIS 221
XII. AZAY-LE-RIDEAU, USSE, AND CHINON 241
XIII. ANJOU AND BRETAGNE 273
XIV. SOUTH OF THE LOIRE 301
XV. BERRY AND GEORGE SAND'S COUNTRY 313
XVI. THE UPPER LOIRE 330
INDEX 337
List of Illustrations
PAGE
A PEASANT GIRL OF TOURAINE _Frontispiece_
ITINERARY OF THE LOIRE (MAP) facing 1
A LACE-MAKER OF THE UPPER LOIRE facing 4
THE LOIRE CHATEAUX (MAP) 9
THE ANCIENT PROVINCES OF THE LOIRE VALLEY
AND THEIR CAPITALS (MAP) 15
THE LOIRE NEAR LA CHARITE facing 18
COIFFES OF AMBOISE AND ORLEANS facing 20
THE CHATEAUX OF THE LOIRE (MAP) facing 30
ENVIRONS OF ORLEANS (MAP) 39
THE LOIRET facing 42
THE LOIRE AT MEUNG facing 46
BEAUGENCY facing 50
ARMS OF THE CITY OF BLOIS 58
THE RIVERSIDE AT BLOIS facing 58
SIGNATURE OF FRANCOIS PREMIER 60
CYPHER OF ANNE DE BRETAGNE, AT BLOIS 62
ARMS OF LOUIS XII. 65
CENTRAL DOORWAY, CHATEAU DE BLOIS facing 66
THE CHATEAUX OF BLOIS (DIAGRAM) 71
CYPHER OF FRANCOIS PREMIER AND CLAUDE OF
FRANCE, AT BLOIS 72
NATIVE TYPES IN THE SOLOGNE 89
DONJON OF MONTRICHARD facing 92
ARMS OF FRANCOIS PREMIER, AT CHAMBORD 99
PLAN OF CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD 103
CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD facing 104
CHATEAU DE CHEVERNY facing 110
CHEVERNY-SUR-LOIRE 113
CHAUMONT facing 116
SIGNATURE OF DIANE DE POITIERS 118
THE LOIRE IN TOURAINE facing 134
THE VINTAGE IN TOURAINE facing 142
CHATEAU D'AMBOISE facing 148
SCULPTURE FROM THE CHAPELLE DE ST. HUBERT facing 164
CYPHER OF ANNE DE BRETAGNE, HOTEL DE
VILLE, AMBOISE 168
CHATEAU DE CHENONCEAUX facing 178
CHATEAU DE CHENONCEAUX (DIAGRAM) 179
LOCHES 189
LOCHES AND ITS CHURCH facing 192
SKETCH PLAN OF LOCHES 198
ST. OURS, LOCHES facing 198
TOURS facing 202
ARMS OF THE PRINTERS, _AVOCATS_, AND INNKEEPERS,
TOURS 205
SCENE IN THE QUARTIER DE LA CATHEDRALE,
TOURS facing 208
PLESSIS-LES-TOURS IN THE TIME OF LOUIS XI. 213
ENVIRONS OF TOURS (MAP) 219
A VINEYARD OF VOUVRAY facing 222
MEDIAEVAL STAIRWAY AND THE CHATEAU DE
LUYNES facing 224
RUINS OF CINQ-MARS facing 228
CHATEAU DE LANGEAIS facing 232
ARMS OF LOUIS XII. AND ANNE DE BRETAGNE 237
CHATEAU D'AZAY-LE-RIDEAU facing 244
CHATEAU D'USSE facing 248
THE ROOF-TOPS OF CHINON facing 252
RABELAIS 255
CHATEAU DE CHINON facing 258
CUISINES, FONTEVRAULT 265
CHATEAU DE SAUMUR facing 276
THE PONTS DE CE facing 284
CHATEAU D'ANGERS facing 288
ENVIRONS OF NANTES (MAP) 297
DONJON OF THE CHATEAU DE CLISSON facing 306
BERRY (MAP) 313
LA TOUR, SANCERRE 317
CHATEAU DE GIEN facing 318
CHATEAU DE VALENCAY facing 322
GATEWAY OF MEHUN-SUR-YEVRE facing 324
LE CARRIOR DORE, ROMORANTIN 325
EGLISE S. AIGNAN, COSNE 331
POUILLY-SUR-LOIRE facing 332
PORTE DU CROUX, NEVERS facing 334
[Illustration: ITINERARY OF THE LOIRE (MAP)]
Castles and Chateaux
of Old Touraine
and the Loire Country
CHAPTER I.
A GENERAL SURVEY
Any account of the Loire and of the towns along its banks must naturally
have for its chief mention Touraine and the long line of splendid feudal
and Renaissance chateaux which reflect themselves so gloriously in its
current.
The Loire possesses a certain fascination and charm which many other
more commercially great rivers entirely lack, and, while the element of
absolute novelty cannot perforce be claimed for it, it has the merit of
appealing largely to the lover of the romantic and the picturesque.
A French writer of a hundred years ago dedicated his work on Touraine to
"Le Baron de Langeais, le Vicomte de Beaumont, le Marquis de Beauregard,
le Comte de Fontenailles, le Comte de Jouffroy-Gonsans, le Duc de
Luynes, le Comte de Vouvray, le Comte de Villeneuve, _et als._;" and he
might have continued with a directory of all the descendants of the
_noblesse_ of an earlier age, for he afterward grouped them under the
general category of "_Proprietaires des fortresses et chateaux les plus
remarquables--au point de vue historique ou architectural_."
He was fortunate in being able, as he said, to have had access to their
"_papiers de famille_," their souvenirs, and to have been able to
interrogate them in person.
Most of his facts and his gossip concerning the personalities of the
later generations of those who inhabited these magnificent
establishments have come down to us through later writers, and it is
fortunate that this should be the case, since the present-day aspect of
the chateaux is ever changing, and one who views them to-day is
chagrined when he discovers, for instance, that an iron-trussed,
red-tiled wash-house has been built on the banks of the Cosson before
the magnificent chateau of Chambord, and that somewhere within the
confines of the old castle at Loches a shopkeeper has hung out his
shingle, announcing a newly discovered dungeon in his own basement,
accidentally come upon when digging a well.
Balzac, Rabelais, and Descartes are the leading literary celebrities of
Tours, and Balzac's "Le Lys dans la Vallee" will give one a more
delightful insight into the old life of the Tourangeaux than whole
series of guide-books and shelves of dry histories.
Blois and its counts, Tours and its bishops, and Amboise and its kings,
to say nothing of Fontevrault, redolent of memories of the Plantagenets,
Nantes and its famous "Edict," and its equally infamous "Revocation,"
have left vivid impress upon all students of French history. Others will
perhaps remember Nantes for Dumas's brilliant descriptions of the
outcome of the Breton conspiracy.
All of us have a natural desire to know more of historic ground, and
whether we make a start by entering the valley of the Loire at the
luxurious midway city of Tours, and follow the river first to the sea
and then to the source, or make the journey from source to mouth, or
vice versa, it does not matter in the least. We traverse the same ground
and we meet the same varying conditions as we advance a hundred
kilometres in either direction.
Tours, for example, stands for all that is typical of the sunny south.
Prune and palm trees thrust themselves forward in strong contrast to the
cider-apples of the lower Seine. Below Tours one is almost at the coast,
and the _tables d'hote_ are abundantly supplied with sea-food of all
sorts. Above Tours the Orleannais is typical of a certain well-to-do,
matter-of-fact existence, neither very luxurious nor very difficult.
Nevers is another step and resembles somewhat the opulence of Burgundy
as to conditions of life, though the general aspect of the city, as well
as a great part of its history, is Italian through and through.
The last great step begins at Le Puy, in the great volcanic _Massif
Centrale_, where conditions of life, if prosperous, are at least harder
than elsewhere.
Such are the varying characteristics of the towns and cities through
which the Loire flows. They run the whole gamut from gay to earnest and
solemn; from the ease and comfort of the country around Tours, almost
sub-tropical in its softness, to the grime and smoke of busy St.
Etienne, and the chilliness and rigours of a mountain winter at Le Puy.
[Illustration: _A Lace-maker of the Upper Loire_]
These districts are all very full of memories of events which have
helped to build up the solidarity of France of to-day, though the
Nantois still proudly proclaims himself a Breton, and the Tourangeau
will tell you that his is the tongue, above all others, which speaks the
purest French,--and so on through the whole category, each and every
citizen of a _petit pays_ living up to his traditions to the fullest
extent possible.
In no other journey in France, of a similar length, will one see as many
varying contrasts in conditions of life as he will along the length of
the Loire, the broad, shallow river which St. Martin, Charles Martel,
and Louis XI., the typical figures of church, arms, and state, came to
know so well.
Du Bellay, a poet of the Renaissance, has sung the praises of the Loire
in a manner unapproached by any other topographical poet, if one may so
call him, for that is what he really was in this particular instance.
There is a great deal of patriotism in it all, too, and certainly no
sweet singer of the present day has even approached these lines, which
are eulogistic without being fulsome and fervent without being lurid.
The verses have frequently been rendered into English, but the following
is as good as any, and better than most translations, though it is one
of those fragments of "newspaper verse" whose authors are lost in
obscurity.
"Mightier to me the house my fathers made,
Than your audacious heads, O Halls of Rome!
More than immortal marbles undecayed,
The thin sad slates that cover up my home;
More than your Tiber is my Loire to me,
More Palatine my little Lyre there;
And more than all the winds of all the sea,
The quiet kindness of the Angevin air."
In history the Loire valley is rich indeed, from the days of the ancient
Counts of Touraine to those of Mazarin, who held forth at Nevers.
Touraine has well been called the heart of the old French monarchy.
Provincial France has a charm never known to Paris-dwellers. Balzac and
Flaubert were provincials, and Dumas was a city-dweller,--and there lies
the difference between them.
Balzac has written most charmingly of Touraine in many of his books, in
"Le Lys dans la Vallee" and "Le Cure de Tours" in particular; not always
in complimentary terms, either, for he has said that the Tourangeaux
will not even inconvenience themselves to go in search of pleasure. This
does not bespeak indolence so much as philosophy, so most of us will not
cavil. George Sand's country lies a little to the southward of Touraine,
and Berry, too, as the authoress herself has said, has a climate
"_souple et chaud, avec pluie abondant et courte_."
The architectural remains in the Loire valley are exceedingly rich and
varied. The feudal system is illustrated at its best in the great walled
chateau at Angers, the still inhabited and less grand chateau at
Langeais, the ruins at Cinq-Mars, and the very scanty remains of
Plessis-les-Tours.
The ecclesiastical remains are quite as great. The churches are, many of
them, of the first rank, and the great cathedrals at Nantes, Angers,
Tours, and Orleans are magnificent examples of the church-builders' art
in the middle ages, and are entitled to rank among the great cathedrals,
if not actually of the first class.
With modern civic and other public buildings, the case is not far
different. Tours has a gorgeous Hotel de Ville, its architecture being
of the most luxuriant of modern French Renaissance, while the railway
stations, even, at both Tours and Orleans, are models of what railway
stations should be, and in addition are decoratively beautiful in their
appointments and arrangements,--which most railway stations are not.
Altogether, throughout the Loire valley there is an air of prosperity
which in a more vigorous climate is often lacking. This in spite of the
alleged tendency in what is commonly known as a relaxing climate toward
_laisser-aller_.
Finally, the picturesque landscape of the Loire is something quite
different from the harder, grayer outlines of the north. All is of the
south, warm and ruddy, and the wooded banks not only refine the
crudities of a flat shore-line, but form a screen or barrier to the
flowering charms of the examples of Renaissance architecture which, in
Touraine, at least, are as thick as leaves in Vallambrosa.
Starting at Gien, the valley of the Loire begins to offer those
monumental chateaux which have made its fame as the land of castles.
From the old fortress-chateau of Gien to the Chateau de Clisson, or the
Logis de la Duchesse Anne at Nantes, is one long succession of florid
masterpieces, not to be equalled elsewhere.
The true chateau region of Touraine--by which most people usually
comprehend the Loire chateaux--commences only at Blois. Here the
edifices, to a great extent, take on these superfine residential
attributes which were the glory of the Renaissance period of French
architecture.
[Illustration: THE LOIRE CHATEAUX (MAP)]
Both above and below Touraine, at Montrichard, at Loches, and Beaugency,
are still to be found scattering examples of feudal fortresses and
donjons which are as representative of their class as are the best
Norman structures of the same era, the great fortresses of Arques,
Falaise, Domfront, and Les Andelys being usually accounted as the types
which gave the stimulus to similar edifices elsewhere.
In this same versatile region also, beginning perhaps with the
Orleannais, are a vast number of religious monuments equally celebrated.
For instance, the church of St. Benoit-sur-Loire is one of the most
important Romanesque churches in all France, and the cathedral of St.
Gatien, with its "bejewelled facade," at Tours, the twin-spired St.
Maurice at Angers, and even the pompous, and not very good Gothic,
edifice at Orleans (especially noteworthy because its crypt is an
ancient work anterior to the Capetian dynasty) are all wonderfully
interesting and imposing examples of mediaeval ecclesiastical
architecture.
Three great tributaries enter the Loire below Tours, the Cher, the
Indre, and the Vienne. The first has for its chief attractions the
Renaissance chateaux St. Aignan and Chenonceaux, the Roman remains of
Chabris, Thezee, and Larcay, the Romanesque churches of Selles and St.
Aignan, and the feudal donjon of Montrichard. The Indre possesses the
chateau of Azay-le-Rideau and the sombre fortresses of Montbazon and
Loches; while the Vienne depends for its chief interest upon the galaxy
of fortress-chateaux at Chinon.
The Loire is a mighty river and is navigable for nearly nine hundred
kilometres of its length, almost to Le Puy, or, to be exact, to the
little town of Vorey in the Department of the Haute Loire.
At Orleans, Blois, or Tours one hardly realizes this, much less at
Nevers. The river appears to be a great, tranquil, docile stream, with
scarce enough water in its bed to make a respectable current, leaving
its beds and bars of _sable_ and _cailloux_ bare to the sky.
The scarcity of water, except at occasional flood, is the principal and
obvious reason for the absence of water-borne traffic, even though a
paternal ministerial department of the government calls the river
navigable.
At the times of the _grandes crues_ there are four metres or more
registered on the big scale at the Pont d'Ancenis, while at other times
it falls to less than a metre, and when it does there is a mere rivulet
of water which trickles through the broad river-bottom at Chaumont, or
Blois, or Orleans. Below Ancenis navigation is not so difficult, but the
current is more strong.
From Blois to Angers, on the right bank, extends a long dike which
carries the roadway beside the river for a couple of hundred kilometres.
This is one of the charms of travel by the Loire. The only thing usually
seen on the bosom of the river, save an occasional fishing punt, is one
of those great flat-bottomed ferry-boats, with a square sail hung on a
yard amidships, such as Turner always made an accompaniment to his Loire
pictures, for conditions of traffic on the river have not greatly
changed.
Whenever one sees a barge or a boat worthy of classification with those
one finds on the rivers of the east or north, or on the great canals, it
is only about a quarter of the usual size; so, in spite of its great
navigable length, the waterway of the Loire is to be considered more as
a picturesque and healthful element of the landscape than as a
commercial proposition.
Where the great canals join the river at Orleans, and from Chatillon to
Roanne, the traffic increases, though more is carried by the canal-boats
on the _Canal Lateral_ than by the barges on the Loire.
It is only on the Loire between Angers and Nantes that there is any
semblance of river traffic such as one sees on most of the other great
waterways of Europe. There is a considerable traffic, too, which
descends the Maine, particularly from Angers downward, for Angers with
its Italian skies is usually thought of, and really is to be considered,
as a Loire town, though it is actually on the banks of the Maine some
miles from the Loire itself.
One thousand or more bateaux make the ascent to Angers from the Loire at
La Pointe each year, all laden with a miscellaneous cargo of
merchandise. The Sarthe and the Loir also bring a notable agricultural
traffic to the greater Loire, and the smaller confluents, the Dive, the
Thouet, the Authion, and the Layon, all go to swell the parent stream
until, when it reaches Nantes, the Loire has at last taken on something
of the aspect of a well-ordered and useful stream, characteristics which
above Nantes are painfully lacking. Because of its lack of commerce the
Loire is in a certain way the most noble, magnificent, and aristocratic
river of France; and so, too, it is also in respect to its associations
of the past.
It has not the grandeur of the Rhone when the spring freshets from the
Jura and the Swiss lakes have filled it to its banks; it has not the
burning activity of the Seine as it bears its thousands of boat-loads of
produce and merchandise to and from the Paris market; it has not the
prettiness of the Thames, nor the legendary aspect of the Rhine; but in
a way it combines something of the features of all, and has, in
addition, a tone that is all its own, as it sweeps along through its
countless miles of ample curves, and holds within its embrace all that
is best of mediaeval and Renaissance France, the period which built up
the later monarchy and, who shall not say, the present prosperous
republic.
Throughout most of the river's course, one sees, stretching to the
horizon, row upon row of staked vineyards with fruit and leaves in
luxuriant abundance and of all rainbow colours. The peasant here, the
worker in the vineyards, is a picturesque element. He is not
particularly brilliant in colouring, but he is usually joyous, and he
invariably lives in a well-kept and brilliantly environed habitation and
has an air of content and prosperity amid the well-beloved treasures of
his household.
The Loire is essentially a river of other days. Truly, as Mr. James has
said, "It is the very model of a generous, beneficent stream ... a wide
river which you may follow by a wide road is excellent company."
The Frenchman himself is more flowery: "_C'est la plus noble riviere de
France. Son domaine est immense et magnifique._"
[Illustration: THE ANCIENT PROVINCES OF THE LOIRE VALLEY AND THEIR
CAPITALS (MAP)]
THE ANCIENT
PROVINCES OF THE
LOIRE VALLEY
AND THEIR
CAPITALS
Bretagne Rennes
Anjou Angers
Touraine Tours
Orleannais Orleans
Berry Bourges
Nivernais Nevers
Bourbonnais Moulins
Lyonnais Lyon
Bourgogne Dijon
Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand
Languedoc Toulouse
The Loire is the longest river in France, and the only one of the four
great rivers whose basin or watershed lies wholly within French
territory. It moreover traverses eleven provinces. It rises in a fissure
of granite rock at the foot of the Gerbier-de-Jonc, a volcanic cone in
the mountains of the Vivarais, a hundred kilometres or more south of
Lyons. In three kilometres, approximately two miles, the little torrent
drops a thousand feet, after receiving to its arms a tiny affluent
coming from the Croix de Monteuse.
For twelve kilometres the river twists and turns around the base of the
Vivarais mountains, and finally enters a gorge between the rocks, and
mingles with the waters of the little Lac d'Issarles, entering for the
first time a flat lowland plain like that through which its course
mostly runs.
The monument-crowned pinnacles of Le Puy and the inverted bowl of
Puy-de-Dome rise high above the plain and point the way to Roanne, where
such activity as does actually take place upon the Loire begins.
Navigation, classed officially as "_flottable_," merely, has already
begun at Vorey, just below Le Puy, but the traffic is insignificant.
Meantime the streams coming from the direction of St. Etienne and Lyons
have been added to the Loire, but they do not much increase its bulk.
St. Galmier, the _source_ dear to patrons of _tables d'hote_ on account
of its palatable mineral water, which is about the only decent
drinking-water one can buy at a reasonable price, lies but a short
distance away to the right.
At St. Rambert the plain of Forez is entered, and here the stream is
enriched by numberless rivulets which make their way from various
sources through a thickly wooded country.
From Roanne onward, the _Canal Lateral_ keeps company with the Loire to
Chatillon, not far from Orleans.
Before reaching Nevers, the _Canal du Nivernais_ branches off to the
left and joins the Loire with the Yonne at Auxerre. Daudet tells of the
life of the _Canal du Nivernais_, in "La Belle Nivernaise," in a manner
too convincingly graphic for any one else to attempt the task, in
fiction or out of it. Like the Tartarin books, "La Belle Nivernaise" is
distinctly local, and forms of itself an excellent guide to a little
known and little visited region.
At Nevers the topography changes, or rather, the characteristics of the
life of the country round about change, for the topography, so far as
its profile is concerned, remains much the same for three-fourths the
length of this great river. Nevers, La Charite, Sancerre, Gien, and
Cosne follow in quick succession, all reminders of a historic past as
vivid as it was varied.
From the heights of Sancerre one sees a wonderful history-making
panorama before him. Caesar crossed the Loire at Gien, the Franks forded
the river at La Charite, when they first went against Aquitaine, and
Charles the Bald came sadly to grief on a certain occasion at Pouilly.
It is here that the Loire rises to its greatest flood, and hundreds of
times, so history tells, from 490 to 1866, the fickle river has caused a
devastation so great and terrible that the memory of it is not yet dead.
This hardly seems possible of this usually tranquil stream, and there
have always been scoffers.
Madame de Sevigne wrote in 1675 to M. de Coulanges (but in her case
perhaps it was mere well-wishing), "_La belle Loire, elle est un peu
sujette a se deborder, mais elle en est plus douce_."
Ancient writers were wont to consider the inundations of the Loire as a
punishment from Heaven, and even in later times the superstition--if it
was a superstition--still remained.
[Illustration: _The Loire near La Charite_]
In 1825, when thousands of charcoal-burners (_charbonniers_) were all
but ruined, they petitioned the government for assistance. The official
who had the matter in charge, and whose name--fortunately for his
fame--does not appear to have been recorded, replied simply that the
flood was a periodical condition of affairs which the Almighty brought
about as occasion demanded, with good cause, and for this reason he
refused all assistance.
Important public works have done much to prevent repetitions of these
inundations, but the danger still exists, and always, in a wet season,
there are those dwellers along the river's banks who fear the rising
flood as they would the plague.
Chatillon, with its towers; Gien, a busy hive of industry, though with a
historic past; Sully; and St. Benoit-sur-Loire, with its unique double
transepted church; all pass in rapid review, and one enters the ancient
capital of the Orleannais quite ready for the new chapter which, in
colouring, is to be so different from that devoted to the upper valley.
From Orleans, south, one passes through a veritable wonderland of
fascinating charms. Chateaux, monasteries, and great civic and
ecclesiastical monuments pass quickly in turn.
Then comes Touraine which all love, the river meantime having grown no
more swift or ample, nor any more sluggish or attenuated. It is simply
the same characteristic flow which one has known before.
The landscape only is changing, while the fruits and flowers, and the
trees and foliage are more luxuriant, and the great chateaux are more
numerous, splendid, and imposing.
Of his well-beloved Touraine, Balzac wrote: "Do not ask me _why_ I love
Touraine; I love it not merely as one loves the cradle of his birth, nor
as one loves an oasis in a desert, but as an artist loves his art."
Blois, with its bloody memories; Chaumont, splendid and retired;
Chambord, magnificent, pompous, and bare; Amboise, with its great tower
high above the river, follow in turn till the Loire makes its regal
entree into Tours. "What a spectacle it is," wrote Sterne in "Tristram
Shandy," "for a traveller who journeys through Touraine at the time of
the vintage."
And then comes the final step which brings the traveller to where the
limpid waters of the Loire mingle with the salty ocean, and what a
triumphant meeting it is!
[Illustration: _Coiffes of Amboise and Orleans_]
Most of the cities of the Loire possess but one bridge, but Tours has
three, and, as becomes a great provincial capital, sits enthroned
upon the river-bank in mighty splendour.
The feudal towers of the Chateau de Luynes are almost opposite, and
Cinq-Mars, with its pagan "_pile_" and the ruins of its feudal castle
high upon a hill, points the way down-stream like a mariner's beacon.
Langeais follows, and the Indre, the Cher, and the Vienne, all ample and
historic rivers, go to swell the flood which passes under the bridges of
Saumur, Ancenis, and Ponts de Ce.
From Tours to the ocean, the Loire comes to its greatest amplitude,
though even then, in spite of its breadth, it is, for the greater part
of the year, impotent as to the functions of a great river.
Below Angers the Loire receives its first great affluent coming from the
country lying back of the right bank: the Maine itself is a considerable
river. It rises far up in the Breton peninsula, and before it empties
itself into the Loire, it has been aggrandized by three great
tributaries, the Loir, the Sarthe, and the Mayenne.
Here in this backwater of the Loire, as one might call it, is as
wonderful a collection of natural beauties and historical chateaux as on
the Loire itself. Chateaudun, Mayenne, and Vendome are historic ground
of superlative interest, and the great castle at Chateaudun is as
magnificent in its way as any of the monuments of the Loire. Vendome has
a Hotel de Ville which is an admirable relic of a feudal edifice, and
the _clocher_ of its church, which dominates many square leagues of
country, is counted as one of the most perfectly disposed church spires
in existence, as lovely, almost, as Texier's masterwork at Chartres, or
the needle-like _fleches_ at Strasburg or Freiburg in Breisgau.
The Maine joins the Loire just below Angers, at a little village
significantly called La Pointe. Below La Pointe are St.
Georges-sur-Loire, and three _chateaux de commerce_ which give their
names to the three principal Angevin vineyards: Chateau Serrand,
l'Epinay, and Chevigne.
Vineyard after vineyard, and chateau after chateau follow rapidly, until
one reaches the Ponts de Ce with their _petite ville_,--all very
delightful. Not so the bridge at Ancenis, where the flow of water is
marked daily on a huge black and white scale. The bridge is quite the
ugliest wire-rope affair to be seen on the Loire, and one is only too
glad to leave it behind, though it is with a real regret that he parts
from Ancenis itself.
Some years ago one could go from Angers to St. Nazaire by boat. It must
have been a magnificent trip, extraordinarily calm and serene, amid an
abundance of picturesque details; old chateaux and bridges in strong
contrast to the prairies of Touraine and the Orleannais. One embarked at
the foot of the stupendously towered chateau of King Rene, and for a
_petite heure_ navigated the Maine in the midst of great _chalands_,
fussy little _remorqueurs_ and _barques_ until La Pointe was reached,
when the Loire was followed to Nantes and St. Nazaire.
To-day this fine trip is denied one, the boats going only so far as La
Pointe.
Below Angers the Loire flows around and about a veritable archipelago of
islands and islets, cultivated with all the luxuriance of a back-yard
garden, and dotted with tiny hamlets of folk who are supremely happy and
content with their lot.
Some currents which run behind the islands are swift flowing and
impetuous, while others are practically elongated lakes, as dead as
those _lomes_ which in certain places flank the Saone and the Rhone.
All these various branches are united as the Loire flows between the
piers of the ungainly bridge of the Chemin-de-fer de Niort as it crosses
the river at Chalonnes.
Champtoce and Montjean follow, each with an individuality all its own.
Here the commerce takes on an increased activity, thanks to the great
national waterway known as the "Canal de Brest a Nantes." Here at the
busy port of Montjean--which the Angevins still spell and pronounce
_Montejean_--the Loire takes on a breadth and grandeur similar to the
great rivers in the western part of America. Montjean is dominated by a
fine ogival church, with a battery of arcs-boutants which are a joy in
themselves.
On the other bank, lying back of a great plain, which stretches away
from the river itself, is Champtoce, pleasantly situated on the flank of
a hill and dominated by the ruins of a thirteenth-century chateau which
belonged to the cruel Gilles de Retz, somewhat apocryphally known to
history as "Barbe-bleu"--not the Bluebeard of the nursery tale, who was
of Eastern origin, but a sort of Occidental successor who was equally
cruel and bloodthirsty in his attitude toward his whilom wives.
From this point on one comes within the sphere of influence of Nantes,
and there is more or less of a suburban traffic on the railway, and the
plodders cityward by road are more numerous than the mere vagabonds of
the countryside.
The peasant women whom one meets wear a curious bonnet, set on the head
well to the fore, with wings at the side folded back quite like the
pictures that one sees of the mediaeval dames of these parts, a survival
indeed of the middle ages.
The Loire becomes more and more animated and occasionally there is a
great tow of boats like those that one sees continually passing on the
lower Seine. Here the course of the Loire takes on a singular aspect. It
is filled with long flat islands, sometimes in archipelagos, but often
only a great flat prairie surrounded by a tranquil canal, wide and deep,
and with little resemblance to the mistress Loire of a hundred or two
kilometres up-stream. All these isles are in a high state of
cultivation, though wholly worked with the hoe and the spade, both of
them of a primitiveness that might have come down from Bible times; rare
it is to see a horse or a harrow on these "bouquets of verdure
surrounded by waves."
Near Oudon is one of those monumental follies which one comes across
now and then in most foreign countries: a great edifice which serves no
useful purpose, and which, were it not for certain redeeming features,
would be a sorry thing indeed. The "Folie-Siffait," a citadel which
perches itself high upon the summit of a hill, was--and is--an
_amusette_ built by a public-spirited man of Nantes in order that his
workmen might have something to do in a time of a scarcity of work. It
is a bizarre, incredible thing, but the motive which inspired its
erection was most worthy, and the roadway running beneath, piercing its
foundation walls, gives a theatrical effect which, in a way, makes it
the picturesque rival of many a more famous Rhine castle.
The river valley widens out here at Oudon, practically the frontier of
Bretagne and Anjou. The railroad pierces the rock walls of the river
with numerous tunnels along the right bank, and the Vendean country
stretches far to the southward in long rolling hills quite unlike any of
the characteristics of other parts of the valley. Finally, the vast
plain of Mauves comes into sight, beautifully coloured with a white and
iron-stained rocky background which is startlingly picturesque in its
way, if not wholly beautiful according to the majority of standards.
Next comes what a Frenchman has called a "tumultuous vision of Nantes."
To-day the very ancient and historic city which grew up from the Portus
Namnetum and the Condivicnum of the Romans is indeed a veritable tumult
of chimneys, masts, and locomotives. But all this will not detract one
jot from its reputation of being one of the most delightful of
provincial capitals, and the smoke and activity of its port only tend to
accentuate a note of colour that in the whole itinerary of the Loire has
been but pale.
Below Nantes the Loire estuary has turned the surrounding country into a
little Holland, where fisherfolk and their boats, with sails of red and
blue, form charming symphonies of pale colour. In the _cabarets_ along
its shores there is a strange medley of peasants, sea-farers, and fisher
men and women. Not so cosmopolitan a crew as one sees in the harbourside
_cabarets_ at Marseilles, or even Le Havre, but sufficiently strange to
be a fascination to one who has just come down from the headwaters.
The "Section Maritime," from Nantes to the sea, is a matter of some
sixty kilometres. Here the boats increase in number and size. They are
known as _gabares_, _chalands_, and _alleges_, and go down with the
river-current and return on the incoming ebb, for here the river is
tidal.
Gray and green is the aspect at the Loire's source, and green and gray
it still is, though of a decidedly different colour-value, at St.
Nazaire, below Nantes, the real deep-water port of the Loire.
By this time the river has amplified into a broad estuary which is lost
in the incoming and outgoing tides of the Bay of Biscay.
For nearly a thousand kilometres the Loire has wound its way gently and
broadly through rocky escarpments, fertile plains, populous and
luxurious towns,--all of it historic ground,--by stately chateaux and
through vineyards and fruit orchards, with a placid grandeur.
Now it becomes more or less prosaic and matter-of-fact, though in a way
no less interesting, as it takes on some of the attributes of the
outside world.
This outline, then, approximates somewhat a portrait of the Loire. It is
the result of many pilgrimages enthusiastically undertaken; a long
contemplation of the charms of perhaps the most beautiful river in
France, from its source to its mouth, at all seasons of the year.
The riches and curios of the cities along its banks have been
contemplated with pleasure, intermingled with a memory of many stirring
scenes of the past, but it is its chateaux that make it famous.
The story of the chateaux has been told before in hundreds of volumes,
but only a personal view of them will bring home to one the manners and
customs of one of the most luxurious periods of life in the France of
other days.
CHAPTER II.
THE ORLEANNAIS
Of the many travelled English and Americans who go to Paris, how few
visit the Loire valley with its glorious array of mediaeval and
Renaissance chateaux. No part of France, except Paris, is so accessible,
and none is so comfortably travelled, whether by road or by rail.
At Orleans one is at the very gateway of this splendid, bountiful
region, the lower valley of the Loire. Here the river first takes on a
complexion which previously it had lacked, for it is only when the Loire
becomes the boundary-line between the north and the south that one comes
to realize its full importance.
The Orleannais, like many another province of mid-France, is a region
where plenty awaits rich and poor alike. Not wholly given over to
agriculture, nor yet wholly to manufacturing, it is without that
restless activity of the frankly industrial centres of the north. In
spite of this, though, the Orleannais is not idle.
[Illustration: THE CHATEAUX OF THE LOIRE (MAP)]
Orleans is the obvious _pointe de depart_ for all the wonderland of the
Renaissance which is to follow, but itself and its immediate
surroundings have not the importance for the visitor, in spite of the
vivid historical chapters which have been written here in the past, that
many another less famous city possesses. By this is meant that the
existing monuments of history are by no means as numerous or splendid
here as one might suppose. Not that they are entirely lacking, but
rather that they are of a different species altogether from that array
of magnificently planned chateaux which line the banks of the Loire
below.
To one coming from the north the entrance to the Orleannais will be
emphatically marked. It is the first experience of an atmosphere which,
if not characteristically or climatically of the south, is at least
reminiscent thereof, with a luminosity which the provinces of old France
farther north entirely lack.
As Lavedan, the Academicien, says: "Here all focuses itself into one
great picture, the combined romance of an epoch. Have you not been
struck with a land where the clouds, the atmosphere, the odour of the
soil, and the breezes from afar, all comport, one with another, in true
and just proportions?" This is the Orleannais, a land where was
witnessed the morning of the Valois, the full noon of Louis XIV., and
the twilight of Louis XVI.
The Orleannais formed a distinct part of mediaeval France, as it did,
ages before, of western Gaul. Of all the provinces through which the
Loire flows, the Orleannais is as prolific as any of great names and
greater events, and its historical monuments, if not so splendid as
those in Touraine, are no less rare.
Orleans itself contains many remarkable Gothic and Renaissance
constructions, and not far away is the ancient church of the old abbey
of Notre Dame de Clery, one of the most historic and celebrated shrines
in the time of the superstitious Louis XI.; while innumerable mediaeval
villes and ruined fortresses plentifully besprinkle the province.
One characteristic possessed by the Orleannais differentiates it from
the other outlying provinces of the old monarchy. The people and the
manners and customs of this great and important duchy were allied, in
nearly all things, with the interests and events of the capital itself,
and so there was always a lack of individuality, which even to-day is
noticeably apparent in the Orleans capital. The shops, hotels, cafes,
and the people themselves might well be one of the _quartiers_ of Paris,
so like are they in general aspect.
The notable Parisian character of the inhabitants of Orleans, and the
resemblance of the people of the surrounding country to those of the Ile
of France, is due principally to the fact that the Orleannais was never
so isolated as many others of the ancient provinces. It was virtually a
neighbour of the capital, and its relations with it were intimate and
numerous. Moreover, it was favoured by a great number of lines of
communication by road and by water, so that its manners and customs
became, more or less unconsciously, interpolations.
The great event of the year in Orleans is the Fete de Jeanne d'Arc,
which takes place in the month of May. Usually few English and American
visitors are present, though why it is hard to reason out, for it takes
place at quite the most delightful season in the year. Perhaps it is
because Anglo-Saxons are ashamed of the part played by their ancestors
in the shocking death of the maid of Domremy and Orleans. Innumerable
are the relics and reminders of the "Maid" scattered throughout the
town, and the local booksellers have likewise innumerable and
authoritative accounts of the various episodes of her life, which saves
the necessity of making further mention here.
There are several statues of Jeanne d'Arc in the city, and they have
given rise to the following account written by Jules Lemaitre, the
Academicien:
"I believe that the history of Jeanne d'Arc was the first that was ever
told to me (before even the fairy-tales of Perrault). The 'Mort de
Jeanne d'Arc,' of Casimir Delavigne, was the first fable that I learned,
and the equestrian statue of the 'Maid,' in the Place Martroi, at
Orleans, is perhaps the oldest vision that my memory guards.
"This statue of Jeanne d'Arc is absurd. She has a Grecian profile, and a
charger which is not a war-horse but a race-horse. Nevertheless to me it
was noble and imposing.
"In the courtyard of the Hotel de Ville is a _petite pucelle_, very
gentle and pious, who holds against her heart her sword, after the
manner of a crucifix. At the end of the bridge across the Loire is
another Jeanne d'Arc, as the maid of war, surrounded by swirling
draperies, as in a picture of Juvenet's. This to me tells the whole
story of the reverence with which the martyred 'Maid' is regarded in the
city of Orleans by the Loire."
One can appreciate all this, and to the full, for a Frenchman is a stern
critic of art, even that of his own countrymen, and Jeanne d'Arc, along
with some other celebrities, is one of those historical figures which
have seldom had justice done them in sculptured or pictorial
representations. The best, perhaps, is the precocious Lepage's fine
painting, now in America. What would not the French give for the return
of this work of art?
The Orleannais, with the Ile de France, formed the particular domain of
the third race of French monarchs. From 1364 to 1498 the province was an
appanage known as the Duche d'Orleans, but it was united with the Crown
by Louis XII., and finally divided into the Departments of Loir et Cher,
Eure et Loir, and Loiret.
Like the "pardons" and "benedictions" of Finistere and other parts of
Bretagne, the peasants of the Loiret have a quaint custom which bespeaks
a long handed-down superstition. On the first Sunday of Lent they hie
themselves to the fields with lighted fagots and chanting the following
lines:
"Sortez, sortez d'ici mulots!
Ou je vais vous bruler les crocs!
Quittez, quittez ces bles;
Allez, vous trouverez
Dans la cave du cure
Plus a boire qu' a manger."
Just how far the cure endorses these sentiments, the author of this book
does not know. The explanation of the rather extraordinary proceeding
came from one of the participants, who, having played his part in the
ceremony, dictated the above lines over sundry _petits verres_ paid for
by the writer. The day is not wound up, however, with an orgy of eating
and drinking, as is sometimes the case in far-western Brittany. The
peasant of the Loiret simply eats rather heavily of "_mi_," which is
nothing more or less than oatmeal porridge, after which he goes to bed.
The Loire rolls down through the Orleannais, from Chateauneuf-sur-Loire
and Jargeau, and cuts the banks of _sable_, and the very shores
themselves, into little capes and bays which are delightful in their
eccentricity. Here cuts in the _Canal d'Orleans_, which makes possible
the little traffic that goes on between the Seine and the Loire.
A few kilometres away from the right bank of the Loire, in the heart of
the Gatanais, is Lorris, the home of Guillaume de Lorris, the first
author of the "Roman de la Rose." For this reason alone it should become
a literary shrine of the very first rank, though, in spite of its claim,
no one ever heard of a literary pilgrim making his way there.
Lorris is simply a big, overgrown French market-town, which is
delightful enough in its somnolence, but which lacks most of the
attributes which tourists in general seem to demand.
At Lorris a most momentous treaty was signed, known as the "Paix de
Lorris," wherein was assured to the posterity of St. Louis the heritage
of the Comte de Toulouse, another of those periodical territorial
aggrandizements which ultimately welded the French nation into the whole
that it is to-day.
From the juncture of the _Canal d'Orleans_ with the Loire one sees
shining in the brilliant sunlight the roof-tops of Orleans, the
Aurelianum of the Romans, its hybrid cathedral overtopping all else. It
was Victor Hugo who said of this cathedral: "This odious church, which
from afar holds so much of promise, and which near by has none," and
Hugo undoubtedly spoke the truth.
Orleans is an old city and a _cite neuve_. Where the river laps its
quays, it is old but commonplace; back from the river is a strata which
is really old, fine Gothic house-fronts and old leaning walls; while
still farther from the river, as one approaches the railway station, it
is strictly modern, with all the devices and appliances of the newest of
the new.
The Orleans of history lies riverwards,--the Orleans where the heart of
France pulsed itself again into life in the tragic days which were
glorified by "the Maid."
"The countryside of the Orleannais has the monotony of a desert," said
an English traveller some generations ago. He was wrong. To do him
justice, however, or to do his observations justice, he meant, probably,
that, save the river-bottom of the Loire, the great plain which begins
with La Beauce and ends with the Sologne has a comparatively
uninteresting topography. This is true; but it is not a desert. La
Beauce is the best grain-growing region in all France, and the Sologne
is now a reclaimed land whose sandy soil has proved admirably adapted to
an unusually abundant growth of the vine. So much for this old-time
point of view, which to-day has changed considerably.
The Orleannais is one of the most populous and progressive sections of
all France, and its inhabitants, per square kilometre, are constantly
increasing in numbers, which is more than can be said of every
_departement_. There are multitudes of tiny villages, and one is
scarcely ever out of sight and sound of a habitation.
[Illustration: _ENVIRONS of ORLEANS_ (MAP)]
In the great forest, just to the west of Orleans, are two small
villages, each a celebrated battle-ground, and a place of a patriotic
pilgrimage on the eighth and ninth of November of each year. They are
Coulmiers and Bacon, and here some fugitives from Metz and Sedan, with
some young troops exposed to fire for the first time, engaged with the
Prussians (in 1870) who had occupied Orleans since mid-October. There is
the usual conventional "soldiers' monument,"--with considerably more art
about it than is usually seen in America,--before which Frenchmen
seemingly never cease to worship.
This same _Foret d'Orleans_, one of those wild-woods which so
plentifully besprinkle France, has a sad and doleful memory in the
traditions of the druidical inhabitants of a former day. Their practices
here did not differ greatly from those of their brethren elsewhere, but
local history is full of references to atrocities so bloodthirsty that
it is difficult to believe that they were ever perpetrated under the
guise of religion.
Surrounding the forest are many villages and hamlets, war-stricken all
in the dark days of seventy-one, when the Prussians were overrunning the
land.
Of all the cities of the Loire, Orleans, Blois, Tours, Angers, and
Nantes alone show any spirit of modern progressiveness or of likeness
to the capital. The rest, to all appearances, are dead, or at least
sleeping in their pasts. But they are charming and restful spots for all
that, where in melancholy silence sit the old men, while the younger
folk, including the very children, are all at work in the neighbouring
vineyards or in the wheat-fields of La Beauce.
Meung-sur-Loire and Beaugency sleep on the river-bank, their proud
monuments rising high in the background,--the massive tower of Caesar and
a quartette of church spires. Just below Orleans is the juncture of the
Loiret and the Loire at St. Mesmin, while only a few kilometres away is
Clery, famed for its associations of Louis XI.
The Loiret is not a very ample river, and is classed by the Minister of
Public Works as navigable for but four kilometres of its length. This,
better than anything else, should define its relative importance among
the great waterways of France. Navigation, as it is known elsewhere, is
practically non-existent.
The course of the Loiret is perhaps twelve kilometres all told, but it
has given its name to a great French _departement_, though it is
doubtless the shortest of all the rivers of France thus honoured.
It first comes to light in the dainty park of the Chateau de la Source,
where there are two distinct sources. The first forms a small circular
basin, known as the "Bouillon," which leads into another semicircular
basin called the "Bassin du Miroir," from the fact that it reflects the
facade of the chateau in its placid surface. Of course, this is all very
artificial and theatrical, but it is a pretty conceit nevertheless. The
other source, known as the "Grande Source," joins the rivulet some
hundreds of yards below the "Bassin du Miroir."
The Chateau de la Source is a seventeenth-century edifice, of no great
architectural beauty in itself, but sufficiently sylvan in its
surroundings to give it rank as one of the notable places of pilgrimage
for tourists who, said a cynical French writer, "take the chateaux of
the Loire _tour a tour_ as they do the morgue, the Moulin Rouge, and the
sewers of Paris."
In the early days the chateau belonged to the Cardinal Briconnet, and it
was here that Bolingbroke, after having been stripped of his titles in
England, went into retirement in 1720. In 1722 he received Voltaire, who
read him his "Henriade."
[Illustration: THE LOIRET]
In 1815 the invading Prince Eckmuehl, with his staff, installed himself
in the chateau, when, after Waterloo, the Prussian and French armies
were separated only by a barrier placed midway on the bridge at Orleans.
It was here also that the Prussian army was disbanded, on the agreement
of the council held at Angerville, near Orleans.
There are three other chateaux on the borders of the Loiret, which are
of more than ordinary interest, so far as great country houses and their
surroundings go, though their histories are not very striking, with
perhaps the exception of the Chateau de la Fontaine, which has a
remarkable garden, laid out by Lenotre, the designer of the parks at
Versailles.
Leaving Orleans by the right bank of the Loire, one first comes to La
Chapelle-St. Mesmin. La Chapelle has a church dating from the eleventh
century and a chateau which is to-day the _maison de campagne_ of the
Bishop of Orleans. On the opposite bank was the Abbaye de Micy, founded
by Clovis at the time of his conversion. A stone cross, only, marks the
site to-day.
St. Ay follows next, and is usually set down in the guide-books as
"celebrated for good wines." This is not to be denied for a moment, and
it is curious to note that the city bears the same name as the famous
town in the champagne district, celebrated also for good wine, though
of a different kind. The name of the Orleannais Ay is gained from a
hermitage founded here by a holy man, who died in the sixth century. His
tomb was discovered in 1860, under the choir of the church, which makes
it a place of pilgrimage of no little local importance.
At Meung-sur-Loire one should cross the river to Clery, five kilometres
off, seldom if ever visited by casual travellers. But why? Simply
because it is overlooked in that universal haste shown by most
travellers--who are not students of art or architecture, or deep lovers
of history--in making their way to more popular shrines. One will not
regret the time taken to visit Clery, which shared with Our Lady of
Embrun the devotions of Louis XI.
Clery's three thousand pastoral inhabitants of to-day would never give
it distinction, and it is only the Maison de Louis XI. and the Basilique
de Notre Dame which makes it worth while, but this is enough.
In "Quentin Durward" one reads of the time when the superstitious Louis
was held in captivity by the Burgundian, Charles the Bold, and of how
the French king made his devotions before the little image, worn in his
hat, of the Virgin of Clery; "the grossness of his superstition, none
the less than his fickleness, leading him to believe Our Lady of Clery
to be quite a different person from the other object of his devotion,
the Madonna of Embrun, a tiny mountain village in southwestern France.
"'Sweet Lady of Clery,' he exclaimed, clasping his hands and beating his
breast as he spoke, 'Blessed Mother of Mercy! thou who art omnipotent
with omnipotence, have compassion with me, a sinner! It is true I have
sometimes neglected you for thy blessed sister of Embrun; but I am a
king, my power is great, my wealth boundless; and were it otherwise, I
would double my _gabelle_ on my subjects rather than not pay my debts to
you both.'"
Louis endowed the church at Clery, and the edifice was built in the fine
flamboyant style of the period, just previous to his death, which De
Commines gives as "_le samedy penultieme jour d'Aoust, l'an mil quatre
cens quatre-vingtz et trois, a huit heures du soir_."
Louis XI. was buried here, and the chief "sight" is of course his tomb,
beside which is a flagstone which covers the heart of Charles VIII. The
Chapelle St. Jacques, within the church, is ornamented by a series of
charming sculptures, and the Chapelle des Dunois-Longueville holds the
remains of the famous ally of Jeanne d'Arc and members of his family.
In the choir is the massive oaken statue of Our Lady of Clery
(thirteenth century); the very one before which Louis made his vows.
There is some old glass in the choir and a series of sculptured stalls,
which would make famous a more visited and better known shrine. There is
a fine sculptured stone portal to the sacristy, and within there are
some magnificent old _armoires_, and also two chasubles, which saw
service in some great church, perhaps here, in the times of Louis
himself.
The "Maison de Louis XI.," near the church, is a house of brick,
restored in 1651, and now--or until a very recent date--occupied by a
community of nuns. In the Grande Rue is another "Maison de Louis XI.;"
at least it has his cipher on the painted ceiling. It is now occupied by
the Hotel de la Belle Image. Those who like to dine and sleep where have
also dined and slept royal heads will appreciate putting up at this
hostelry.
[Illustration: _The Loire at Meung_]
Meung-sur-Loire was the birthplace of Jehan Clopinel, better known as
Jean de Meung, who continued Guillaume de Lorris's "Roman de la Rose,"
the most famous bit of verse produced by the _trouveres_ of the
thirteenth century. The voice of the troubadour was soon after hushed
for ever, but that thirteenth-century masterwork--though by two hands
and the respective portions unequal in merit--lives for ever as the
greatest of its kind. In memory of the author, Meung has its Rue Jehan
de Meung, for want of a more effective or appealing monument.
Dumas opens the history of "Les Trois Mousquetaires" with the following
brilliantly romantic lines anent Meung: "_Le premier lundi du mois
d'Avril, 1625, le bourg de Meung, ou naquit l'auteur du 'Roman de la
Rose.'_" (One of the authors, he should have said, but here is where
Dumas nodded, as he frequently did.)
Continuing, one reads: "The town was in a veritable uproar. It was as if
the Huguenots were up in arms and the drama of a second Rochelle was
being enacted." Really the description is too brilliant and entrancing
to be repeated here, and if any one has forgotten his Dumas to the
extent that he has forgotten D'Artagnan's introduction to the hostelry
of the "Franc Meunier," he is respectfully referred back to that
perennially delightful romance.
Meung was once a Roman fortress, known as Maudunum, and in the eleventh
century St. Liphard founded a monastery here.
In the fifteenth century Meung was the prison of Francois Villon. Poor
vagabond as he was then, it has become the fashion to laud both the
personality and the poesy of Maitre Francois Villon.
By the orders of Thibaut d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans, Villon was
confined in a strong tower attached to the side of the _clocher_ of the
parish church of St. Liphard, and which adjoined the _chateau de
plaisance_ belonging to the bishop. Primarily this imprisonment was due
to a robbery in which the poet had been concerned at Orleans. He spent
the whole of the summer in this dungeon, which was overrun with rats,
and into which he had to be lowered by ropes. As his food consisted of
bread and water only, his sufferings at this time were probably greater
than at any other period in his life. Here the burglar-poet remained
until October, 1461, when Louis XI. visited Meung, and, to mark the
occasion, ordered the release of all prisoners. For this delivery,
Villon, according to the accounts of his life, appears to have been
genuinely grateful to the king.
At Beaugency, seven kilometres from Meung, one comes upon an
architectural and historical treat which is unexpected.
In the eleventh century Beaugency was a fief of the bishopric of Amiens,
and its once strong chateau was occupied by the Barons de Landry, the
last of whom died, without children, in the thirteenth century.
Philippe-le-Bel bought the fief and united it with the Comte de Blois.
It was made an independent _comte_ of itself in 1569, and in 1663 became
definitely an appanage of Orleans. The Prince de Galles took Beaugency
in 1359, the Gascons in 1361, Duguesclin in 1370 and again in 1417; in
1421 and in 1428 it was taken by the English, from whom it was delivered
by Jeanne d'Arc in 1429. Internal wars and warfares continued for
another hundred and fifty years, finally culminating in one of the
grossest scenes which had been enacted within its walls,--the bloody
revenge against the Protestants, encouraged doubtless by the affair of
St. Bartholomew's night at Paris.
The ancient square donjon of the eleventh century, known as the Tour de
Cesar, still looms high above the town. It must be one of the hugest
keeps in all France. The old chateau of the Dunois is now a charitable
institution, but reflects, in a way, the splendour of its
fourteenth-century inception, and its Salle de Jeanne d'Arc, with its
great chimneypiece, is worthy to rank with the best of its kind along
the Loire. The spiral staircase, of which the Loire builders were so
fond, is admirable here, and dates from 1530.
The Hotel de Ville of Beaugency is a charming edifice of the very best
of Renaissance, which many more pretentious structures of the period are
not. It dates from 1526, and was entirely restored--not, however, to its
detriment, as frequently happens--in the last years of the nineteenth
century. Its charm, nevertheless, lies mostly in its exterior, for
little remains of value within except a remarkable series of old
embroideries taken from the choir of the old abbey of Beaugency.
The Eglise de Notre Dame is a Romanesque structure with Gothic
interpolations. It is not bad in its way, but decidedly is not
remarkable as mediaeval churches go.
The old streets of Beaugency contain a dazzling array of old houses in
wood and stone, and in the Rue des Templiers is a rare example of
Romanesque civil architecture; at least the type is rare enough in the
Orleannais, though more frequently seen in the south of France. The Tour
St. Firmin dates from 1530, and is all that remains of a church which
stood here up to revolutionary times. The square ruined towers known
as the Porte Tavers are relics of the city's old walls and gates, and
are all that are left to mark the ancient enclosure.
[Illustration: _Beaugency_]
The Tour du Diable and the house of the ruling abbot remain to suggest
the power and magnificence of the great abbey which was built here in
the tenth century. In 1567 it was burned, and later restored, but beyond
the two features just mentioned there is nothing to indicate its former
uses, the remaining structures having passed into private hands and
being devoted to secular uses.
The old bridge which crosses the Loire at this point is most curious,
and dates from various epochs. It is 440 metres in length, and is
composed of twenty-six arches, one of which dates from the fourteenth
century, when bridge-building was really an art. Eight of the
present-day arches are of wood, and on the second is a monolith
surmounted by a figure of Christ in bronze, replacing a former chapel to
St. Jacques. A chapel on a bridge is not a unique arrangement, but few
exist to-day, one of the most famous being, perhaps, that on the ruined
bridge of St. Benezet at Avignon.
Altogether, Beaugency, as it sleeps its life away after the strenuous
days of the middle ages, is more lovable by far than a great
metropolis.
The traveller is well repaid who makes a stop at Beaugency a part of a
three days' gentle ramble among the usually neglected towns and villages
of the Orleannais and the Blaisois, instead of rushing through to Blois
by express-train, which is what one usually does.
Southward one's route lies through pleasant vineyards, on one side the
Sologne, and on the other the Coteau de Guignes, which latter ranks as
quite the best among the vine-growing districts of the Orleannais.
Near Tavers is a natural curiosity in the shape of the "Fontaine des
Sables Mouvants," where the sands of a tiny spring boil and bubble like
a miniature geyser.
Mer, another small town, follows, twelve kilometres farther on. Like
Beaugency it is a somnolent bourg, and the life of the peasant folk
round about, who go to market on one day at Beaugency and on another at
Blois, and occasionally as far away as Orleans, is much the same as it
was a century ago.
There is a Boulevard de la Gare and a Grande Rue at Mer, the latter
leading to a fine Gothic church with a fifteenth-century tower, which is
admirable in every way, and forms a beacon by land for many miles
around. The primitive church at Mer dates from the eleventh century, the
side walls, however, being all that remain of that period. There is a
sculptured pulpit of the seventeenth century, and a great painting,
which looks ancient and is certainly a masterful work of art,
representing an "Adoration of the Magi."
When all is said and done, it is its irresistible and inexpressible
charm which makes Mer well-beloved, rather than any great wealth of
artistic atmosphere of any nature.
Away to the south, across the Loire to Muides, runs the route to
Chambord, through the Sologne, where immediately the whole aspect of
life changes from that on the borders of the rich grain-lands of the
Orleannais and La Beauce.
All the way from Beaugency to Blois the Loire threads its way through a
lovely country, whose rolling slopes, back from the river, are
surmounted here and there by windmills, a not very frequent adjunct to
the landscape of France, except in the north.
Near Mer is Menars, with its eighteenth-century chateau of La Pompadour;
Suevres, the site of an ancient Roman city; the lowlands lying before
Chambord; St. Die; Montlivault; St. Claude, and a score of little
villages which are entrancing in their old-world aspect even in these
days of progress. This completes the panorama to Blois which, with the
Blaisois, forms the borderland between the Orleannais and Touraine.
Before reaching Blois, Menars, at any rate, commands attention. It
fronts upon the Loire, but is practically upon the northern border of
the Foret de Blois, hence properly belongs to the Blaisois. Menars was
made a rendezvous for the chase by the wily and pleasure-loving La
Pompadour, who quartered herself at the chateau, which afterward passed
to her brother, De Marigny.
Before the Revolution, Menars was the seat of a marquisate, of which the
land was bought by Louis XV. for his famous, or infamous, _maitresse_.
The property has frequently changed hands since that day, but its
gardens and terraces, descending toward the river-bank, mark it as one
of those _coquette_ establishments, with which France was dotted in the
eighteenth century.
These establishments possessed enough of luxurious appointments to be
classed as fitting for the butterflies of the time, but in no way, so
far as the architectural design or the artistic details were concerned,
were any of them worthy to be classed with the great domestic chateaux
of the early years of the Renaissance.
CHAPTER III.
THE BLAISOIS AND THE SOLOGNE
The Blesois or Blaisois was the ancient name given to the _petit pays_
which made a part of the government of the Orleannais. It was, and is,
the borderland between the Orleannais and Touraine, and, with its
capital, Blois, the city of counts, was a powerful territory in its own
right, in spite of the allegiance which it owed to the Crown. Twenty
leagues in length by thirteen in width, it was bounded on the north by
the Dunois and the Orleannais, on the east by Berry, on the south by
Touraine, and on the west by Touraine and the Vendomois.
Blois, its capital, was famed ever in the annals of the middle ages, and
to-day no city in the Loire valley possesses more sentimental interest
for the traveller than does Blois.
To the eastward lay the sands of the Sologne, and southward the ample
and fruitful Touraine, hence Blois's position was one of supreme
importance, and there is no wonder that it proved to be the scene of so
many momentous events of history.
The present day Department of the Loir et Cher was carved out from the
Blaisois, the Vendomois, and the Orleannais. The Baisois was, in olden
time, one of the most important of the _petits gouvernements_ of all the
kingdom, and gave to Blois a line of counts who rivalled in power and
wealth the churchmen of Tours and the dukes of Brittany. Gregory of
Tours is the first historian who makes mention of the ancient _Pagus
Blensensis_.
One must not tell the citizen of Blois that it is at Tours that one
hears the best French spoken. Everybody knows this, but the inhabitant
of the Blaisois will not admit it, and, in truth, to the stranger there
is not much apparent difference. Throughout this whole region he
understands and makes himself understood with much more facility than in
any other part of France.
For one thing, not usually recalled, Blois should be revered and
glorified. It was the native place of Lenoir, who invented the
instrument which made possible the definite determination of the metric
system of measurement.
One reads in Bernier's "Histoire de Blois" that the inhabitants are
"honest, gallant, and polite in conversation, and of a delicate and
diffident temperament." This was written nearly a century ago, but there
is no excuse for one's changing the opinion to-day unless, as was the
misfortune of the writer, he runs up against an unusually importunate
vender of post-cards or an aggressive _garcon de cafe_.
[Illustration: ARMS OF THE CITY OF BLOIS]
Blois, among all the cities of the Loire, is the favourite with the
tourist. Why this should be is an enigma. It is overburdened, at times,
with droves of tourists, and this in itself is a detraction in the eyes
of many.
Perhaps it is because here one first meets a great chateau of state; and
certainly the Chateau de Blois lives in one's memory more than any other
chateau in France.
[Illustration: _The Riverside at Blois_]
Much has been written of Blois, its counts, its chateau, and its many
and famous _hotels_ of the nobility, by writers of all opinions and
abilities, from those old chroniclers who wrote of the plots and
intrigues of other days to those critics of art and architecture who
have discovered--or think they have discovered--that Da Vinci designed
the famous spiral staircase.
From this one may well gather that Blois is the foremost chateau of all
the Loire in popularity and theatrical effect. Truly this is so, but it
is by no manner of means the most lovable; indeed, it is the least
lovable of all that great galaxy which begins at Blois and ends at
Nantes. It is a show-place and not much more, and partakes in every form
and feature--as one sees it to-day--of the attributes of a museum, and
such it really is. All of its former gorgeousness is still there, and
all the banalities of the later period when Gaston of Orleans built his
ugly wing, for the "personally conducted" to marvel at, and honeymoon
couples to envy. The French are quite fond of visiting this shrine
themselves, but usually it is the young people and their mammas, and
detached couples of American and English birth that one most sees
strolling about the courts and apartments were formerly lords and ladies
and cavaliers moved and plotted.
The great chateau of the Counts of Blois is built upon an inclined rock
which rises above the roof-tops of the lower town quite in fairy-book
fashion,--
"... Batie en pierre et d'ardoise converte,
Blanche et carree au bas de la colline verte."
Commonly referred to as the Chateau de Blois, it is really composed of
four separate and distinct foundations; the original chateau of the
counts; the later addition of Louis XII.; the palace of Francois I., and
the most unsympathetically and dismally disposed _pavillon_ of Gaston of
Orleans.
[Illustration: _Signature of Francois Premier_]
The artistic qualities of the greater part of the distinct edifices
which go to make up the chateau as it stands to-day are superb, with the
exception of that great wing of Gaston's, before mentioned, which is as
cold and unfeeling as the overrated palace at Versailles.
The Comtes de Chatillon built that portion just to the right of the
present entrance; Louis XII., the edifice through which one enters the
inner court and which extends far to the left, including also the chapel
immediately to the rear; while Francois Premier, who here as elsewhere
let his unbounded Italian proclivities have full sway, built the
extended wing to the left of the inner court and fronting on the present
Place du Chateau, formerly the Place Royale.
Immediately to the left, in the Basse Cour de Chateau, are the Hotel
d'Amboise, the Hotel d'Epernon, and farther away, in the Rue St. Honore,
the Hotel Sardini, the Hotel d'Alluye, and a score of others belonging
to the nobility of other days; all of them the scenes of many stirring
and gallant events in Renaissance times.
This is hardly the place for a discussion of the merits or demerits of
any particular artistic style, but the frequently repeated expression of
Buffon's "_Le style, c'est l'homme_" may well be paraphrased into
"_L'art, c'est l'epoque._" In fact one finds at all times imprinted upon
the architectural style of any period the current mood bred of some
historical event or a passing fancy.
At Blois this is particularly noticeable. As an architectural monument
the chateau is a picturesque assemblage of edifices belonging to many
different epochs, and, as such, shows, as well as any other document of
contemporary times, the varying ambitions and emotions of its builders,
from the rude and rough manners of the earliest of feudal times through
the highly refined Renaissance details of the imaginative brain of
Francois, down to the base concoction of the elder Mansart, produced at
the commands of Gaston of Orleans.
[Illustration: CYPHER OF ANNE D'BRETANGE CHATEAU DE BLOIS]
The whole gamut, from the gay and winsome to the sad and dismal, is
found here.
The escutcheons of the various occupants are plainly in evidence,--the
swan pierced by an arrow of the first Counts of Blois; the ermine of
Anne de Bretagne; the porcupine of the Ducs d'Orleans, and the
salamander of Francois Premier.
In the earliest structure were to be seen all the attributes of a feudal
fortress, towers and walls pierced with narrow loopholes, and damp, dark
dungeons hidden away in the thick walls. Then came a structure which was
less of a fortress and more habitable, but still a stronghold, though
having ample and decorative doorways and windows, with curious
sculptures and rich framings. Then the pompous Renaissance with
_escaliers_ and _balcons a jour_, balustrades crowning the walls,
arabesques enriching the pilasters and walls, and elaborate cornices
here, there, and everywhere,--all bespeaking the gallantry and taste of
the _roi-chevalier_. Finally came the cold, classic features of the
period of the brother of Louis XIII., decidedly the worst and most
unlivable and unlovely architecture which France has ever produced. All
these features are plain in the general scheme of the Chateau de Blois
to-day, and doubtless it is this that makes the appeal; too much
loveliness, as at Chenonceaux or Azay-le-Rideau, staggers the modern
mortal by the sheer impossibility of its modern attainment.
In plan the Chateau de Blois forms an irregular square situated at the
apex of a promontory high above the surface of the Loire, and
practically behind the town itself. The building has a most picturesque
aspect, and, to those who know, gives practically a history of the
chateau architecture of the time. Abandoned, mutilated, and dishonoured
from time to time, the structure gradually took on new forms until the
thick walls underlying the apartment known to-day as the Salle des
Etats--probably the most ancient portion of all--were overshadowed by
the great richness of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One early
fragment was entirely enveloped in the structure which was built by
Francois Premier, the ancient Tour de Chateau Regnault, or De Moulins,
or Des Oubliettes, as it was variously known, and from the outside this
is no longer visible.
From the platform one sees a magnificent panorama of the city and the
far-reaching Loire, which unrolls itself southward and northward for
many leagues, its banks covered by rich vineyards and crowned by thick
forests.
The building of Louis XII. presents its brick-faced exterior in black
and red lozenge shapes, with sculptured window-frames, squarely upon the
little tree-bordered _place_ of to-day, which in other times formed a
part of that magnificent terrace which looked down upon the roof of the
Eglise St. Nicolas, and the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception,
and the silvery belt of the Loire itself.
[Illustration: ARMS OF LOIS XII]
On the west facade of this vast conglomerate structure one sees the
effigy of the porcupine, that weird symbol adopted by the family of
Orleans.
The choice of this ungainly animal--in spite of which it is most
decorative in outline--was due to the first Louis, who was Duc
d'Orleans. In the year 1393 Louis founded the order of the porcupine,
in honour of the birth of Charles, his eldest son, who was born to him
by Valentine de Milan. The legend which accompanied the adoption of the
symbol--though often enough it was missing in the sculptured
representations--was _Cominus et eminus_, which had its origin in the
belief that the porcupine could defend himself in a near attack, but
that when he himself attacked, he fought from afar by launching forth
his spines.
Naturalists will tell you that the porcupine does no such thing; but in
those days it was evidently believed that he did, and in many, if not
all, of the sculptured effigies that one sees of the beast there is a
halo of detached spines forming a background as if they were really
launching themselves forth in mid-air.
Above this central doorway, or entrance to the courtyard, is a niche in
which is a modern equestrian statue of Louis XII., replacing a more
ancient one destroyed at the Revolution. This old statue, it is claimed,
was an admirable work of art in its day, and the present statue is
thought to be a replica of it.
It originally bore the following inscription--a verse written by Fausto
Andrelini, the king's favourite poet.
[Illustration: _Central Doorway, Chateau de Blois_]
"Hic ubi natus erat dextro Lodoicus Olympo,
Sumpsit honorata Regia sceptra manu;
Felix quae tanti fulfit lux nuntia Regis;
Gallia non alio Principe digna fuit.
FAUSTUS 1498."
According to an old French description this old statue was: "_tres beau
et tres agreable ainsy que tous ses portraits l'ont represente, comme
celui qui est au grand portail de Bloys_."
Above rises a balustrade with fantastic gargoyles with the pinnacles and
fleurons of the window gables all very ornate, the whole topped off with
a roofing of slate.
Blois, in its general aspect, is fascinating; but it is not sympathetic,
and this is not surprising when one remembers men and women who worked
their deeds of bloody daring within its walls.
The murders and other acts of violence and treason which took place here
are interesting enough, but one cannot but feel, when he views the
chimneypiece before which the Duc de Guise was standing when called to
his death in the royal closet, that the men of whom the bloody tales of
Blois are told quite deserved their fates.
One comes away with the impression of it all stamped only upon the
mind, not graven upon the heart. Political intrigue to-day, if quite as
vulgar, is less sordid. Bigotry and ambition in those days allowed few
of the finer feelings to come to the surface, except with regard to the
luxuriance of surroundings. Of this last there can be no question, and
Blois is as characteristically luxurious as any of the magnificent
edifices which lodged the royalty and nobility of other days, throughout
the valley of the Loire.
A numismatic curiosity, connected with the history of the Chateau de
Blois, is an ancient piece of money which one may see in the local
museum. It is the oldest document in existence in which, or on which,
the name of Blois is mentioned. On one side is a symbolical figure and
the legend _Bleso Castro_, and on the other a _croix haussee_ and the
name of the officer of the mint at Blois, _Pre Cistato, monetario_.
The plan of the Chateau de Blois here given shows it not as it is
to-day, but as it was at the death of Gaston d'Orleans in 1660. The
constructions of the different epochs are noted on the plan as follows:
ERECTED BY THE COMTES DE CHATILLON
1. Tour de Donjon, Chateau-Regnault, Moulins, or des
Oubliettes.
2. Salle des Etats.
3. Tour du Foix or Observatory.
ERECTED BY THE DUCS D'ORLEANS
4. Portico and Galerie d'Orleans. (Destroyed in part by the
military.)
5. Galerie des Cerfs. (Built in part by Gaston, but made away
with by the city of Blois when the Jardins du Roi were built.)
ERECTED BY LOUIS XII.
6. Chapelle St. Calais. (Destroyed in part by the military.)
7. La Grande Vis, or Grand Escalier of Louis XI.
8. La Petite Vis, or Petit Escalier, in one chamber of which
the corpse of the Duc de Guise was burned.
9. Portico and Galerie de Louis XII.
10. Portico.
11. Salle des Gardes,--of the queen on the ground floor and of
the king on the first floor.
12. Bedchamber,--of the queen on the ground floor and of the
king on the first floor.
13. Corps de Garde.
14. Kitchen. (To-day Salle de Reception for visitors.)
ERECTED FROM THE TIME OF FRANCOIS I. TO HENRI III.
15 and 16. Portico and Terrace Henri II. (In part built over by
Gaston.)
17. Grand Staircase.
18. Galerie de Francois I.
19. Staircase of the Salle des Etats. (Destroyed by the
military.)
20. First floor, Salle des Gardes of the queen; second floor,
Salle des Gardes of the king.
21. Staircase leading to the apartments of the queen mother.
Here also Henri III. had made the cells destined for the use
of the Capucins, and here were closeted "_pour s'assurer de
leur discretion_," the "_Quarante-Cinq_" who were to kill the
Duc de Guise.
22. Cabinet Neuf of Henri III. (Second floor.)
23. Gallery where was held the reunion of the Tiers Etats of
1576.
24. First floor, bedchamber of the king; second floor,
bedchamber of the queen.
25. Oratory.
26. Cabinet.
27. Passage to the Tour de Moulins.
28. Passage to the Cabinet Vieux, where the Duc de Guise was
struck down.
29. Cabinet Vieux.
30. Oratory, where the two chaplains of the king prayed during
the perpetration of the murder.
31. Garde-robe, where was first deposited the body of De Guise.
ERECTED BY GASTON D'ORLEANS
32. Peristyle. (Destroyed by the military.)
33. Dome.
34. Pavilion des Jardins.
35. Pavilion du Foix.
36. Petit Pavilion of the Meridionale facade. (Destroyed in
1825.)
37. Terraces.
38. Bastions du Foix and des Jardins.
39. L'Eperon.
40. Le Jardin Haut, or Jardin du Roi.
[Illustration: _The_ CHATEAUX _of_ BLOIS (DIAGRAM)]
The interior court is partly surrounded by a colonnade, quite
cloister-like in effect. At the right centre of the Francois I. wing is
that wonderful spiral staircase, concerning the invention of which so
much speculation has been launched. Leonardo da Vinci, the protege of
Francois, has been given the honour, and a very considerable volume has
been written to prove the claim.
[Illustration: _Cypher of Francois Premier and Claude of France, at
Blois_]
Within this "_tour octagone"--"qui fait a ses huit pans hurler un
gorgone_"--is built this marvellous openwork stairway,--an _escalier a
jour_, as the French call it,--without an equal in all France, and for
daring and decorative effect unexcelled by any of those Renaissance
motives of Italy itself. Its ascent turns not, as do most _escaliers_,
from left to right, but from right to left. It is the prototype of those
supposedly unique outside staircases pointed out to country cousins in
the abodes of Fifth Avenue millionaires.
It is as impossible to catalogue the various apartments and their
accessories here, as it is to include a chronology of the great events
which have passed within their walls. One thing should be remembered,
and that is, that the architect Duban restored the chateau throughout in
recent years. In spite of this restoration one may readily enough
reconstruct the scene of the murder of the Duc de Guise from the great
fireplace on the second floor before which De Guise was standing when
summoned by a page to the kingly presence, from the door through which
he entered to his death, and from the wall where hung the tapestry
behind which he was to pass. All this is real enough, and also the "Tour
des Oubliettes," in which the duke's brother, the cardinal, suffered,
and of which many horrible tales are still told by the attendants.
Duban, the architect, came with his careful restorations and pictured
with a most exact fidelity the decorations and the furnishings of the
times of Francois, of Catherine, and of Henri III. The ornate
chimneypieces have been furbished up anew, the walls and ceilings
covered with new paint and gold; nothing could be more opulent or
glorious, but it gives the impression of a city dwelling or a great
hotel, "newly done up," as the house renovators express it.
One contrasting emotion will be awakened by a contemplation of the two
great Salles des Gardes and the apartments of Catherine de Medici; here,
at least for the moment, is a relief from the intrigues, massacres, and
assassinations which otherwise went on, for one recalls that, at one
period, "_danses, ballets et jeux_" took place here continuously.
In the apartments of Catherine there is much to remind one of "the base
Florentine," as it has been the fashion of latter-day historians to
describe the first of the Medici queens. Nothing could be more sumptuous
than the Galerie de la Reine, her _Cabinet de Toilette_, or her _Chambre
a Coucher_, with its secret panels, where she died on the 5th of
January, 1589, "adored and revered," but soon forgotten, and of no more
account than "_une chevre mort_," says one old chronicler.
The apartments of Catherine de Medici were directly beneath the
guard-room where the Balafre was murdered, and that event, taking place
at the very moment when the "queen-mother" was dying, cannot be said to
have been conducive to a peaceful demise.
Here, on the first floor of the Francois Premier wing, the _reine-mere_
held her court, as did the king his. The great gallery overlooked the
town on the side of the present Place du Chateau. It was, and is, a
truly grand apartment, with diamond-paned windows, and rich, dark, wall
decorations on which Catherine's device, a crowned C and her monogram in
gold, frequently appears. There was, moreover, a great oval window,
opposite which stood her altar, and a doorway, half concealed, led to
her writing-closet, with its secret drawers and wall-panels which well
served her purposes of intrigue and deceit. A hidden stairway led to the
floor above, and there was a _chambre a coucher_, with a deep recess for
the bed, the same to which she called her son Henri as she lay dying,
admonishing him to give up the thought of murdering Guise. "What," said
Henri, on this embarrassing occasion, "spare Guise, when he, triumphant
in Paris, dared lay his hand on the hilt of his sword! Spare him who
drove me a fugitive from the capital! Spare them who never spared me!
No, mother, I will _not_."
As the queen-mother drew near her end, and was lying ill at Blois,
great events for France were culminating at the chateau. Henri III. had
become King of France, and the Balafre, supported by Rome and Spain, was
in open rebellion against the reigning house, and the word had gone
forth that the Duc de Guise must die. The States General were to be
immediately assembled, and De Guise, once the poetic lover of
Marguerite, through his emissaries canvassed all France to ensure the
triumph of the party of the Church against Henri de Navarre and his
queen,--the Marguerite whom De Guise once professed to love,--who soon
were to come to the throne of France.
The uncomfortable Henri III. had been told that he would never be king
in reality until De Guise had been made away with.
The final act of the drama between the rival houses of Guise and Valois
came when the king and his council came to Blois for the Assembly. The
sunny city of Blois was indeed to be the scene of a momentous affair,
and a truly sumptuous setting it was, the roof-tops of its houses
sloping downward gently to the Loire, with the chief accessory, the
coiffed and turreted chateau itself, high above all else.
Details had been arranged with infinite pains, the guard doubled, and a
company of Swiss posted around the courtyard and up and down the
gorgeous staircase. Every nook and corner has its history in connection
with this greatest event in the history of the Chateau of Blois.
As Guise entered the council-chamber he was told that the king would see
him in his closet, to reach which one had to pass through the guard-room
below. The door was barred behind him that he might not return, when the
trusty guards of the "Forty-fifth," under Dalahaide, already hidden
behind the wall-tapestry, sprang upon the Balafre and forced him back
upon the closed door through which he had just passed. Guise fell
stabbed in the breast by Malines, and "lay long uncovered until an old
carpet was found in which to wrap his corpse."
Below, in her own apartments, lay the queen-mother, dying, but listening
eagerly for the rush of footsteps overhead, hoping and praying that
Henri--the hitherto effeminate Henri who played with his sword as he
would with a battledore, and who painted himself like a woman, and put
rings in his ears--would not prejudice himself at this time in the eyes
of Rome by slaying the leader of the Church party.
Guise died as Henri said he would die, with the words on his lips: "_A
moi, mes amis!--trahison!--a moi, Guise,--je me meurs_," but the revenge
of the Church party came when, at St. Cloud, the monk, Jacques Clement,
poignarded the last of the Valois, and put the then heretical Henri de
Navarre on the throne of France.
Within the southernmost confines of the chateau is the Tour de Foix, so
called for the old faubourg near by. The upper story and roof of this
curious round tower was the work of Catherine de Medici, who installed
there her astrologer and maker of philtres, Cosmo Ruggieri.
Ruggieri was a most versatile person; he was astrologer, alchemist, and
philosopher alike, besides being many other kinds of a rogue, all of
which was very useful to the Medici now that she had come to power.
Catherine built an outside stairway up to the platform of this tower,
and a great, flat, stone table was placed there to form a foundation for
Ruggieri's cabalistic instruments. Even this stone table itself was an
uncanny affair, if we are to believe the old chronicles. It rang out in
a clear sharp note whenever struck with some hard body, and on its
surface was graven a line which led the eye directly toward the golden
_fleur-de-lys_ on the cupola of Chambord's chateau, some three leagues
distant on the other side of the Loire. What all this symbolism actually
meant nobody except Catherine and her astrologer knew; at least, the
details do not appear to have come down to enlighten posterity. Over the
doorway of the observatory were graven the words, "_Vraniae Sacrum_," _i.
e._, consecrated to Uranius.
Wherever Catherine chose to reside, whether in Touraine or at Paris, her
astrologer and his "_observatoire_" formed a part of her train. She had
brought Cosmo from Italy, and never for a moment did he leave her. He
was a sort of a private demon on whom Catherine could shoulder her
poisonings and her stabs, and, as before said, he was an exceedingly
busy functionary of the court.
That part of the structure built by Mansart for Gaston d'Orleans appears
strange, solemn, and superfluous in connection with the sumptuousness of
the earlier portions. With what poverty the architectural art of the
seventeenth century expressed itself! What an inferiority came with the
passing of the sixteenth century and the advent of the following! One
finds a certain grandeur in the outlines of this last wing, with its
majestic cupola over the entrance pavilion, but the general effect of
the decorations is one of a great paucity of invention when compared to
the more brilliant Renaissance forerunners on the opposite side of the
courtyard.
It was under the regime of Gaston d'Orleans that the gardens of the
Chateau de Blois came to their greatest excellence and beauty. In 1653
Abel Brunyer, the first physician of Gaston's suite, published a
catalogue of the fruits and flowers to be found here in these gardens,
of which he was also director. More than five hundred varieties were
included, three-quarters of which belonged to the flora of France.
Among the delicacies and novelties of the time to be found here was the
Prunier de Reine Claude, from which those delicious green plums known to
all the world to-day as "Reine Claudes" were propagated, also another
variety which came from the Prunier de Monsieur, somewhat similar in
taste but of a deep purple colour. The _pomme de terre_ was tenderly
cared for and grown as a great novelty and delicacy long before its
introduction to general cultivation by Parmentier. The tomato was
imported from Mexico, and even tobacco was grown; from which it may be
judged that Gaston did not intend to lack the good things of life.
All these facts are recounted in Brunyer's "Hortus Regius Blesensis,"
and, in addition, one Morrison, an expatriate Scotch doctor, who had
attached himself to Gaston, also wrote a competing work which was
published in London in 1669 under the title of "Preludia Botanica," and
which dealt at great length with the already celebrated gardens of the
Chateau de Blois.
Morrison placed at the head of his work a Latin verse which came in time
to be graven over the gateway of the gardens. This--as well as pretty
much all record of it--has disappeared, but a repetition of the lines
will serve to show with what admiration this paradise was held:
"Hinc, nulli biferi miranda rosaria Pesti,
Nec mala Hesperidum, vigili servata dracone.
Si paradisiacis quicquam (sine crimine) campis
Conferri possit, Blaesis mirabile specta.
Magnifici Gastonis opus! Qui terra capaci ...
* * * * *
JACOBUS METELANUS SCOTUS."
Not merely in history has the famous chateau at Blois played its part.
Writers of fiction have more than once used it as an accessory or the
principal scenic background of their sword and cloak novels; none more
effectively than Dumas in the D'Artagnan series.
The opening lines of "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne" are laid here. "It
should have been a source of pride to the city of Blois," says Dumas,
"that Gaston of Orleans had chosen it as his residence, and held his
court in the ancient chateau of the States."
Here, too, in the second volume of the D'Artagnan romances, is the scene
of that most affecting meeting between his Majesty Charles II., King of
England, and Louis XIV.
Altogether one lives here in the very spirit of the pages of Dumas. Not
only Blois, but Langeais, Chambord, Cheverny, Amboise, and many other
chateaux figure in the novels with an astonishing frequency, and,
whatever the critics may say of the author's slips of pen and memory,
Dumas has given us a wonderfully faithful picture of the life of the
times.
In 1793 all the symbols and emblems of royalty were removed from the
chateau and destroyed. The celebrated bust of Gaston, the chief artistic
attribute of that part of the edifice built by him, was decapitated, and
the statue of Louis XII. over the entrance gateway was overturned and
broken up. Afterward the chateau became the property of the "domaine"
and was turned into a mere barracks. The Pavilion of Queen Anne became a
"_magasin des subsistances militaires_," the Tour de l'Observatoire, a
powder-magazine, and all the indignities imaginable were heaped upon the
chateau.
In 1814 Blois became the last capital of Napoleon's empire, and the
chateau walls sheltered the prisoners captured by the imperial army.
Blois's most luxurious church edifice was the old abbey church of St.
Sauveur, which was built from 1138 to 1210. It lost the royal favour in
1697, when Louis XIV. made Blois a city of bishops as well as of counts,
and transferred the chapter of St. Sauveur's to the bastard Gothic
edifice first known as St. Solenne, but which soon took on the name of
St. Louis. In spite of the claims of the old church, this cold,
unfeeling, and ugly mixture of tomblike Renaissance became, and still
remains, the bishop's church of Blois.
One must not neglect or forget the magnificent bridge which crosses the
Loire at Blois. A work of 1717-24, it bears the Rue Denis Papin across
its eleven solidly built masonry piers. Above the central arch is
erected a memorial pyramid and tablet which states the fact that it was
one of the first works of the reign of Louis XV.
Blois altogether, then, offers a multitudinous array of attractions for
the tourist who makes his first entrance to the chateaux country through
its doors. The town itself has not the appeal of Tours, of Angers, or of
Nantes; but, for all that, its abundance of historic lore, the admirable
preservation of its chief monument, and the general picturesqueness of
its site and the country round about make up for many other qualities
that may be lacking.
The Sologne, lying between Blois, Vierzon, and Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, is
a great region of lakelets, sandy soil, and replanted Corsican pines,
which to-day has taken on a new lease of life and a prosperity which was
unknown in the days when the Comtes de Blois first erected that _maison
de plaisance_, on its western border which was afterward to aggrandize
itself into the later Chateau de Chambord. The soil has been drained and
the vine planted to a hitherto undreamed of extent, until to-day, if the
land does not exactly blossom like the rose, it at least somewhat
approaches it.
The _chaumieres_ of the Sologne have disappeared to a large extent, and
their mud walls and thatched roofs are not as frequent a detail of the
landscape as formerly, but even now there is a distinct individuality
awaiting the artist who will go down among these vineyard workers of the
Sologne and paint them and their surroundings as other parts have been
painted and popularized. It will be hot work in the summer months, and
lonesome work at all times, but there is a new note to be sounded if one
but has the ear for it, and it is to be heard right here in this tract
directly on the beaten track from north to south, and yet so little
known.
The peasant of the Sologne formerly ate his _soupe au poireau_ and a
morsel of _fromage maigre_ and was as content and happy as if his were a
more luxurious board, as it in reality became when a stranger demanded
hospitality. Then out from the _armoire_--that ever present adjunct of a
French peasant's home, whether it be in Normandy, Touraine, or the
Midi--came a bottle of _vin blanc_, bought in the wine-shops of
Romorantin or Vierzon on some of his periodical trips to town.
To-day all is changing, and the peasant of the Sologne nourishes himself
better and trims his beard and wears a round white collar on fete-days.
He is proud of his well-kept appearance, but his neighbours to the
north and the south will tell you that all this hides a deep malice,
which is hard to believe, in spite of the well recognized saying, "_Sot
comme un Solognat_." The women have a physiognomy more passive; when
young they are fresh and lip-lively, but as they grow older their charms
pass quickly.
The Sologne in most respects has changed greatly since the days of
Arthur Young. Then this classic land was reviled and vehement
imprecations were launched upon the proprietors of its soil,--"those
brilliant and ambitious gentlemen" who figure so largely in the
ceremonies of Versailles. To-day all is changed, and the gentleman
farmer is something more than a _bourgeois parisien_ who hunts and rides
and apes "_le sport_" of the English country squire.
The jack-rabbit and the hare are the pests of the Sologne now that its
sandy soil has been conquered, but they are quite successfully kept down
in numbers, and the insects which formerly ravaged the vines are
likewise less offensive than they used to be, so the Sologne may truly
be said to have been transformed.
To-day, as in the days of the royal hunt, when Chambord was but a
shooting-box of the Counts of Blois, the Sologne is rife with small
game, and even deer and an occasional _sanglier_.
"_La chasse_" in France is no mean thing to-day, and the Sologne, La
Beauce, and the great national forests of Lyons and Rambouillet draw--on
the opening of the season, somewhere between the 28th of August and the
2d of September of each year--their hundreds of thousands of Nimrods and
disciples of St. Hubert. The bearer of the gun in France is indeed a
most ardent sportsman, and in no European country can one buy in the
open market a greater variety of small game,--all the product of those
who pay their twenty francs for the privilege of bagging rabbits, hares,
partridges, and the like. The hunters of France enjoy one superstition,
however, and that is that to accidentally bag a crow on the first shot
means a certain and sudden death before the day is over.
La Motte-Beuvron is celebrated in the annals of the Sologne; it is, in
fact, the metropolis of the region, and the centre from which radiated
the influences which conquered the soil and made of it a prosperous
land, where formerly it was but a sandy, arid desert. La Motte-Beuvron
is a long-drawn-out _bourgade_, like some of the populous centres of the
great plain of Hungary, and there is no great prosperity or
"up-to-dateness" to be observed, in spite of its constantly increasing
importance, for La Motte-Beuvron and the country round about is one of
the localities of France which is apparently not falling off in its
population.
La Motte has a most imposing Hotel de Ville, a heavy edifice of brick
built by Napoleon III.--who has never been accused of having had the
artistic appreciation of his greater ancestor--after the model of the
Arsenal at Venice.
This is all La Motte has to warrant remark unless one is led to
investigate the successful agricultural experiment which is still being
carried out hereabouts. La Motte's hotels and cafes are but ordinary,
and there is no counter attraction of boulevard or park to place the
town among those lovable places which travellers occasionally come upon
unawares.
To realize the Sologne at its best and in its most changed aspect, one
should follow the roadway from La Motte to Blois. He may either go by
tramway _a vapeur_, or by his own means of communication. In either case
he will then know why the prosperity of the Sologne and the contentment
of the Solognat is assured.
Romorantin, still characteristic of the Sologne and its historic
capital, is famous for its asparagus and its paternal chateau of
Francois Premier, where that prince received the scar upon his face, at
a tourney, which compelled him ever after to wear a beard.
To-day the Sous-Prefecture, the Courts and their prisoners, the
Gendarmerie, and the Theatre are housed under the walls that once formed
the chateau royal of Jean d'Angouleme; within whose apartments the
gallant Francois was brought up.
[Illustration: _Native Types in the Sologne_]
The Sologne, like most of the other of the _petits pays_ of France, is
prolific in superstitions and traditionary customs, and here for some
reason they deal largely of the marriage state. When the _paysan
solognais_ marries, he takes good care to press the marriage-ring well
up to the third joint of his spouse's finger, "else she will be the
master of the house," which is about as well as the thing can be
expressed in English. It seems a simple precaution, and any one so
minded might well do the same under similar circumstances, provided he
thinks the proceeding efficacious.
Again, during the marriage ceremony itself, each of the parties most
interested bears a lighted wax taper, with the belief that whichever
first burns out, so will its bearer die first. It's a gruesome thought,
perhaps, but it gives one an inkling of who stands the best chance of
inheriting the other's goods, which is what matches are sometimes made
for.
The marriage ceremony in the Sologne is a great and very public
function. Intimates, friends, acquaintances, and any of the neighbouring
populace who may not otherwise be occupied, attend, and eat, drink, and
ultimately get merry. But they have a sort of process of each paying his
or her own way; at least a collection is taken up to pay for the
entertainment, for the Sologne peasant would otherwise start his married
life in a state of bankruptcy from which it would take him a long time
to recover.
The collection is made with considerable _eclat_ and has all the
elements of picturesqueness that one usually associates with the wedding
processions that one sees on the comic-opera stage. A sort of nuptial
bouquet--a great bunch of field flowers--is handed round from one guest
to another, and for a sniff of their fragrance and a participation in
the collation which is to come, they make an offering, dropping much or
little into a golden (not gold) goblet which is passed around by the
bride herself.
In the Sologne there is (or was, for the writer has never seen it)
another singular custom of the marriage service--not really a part of
the churchly office, but a sort of practical indorsement of the
actuality of it all.
The bride and groom are both pricked with a needle until the blood runs,
to demonstrate that neither the man nor the woman is insensible or
dreaming as to the purport of the ceremony about to take place.
As every French marriage is at the Mairie, as well as being held in
church, this double ceremony (and the blood-letting as well) must make a
very hard and fast agreement. Perhaps it might be tried elsewhere with
advantage.
Montrichard, on the Cher, is on the borderland between the Blaisois and
Touraine. Its donjon announces itself from afar as a magnificent feudal
ruin. The town is moreover most curious and original, the great
rectangular donjon rising high into the sky above a series of
cliff-dwellers' chalk-cut homes, in truly weird fashion.
There is nothing so very remarkable about cliff-dwellers in the Loire
country, and their aspect, manners, and customs do not differ greatly
from those of their neighbours, who live below them.
Curiously enough these rock-cut dwellings appear dry and healthful, and
are not in the least insalubrious, though where a _cave_ has been
devoted only to the storage of wine in vats, barrels, and bottles the
case is somewhat different.
Montrichard itself, outside of these scores of homes burrowed out of the
cliff, is most picturesque, with stone-pignoned gables and
dormer-windows and window-frames cut or worked in wood or stone into a
thousand amusing shapes.
Montrichard, with Chinon, takes the lead in interesting old houses in
these parts; in fact, they quite rival the ruinous lean-to houses of
Rouen and Lisieux in Normandy, which is saying a good deal for their
picturesque qualities.
[Illustration: _Donjon of Montrichard_]
One-third of Montrichard's population live underground or in houses
built up against the hillsides. Even the lovely old parish church backs
against the rock.
Everywhere are stairways and _petits chemins_ leading upward or
downward, with little facades, windows, or doorways coming upon one in
most unexpected and mysterious fashion at every turn.
The magnificent donjon is a relic of the work of that great
fortress-builder, Foulques Nerra, Comte d'Anjou, who dotted the land
wherever he trod with these masterpieces of their kind, most of them
great rectangular structures like the donjons of Britain, but quite
unlike the structures of their class mostly seen in France.
Richard Coeur de Lion occupied the fortress in 1108, but was obliged to
succumb to his rival in power, Philippe-Auguste, who in time made a
breach in its walls and captured it. Thereafter it became an outpost of
his own, from whence he could menace the Comte d'Anjou.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAMBORD
Chambord is four leagues from Blois, from which point it is usually
approached. To reach it one crosses the Sologne, not the arid waste it
has been pictured, but a desert which has been made to blossom as the
rose.
A glance of the eye, given anywhere along the road from Blois to
Chambord, will show a vineyard of a thousand, two thousand, or even more
acres, where, from out of a soil that was once supposed to be the
poorest in all wine-growing France, may be garnered a crop equalling a
hundred dozen of bottles of good rich wine to the acre.
This wine of the Sologne is not one of the famous wines of France, to be
sure, but what one gets in these parts is pure and astonishingly
palatable; moreover, one can drink large portions of it--as do the
natives--without being affected in either his head or his pocket-book.
From late September to early December there is a constant harvest going
on in the vineyards, whose labourers, if not as picturesque and joyous
as we are wont to see them on the comic-opera stage, are at least
wonderfully clever and industrious, for they make a good wine crop out
of a soil which previously gave a living only to charcoal-burners and
goat-keepers.
Francois was indeed a rare devotee of the building mania when he laid
out the wood which surrounds Chambord and which ultimately grew to some
splendour. The nineteenth century saw this great wood cut and sold in
huge quantities, so that to-day it is rather a scanty copse through
which one drives on the way from Blois.
The country round about is by no means impoverished,--far from it. It is
simply unworked to its fullest extent as yet. As it is plentifully
surrounded by water it makes an ideal land for the growing of asparagus,
strawberries, and grapes, and so it has come to be one of the most
prosperous and contented regions in all the Loire valley.
The great white Chateau de Chambord, with its turrets and its
magnificent lantern, looms large from whatever direction it is
approached, though mostly it is framed by the somewhat stunted pines
which make up the pleasant forest. The vistas which one sees when coming
toward Chambord, through the drives and alleys of its park, with the
chateau itself brilliant in the distance, are charming and fairy-like
indeed. Straight as an arrow these roadways run, and he who traverses
one of those centring at the chateau will see a tiny white fleck in the
sunlight a half a dozen kilometres away, which, when it finally is
reached, will be admitted to be the greatest triumph of the art-loving
monarch.
Francois Premier was foremost in every artistic expression in France,
and the court, as may be expected, were only too eager to follow the
expensive tastes of their monarch,--when they could get the means, and
when they could not, often enough Francois supplied the wherewithal.
Francois himself dressed in the richest of Italian velvets, the more
brilliant the better, with a preponderant tendency toward pink and sky
blue.
A dozen years after Francois came to the throne, a dozen years after the
pleasant life of Amboise, when mother, daughter, and son lived together
on the banks of the Loire in that "Trinity of love," the monarch and
his wife, Queen Claude of France, the daughter of Louis XII. and Anne of
Brittany, came to live at Chambord on the edge of the sandy Sologne
waste.
Here, too, came Marguerite d'Alencon, the ever faithful and devoted
sister of Francois, the duke, her husband, and all the gay members of
the court. The hunt was the order of the day, for the forest tract of
the Sologne, scanty though it was in growth, abounded in small game.
Chambord at this time had not risen to the grand and ornate proportions
which we see to-day, but set snugly on the low, swampy banks of the tiny
river Cosson, a dull, gloomy mediaeval fortress, whose only aspect of
gaiety was that brought by the pleasure-loving court when it assembled
there. In size it was ample to accommodate the court, but Francois's
artistic temperament already anticipated many and great changes. The
Loire was to be turned from its course and the future pompous palace was
to have its feet bathed in the limpid Loire water rather than in the
stagnant pools of the morass which then surrounded it.
As a triumph of the royal chateau-builder's art, Chambord is far and
away ahead of Fontainebleau or Versailles, both of which were built in
a reign which ended two hundred years later than that which began with
the erection of Chambord. As an example of the arts of Francois I. and
his time compared with those of Louis XIV. and his, Chambord stands
forth with glorious significance.
On the low banks of the Cosson, Francois achieved perhaps the greatest
triumph that Renaissance architecture had yet known.
It was either Chambord, or the reconstruction by Francois of the edifice
belonging to the Counts of Blois, which resulted in the refinement of
the Renaissance style less than a quarter of a century after its
introduction into France by Charles VIII.,--if he really was responsible
for its importation from Italy. Francois lacked nothing of daring, and
built and embellished a structure which to-day, in spite of numerous
shortcomings, stands as the supreme type of a great Renaissance domestic
edifice of state. Every device of decoration and erratic suggestion
seems to have been carried out, not only structurally, as in the great
double spiral of its central stairway, but in its interpolated details
and symbolism as well.
It was at this time, too, that Francois began to introduce the famous
salamander into his devices and ciphers; that most significant emblem
which one may yet see on wall and ceiling of Chambord surrounded by the
motto: "_Je me nourris et je meurs dans le feu._"
[Illustration: _Arms of Francois Premier, at Chambord_]
Chambord, first of all, gives one a very high opinion of Francois
Premier, and of the splendours with which he was wont to surround
himself. The apartments are large and numerous and are admirably planned
and decorated, though, almost without exception, bare to-day of
furniture or furnishings.
To quote the opinion of Blondel, the celebrated French architect: "The
Chateau de Chambord, built under Francois I. and Henri II., from the
designs of Primatice, was never achieved according to the original plan.
Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. contributed a certain completeness, but the
work was really pursued afterward according to the notions of one
Sertio."
The masterpiece of its constructive elements is its wonderful doubly
spiralled central staircase, which permits one to ascend or descend
without passing another proceeding in the opposite direction at the same
time. Whatever may have been the real significance of this great double
spiral, it has been said that it played its not unimportant part in the
intrigue and scandal of the time. It certainly is a wonder of its kind,
more marvellous even than that spiral at Blois, attributed, with some
doubt perhaps, to Leonardo da Vinci, and certainly far more beautiful
than the clumsy round tower up which horses and carriages were once
driven at Amboise.
At all events, it probably meant something more than mere constructive
ability, and a staircase which allows one individual to mount and
another to descend without knowing of the presence of the other may
assuredly be classed with those other mediaeval accessories, sliding
panels, hidden doorways, and secret cabinets.
Beneath the dome which terminates the staircase in the Orleans wing are
three caryatides representing--it is doubtfully stated--Francois
Premier, La Duchesse d'Etampes, and Madame la Comtesse de
Chateaubriand,--a trinity of boon companions in intrigue.
In reality Chambord presents the curiously contrived arrangement of one
edifice within another, as a glance of the eye at the plan will show.
The fosse, the usual attribute of a great mediaeval chateau--it may be a
dry one or a wet one, in this case it was a wet one--has disappeared,
though Brantome writes that he saw great iron rings let into the walls
to which were attached "_barques et grands bateaux_," which had made
their way from the Loire via the dribbling Cosson.
The Cosson still dribbles its life away to-day, its moisture having, to
a great part, gone to irrigate the sandy Sologne, but formerly it was
doubtless a much more ample stream.
From the park the ornate gables and dormer-windows loom high above the
green-swarded banks of the Cosson. It was so in Francois's time, and it
is so to-day; nothing has been added to break the spread of lawn, except
an iron-framed wash-house with red tiles and a sheet-iron chimney-pot
beside the little river, and a tin-roofed garage for automobiles
connected with the little inn outside the gates.
The rest is as it was of yore, at least, the same as the old engravings
of a couple of hundreds of years ago picture it, hence it is a great
shame, since the needs of the tiny village could not have demanded it,
that the foreground could not have been left as it originally was.
The town, or rather village, or even hamlet, of Chambord is about the
most abbreviated thing of its kind existent. There is practically no
village; there are a score or two of houses, an inn of the frankly
tourist kind, which evidently does not cater to the natives, the
aforesaid wash-house by the river bank, the dwellings of the
gamekeepers, gardeners, and workmen on the estate, and a diminutive
church rising above the trees not far away. These accessories
practically complete the make-up of the little settlement of Chambord,
on the borders of the Blaisois and Touraine.
Chambord has been called top-heavy, but it is hardly that. Probably the
effect is caused by its low-lying situation, for, as has been intimated
before, this most imposing of all of the Loire chateaux has the least
desirable situation of any. There is a certain vagueness and foreignness
about the sky-line that is almost Eastern, though we recognize it as
pure Renaissance. Perhaps it is the magnitude and lonesomeness of it all
that makes it seem so strange, an effect that is heightened when one
steps out upon its roof, with the turrets, towers, and cupolas still
rising high above.
[Illustration: _PLAN OF CHAMBORD_]
The ground-plan is equally magnificent, flanked at every corner by a
great round tower, with another quartette of them at the angles of the
interior court.
Most of the stonework of the fabric is brilliant and smooth, as if it
were put up but yesterday, and, beyond the occasional falling of a tile
from the wonderful array of chimney-pots, but little evidences are seen
exteriorly of its having decayed in the least. On the tower which flanks
the little door where one meets the _concierge_ and enters, there are
unmistakable marks of bullets and balls, which a revolutionary or some
other fury left as mementoes of its passage.
Considering that Chambord was not a product of feudal times, these
disfigurements seem out of place; still its peaceful motives could
hardly have been expected to have lasted always.
The southern facade is not excelled by the elevation of any residential
structure of any age, and its outlines are varied and pleasing enough to
satisfy the most critical; if one pardons the little pepper-boxes on the
north and south towers, and perforce one has to pardon them when he
recalls the magnificence of the general disposition and sky-line of this
marvellously imposing chateau of the Renaissance.
Francois Premier made Chambord his favourite residence, and in fact
endowed Pierre Nepveu--who for this work alone will be considered one of
the foremost architects of the French Renaissance--with the
inspiration for its erection in 1526.
[Illustration: _Chateau de Chambord_]
A prodigious amount of sculpture by Jean Cousin, Pierre Bontemps, Jean
Goujon, and Germain Pilon was interpolated above the doorways and
windows, in the framing thereof, and above the great fireplaces. Inside
and out, above and below, were vast areas to be covered, and Francois
allowed his taste to have full sway.
The presumptuous Francois made much of this noble residence, perhaps
because of his love of _la chasse_, for game abounded hereabouts, or
perhaps because of his regard for the Comtesse Thoury, who occupied a
neighbouring chateau.
For some time before his death, Francois still lingered on at Chambord.
Marguerite and her brother, both now considerably aged since the happier
times of their childhood in Touraine, always had an indissoluble
fondness for Chambord. Marguerite had now become Queen of Navarre, but
her beauty had been dimmed with the march of time, and she no longer was
able to comfort and amuse her kingly brother as of yore. His old
pleasures and topics of conversation irritated him, and he had even
tired of poetry, art, and political affairs.
Above all, he shamefully and shamelessly abused women, at once the prop
and the undermining influence of his kingly power in days gone by. There
is an existing record to the effect that he wrote some "window-pane"
verse on the window of his private apartment to the following effect:
"Souvent femme varie;
Mal habile quis'y fie!"
If this be not apocryphal, the incident must have taken place long years
before that celebrated "window-pane" verse of Shenstone's, and Francois
is proven again a forerunner, as he was in many other things.
Without doubt the Revolution did away with this square of glass,
which--according to Piganiol de la Force--existed in the middle of the
eighteenth century. Perhaps Francois's own jealous humour prompted him
to write these cynical lines, and then again perhaps it is merely one of
those fables which breathe the breath of life in some unaccountable
manner, no one having been present at its birth, and hearsay and
tradition accounting for it all.
Francois, truly, was failing, and he and his sister discussed but
sorrowful subjects: the death of his favourite son, Charles, the
inheritor of the throne, at Abbeville, where he became infected with the
plague, and also the death of him whom he called "his old friend," Henry
VIII. of England, a monarch whose amours were as numerous and celebrated
as his own.
Henri II. preferred the attractions of Anet to Chambord, while Catherine
de Medici and Charles IX. cared more for Blois, Chaumont, and
Chenonceaux. Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. only considered it as a
rendezvous for the chase, and the latter's successor, Louis XV., gave it
to the illustrious Maurice de Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, who spent
his old age here, amid fetes, pleasures, and military parades. Near by
are the barracks, built for the accommodation of the regiment of horse
formed by the marechal and devoted to his special guardianship and
pleasure, and paid for by the king, who in turn repaid himself--with
interest--from the public treasury. The exercising of this "little army"
was one of the chief amusements of the illustrious old soldier.
"A de feints combats
Lui-meme en se jouant conduit les vieux soldats"--
wrote the Abbe de Lille in contemporary times.
King Stanislas of Poland lived here from 1725 to 1733, and later it was
given to Marechal Berthier, by whose widow it was sold in 1821.
It was bought by national subscription for a million and a half of
francs and given to the Duc de Bordeaux, who immediately commenced its
restoration, for it had been horribly mutilated by Marechal de Saxe, and
the surrounding wood had been practically denuded under the Berthier
occupancy.
The Duc de Bordeaux died in 1883, and his heirs, the Duc de Parme and
the Comte de Bardi, are now said to spend a quarter of a million
annually in the maintenance of the estate, the income of which
approximates only half that sum.
There are thirteen great staircases in the edifice, and a room for every
day in the year. On the ground floor is the Salle des Gardes, from which
one mounts by the great spiral to another similar apartment with a
barrel-vaulted roof, which in a former day was converted into a theatre,
where in 1669-70 were held the first representations of "Pourceaugnac"
and "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," and where Moliere himself frequently
appeared.
The second floor is known as the "_grandes terrasses_" and surrounds the
base of the great central lantern so admired from the exterior. On this
floor, to the eastward, were the apartments of Francois Premier. The
chapel was constructed by Henri II., but the tribune is of the era of
Louis XIV. This tribune is decorated with a fine tapestry, made by
Madame Royale while imprisoned in the Temple. At the base of the altar
is also a tapestry made and presented to the Comte de Chambord by the
women of the Limousin.
The apartments of Louis XIV. contain portraits of Madame de Maintenon
and Madame de Lafayette, a great painting of the "Bataille de Fontenoy,"
and another of the Comte de Chambord on horseback.
CHAPTER V.
CHEVERNY, BEAUREGARD, AND CHAUMONT
From Chambord and its overpowering massiveness one makes his way to
Chaumont, on the banks of the Loire below Blois, by easy stages across
the plain of the Sologne.
One leaves the precincts of Chambord by the back entrance, as one might
call it, through six kilometres of forest road, like that by which one
enters, and soon passes the little townlet of Bracieux.
One gets glimpses of more or less modern residential chateaux once and
again off the main road, but no remarkably interesting structures of any
sort are met with until one reaches Cheverny. Just before Cheverny one
passes Cour-Cheverny, with a curious old church and a quaint-looking
little inn beside it.
[Illustration: _Chateau de Cheverny_]
Cheverny itself is, however, the real attraction, two kilometres away.
Here the chateau is opened by its private owners from April to
October of each year, and, while not such a grand establishment as many
of its contemporaries round about, it is in every way a perfect
residential edifice of the seventeenth century, when the flowery and
ornate Renaissance had given way to something more severely classical,
and, truth to tell, far less pleasing in an artistic sense.
Cheverny belongs to-day to the Marquis de Vibraye, one of those undying
titles of the French nobility which thrive even in republican France and
uphold the best traditions of the _noblesse_ of other days.
The chateau was built much later than most of the neighbouring chateaux,
in 1634, by the Comte de Cheverny, Philippe Hurault. It sits
green-swarded in the midst of a beautifully wooded park, and the great
avenue which faces the principal entrance extends for seven kilometres,
a distance not excelled, if equalled, by any private roadway elsewhere.
In its constructive features the chateau is more or less of rectangular
outlines. The pavilions at each corner have their openings _a la
imperiale_, with the domes, or lanterns, so customary during the height
of the style under Louis XIV. An architect, Boyer by name, who came from
Blois, where surely he had the opportunity of having been well
acquainted with a more beautiful style, was responsible for the design
of the edifice at Cheverny.
The interior decorations in Cordovan leather, the fine chimneypieces,
and the many elaborate historical pictures and wall paintings, by
Mosnier, Clouet, and Mignard, are all of the best of their period; while
the apartments themselves are exceedingly ample, notably the Appartement
du Roi, furnished as it was in the days of "Vert Galant," the Salle des
Gardes, the library and an elaborately traceried staircase. In the
chapel is an altar-table which came from the Eglise St. Calais, in the
chateau at Blois.
Just outside the gates is a remarkable crotchety old stone church, with
a dwindling, toppling spire. It is poor and impoverished when compared
with most French churches, and has a most astonishing timbered veranda,
with a straining, creaking roof running around its two unobstructed
walls. The open rafters are filled with all sorts of rubbish, and the
local fire brigade keeps its hose and ladders there. A most suitable old
rookery it is in which to start a first-class conflagration.
[Illustration: _Cheverny-sur-Loire_]
Within are a few funeral marbles of the Hurault family, and the daily
offices are conducted with a pomp most unexpected. Altogether it
forms, as to its fabric and its functions, as strong a contrast of
activity and decay as one is likely to see in a long journey.
The town itself is a sleepy, unprogressive place, where automobilists
may not even buy _essence a petrole_, and, though boasting--if the
indolent old town really does boast--a couple of thousand souls, one
still has to journey to Cour-Cheverny to send a telegraphic despatch or
buy a daily paper.
Between Cheverny and Blois is the Foret de Russy, which will awaken
memories of the boar-hunts of Francois I., which, along with art in all
its enlightening aspects, appears to have been one of the chief
pleasures of that monarch. Perhaps one ought to include also the love of
fair women, but with them he was not so constant.
On the road to Blois, also, one passes the Chateau de Beauregard; that
is, one usually passes it, but he shouldn't. It is built, practically,
within the forest, on the banks of the little river Beauvron. An iron
_grille_ gives entrance to a beautiful park, and within is the chateau,
its very name indicating the favour with which it was held by
its royal owner. It was in 1520 that Francois I. established it
as a _rendezvous de chasse_. Under his son, Henri II., it was
reconstructed, in part; entirely remodelled in the seventeenth century;
and "modernized"--whatever that may mean--in 1809, and again, more
lately, restored by the Duc de Dino. It belongs to-day to the Comte de
Cholet, who has tried his hand at "restoration" as well.
The history of this old chateau is thus seen to have been most varied,
and it is pretty sure to have lost a good deal of its original character
in the transforming process.
The interior is more attractive than is the exterior. There is a grand
gallery of portraits of historical celebrities, more than 350, executed
between 1617 and 1638 by Paul Ardier, Counsellor of State, who thus
combined the accomplishment of the artist with the sagacity of the
statesman.
The ceilings of the great rooms are mostly elaborate works in enamel and
carved oak, and there is a tiled floor (_carrelage_) in the portrait
gallery, in blue faience, representing an army in the order of battle,
which must have delighted the hearts of the youthful progeny who may
have been brought up within the walls of the chateau. This pavement is
moreover an excellent example of the craftsmanship of tile-making.
One gains admission to the chateau freely from the _concierge_, who in
due course expects her _pourboire_, and sees that she gets it. But what
would you, inquisitive traveller? You have come here to see the sights,
and Beauregard is well worth the price of admission, which is anything
you like to give, certainly not less than a franc.
One may return to Blois through the forest, or may continue his way down
the river to Chaumont on the left bank.
At Chaumont the Loire broadens to nearly double the width at Blois, its
pebbles and sandbars breaking the mirror-like surface into innumerable
pools and _etangs_. There is a bridge which connects Chaumont with the
railway at Onzain and the great national highway from Tours to Blois.
The bridge, however, is so hideous a thing that one had rather go miles
out of his way than accept its hospitality. It is simply one of those
unsympathetic wire-rope affairs with which the face of the globe is
being covered, as engineering skill progresses and the art instinct dies
out.
[Illustration: _Chaumont_]
The Chateau de Chaumont is charmingly situated, albeit it is not very
accessible to strangers after one gets there, as it is open to the
public only on Thursdays, from July to December. It is exactly what one
expects to find,--a fine riverside establishment of its epoch, and in
architectural style combining the well-recognized features of late
Gothic and the early Renaissance. It is not moss-grown or decrepit in
any way, which fact, considering its years, is perhaps remarkable.
The park of the chateau is only of moderate extent, but the structure
itself is, comparatively, of much larger proportions. The ideal view of
the structure is obtained from midway on that ungainly bridge which
spans the Loire at this point. Here, in the gold and purple of an autumn
evening, with the placid and far-reaching Loire, its pools and its bars
of sand and pebble before one, it is a scene which is as near idyllic as
one is likely to see.
The town itself is not attractive; one long, narrow lane-like street,
lined on each side by habitations neither imposing nor of a tumble-down
picturesqueness, borders the Loire. There is nothing very picturesque,
either, about the homes of the vineyard workers round about. Below and
above the town the great highroad runs flat and straight between Tours
and Blois on either side of the river, and automobilists and cyclists
now roll along where the state carriages of the court used to roll when
Francois Premier and his sons journeyed from one gay country house to
another.
It is to be inferred that the aspect of things at Chaumont has not
changed much since that day,--always saving that spider-net wire bridge.
The population of the town has doubtless grown somewhat, even though
small towns in France sometimes do not increase their population in
centuries; but the topographical aspect of the long-drawn-out village,
backed by green hills on one side and the Loire on the other, is much as
it always has been.
[Illustration: _Signature of Diane de Poitiers_]
The chateau at Chaumont had its origin as far back as the tenth century,
and its proprietors were successively local seigneurs, Counts of Blois,
the family of Amboise, and Diane de Poitiers, who received it from
Catherine in exchange for Chenonceaux. This was not a fair exchange, and
Diane was, to some extent, justified in her complaints.
Chaumont was for a time in the possession of Scipion Sardini, one of
the Italian partisans of the Medici, "whose arms bore _trois sardines
d'argent_," and who had married Isabelle de la Tour, "_la Demoiselle de
Limieul_" of unsavoury reputation.
The "_Demoiselle de Limieul_" was related, too, to Catherine, and was
celebrated in the gallantries of the time in no enviable fashion. She
was a member of that band of demoiselles whose business it was--by one
fascination or another--to worm political secrets from the nobles of the
court. One horrible scandal connected the unfortunate lady with the
Prince de Conde, but it need not be repeated here. The Huguenots
ridiculed it in those memorable verses beginning thus:
"Puella illa nobilis
Quae erat tam amabilis."
After the reign of Sardini and of his direct successors, the house of
Bullion, Chaumont passed through many hands. Madame de Stael arrived at
the chateau in the early years of the nineteenth century, when she had
received the order to separate herself from Paris, "by at least forty
leagues." She had made the circle of the outlying towns, hovering about
Paris as a moth about a candle-flame; Rouen, Auxerre, Blois, Saumur, all
had entertained her, but now she came to establish herself in this
Loire citadel. As the story goes, journeying from Saumur to Tours, by
post-chaise, on the opposite side of the river, she saw the imposing
mass of Chaumont rising high above the river-bed, and by her good graces
and winning ways installed herself in the affections of the then
proprietor, M. Leray, and continued her residence "and made her court
here for many years."
Chaumont is to-day the property of the Princesse de Broglie, who has
sought to restore it, where needful, even to reestablishing the ancient
fosse or moat. This last, perhaps, is not needful; still, a moated
chateau, or even a moated grange has a fascination for the sentimentally
inclined.
At the drawbridge, as one enters Chaumont to-day, one sees the graven
initials of Louis XII. and Anne de Bretagne, the arms of Georges
d'Amboise, surmounted by his cardinal's hat, and those of Charles de
Chaumont, as well as other cabalistic signs: one a representation of a
mountain (apparently) with a crater-like summit from which flames are
breaking forth, while hovering about, back to back, are two C's: [IMAGE
OF TWO JOINED LETTER 'C' POSITIONED LIKE THIS: )(]. The Renaissance
artists greatly affected the rebus, and this perhaps has some reference
to the etymology of the name Chaumont, which has been variously given
as coming from _Chaud Mont_, _Calvus Mont_, and _Chauve Mont_.
Georges d'Amboise, the first of the name, was born at Chaumont in 1460,
the eighth son of a family of seventeen children. It was a far cry, as
distances went in those days, from the shores of the shallow, limpid
Loire to those of the forceful, turgent Seine at Rouen, where in the
great Cathedral of Notre Dame, this first Georges of Amboise, having
become an archbishop and a cardinal, was laid to rest beneath that
magnificent canopied tomb before which visitors to the Norman capital
stand in wonder. The mausoleum bears this epitaph, which in some small
measure describes the activities of the man.
"Pastor eram cleri, populi pater; aurea sese
Lilia subdebant, quercus et ipsa mihi.
"Martuus en jaceo, morte extinguunter honores,
Et virtus, mortis nescia, mort viret."
His was not by any means a life of placidity and optimism, and he had
the air and reputation of doing things. There is a saying, still current
in Touraine: "_Laissez faire a Georges._"
The second of the same name, also an Archbishop of Rouen and a
cardinal, succeeded his uncle in the see. He also is buried beneath the
same canopy as his predecessor at Rouen.
The main portal of the chateau leads to a fine quadrilateral court with
an open gallery overlooking the Loire, which must have been a
magnificent playground for the nobility of a former day. The interior
embellishments are fine, some of the more noteworthy features being a
grand staircase of the style of Louis XII.; the Salle des Gardes, with a
painted ceiling showing the arms of Chaumont and Amboise; the Salle du
Conseil, with some fine tapestries and a remarkable tiled floor,
depicting scenes of the chase; the Chambre de Catherine de Medici (she
possessed Chaumont for nine years), containing some of the gifts
presented to her upon her wedding with Henri II.; and the curious
Chambre de Ruggieri, the astrologer whom Catherine brought from her
Italian home, and who was always near her, and kept her supplied with
charms and omens, good and bad, and also her poisons.
Ruggieri's observatory was above his apartment. It was at Chaumont that
the astrologer overstepped himself, and would have used his magic
against Charles IX. He did go so far as to make an image and inflict
certain indignities upon it, with the belief that the same would befall
the monarch himself. Ruggieri went to the galleys for this, but the
scheming Catherine soon had him out again, and at work with his poisons
and philtres.
Finally there is the Chambre de Diane de Poitiers, Catherine's more than
successful rival, with a bed (modern, it is said) and a series of
sixteenth-century tapestries, with various other pieces of contemporary
furniture. A portrait of Diane which decorates the apartment is supposed
to be one of the three authentic portraits of the fair huntress. The
chapel has a fine tiled pavement and some excellent glass.
Chaumont is eighteen kilometres from Blois and the same distance from
Amboise. It has not the splendour of Chambord, but it has a greater
antiquity, and an incomparably finer situation, which displays its
coiffed towers and their _machicoulis_ and cornices in a manner not
otherwise possible. It is one of those picture chateaux which tell a
silent story quite independent of guide-book or historical narrative.
It was M. Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, the superintendent of the forests
of Berry and the Blaisois, under Louis XVI., who gave hospitality to
Benjamin Franklin, and turned over to the first American ambassador to
France the occupancy of his house at Passy, where Franklin lived for
nine consecutive years.
Of this same M. de Chaumont Americans cannot have too high a regard, for
his timely and judicious hospitality has associated his name, only less
permanently than Franklin's, with the early fortunes of the American
republic.
Besides his other offices, M. de Chaumont was the intendant of the Hotel
des Invalides, at Paris, holding confidential relations with the
ministry of the young king, and was in the immediate enjoyment of a
fortune which amounted to two and a half million of francs, besides
owning, in addition to Chaumont on the Loire, another chateau in the
Blaisois. This chateau he afterward tendered to John Adams, who declined
the offer in a letter, written at Passy-sur-Seine, February 25, 1779, in
the following words: "... To a mind as much addicted to retirement as
mine, the situation you propose would be delicious indeed, provided my
country were at peace and my family with me; but, separated from my
family and with a heart bleeding with the wounds of its country, I
should be the most miserable being on earth...."
The potteries, which now form the stables of the chateau at Chaumont,
are somewhat reminiscent of Franklin. M. de Chaumont had established a
pottery here, where he had found a clay which had encouraged him to hope
that he could compete with the English manufacturers of the time. Here
the Italian Nini, who was invited to Chaumont, made medallions much
sought for by collectors, among others one of Franklin, which was so
much admired as a work of art, and became so much in demand that in
later years replicas were made and are well known to amateurs.
The family of Le Ray de Chaumont were extensively known in America,
where they became large landholders in New York State in the early
nineteenth century, and the head of the family seems to have been an
amiable and popular landlord. The towns of Rayville and Chaumont in New
York State still perpetuate his name.
The two male members of the family secured American wives; Le Ray
himself married a Miss Coxe, and their son a Miss Jahel, both of New
York.
From an anonymous letter to the New York _Evening Post_ of November 19,
1885, one quotes the following:
"It was in Blois that I first rummaged among these shops, whose
attractions are almost a rival to those of the castle, though this is
certainly one of the most interesting in France. The traveller will
remember the long flight of stone steps which climbs the steep hill in
the centre of the town. Near the foot of this hill there is a
well-furnished book-shop; its windows display old editions and rich
bindings, and tempt one to enter and inquire for antiquities. Here I
found a quantity of old notarial documents and diplomas of college or
university, all more or less recently cleared out from some town hall,
or unearthed from neighbouring castle, and sold by a careless owner, as
no longer valuable to him. This was the case with most of the parchments
I found at Blois; they had been acquired within a few years from the
castle of Madon, and from a former proprietor of the neighbouring castle
of Chaumont (the _calvus mons_ of mediaeval time), and most of them
pertained to the affairs of the _seigneurie de Chaumont_. Contracts,
executions, sales of vineyards and houses, legal decisions, _actes de
vente_, loans on mortgages, the marriage contract of a M. Lubin,--these
were the chief documents that I found and purchased."
The traveller may not expect to come upon duplicates of these treasures
again, but the incident only points to the fact that much documentary
history still lies more or less deeply buried.
CHAPTER VI.
TOURAINE: THE GARDEN SPOT OF FRANCE
"C'est une grande dame, une princesse altiere,
Chacun de ses chateaux, marque du sceau royal,
Lui fait une toilette en dentelle de pierre
Et son splendide fleuve un miroir de cristal."
It is difficult to write appreciatively of Touraine without echoing the
words of some one who has gone before, and it is likely that those who
come after will find the task no easier.
Truly, as a seventeenth-century geographer has said: "Here is the most
delicious and the most agreeable province of the kingdom. It has been
named the garden of France because of the softness of its climate, the
affability of its people, and the ease of its life."
The poets who have sung the praises of Touraine are many, Ronsard, Remy
Belleau, Du Bellay, and for prose authors we have at the head, Rabelais,
La Fontaine, Balzac, and Alfred de Vigny. Merely to enumerate them all
would be impossible, but they furnish a fund of quotable material for
the traveller when he is writing home, and are equally useful to the
maker of guide-books.
One false note on Touraine, only, has ever rung out in the world of
literature, and that was from Stendahl, who said: "_La Belle Touraine
n'existe pas!_" The pages of Alfred de Vigny and Balzac answer this
emphatically, and to the contrary, and every returning traveller
apparently sides with them and not with Stendahl.
How can one not love its prairies, gently sloping to the caressing
Loire, its rolling hills and dainty ravines? The broad blue Loire is
always vague and tranquil here, at least one seems always to see it so,
but the beauty of Touraine is, after all, a quiet beauty which must be
seen to be appreciated, and lived with to be loved.
It is a land of most singular attractions, neither too hot nor too cold,
too dry nor too damp, with a sufficiency of rain, and an abundance of
sunshine. Its market-gardens are prolific in their product, its orchards
overflowing with plenitude, and its vineyards generous in their harvest.
Touraine is truly the region where one may read history without books,
with the very pages of nature punctuated and adorned with the marvels of
the French Renaissance. Louis XI. gave the first impetus to the alliance
of the great domestic edifice--which we have come to distinguish as the
residential chateau--with the throne, and the idea was amplified by
Charles VIII. and glorified by Francois Premier.
In the brilliant, if dissolute, times of the early sixteenth century
Francois Premier and his court travelled down through this same Touraine
to Loches and to Amboise, where Francois's late gaoler, Charles Quint,
was to be received and entertained. It was after Francois had returned
from his involuntary exile in Spain, and while he was still in residence
at the Louvre, that the plans for the journey were made. To the Duchesse
d'Etampes Francois said,--the duchess who was already more than a rival
of both Diane and the Comtesse de Chateaubriant,--"I must tear myself
away from you to-morrow. I shall await my brother Charles at Amboise on
the Loire."
"Shall you not revenge yourself upon him, for his cruel treatment of
you?" said the wily favourite of the time. "If he, like a fool, comes
to Touraine, will you not make him revoke the treaty of Madrid or shut
him up in one of Louis XI.'s oubliettes?"
"I will persuade him, if possible," said Francois, "but I shall never
force him."
In due time Francois did receive his brother king at Amboise and it was
amid great ceremony and splendour. His guest could not, or would not,
mount steps, so that great inclined plane, up which a state coach and
its horses might go, was built. Probably there was a good reason for the
emperor's peculiarity, for that worthy or unworthy monarch finally died
of gout in the monastery of San Juste.
The meeting here at Amboise was a grand and ceremonious affair and the
Spanish monarch soon came to recognize a possible enemy in the royal
favourite, Anne de Pisselieu. The emperor's eyes, however, melted with
admiration, and he told her that only in France could one see such a
perfection of elegance and beauty, with the result that--as is popularly
adduced--the susceptible, ambitious, and unfaithful duchess betrayed
Francois more than once in the affairs attendant upon the subsequent
wars between France, England, and Spain.
From Touraine, in the sixteenth century, spread that influence which
left its impress even on the capital of the kingdom itself, not only in
respect to architectural art, but in manners and customs as well.
Whatever may be the real value of the Renaissance as an artistic
expression, the discussion of it shall have no place here, beyond the
qualifying statement that what we have come to know as the French
Renaissance--which undeniably grew up from a transplanted Italian
germ--proved highly tempting to the mediaeval builder for all manner of
edifices, whereas it were better if it had been confined to civic and
domestic establishments and left the church pure in its full-blown
Gothic forms.
Curiously enough, here in Touraine, this is just what did happen. The
Renaissance influence crept into church-building here and there--and it
is but a short step from the "_gothique rayonnant_" to what are
recognized as well-defined Renaissance features; but it is more
particularly in respect to the great chateaux, and even smaller
dwellings, that the superimposed Italian details were used. A notable
illustration of this is seen in the Cathedral of St. Gatien at Tours. It
is very beautiful and has some admirable Gothic features, but there are
occasional constructive details, as well as those for decorative effect
alone, which are decidedly not good Gothic; but, as they are, likewise,
not Renaissance, they hence cannot be laid to its door, but rather to
the architect's eccentricity.
In the smaller wayside churches, such as one sees at Cormery, at
Cheverny, and at Cour-Cheverny, there is scarcely a sign of Renaissance,
while their neighbouring chateaux are nothing else, both in construction
and in decoration.
The Chateau de Langeais is, for the most part, excellent Gothic, and so
is the church near by. Loches has distinct and pure Gothic details both
in its church and its chateau, quite apart from the Hotel de Ville and
that portion of the chateau now used as the Sous-Prefecture, which are
manifestly Renaissance; hence here in Touraine steps were apparently
taken to keep the style strictly non-ecclesiastical.
A glance of the eye at the topography of this fair province stamps it at
once as something quite different from any other traversed by the Loire.
Two of the great "routes nationales" cross it, the one via Orleans,
leading to Nantes, and the other via Chartres, going to Bordeaux. It is
crossed and recrossed by innumerable "routes secondaires,"
"departementales," "vicinales" and "particulieres," second to none of
their respective classes in other countries, for assuredly the roads of
France are the best in the world. Many of these great ways of
communication replaced the ancient Roman roads, which were the pioneers
of the magnificent roadways of the France of to-day.
Almost invariably Touraine is flat or rolling, its highest elevation
above the sea being but a hundred and forty-six metres, scarce four
hundred and fifty feet, a fact which accounts also for the gentle flow
of the Loire through these parts.
All the fruits of the southland are found here, the olive alone
excepted. Mortality, it is said, and proved by figures, is lower than in
any other part of France, and for this reason many dwellers in the large
cities, if they may not all have a mediaeval chateau, have at least a
villa, far away from "the madding crowd," and yet within four hours'
travel of the capital itself.
[Illustration: THE LOIRE IN TOURAINE]
Touraine, properly speaking, has no natural frontiers, as it is not
enclosed by rivers or mountains. It is, however, divided by the Loire
into two distinct regions, the Meridionale and the Septentrionale; but
the dress, the physiognomy, the language, and the predilections of
the people are everywhere the same, though the two sections differ
somewhat in temperament. In the south, the Tourangeau is timid and
obliging, but more or less engrossed in his affairs; in the north, he is
proud, egotistical, and a little arrogant, but, above all, he likes his
ease and comfort, something after the manner of "mynheer" of Holland.
These are the characteristics which are enumerated by Stanislas
Bellanger of Tours, in "La Touraine Ancienne et Moderne," and they are
traceable to-day, in every particular, to one who knows well the
by-paths of the region.
Formerly the peasant was, in his own words, "_sous la main de M. le
comte_," but, with the coming of the eighteenth century, all this was
changed, and the conditions which, in England, succeeded feudalism, are
unknown in Touraine, as indeed throughout France.
The two great divisions which nature had made of Touraine were further
cut up into five _petits pays_; les Varennes, le Veron, la Champeigne,
la Brenne, and les Gatines; names which exist on some maps to-day, but
which have lost, in a great measure, their former distinction.
There is a good deal to be said in favour of the physical and moral
characteristics of the inhabitants of Touraine. Just as the descendants
of the Phoceans, the original settlers of Marseilles, differ from the
natives of other parts of France, so, too, do the Tourangeaux differ
from the inhabitants of other provinces. The people of Touraine are a
mixture of Romans, Visigoths, Saracens, Alains, Normans and Bretons,
Anglais and Gaulois; but all have gradually been influenced by local
conditions, so that the native of Touraine has become a distinct variety
all by himself. The deliciousness of the "garden of France" has altered
him so that he stands to-day as more distinctly French than the citizen
of Paris itself.
Touraine, too, has the reputation of being that part of France where is
spoken the purest French. This, perhaps, is as true of the Blaisois, for
the local bookseller at Blois will tell one with the most dulcet and
understandable enunciation that it is at Blois that one hears the best
accent. At any rate, it is something found within a charmed circle, of
perhaps a hundred miles in diameter, that does not find its exact
counterpart elsewhere. As Seville stands for the Spanish tongue,
Florence for the Italian, and Dresden for the German, so Tours stands
for the French.
The history of the Loire in Touraine, as is the case at Le Puy, at
Nevers, at Sancerre, or at Orleans, is abundant and vivid, and the
monuments which line its banks are numerous and varied, from the
fortress-chateau of Amboise to the Cathedral of St. Gatien at Tours with
its magnificent bejewelled facade. The ruined towers of the castle of
Cinq-Mars, with its still more ancient Roman "pile," and the feudal
chateaux of the countryside are all eloquent, even to-day, in their
appeal to all lovers of history and romance.
There are some verses, little known, in praise of the Loire, as it comes
through Touraine, written by Houdon des Landes, who lived near Tours in
the eighteenth century. The following selection expresses their quality
well and is certainly worthy to rank with the best that Balzac wrote in
praise of his beloved Touraine.
"La Loire enorgueillit ses antiques cites,
Et courounne ses bords de coteaux enchantes;
Dans ses vallons heureux, sur ses rives aimees,
Les pres ont deploye leurs robes parfumees;
Le saule humide et souple y lance ses rameaux.
Ses coteaux sont peuples, et le rocher docile
A l'homme qui le creuse offre un champetre asile.
De notre vieille Gaule, o fleuve paternel!
Fleuve des doux climats! la Valliere et Sorel
Sur tes bords fortunes naquirent, et la gloire
A l'une dut l'amour, a l'autre la victoire."
Again and again Balzac's words echo in one's ears from his "Scene de la
Vie de Province." The following quotations are typical of the whole:
"The softness of the air, the beauty of the climate, all tend to a
certain ease of existence and simplicity of manner which encourages an
appreciation of the arts."
"Touraine is a land to foster the ambition of a Napoleon and the
sentiment of a Byron."
Another writer, A. Beaufort, a publicist of the nineteenth century,
wrote:
"The Tourangeaux resemble the good Adam in the garden of Eden. They
drink, they eat, they sleep and dream, and care not what their neighbour
may be doing."
Touraine was indeed, at one time, a veritable Eden, though guarded by
fortresses, _hallebardes_, and arquebuses, but not the less an Eden for
all that. In addition it was a land where, in the middle ages, the
seigneurs made history, almost without a parallel in France or
elsewhere.
Touraine, truly enough, was the centre of the old French monarchy in
the perfection of its pomp and state; but it is also true that Touraine
knew little of the serious affairs of kings, though some all-important
results came from events happening within its borders.
Paris was the law-making centre in the sixteenth century, and Touraine
knew only the domestic life and pleasures of royalty. Etiquette, form,
and ceremony were all relaxed, or at least greatly modified, and the
court spent in the country what it had levied in the capital.
Curiously enough, the monarchs were omnipotent and influential here,
though immediately they quartered themselves in Paris their powers waned
considerably; indeed, they seemed to lose their influence upon ministers
and vassals alike.
Louis XIII., it is true, tried to believe that Paris was France,--like
the Anglo-Saxon tourists who descend upon it in such great numbers
to-day,--and built Versailles; but there was never much real glory about
its cold and pompous walls.
The fortunes of the old chateaux of Touraine have been most varied.
Chambord is vast and bare, elegant and pompous; Blois, just across the
border, is a tourist sight of the first rank whose salamanders and
porcupines have been well cared for by the paternal French government.
Chaumont, Chenonceaux, Langeais, Azay-le-Rideau, and half a dozen others
are still inhabited, and are gay with the life of twentieth-century
luxury; Amboise is a possession of the Orleans family; Loches is, in
part, given over to the uses of a sous-prefecture; and Chinon's chateaux
are but half-demolished ruins. Besides these there are numerous smaller
residential chateaux of the nobility scattered here and there in the
Loire watershed.
There have been writers who have sought to commiserate with "the poor
peasant of Touraine," as they have been pleased to think of him, and
have deplored the fact that his sole possession was a small piece of
ground which he and his household cultivated, and that he lived in a
little whitewashed house, built with his own hands, or those of his
ancestors. Though the peasant of Touraine, as well as of other parts of
the countryside, works for an absurdly small sum, and for considerably
less than his brother nearer Paris, he sells his produce at the nearest
market-town for a fair price, and preserves a spirit of independence
which is as valuable as are some of the things which are thrust upon him
in some other lands under the guise of benevolent charity, really
patronage of a most demeaning and un-moral sort. At night the Touraine
peasant returns to his own hearthstone conscious that he is a man like
all of his fellows, and is not a mere atom ground between the upper and
nether millstones of the landlord and the squire. He cooks his
"_bouillie_" over three small sticks and retires to rest with the fond
hope that on the next market-day following the prices of eggs, chickens,
cauliflowers, or tomatoes may be higher. He is the stuff that successful
citizens are made of, and is not to be pitied in the least, even though
it is only the hundredth man of his community who ever does rise to more
wealth than a mere competency.
Touraine, rightly enough, has been called the garden of France, but it
is more than that, much more; it is a warm, soft land where all products
of the soil take on almost a subtropical luxuriance. Besides the great
valley of the Loire, there are the valleys of the tributaries which run
into it, in Touraine and the immediate neighbourhood, all of which are
fertile as only a river-bottom can be. It is true that there are
numerous formerly arid and sandy plateaux, quite unlike the abundant
plains of La Beauce, though to-day, by care and skill, they have been
made to rival the rest of the region in productiveness.
The Departement d'Indre et Loire is the richest agricultural region in
all France so far as the variety and abundance of its product goes,
rivalling in every way the opulence of the Burgundian hillsides. Above
all, Touraine stands at the head of the vine-culture of all the Loire
valley, the _territoire vinicole_ lapping over into Anjou, where are
produced the celebrated _vins blancs_ of Saumur.
The vineyard workers of Touraine, in the neighbourhood of Loches, have
clung closely to ancient customs, almost, one may say, to the
destruction of the industry, though of late new methods have set in,
and, since the blight now some years gone by, a new prosperity has come.
The day worker, who cares for the vines and superintends the picking of
the grapes by the womenfolk and the children, works for two francs fifty
centimes per day; but he invariably carries with him to the scene of his
labours a couple of cutlets from a young and juicy _brebis_, or even a
_poulet roti_, so one may judge from this that his pay is ample for his
needs in this land of plenty.
[Illustration: _The Vintage in Touraine_]
In the morning he takes his bowl of soup and a cup of white wine, and of
course huge hunks of bread, and finally coffee, and on each Sunday he
has his _roti a la maison_. All this demonstrates the fact that the
French peasant is more of a meat eater in these parts than he is
commonly thought to be.
Touraine has no peculiar beauties to offer the visitor; there is nothing
_outre_ about it to interest one; but, rather, it wins by sheer charm
alone, or perhaps a combination of charms and excellencies makes it so
truly a delectable land.
The Tourangeaux themselves will tell you, when speaking of Rabelais and
Balzac, that it is the land of "_haute graisse, feconde et
spirituelle_." It is all this, and, besides its spirituelle components,
it will supply some very real and substantial comforts. It is the Eden
of the gourmandiser of such delicacies as _truffes_, _rilettes_, and
above all, _pruneaux_, which you get in one form or another at nearly
every meal. Most of the good things of life await one here in abundance,
with kitchen-gardens and vineyards at every one's back door. Truly
Touraine is a land of good living.
Life runs its course in Touraine, "_facile et bonne_," without any
extremes of joy or sorrow, without chimerical desires or infinite
despair, and the agreeable sensations of life predominate,--the first
essential to real happiness.
Some one has said, and certainly not without reason, that every
Frenchman has a touch of Rabelais and of Voltaire in his make-up. This
is probably true, for France has never been swept by a wave of
puritanism such as has been manifest in most other countries, and _le
gros rire_ is still the national philosophy.
In a former day a hearty laugh, or at least an amused cynicism, diverted
the mind of the martyr from threatened torture and even violent death.
Brinvilliers laughed at those who were to torture her to death, and De
la Barre and Danton cracked jokes and improvised puns upon the very edge
of their untimely graves.
Touraine has the reputation of being a wonderfully productive field for
the book collector, though with books, like many other treasures of a
past time, the day has passed when one may "pick up" for two sous a MS.
worth as many thousands of francs; but still bargains are even now
found, and if one wants great calf-covered tomes, filled with fine old
engravings, bearing on the local history of the _pays_, he can generally
find them at all prices here in old Touraine.
There was a more or less apocryphal story told us and the landlady of
our inn concerning a find which a guest had come upon in a little
roadside hamlet at which he chanced to stop. He was one of those
omnipresent _commis voyageurs_ who thread the French provinces up and
down, as no other country in the world is "travelled" or "drummed." He
was the representative for a brandy shipper, one of those substantial
houses of the cognac region whose product is mostly sold only in France;
but this fact need not necessarily put the individual very far down in
the social scale. Indeed, he was a most amiable and cultivated person.
Our fellow traveller had come to a village where all the available
accommodations of the solitary inn were already engaged; therefore he
was obliged to put up with a room in the town, which the landlord hunted
out for him. Repairing to his room without any thought save that of
sleep, the traveller woke the next morning to find the sun streaming
through the opaqueness of a brilliantly coloured window. Not stained
glass here, surely, thought the stranger, for his lodging was a most
humble one. It proved to be not glass at all; merely four great vellum
leaves, taken from some ancient tome and stuck into the window-framing
where the glass ought to have been. Daylight was filtering dimly through
the rich colouring, and it took but a moment to become convinced that
the sheets were something rare and valuable. He learned that the pages
were from an old Latin MS., and that the occupant of the little dwelling
had used "_the paper_" in the place of the glass which had long since
disappeared. The vellum and its illuminations had stood the weather
well, though somewhat dimmed in comparison with the brilliancy of the
remaining folios, which were found below-stairs. There were in all some
eighty pages, which were purchased for a modest forty sous, and
everybody satisfied.
The volume had originally been found by the father of the old dame who
then had possession of it in an old chateau in revolutionary times.
Whether her honoured parent was a pillager or a protector did not come
out, but for all these years the possession of this fine work meant no
more to this Tourangelle than a supply of "paper" for stopping up broken
window-panes.
"She parted readily enough with the remaining leaves," said our
Frenchman, "but nothing would induce her to remove those which filled
the window." "No, we have no more glass, and these have answered quite
well for a long time now," she said. And such is the simplicity of the
French provincial, even to-day--_sometimes_.
CHAPTER VII.
AMBOISE
As one approaches Amboise, he leaves the comparatively insalubrious
plain of the Sologne and the Blaisois and enters Touraine.
Amboise! What history has been made there; what a wealth of action its
memories recall, and what splendour, gaiety, and sadness its walls have
held! An entire book might be written about the scenes which took place
under its roof.
To-day most travellers are content to rush over its apartments, gaze at
its great round tower, view the Loire, which is here quite at its best,
from the battlements, and, after a brief admiration of the wonderfully
sculptured portal of its chapel, make their way to Chenonceaux, or to
the gay little metropolis of Tours.
[Illustration: _Chateau d'Amboise_]
No matter whither one turns his steps from Amboise, he will not soon
forget this great fortress-chateau and the memories of the _petite
bande_ of blondes and brunettes who followed in the wake of Francois
Premier.
Here, and at Blois, the recollections of this little band are strong in
the minds of students of romance and history. Some one has said that
along the corridors of Amboise one still may meet the wraiths of those
who in former days went airily from one pleasure to another, but this of
course depends upon the mood and sentiment of the visitor.
Amboise has a very good imitation of the climate of the south, and the
glitter of the Loire at midday in June is about as torrid a picture as
one can paint in a northern clime. It is not that it is so very hot in
degree, but that the lack of shade-trees along its quays gives Amboise a
shimmering resemblance to a much warmer place than it really is. The
Loire is none too ample here, and frets its way, as it does through most
of its lower course, through banks of sand and pebbles in a more or less
vain effort to look cool.
Amboise is old, for, under the name of Ambatia, it existed in the fourth
century, at which epoch St. Martin, the patron of Tours, threw down a
pagan pyramidal temple here and established Christianity; and Clovis and
Alaric held their celebrated meeting on the Ile St. Jean in 496. It was
not long after this, according to the ancient writers, that some sort
of a fortified chateau took form here. Louis-le-Begue gave Amboise to
the Counts of Anjou, and Hughes united the two independent seigneuries
of the chateau and the bourg. After the Counts of Anjou succeeded the
Counts of Berry, Charles VII., by appropriation, confiscation, seizure,
or whatever you please to call it,--history is vague as to the real
motive,--united Amboise to the possessions of the Crown in 1434. Louis
XI. lived for a time at this strong fortress-chateau, before he turned
his affections so devotedly to Plessis-les-Tours. Charles VIII. was born
and died here, and it was he who added the Renaissance details, or at
least the first of them, upon his return from Italy. Indeed, it is to
him and to the nobles who followed in his train during his Italian
travels that the introduction of the Renaissance into France is commonly
attributed.
It was at Amboise that Charles VIII., forgetful of the miseries of his
Italian campaign, set about affairs of state with a renewed will and
vigour. He was personally superintending some alterations in the old
castle walls, and instructing the workmen whom he brought from Italy
with him as to just how far they might introduce those details which the
world has come to know as Renaissance, when, in passing beneath a low
overhanging beam, he struck his head so violently that he expired almost
immediately (April 17, 1498).
Louis XII., the superstitious, lived here for some time, and here
occurred some of the most important events in the life of the great
Francois, the real popularizer of the new architectural Renaissance.
It was in the old castle of Amboise, the early home of Louis XII., that
his appointed successor, his son-in-law and second cousin, Francois, was
brought up. Here he was educated by his mother, Louise de Savoie,
Duchesse d'Angouleme, together with that bright and shining light, that
Marguerite who was known as the "Pearl of the Valois," poetess, artist,
and court intriguer. Here the household formed what in the early days
Francois himself was pleased to call a "trinity of love."
Throughout the structure may yet be seen the suggestions of Francois's
artistic instincts, traced in the window-framings of the facade, in the
interior decorations of the long gallery, and on the terrace hanging
high above the Loire.
In the park and in the surrounding forest Francois and his sister
Marguerite passed many happy days of their childhood. Marguerite, who
had already become known as the "tenth muse," had already thought out
her "Heptameron," whilst Francois tried his prentice hand at
love-rhyming, an expression of sentiment which at a later period took
the form of avowals in person to his favourites.
One recalls those stanzas to the memory of Agnes Sorel, beginning:
"Gentille Agnes plus de loz tu merite,
La cause etait de France recouvrir;
Que ce que peut dedans un cloitre ouvrir
Close nonnaine? ou bien devot hermite?"
Francois was more than a lover of the beautiful. His appreciation of
architectural art amounted almost to a passion, and one might well claim
him as a member of the architectural guild, although, in truth, he was
nothing more than a generous patron of the craftsmen of his day.
Francois was the real father of the French Renaissance, the more
splendid flower which grew from the Italian stalk. He had no liking for
the Van Eycks and Holbeins of the Dutch school, reserving his favour for
the frankly languid masters from the south. He brought from Italy
Cellini, Primaticcio, and the great Leonardo, who it is said had a hand
in that wonderful shell-like spiral stairway in the chateau at Blois.
By just what means Da Vinci was inveigled from Italy will probably never
be known. The art-loving Francois visited Milan, and among its
curiosities was shown the even then celebrated "Last Supper" of
Leonardo. The next we know is that, "_Francois repasse les Alpes ayant
avec lui Mon Sieur Lyonard, son peintre_." Leonardo was given a pension
of seven _ecus de France_ per year and a residence near Amboise. Vasari
recounts very precisely how Leonardo expired in the arms of his kingly
patron at Amboise, but on the other hand, the court chronicles have said
that Francois was at St. Germain on that day. Be this as it may, the
intimacy was a close one, and we may be sure that Francois felt keenly
the demise of this most celebrated painter of his court.
It was during those early idyllic days at Amboise that the character of
Francois was formed, and the marvel is that the noble and endearing
qualities did not exceed the baser ones. To be sure his after lot was
hard, and his real and fancied troubles many, and they were not made the
less easy to bear because of his numerous female advisers.
In his youth at Amboise his passions still slumbered, but when they did
awaken, they burst forth with an unquenchable fury. Meantime he was
working off any excess of imagination by boar-hunts and falconry in the
neighbouring forest of Chanteloup, and had more than one hand-to-hand
affray with resentful citizens of the town, when he encroached upon what
they considered their traditional preserves. So he grew to man's estate,
but the life that he lived in his youth under the kingly roof of the
chateau at Amboise gave him the benefits of all the loyalty which his
fellows knew, and it helped him carry out the ideas which were
bequeathed to him by his uncle.
It was at a sitting of the court at Amboise, when Francois was still
under his mother's wing,--at the age of twenty only,--that the Bourbon
affair finally came to its head. Many notables were mixed up in it as
partisans of the ungrateful and ambitious Bourbon, Charles de
Montpensier, Connetable de France. It was an office only next in power
to that of the sovereign himself, and one which had been allowed to die
out in the reign of Louis XI. The final outcome of it all was that
Francois became a prisoner at Pavia, through the treachery of the
Connetable and his followers, who went over _en masse_ to Francois's
rival, Charles V., who, as Charles II., was King of Spain.
Of the subsequent meeting with the Emperor Charles on French soil,
Francois said to the Duchesse d'Etampes: "It is with regret that I leave
you to meet the emperor at Amboise on the Loire." And he added: "You
will follow me with the queen." His queen at this time was poor Eleanor
of Portugal, herself a Spanish princess, Claude of France, his first
wife, having died. "These two," says Brantome, "were the only virtuous
women of his household."
The Emperor Charles was visibly affected by the meeting, though, it is
true, he had no love for his old enemy, Francois. Perhaps it was on
account of the duchess, for whom Francois had put aside Diane. At any
rate, the emperor was gallant enough to say to her: "It is only in
France that I have seen such a perfection of elegance and beauty. My
brother, your king, should be the envy of all the sovereigns of Europe.
Had I such a captive at my palace in Madrid, there were no ransom that I
would accept for her."
Francois cared not for the lonely Spanish princess whom he had made his
queen; but he was somewhat susceptible to the charms of his
daughter-in-law, Catherine de Medici, the wife of his son Henri, who,
when at Amboise, was his ever ready companion in the chase.
Francois was inordinately fond of the hunt, and made of it a most
strenuous pastime, full of danger and of hard riding in search of the
boar and the wolf, which abounded in the thick underwood in the
neighbourhood. One wonders where they, or, rather, their descendants,
have disappeared, since nought in these days but a frightened hare, a
partridge, or perhaps a timid deer ever crosses one's path, as he makes
his way by the smooth roads which cross and recross the forest behind
Amboise.
When Francois II. was sixteen he became the nominal king of France. To
Amboise he and his young bride came, having been brought thither from
Blois, for fear of the Huguenot rising. The court settled itself
forthwith at Amboise, where the majestic feudal castle piled itself high
up above the broad, limpid Loire, feeling comparatively secure within
the protection of its walls. Here the Loire had widened to the
pretensions of a lake, the river being spanned by a bridge, which
crossed it by the help of the island, as it does to-day.
Over this old stone bridge the court approached the castle, the retinue
brilliant with all the trappings of a luxurious age, archers, pages,
and men-at-arms. The king and his new-found bride, the winsome Mary
Stuart, rode well in the van. In their train were Catherine, the
"queen-mother" of three kings, the Cardinal de Lorraine, the Duc de
Guise, the Duc de Nemours, and a vast multitude of gay retainers, who
were moved about from place to place like pawns upon the chess-board,
and with about as much consideration.
The gentle Mary Stuart, born in 1542, at Linlithgow, in stern Caledonia,
of a French mother,--Marie de Lorraine,--was doomed to misfortune, for
her father, the noble James V., prophesied upon his death-bed that the
dynasty would end with his daughter.
At the tender age of five Mary was sent to France and placed in a
convent. Her education was afterward continued at court under the
direction of her uncle, the Cardinal de Lorraine. By ten she had become
well versed in French, Latin, and Italian, and at one time, according to
Brantome, she gave a discourse on literature and the liberal arts--so
flourishing at the time--before the king and his court. Ronsard was her
tutor in versification, which became one of her favourite pursuits.
Mary Stuart's charms were many. She was tall and finely formed, with
auburn hair shining like an aureole above her intellectual forehead, and
with a skin of such dazzling whiteness--a trite saying, but one which is
used by Brantome--"that it outrivalled the whiteness of her veil."
In the spring of 1558, when she was but sixteen, Mary Stuart was married
to the Dauphin, the weak, sickly Francois II., himself but a youth. He
was, however, sincerely and deeply fond of his young wife.
Unexpectedly, through the death of Henri II. at the hands of Montgomery
at that ever debatable tournament, Francois II. ascended the throne of
France, and Mary Stuart saw herself exalted to the dizzy height which
she had not so soon expected. She became the queen of two kingdoms, and,
had the future been more propitious, the whole map of Europe might have
been changed.
Disease had marked the unstable Francois for its own, and within a year
he passed from the throne to the grave, leaving his young queen a widow
and an orphan.
Shortly afterward "_la reine blanche_" returned to her native Scotland,
bidding France that long, last, sad adieu so often quoted:
"Farewell, beloved France, to thee!
Best native land,
The cherished strand
That nursed my tender infancy!
Farewell my childhood's happy day!
The bark, which bears me thus away,
Bears but the poorer moiety hence,
The nobler half remains with thee,
I leave it to thy confidence,
But to remind thee still of me!"
The young sovereigns had had a most stately suite of apartments prepared
for them at Amboise, the lofty windows reaching from floor to ceiling
and overlooking the river and the vast terrace where was so soon to be
enacted that bloody drama to which they were to be made unwilling
witnesses.
This gallery was wainscoted with old oak and hung with rich leathers,
and the lofty ceiling was emblazoned with heraldic emblems and
monograms, as was the fashion of the day. Brocades and tapestries, set
in great gold frames, lined the walls, and, in a boudoir or
retiring-room beyond, still definitely to be recognized, was a
remarkable series of embroidered wall decorations, a tapestry of flowers
and fruits with an arabesque border of white and gold, truly a queenly
apartment, and one that well became the luxurious and dainty Mary, who
came from Scotland to marry the youthful Francois.
Mary Stuart knew little at the time as to why they had so suddenly
removed from Blois, but Francois soon told her, something after this
wise: "Our mother," said he, "is deeply concerned with affairs of state.
There is some conspiracy against her and your uncles, the Guises."
"Tell me," she demanded, "concerning this dreadful conspiracy."
"Were you not suspicious," he asked, querulously, "when we left for
Amboise so suddenly?"
"_Ah, non, mon Francois_, methought that we came here to hold a jousting
tourney and to hunt in the forest...."
"Well, at any rate, we are secure here from Turk, or Jew, or Huguenot,
my queen," replied the king.
Within a short space a council was called in the great hall of Amboise,
which the Huguenot chiefs, Conde, Coligny, the Cardinal de
Chatillon,--who appears to have been a sort of a religious
renegade,--were requested to attend. A conciliatory edict was to be
prepared, and signed by the king, as a measure for gaining time and
learning further the plans of the conspirators.
This edict ultimately was signed, but it was in force but a short time
and was a subterfuge which the youthful king deep in his heart--and he
publicly avowed the fact--deeply resented. Furthermore it did
practically nothing toward quelling the conspiracy.
Through the plains of Touraine and over the hills from Anjou the
conspirators came in straggling bands, to rendezvous for a great _coup
de main_ at Amboise. They halted at farms and hid in vineyards, but the
royalists were on the watch and one after another the wandering bands
were captured and held for a bloody public massacre when the time should
become ripe. In all, two thousand or more were captured, including Jean
Barri de la Renaudie. This man was the leader, but he was merely a bold
adventurer, seeking his own advantage, and caring little what cause
employed his peculiar talents. This was his last affair, however, for
his corpse soon hung in chains from Amboise's bridge. Conde, Coligny,
and the other Calvinists soon learned that the edict was not worth the
paper on which it was written.
After the two thousand had been dispersed or captured the
"queen-mother" threw off the mask. She led the trembling child-king and
queen toward the southern terrace, where, close beneath the windows of
the chateau, was built a scaffold, covered with black cloth, before
which stood the executioner clothed in scarlet. The prisoners were
ranged by hundreds along the outer rampart, guarded by archers and
musketeers. The windows of the royal apartment were open and here the
company placed themselves to witness the butchery to follow.
Speechless with horror sat the young king and queen, until finally, as
another batch of mutilated corpses were thrown into the river below, the
young queen swooned.
"My mother," said Francois, "I, too, am overcome by this horrible sight.
I crave your Highness's permission to retire; the blood of my subjects,
even of my enemies, is too horrible to contemplate."
"My son," said the bloodthirsty Catherine, "I command you to stay. Duc
de Guise, support your niece, the Queen of France. Teach her her duty as
a sovereign. She must learn how to govern those hardy Scots of hers."
It was on the very terraced platform on which one walks to-day that,
between two ranks of _hallebardiers_ and arquebusiers, moved that long
line of bareheaded and bowed men whose prayers went up to heaven while
they awaited the fate of the gallows.
Either the cord or the sword-blade quickly accounted for the lives of
this multitude, and their blood flowed in rivulets, while above in the
gallery the willing and unwilling onlookers were gay with laughter or
dumb with sadness.
When all this horrible murdering was over the Loire was literally a
reeking mass of corpses, if we are to believe the records of the time.
The chief conspirators were hung in chains from the castle walls, or
from the bridge, and the balustrades which overhang the street, which
to-day flanks the Loire beneath the castle walls, were filled with a
ribald crew of jeering partisans who knew little and cared less for
religion of any sort.
Some days after the execution of the Calvinists the "Protestant poet"
and historian passed through the royal city with his _precepteur_ and
his father, and was shown the rows of heads planted upon pikes, which
decorated the castle walls, and thereupon vowed, if not to avenge, at
least to perpetuate the infamy in prose and verse, and this he did most
effectually.
An odorous garden of roses, lilacs, honeysuckle, and hawthorn framed the
joyous architecture of the chateau, then as now, in adorable fashion;
but it could not purify the malodorous reputation which it had received
until the domain was ceded by Louis XIV. to the Duc de Penthievre and
made a _duche-pairie_.
It would be possible to say much more, but this should suffice to stamp
indelibly the fact that Touraine, in general, and the chateau of
Amboise, in particular, cradled as much of the thought and action of the
monarchy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as did the capital
itself. At any rate the memory of it all is so vivid, and the tangible
monuments of the splendour and intrigue of the court of those days are
so very numerous and magnificent, that one could not forget the parts
they played--once having seen them--if he would.
After the assassination of the Duc de Guise at Blois, Amboise became a
prison of state, where were confined the Cardinal de Bourbon and Cesar
de Vendome (the sons of Henri IV. and Gabrielle d'Estrees), also Fouquet
and Lauzun. In 1762 the chateau was given by Louis XV. to the Duc de
Choiseul, and the great Napoleon turned it over to his ancient
colleague, Roger Ducos, who apparently cared little for its beauties
or associations, for he mutilated it outrageously.
[Illustration: _Sculpture from the Chapelle de St. Hubert_]
In later times the history of the chateau and its dependencies has been
more prosaic. The Emir Abd-el-Kader was imprisoned here in 1852, and
Louis Napoleon stayed for a time within its walls upon his return from
the south. To-day it belongs to the family of Orleans, to whom it was
given by the National Assembly in 1872, and has become a house of
retreat for military veterans. This is due to the generosity of the Duc
d'Aumale into whose hands it has since passed. The restoration which has
been carried on has made of Amboise an ideal reproduction of what it
once was, and in every way it is one of the most splendid and famous
chateaux of its kind, though by no means as lovable as the residential
chateaux of Chenonceaux or Langeais.
The Chapelle de St. Hubert, which was restored by Louis Philippe, is the
chief artistic attraction of Amboise; a bijou of full-blown Gothic. It
is a veritable architectural joy of the period of Charles VIII., to whom
its erection was due. Its portal has an adorable bas-relief,
representing "La Chasse de St. Hubert," and showing St. Hubert, St.
Christopher, and St. Anthony, while above, in the tympanum, are
effigies of the Virgin, of Charles VIII., and of Anne de Bretagne. The
sculpture is, however, comparatively modern, but it embellishes a shrine
worthy in every way, for there repose the bones of Leonardo da Vinci.
Formerly Da Vinci's remains had rested in the chapel of the chateau
itself, dedicated to St. Florentin.
Often the Chapelle de St. Hubert has been confounded with that described
by Scott in "Quentin Durward," but it is manifestly not the same, as
that was located in Tours or near there, and his very words describe the
architecture as "of the rudest and meanest kind," which this is not.
Over the arched doorway of the chapel at Tours there was, however, a
"statue of St. Hubert with a bugle-horn around his neck and a leash of
greyhounds at his feet," which may have been an early suggestion of the
later work which was undertaken at Amboise.
All vocations came to have their protecting saints in the middle ages,
and, since "_la chasse_" was the great recreation of so many,
distinction was bestowed upon Hubert as being one of the most devout.
The legend is sufficiently familiar not to need recounting here, and,
anyway, the story is plainly told in this sculptured panel over the
portal of the chapel at Amboise.
In this Chapel of St. Hubert was formerly held "that which was called a
hunting-mass. The office was only used before the noble and powerful,
who, while assisting at the solemnity, were usually impatient to
commence their favourite sport."
The ancient Salle des Gardes of the chateau, with the windows giving on
the balcony overlooking the river, became later the Logis du Roi. From
this great chamber one passes on to the terrace near the foot of the
Grosse Tour, called the Tour des Minimes. It is this tower which
contains the "_escalier des voitures_." The entrance is through an
elegant portico leading to the upper stories. Above another portico,
leading from the terrace to the garden, is to be seen the emblem of
Louis XII., the porcupine, so common at Blois.
In the fosse, which still remains on the garden side, was the
universally installed _jeu-de-paume_, a favourite amusement throughout
the courts of Europe in the middle ages.
At the base of the chateau are clustered numerous old houses of the
sixteenth century, but on the river-front these have been replaced with
pretentious houses, cafes, automobile garages, and other modern
buildings.
Near the Quai des Violettes are a series of subterranean chambers known
as the Greniers de Cesar, dating from the sixteenth century.
[Illustration: _Cipher of Anne de Bretagne, Hotel de Ville, Amboise_]
Even at this late day one can almost picture the great characters in the
drama of other times who stalked majestically through the apartments,
and over the very flagstones of the courts and terraces which one treads
to-day; Catherine de Medici with her ruffs and velvets; Henri de Guise
with all his wiles; Conde the proud; the second Francois, youthful but
wise; his girl queen, loving and sad; and myriads more of all ranks and
of all shades of morality,--all resplendent in the velvets and gold of
the costume of their time.
Near the chateau is the Clos Luce, a Gothic habitation in whose oratory
died Leonardo da Vinci, on May 2, 1519.
Immediately back of the chateau is the Foret d'Amboise, the scene of
many gay hunting parties when the court was here or at Chenonceaux,
which one reaches by traversing the forest route. On the edge of this
forest is Chanteloup, remembered by most folk on account of its
atrocious Chinese-like pagoda, built of the debris of the Chateau de la
Bourdaisiere, by the Duc de Choiseul, in memory of the attentions he
received from the nobles and bourgeois of the ville upon the fall of his
ministry and his disgrace at the hands of Louis XV. and La Du Barry. It
is a curious form to be chosen when one had such beautiful examples of
architectural art near by, only equalled, perhaps, in atrociousness by
the "Royal Pavilion" of England's George IV.
La Bourdaisiere, near Amboise, of which only the site remains, if not
one of the chief tourist attractions of the chateau country, has at
least a sentimental interest of abounding importance for all who recall
the details of the life of "La Belle Gabrielle."
Here in Touraine Gabrielle d'Estrees was born in 1565. She was
twenty-six years old when Henri IV. first saw her in the chateau of her
father at Coeuvres. So charmed was he with her graces that he made her
his _maitresse_ forthwith, though the old court-life chronicles of the
day state that she already possessed something more than the admiration
of Sebastian Zamet, the celebrated financier.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHENONCEAUX
"The castle of Chenonceaux is a fine place on the river Cher, in a fine
and pleasant country."
FRANCOIS PREMIER.
"The castle of Chenonceaux is one of the best and most beautiful of our
kingdom."
HENRI II.
The average visitor will come prepared to worship and admire a chateau
so praised by two luxury-loving Kings of France.
Chenonceaux is noted chiefly for its chateau, but the little village
itself is charming. The houses of the village are not very new, nor very
old, but the one long street is most attractive throughout its length,
and the whole atmosphere of the place, from September to December, is
odorous with the perfume of red-purple grapes. The vintage is not the
equal of that of the Bordeaux region, perhaps, nor of Chinon, nor
Saumur; but the _vin du pays_ of the Cher and the Loire, around Tours,
is not to be despised.
Most tourists come to Chenonceaux by train from Tours; others drive over
from Amboise, and yet others come by bicycle or automobile. They are not
as yet so numerous as might be expected, and accordingly here, as
elsewhere in Touraine, every facility is given for visiting the chateau
and its park.
If you do not hurry off at once to worship at the abode of the
fascinating Diane, one of the brightest ornaments of the court of
Francois Premier and his son Henri, you will enjoy your dinner at the
Hotel du Bon Laboureur, though most likely it wi
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