There Is No Sort Of
Sign, And The Place Looks Peculiarly Private.
But if
you ring at the gate, you will not be turned away.
You will, on the contrary, be
Ushered upstairs into a
parlor - there is nothing resembling a shop- encum-
bered with specimens - of remarkably handsome pottery.
The work is of the best, - a careful reproduction of
old forms, colors, devices; and the master of the
establishment is one of those completely artistic types
that are often found in France. His reception is as
friendly as his work is ingenious; and I think it is not
too much to say that you like the work the better be-
cause he has produced it. His vases, cups and jars,
lamps, platters, _plaques,_ with their brilliant glaze, their
innumerable figures, their family likeness, and wide
variations, are scattered, through his occupied rooms;
they serve at once as his stock-in-trade and as house-
hold ornament. As we all know, this is an age of
prose, of machinery, of wholesale production, of coarse
and hasty processes. But one brings away from the
establishment of the very intelligent M. Ulysse the
sense of a less eager activity and a greater search for
perfection. He has but a few workmen, and he gives
them plenty of time. The place makes a little vignette,
leaves an impression, - the quiet white house in its
garden on the road by the wide, clear river, without
the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our
modern industry. It ought to gratify Mr. Ruskin.
V.
The second time I went to Blois I took a carriage
for Chambord, and came back by the Chateau de
Cheverny and the forest of Russy, - a charming little
expedition, to which the beauty of the afternoon (the
finest in a rainy season that was spotted with bright
days) contributed not a little. To go to Chambord,
you cross the Loire, leave it on one side, and strike
away through a country in which salient features be-
come less and less numerous, and which at last has
no other quality than a look of intense, and peculiar
rurality, - the characteristic, even when it is not the
charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This
is not the appearance of wildness, for it goes with
great cultivation; it is simply the presence of the
delving, drudging, economizing peasant. But it is a
deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape;
not, as in England, a landlord's. On the way to Cham-
bord you enter the flat and sandy Sologne. The wide
horizon opens out like a great _potager,_ without inter-
ruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a
long, low stretch of wood. There is an absence of
hedges, fences, signs of property; everything is ab-
sorbed in the general flatness, - the patches of vine-
yard, the scattered cottages, the villages, the children
(planted and staring and almost always pretty), the
women in the fields, the white caps, the faded blouses,
the big sabots. At the end of an hour's drive (they
assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will
spend double that time), I passed through a sort of
gap in a wall, which does duty as the gateway of the
domain of an exiled pretender. I drove along a
straight avenue, through a disfeatured park, - the park
of Chambord has twenty-one miles of circumference, -
a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy plantation, in which
the timber must have been cut many times over and
is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so
many spots in France, the traveller perceives that he
is in a land of revolutoins. Nevertheless, its great ex-
tent and the long perspective of its avenues give this
desolate boskage a certain majesty; just as its shabbi-
ness places it in agreement with one of the strongest
impressions of the chateau. You follow one of these
long perspectives a proportionate time, and at last you
see the chimneys and pinnacles of Chambord rise ap-
parently out of the ground. The filling-in of the wide
moats that formerly surrounded it has, in vulgar par-
lance, let it down, bud given it an appearance of top-
heaviness that is at the same time a magnificent Orien-
talism. The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables,
the lanterns, the chimneys, look more like the spires
of a city than the salient points of a single building.
You emerge from the avenue and find yourself at the
foot of an enormous fantastic mass. Chambord has a
strange mixture of society and solitude. A little village
clusters within view of its stately windows, and a couple
of inns near by offer entertainment to pilgrims. These
things, of course, are incidents of the political pro-
scription which hangs its thick veil over the place.
Chambord is truly royal, - royal in its great scale, its
grand air, its indifference to common considerations.
If a cat may look at a king, a palace may lock at a
tavern. I enjoyed my visit to this extraordinary struc-
ture as much as if I had been a legitimist; and indeed
there is something interesting in any monument of a
great system, any bold presentation of a tradition.
You leave your vehicle at one of the inns, which
are very decent and tidy, and in which every one is
very civil, as if in this latter respect the influence of
the old regime pervaded the neighborhood, and you
walk across the grass and the gravel to a small door,
- a door infinitely subordinate and conferring no title
of any kind on those who enter it. Here you ring a
bell, which a highly respectable person answers (a per-
son perceptibly affiliated, again, to the old regime),
after which she ushers you across a vestibule into an
inner court. Perhaps the strongest impression I got
at Chambord came to me as I stood in this court.
The woman who admitted me did not come with
me; I was to find my guide somewhere else.
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