The Station And The Village Are About Ten
Minutes' Walk From The Chateau, And The Village Con-
Tains A Very
Tidy inn, where, if you are not in too
great a hurry to commune with the shades of the royal
Favorite and the jealous queen, you will perhaps stop
and order a dinner to be ready for you in the evening.
A straight, tall avenue leads to the grounds of the
castle; what I owe to exactitude compels me to add
that it is crossed by the railway-line. The place is so
arranged, however, that the chateau need know nothing
of passing trains, - which pass, indeed, though the
grounds are not large, at a very sufficient distance.
I may add that the trains throughout this part of
France have a noiseless, desultory, dawdling, almost
stationary quality, which makes them less of an offence
than usual. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the light
was yellow, save under the trees of the avenue, where,
in spite of the waning of September, it was duskily
green. Three or four peasants, in festal attire, were
strolling about. On a bench at the beginning of the
avenue, sat a man with two women. As I advanced
with my companions he rose, after a sudden stare,
and approached me with a smile, in which (to be
Johnsonian for a moment) certitude was mitigated by
modesty and eagerness was embellished with respect.
He came toward me with a salutation that I had seen
before, and I am happy to say that after an instant I
ceased to be guilty of the brutality of not knowing
where. There was only one place in the world where
people smile like that, - only one place where the art
of salutation has that perfect grace. This excellent
creature used to crook his arm, in Venice, when I
stepped into my gondola; and I now laid my hand on
that member with the familiarity of glad recognition;
for it was only surprise that had kept me even for a
moment from accepting the genial Francesco as an
ornament of the landscape of Touraine. What on
earth - the phrase is the right one - was a Venetian
gondolier doing at Chenonceaux? He had been
brought from Venice, gondola and all, by the mistress
of the charming house, to paddle about on the Cher.
Our meeting was affectionate, though there was a kind
of violence in seeing him so far from home. He was
too well dressed, too well fed; he had grown stout,
and his nose had the tinge of good claret. He re-
marked that the life of the household to which he had
the honor to belong was that of a _casa regia;_ which
must have been a great change for poor Checco, whose
habits in Venice were not regal. However, he was
the sympathetic Checco still; and for five minutes
after I left him I thought less about the little plea-
sure-house by the Cher than about the palaces of the
Adriatic.
But attention was not long in coming round to the
charming structure that presently rose before us. The
pale yellow front of the chateau, the small scale of
which is at first a surprise, rises beyond a consider-
able court, at the entrance of which a massive and
detached round tower, with a turret on its brow (a
relic of the building that preceded the actual villa),
appears to keep guard. This court is not enclosed -
or is enclosed, at least, only by the gardens, portions
of which are at present in a state of violent reforma-
tion. Therefore, though Chenonceaux has no great
height, its delicate facade stands up boldly enough.
This facade, one of the most finished things in Tou-
raine, consists of two stories, surmounted by an attic
which, as so often in the buildings of the French
Renaissance, is the richest part of the house. The
high-pitched roof contains three windows of beautiful
design, covered with embroidered caps and flowering
into crocketed spires. The window above the door
is deeply niched; it opens upon a balcony made in
the form of a double pulpit, - one of the most charm-
ing features of the front. Chenonceaux is not large,
as I say, but into its delicate compass is packed a
great deal of history, - history which differs from that
of Amboise and Blois in being of the private and sen-
timental kind. The echoes of the place, faint and far
as they are to-day, are not political, but personal.
Chenonceaux dates, as a residence, from the year 1515,
when the shrewd Thomas Bohier, a public functionary
who had grown rich in handling the finances of Nor-
mandy, and had acquired the estate from a family
which, after giving it many feudal lords, had fallen
into poverty, erected the present structure on the
foundations of an old mill. The design is attributed,
with I know not what justice, to Pierre Nepveu, _alias_
Trinqueau, the audacious architect of Chambord. On
the death of Bohier the house passed to his son, who,
however, was forced, under cruel pressure, to surrender
it to the crown, in compensation for a so-called deficit
in the accounts of the late superintendent of the trea-
sury. Francis I. held the place till his death; but
Henry II., on ascending the throne, presented it out of
hand to that mature charmer, the admired of two
generations, Diana of Poitiers. Diana enjoyed it till
the death of her protector; but when this event oc-
curred, the widow of the monarch, who had been
obliged to submit in silence, for years, to the ascend-
ency of a rival, took the most pardonable of all the
revenges with which the name of Catherine de' Medici
is associated, and turned her out-of-doors. Diana was
not in want of refuges, and Catherine went through
the form of giving her Chaumont in exchange; but
there was only one Chenonceaux. Catherine devoted
herself to making the place more completely unique.
The feature that renders it sole of its kind is not ap-
preciated till you wander round to either side of the
house.
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