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. The
specialty of Chambord is its prodigious round towers.
There are, I believe, no less than eight of them,
placed at each angle of the inner and outer square of
buildings; for the castle is in the form of a larger
structure which encloses a smaller one. One of these
towers stood before me in the court; it seemed to
fling its shadow over the place; while above, as I
looked up, the pinnacles and gables, the enormous
chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place
was empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extra-
ordinary projections, were thrown across the clear
gray surfaces. One felt that the whole thing was
monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young
man in a rather shabby livery, and led me about with
a mixture of the impatient and the desultory, of con-
descension and humility. I do not profess to under-
stand the plan of Chambord, and I may add that I
do not even desire to do so; for it is much more
entertaining to think of it, as you can so easily, as an
irresponsible, insoluble labyrinth. Within, it is a
wilderness of empty chambers, a royal and romantic
barrack. The exiled prince to whom it gives its title
has not the means to keep up four hundred rooms;
he contents himself with preserving the huge outside.
The repairs of the prodigious roof alone must absorb
a large part of his revenue. The great feature of
the interior is the celebrated double staircase, rising
straight through the building, with two courses of
steps, so that people may ascend and descend without
meeting.
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