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.
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