is a part of the place. He holds ones. and the pictures are interesting, especially Marie Leczynski, looking so different in her plain red dress from all the powdered and painted dames around her. But somehow I get careless of all its grandeur when I look at that loop-holed wall, and think of how much might have been saved-Ferrières degradation, miserable, impossible peace, Paris madness and wild destruction, and (most sadly shameful thing of all) the wretched Thiers' eulogium on 'our brave army,' 'our unvanquished and unvanquishable host,' with Marquis Gallifet as chief hero-all this avoided had Morandi held firm. Through the park, where we can't help hunting thegreen lizards, and out upon the tilled land, where women are filling their aprons with weeds for their cows, and others washing the dust off what they've cut. It is a typical bit of Francethe forest behind, in front, towards the river, villages and clumps of trees, and around a sandy ocean of allotments in every kind of crop. This is, I suppose, the Varennes, I'm afraid the Prussians, who (the 'light alluvial sand of inexhaustible gardien said) would have paid for fertility.' Soon we come to the Loire photographs in coups de poing, did levée, and then to the ferry which some damage to the place. I wish lands us under pretty Menars-lethey had done more, for I can't Château. The castle terrace, high help regretting that Chambord was above the river, looks lovely; the basely abandoned by General Mo- place belonged to Madame de Pomrandi. There are the loop-holes padour, one of those who did more in the park wall, and there is the to bring France to what she is than position to speak for itself. A half-a-dozen Bismarks. handful of desperate men might have blocked the road to Blois and given time for Gambetta to put it in a state of defence. But then the French were never desperate: they talked about being so, and always waited for some one else to be desperate for them. Morandi was of course a traitor;' but he was no more a traitor than almost everybody except the restless Gambetta and the reckless Nationals whom Trochu maddened by refusing to use them and then calling them cowards. Chambord is a fine place-much finer, to my mind, than Versailles; White, clean-looking Menars has not much to interest. They make bricks here; they have a stainedglass works. On almost every door is chalked malade: I'm afraid they had small-pox; but they used the word really as a charm against Prussian occupation. The Prussians were here three months, and have won the deep hatred of the people; they don't talk of them in Menars as they did at Loches and Montresor. So we find it all along: where there was no fighting the Prussians were on their best behaviour and won golden opinions; but their plan was to crush out resistance by bitter severity wherever there had been a struggle, and so along the line of actual fighting you don't hear much in their praise. The church is a poor affair, with a fine monument to Gul. Charron, præses infulatus 1619. In one of the pews we find a sort of French Christian Year, Chants pieux, ou choix de cantiques en rapport avec l'esprit de l'église.' Except those for the mois de Marie the greater number dwell on the terrors of the law. Here is part of the 'Voix d'un réprouvé: ' Adieu, paradis de délices, Beau ciel, ô cité des élus; J'étais créé pour vous, et d'éternels supplices Sont devenus ma part; pour moi vous n'êtes plus. The priest shows us his relic-boxes, but cannot vouch for their authenticity: they were all scattered at the Reformation; some are real, because of the holes in which the gold setting was once fixed.' I didn't like to ask him the exact value of non-authentic relics. The train starts at last, and we pass Blois, catching a glimpse of the red frescoes on the castle, and Chaumont (Mons Calidus) on its terrace above the Loire-Chaumont, where that Cardinal of Amboise was born who ruled France so well under Louis XII., and where, byand-by, Catherine of Medicis worked at astrology, until after her husband's death she made Diana of Poitiers give her Chenonceaux and take all this in exchange. Near Lineray the low hills on the right come close to the river, and there are plenty of those cavehouses, burrowed in the soft sandcliff, which are SO common in Touraine. On Amboise the war laid its hand very heavily. The old suspension bridge was cut; the fine new bridge fell literally all of a heap when one pier was destroyed: it was so well built, you see,' was the expla nation. The castle stands grandly on a plateau of rock, a spur of which supports the Sainte-Chapelle, built for Anne of Brittany, perhaps by some of the famous guild of workmen who did so much for her in Brittany itself. The carvings are wonderful; the St. Hubert scene over the doorway is as rich as stonework can be. Louis Philippe did a great deal of restoration here: he tunnelled under the rock, and made the winding carriage drives inside the two enormous towers (each forty-two feet across), which, rising from the foot of the rock, are carried as high as the rest of the building. He, too, fitted up the place to receive Abd-el-Kader, breaking big holes into the old dungeons so as to form out of them a second suite of rooms, cool and yet dry. Never was castle SO metamorphosed. Yet you can see the room where Margaret of Anjou was reconciled to the Earl of Warwick, and that in which the doom of La Renaudie and his fellows was fixed, and (saddest of all) the spot where Charles VIII. died for want of the commonest attention. On April 7, 1498, the king, after twice confessing, came out of the queen's rooms to watch the tennis players in the castle ditch. He had to cross a place (you can see it still) le plus déshonoré du château, car tout le monde y fesoit ses nécessités.' Little as he was, he knocked his head against the lintel as he hastened through, cracking the stone with the force of the blow. Still he looked on at the game for hours, and then fell down in a fit of apoplexy. Everybody, as usual, did the wrong thing; instead of carrying him into the fresh air, they brought a mattress, and let him lie for nine hours dans une galerie infecte et souillée d'ordures. La royne estoit en un coing de la salle gisante à terre et plorante incessamment. Et ainsi (adds Commines) départit de ce monde si puissant et si grand roy, en si misérable lieu, qui tant avoit de belles maisons et en faisoit une si belle, et si ne sceut à ce besoin finer d'une pauvre chambre.' His wife soon consoled herself: poor Jeanne, Louis XI.'s daughter, the original of Kingsley's Ugly Princess, was divorced. I am ashamed to say that Louis XII. was dastard enough to invent lies about her. The people knew better, and called the three papal judges who pronounced the divorce, Caiaphas, Herod, and Pontius Pilate. At Amboise you'll be sure to hear of Francis I.'s trick: he loosed a huge wild boar at the wedding of Renée de Bourbon and the Duke of Lorraine; the beast suddenly ran upstairs and burst into the ladies' room, and Francis won much glory by rushing upon it and killing it at one blow. They will show you, too, Leonardo da Vinci's skull; but as the only identification was the letters ARD on the coffin, a French archæologist suggests that Tissard, Renard, &c., are common enough local names. Amboise is great in print shops. Here is Ireland and Jamaica:' a nigger whispers to a disconsolate Pat, Have patience,' while Bull, with a big stick, stands by to check any impatient tendencies. From the next window stares l'étranger à Paris: the Englishman with chinablue eyes, long flapping spaniel-ear whiskers, faultless teeth, which he shows to the full, cherry lips, and, of course, a white hat, light coat, and plaid trowsers. There is more fun in the next pane: a village mayor at the Great Exhibition Madame Potiphar, with her sphinx face and yellow skin. Turning to Joseph, a very handsome young clerk, he collars him, and cries, 'Look at that creature: why, you've been a polisson for four thousand years, deceiving us with all this stuff about your virtue and self-restraint. Get along with you!' Just outside Amboise is all that is left of Chanteloup, where Choiseul retired when Madame du Barry comes upon had got him deposed. Her management was so much worse, even than his, that everybody flocked to Chanteloup, and his court was far more thronged than that of Versailles. The Bande Noire, those uncompromising utilitarians of 1830, bought up the place and sold the materials, leaving nothing but the pagoda, one of the Chinoiseries, which in England as well (witness Kew) were fashionable about 1770. Chanteloup had been the residence of that Madame des Ursins who governed Spain so well as long as they would let her do so. The walk to Chenonceaux is very pleasant, past turreted farms, which have been châteaux, and rockhouses, and caves, which they call greniers de César. Chenonceaux is indeed a bijou; most of it is actually on the Cher, and somehow (as at Venice) we think a great deal of buildings that rise out of the water. It belongs to Deputy Wilson: his tall concierge hastens to inform us that he is not English in spite of the name. Monsieur is at Versailles, settling the rents that the Parisians are to pay for the months of siege, fiddling at that and other trifles while Paris is being worked up to madness pitch. We go through all the rooms, with their wealth of antique furniture, carpets and glasses, and plaster ceilings. A great many of the 'relics' have been discredited, for madame,' said the porter's wife, 'will have nothing called by a name that does not belong to it.' So Mary Queen of Scots' mirror, Francis I.'s wine-glass, &c., have gone into the common ruck of nameless curiosities. Francis's hunting-horn is the only thing about which there seems no doubt. The outside of the place is not less charming than the perfectly furnished rooms in which you can even more readily fancy Diana of Poitiers and Cesar of Vendôme than you can picture Madame Dupin with Voltaire, Rousseau, and Bolingbroke about her. How is it that she managed to live on quietly here, through the Terror, without the loss of a tree or a chair, and with no thought of her life being in danger? No wonder Mary Stuart wished to live on here as dowager; under these grand trees she may have written her sweet Complaincte: Si en quelque séjour, Le regret d'un absent. their dislike of the fellows-returned prisoners mostly, who are being brigaded and sent up to Versailles. No one treats them even to a halfpenny cigar. The station just before Tours is full of Turcos and Zouaves on their way to Algeria: it is a wild scene-men in burnouses lying about round their piled muskets, others sitting at a long table in the buvette. It is night; and the contrast from the quiet of Chenonceaux, with its nightingales and its wrynecks crying as monotonously as our corncrakes, to the Here are more verses on Diana's glare and roar of these stations, is own garden:1 Marguerites, lys, et œilletz, As Chambord is perhaps the grandest, so Chenonceaux is surely the prettiest specimen of the French Renaissance-a style distinct from Brunelleschi's Italian Renaissance, though of course it owes much to the French painters who went to Rome, and to the fashion which set in after Charles VIII.'s Italian wars. Still it ignores Vitruvius, and does not give up the pointed arch, of which the Italians never understood the use or the beauty. One can't see everything. Cangé, the old seat of the Cunninghams; Pocé, near Amboise, with the great iron-foundries, where the fine roof of the Tours station was made; almost every village has its chateau. Another time I may tell you of those lying south and west of Tours Azay-le-Rideau, Luynes, Langeais, and so on to Chinon and Fontevrault. Now we must get back to Tours. The train is full of soldiers, packed into carriages of every class. Civilians show, as much as they dare startling. Some regiments are going to Le Mans, where they expect a row at the municipal elections. The Zouaves, I hear, are sent away from Versailles because they could not be trusted against the Federals very likely it's a lie. I am beginning to get wild in this atmosphere of suspicion, and to understand the Count of Montalembert's longing to run over to England every now and then for a bain de vie. Steeped up to the eyes in mouchardism, these folks are; and they don't seem to have backbone enough to get out of the slough. The other day, on a coach, I fell into talk with a most courteous man: 'I see you're a stranger,' said he; may I ask of what nation?' Guess,' said I. 'Well, a Pole, I think.' 'You're wrong; I'm a born British subject, and that's my son.' 'Oh yes, if I'd known you were father and son -one sees at a glance he is English; but you-you certainly have the Polish accent. I've been in Poland, and so I know.' 'Well, I've never been there, so I don't know.' When we were changing horses, a handsome, burly young farmer, who had been very silent on the road, watched till I was alone, and then said, 'Do you know whom you were talking to?' 6 To 'Diana planted 150 white mulberries at Chenonceaux, and presented Henry with the first pair of silk stockings ever seen in France. a spy, I think,' said I. 'I'm glad you thought so, for probably the thought has made you careful. He's a gendarme.' 'I didn't like the ferret look of his eyes,' said I. The return of my courteous friend prevented my asking the young farmer how he could submit to such a system. There was no shaking off the gendarme. When we got down he got down; and as we had only our dressing bags, he insisted on helping to carry mine, and so on seeing where we put up. Two days afterwards all travelling towards Le Mans was stopped; and the number of times they insisted on seeing my passport made me think my friend had too accurately described my republican beard and Garibaldian wide-awake. The grand want in France is truth. They are honest (far more honest than we are) in trade: you know what you buy when you get a thing in a French shop; and as for chaffering about price, it is their amusement-that's all. But in politics, in religion, in the family, they are eaten up with lies. I don't like to get uncharitable. My friends here call me High Church, but I never come back from France without rage against Popery in my heart, and sympathy even for the Protestant League. Look at those seven priests saying that Monseigneur Darboy was a strong and consistent advocate of infallibility! Why, he refused a cardinal's hat rather than acquiesce in it. No wonder the calm, shrewd Guizot should have deliberately said that it's impossible to be tolerant to Popery in the same sense in which you can be tolerant to all other sects. They're very pretty, the mois de Marie altars, with their blue and white gauze, and spangles, and flowers; and it's very pretty to hear the women say after vespers, as they come to catch a look before the candles are put out, 'Ah, quelle bonne Mère! on ne peut pas trop faire pour une telle Mère, surtout dans un temps pareil;' but John Knox was right when he flung the painted bredd into the water of Lore.' This spangle-work, these relics and miraculous images, have eaten out the truthfulness of the nation so thoroughly that they don't even feel what they have lost. Well, every château almost-all I have named except Luynes and Azay -belonged in some way to royalty; and such royalty! I don't find a really noble trait recorded of one of them or their crew, except that Diana of Poitiers did pay Bohier's heirs for Chenonceaux, which Francis had meanly taken from him 'to pay his debts to the king.' France has been king as well as priest-ridden; and the work of '93 was not done in a way to set things permanently right. 6 Years ago I picked up a little German book called The Devil in History, which describes the stones of some grand cathedral crying out Moloch! Moloch!' amid a weird chorus of 'Heulen und Seufzen und wüste wüste Angst.' What would all these Blois and Amboise and Loches stones cry if they could have a voice? Would it not be 'Moloch' with a vengeance? What have they seen but misery from the day they were built by the forced labour of miserable serfs to the time when mad sans-culottes half ruined them in their search for cidevants? What a nation! Rousseau, when he was Madame Dupin's secretary at Chenonceaux, wrote Les Français sont en Touraine, et non à Paris:' he felt the heart of France beat there,' says his commentator. If so, France is Legitimist and Ultramontane. Royal palaces enough for all Europe, and shrines like that of St. Martin at Tours, have made the Tourangeaux submissive to the yoke, which the richness of their soil helps to prevent them from feeling. But is Rousseau right? Are we henceforth to judge of France by Touraine? If so, it did not need the Bismark treaty to blot her out of the map of Europe. |