CHAPTER IV.

CHAMBORD

Chambord is four leagues from Blois, from which point it is usually approached. To reach it one crosses the Sologne, not the arid waste it has been pictured, but a desert which has been made to blossom as the rose.

A glance of the eye, given anywhere along the road from Blois to Chambord, will show a vineyard of a thousand, two thousand, or even more acres, where, from out of a soil that was once supposed to be the poorest in all wine-growing France, may be garnered a crop equalling a hundred dozen of bottles of good rich wine to the acre.

This wine of the Sologne is not one of the famous wines of France, to be sure, but what one gets in these parts is pure and astonishingly palatable; moreover, one can drink large portions of it--as do the natives--without being affected in either his head or his pocket-book.

From late September to early December there is a constant harvest going on in the vineyards, whose labourers, if not as picturesque and joyous as we are wont to see them on the comic-opera stage, are at least wonderfully clever and industrious, for they make a good wine crop out of a soil which previously gave a living only to charcoal-burners and goat-keepers.

Francois was indeed a rare devotee of the building mania when he laid out the wood which surrounds Chambord and which ultimately grew to some splendour. The nineteenth century saw this great wood cut and sold in huge quantities, so that to-day it is rather a scanty copse through which one drives on the way from Blois.

The country round about is by no means impoverished,--far from it. It is simply unworked to its fullest extent as yet. As it is plentifully surrounded by water it makes an ideal land for the growing of asparagus, strawberries, and grapes, and so it has come to be one of the most prosperous and contented regions in all the Loire valley.

The great white Chateau de Chambord, with its turrets and its magnificent lantern, looms large from whatever direction it is approached, though mostly it is framed by the somewhat stunted pines which make up the pleasant forest. The vistas which one sees when coming toward Chambord, through the drives and alleys of its park, with the chateau itself brilliant in the distance, are charming and fairy-like indeed. Straight as an arrow these roadways run, and he who traverses one of those centring at the chateau will see a tiny white fleck in the sunlight a half a dozen kilometres away, which, when it finally is reached, will be admitted to be the greatest triumph of the art-loving monarch.

Francois Premier was foremost in every artistic expression in France, and the court, as may be expected, were only too eager to follow the expensive tastes of their monarch,--when they could get the means, and when they could not, often enough Francois supplied the wherewithal.

Francois himself dressed in the richest of Italian velvets, the more brilliant the better, with a preponderant tendency toward pink and sky blue.

A dozen years after Francois came to the throne, a dozen years after the pleasant life of Amboise, when mother, daughter, and son lived together on the banks of the Loire in that "Trinity of love," the monarch and his wife, Queen Claude of France, the daughter of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, came to live at Chambord on the edge of the sandy Sologne waste.

Here, too, came Marguerite d'Alencon, the ever faithful and devoted sister of Francois, the duke, her husband, and all the gay members of the court. The hunt was the order of the day, for the forest tract of the Sologne, scanty though it was in growth, abounded in small game.

Chambord at this time had not risen to the grand and ornate proportions which we see to-day, but set snugly on the low, swampy banks of the tiny river Cosson, a dull, gloomy mediaeval fortress, whose only aspect of gaiety was that brought by the pleasure-loving court when it assembled there. In size it was ample to accommodate the court, but Francois's artistic temperament already anticipated many and great changes. The Loire was to be turned from its course and the future pompous palace was to have its feet bathed in the limpid Loire water rather than in the stagnant pools of the morass which then surrounded it.

As a triumph of the royal chateau-builder's art, Chambord is far and away ahead of Fontainebleau or Versailles, both of which were built in a reign which ended two hundred years later than that which began with the erection of Chambord. As an example of the arts of Francois I. and his time compared with those of Louis XIV. and his, Chambord stands forth with glorious significance.

On the low banks of the Cosson, Francois achieved perhaps the greatest triumph that Renaissance architecture had yet known.

It was either Chambord, or the reconstruction by Francois of the edifice belonging to the Counts of Blois, which resulted in the refinement of the Renaissance style less than a quarter of a century after its introduction into France by Charles VIII.,--if he really was responsible for its importation from Italy. Francois lacked nothing of daring, and built and embellished a structure which to-day, in spite of numerous shortcomings, stands as the supreme type of a great Renaissance domestic edifice of state. Every device of decoration and erratic suggestion seems to have been carried out, not only structurally, as in the great double spiral of its central stairway, but in its interpolated details and symbolism as well.

It was at this time, too, that Francois began to introduce the famous salamander into his devices and ciphers; that most significant emblem which one may yet see on wall and ceiling of Chambord surrounded by the motto: "_Je me nourris et je meurs dans le feu._"

Chambord, first of all, gives one a very high opinion of Francois Premier, and of the splendours with which he was wont to surround himself. The apartments are large and numerous and are admirably planned and decorated, though, almost without exception, bare to-day of furniture or furnishings.

To quote the opinion of Blondel, the celebrated French architect: "The Chateau de Chambord, built under Francois I. and Henri II., from the designs of Primatice, was never achieved according to the original plan. Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. contributed a certain completeness, but the work was really pursued afterward according to the notions of one Sertio."

The masterpiece of its constructive elements is its wonderful doubly spiralled central staircase, which permits one to ascend or descend without passing another proceeding in the opposite direction at the same time. Whatever may have been the real significance of this great double spiral, it has been said that it played its not unimportant part in the intrigue and scandal of the time. It certainly is a wonder of its kind, more marvellous even than that spiral at Blois, attributed, with some doubt perhaps, to Leonardo da Vinci, and certainly far more beautiful than the clumsy round tower up which horses and carriages were once driven at Amboise.

At all events, it probably meant something more than mere constructive ability, and a staircase which allows one individual to mount and another to descend without knowing of the presence of the other may assuredly be classed with those other mediaeval accessories, sliding panels, hidden doorways, and secret cabinets.

Beneath the dome which terminates the staircase in the Orleans wing are three caryatides representing--it is doubtfully stated--Francois Premier, La Duchesse d'Etampes, and Madame la Comtesse de Chateaubriand,--a trinity of boon companions in intrigue.

In reality Chambord presents the curiously contrived arrangement of one edifice within another, as a glance of the eye at the plan will show.

The fosse, the usual attribute of a great mediaeval chateau--it may be a dry one or a wet one, in this case it was a wet one--has disappeared, though Brantome writes that he saw great iron rings let into the walls to which were attached "_barques et grands bateaux_," which had made their way from the Loire via the dribbling Cosson.

The Cosson still dribbles its life away to-day, its moisture having, to a great part, gone to irrigate the sandy Sologne, but formerly it was doubtless a much more ample stream.

From the park the ornate gables and dormer-windows loom high above the green-swarded banks of the Cosson. It was so in Francois's time, and it is so to-day; nothing has been added to break the spread of lawn, except an iron-framed wash-house with red tiles and a sheet-iron chimney-pot beside the little river, and a tin-roofed garage for automobiles connected with the little inn outside the gates.

The rest is as it was of yore, at least, the same as the old engravings of a couple of hundreds of years ago picture it, hence it is a great shame, since the needs of the tiny village could not have demanded it, that the foreground could not have been left as it originally was.

The town, or rather village, or even hamlet, of Chambord is about the most abbreviated thing of its kind existent. There is practically no village; there are a score or two of houses, an inn of the frankly tourist kind, which evidently does not cater to the natives, the aforesaid wash-house by the river bank, the dwellings of the gamekeepers, gardeners, and workmen on the estate, and a diminutive church rising above the trees not far away. These accessories practically complete the make-up of the little settlement of Chambord, on the borders of the Blaisois and Touraine.

Chambord has been called top-heavy, but it is hardly that. Probably the effect is caused by its low-lying situation, for, as has been intimated before, this most imposing of all of the Loire chateaux has the least desirable situation of any. There is a certain vagueness and foreignness about the sky-line that is almost Eastern, though we recognize it as pure Renaissance. Perhaps it is the magnitude and lonesomeness of it all that makes it seem so strange, an effect that is heightened when one steps out upon its roof, with the turrets, towers, and cupolas still rising high above.

The ground-plan is equally magnificent, flanked at every corner by a great round tower, with another quartette of them at the angles of the interior court.

Most of the stonework of the fabric is brilliant and smooth, as if it were put up but yesterday, and, beyond the occasional falling of a tile from the wonderful array of chimney-pots, but little evidences are seen exteriorly of its having decayed in the least. On the tower which flanks the little door where one meets the _concierge_ and enters, there are unmistakable marks of bullets and balls, which a revolutionary or some other fury left as mementoes of its passage.

Considering that Chambord was not a product of feudal times, these disfigurements seem out of place; still its peaceful motives could hardly have been expected to have lasted always.

The southern facade is not excelled by the elevation of any residential structure of any age, and its outlines are varied and pleasing enough to satisfy the most critical; if one pardons the little pepper-boxes on the north and south towers, and perforce one has to pardon them when he recalls the magnificence of the general disposition and sky-line of this marvellously imposing chateau of the Renaissance.

Francois Premier made Chambord his favourite residence, and in fact endowed Pierre Nepveu--who for this work alone will be considered one of the foremost architects of the French Renaissance--with the inspiration for its erection in 1526.

A prodigious amount of sculpture by Jean Cousin, Pierre Bontemps, Jean Goujon, and Germain Pilon was interpolated above the doorways and windows, in the framing thereof, and above the great fireplaces. Inside and out, above and below, were vast areas to be covered, and Francois allowed his taste to have full sway.

The presumptuous Francois made much of this noble residence, perhaps because of his love of _la chasse_, for game abounded hereabouts, or perhaps because of his regard for the Comtesse Thoury, who occupied a neighbouring chateau.

For some time before his death, Francois still lingered on at Chambord. Marguerite and her brother, both now considerably aged since the happier times of their childhood in Touraine, always had an indissoluble fondness for Chambord. Marguerite had now become Queen of Navarre, but her beauty had been dimmed with the march of time, and she no longer was able to comfort and amuse her kingly brother as of yore. His old pleasures and topics of conversation irritated him, and he had even tired of poetry, art, and political affairs.

Above all, he shamefully and shamelessly abused women, at once the prop and the undermining influence of his kingly power in days gone by. There is an existing record to the effect that he wrote some "window-pane" verse on the window of his private apartment to the following effect:

"Souvent femme varie; Mal habile quis'y fie!"

If this be not apocryphal, the incident must have taken place long years before that celebrated "window-pane" verse of Shenstone's, and Francois is proven again a forerunner, as he was in many other things.

Without doubt the Revolution did away with this square of glass, which--according to Piganiol de la Force--existed in the middle of the eighteenth century. Perhaps Francois's own jealous humour prompted him to write these cynical lines, and then again perhaps it is merely one of those fables which breathe the breath of life in some unaccountable manner, no one having been present at its birth, and hearsay and tradition accounting for it all.

Francois, truly, was failing, and he and his sister discussed but sorrowful subjects: the death of his favourite son, Charles, the inheritor of the throne, at Abbeville, where he became infected with the plague, and also the death of him whom he called "his old friend," Henry VIII. of England, a monarch whose amours were as numerous and celebrated as his own.

Henri II. preferred the attractions of Anet to Chambord, while Catherine de Medici and Charles IX. cared more for Blois, Chaumont, and Chenonceaux. Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. only considered it as a rendezvous for the chase, and the latter's successor, Louis XV., gave it to the illustrious Maurice de Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, who spent his old age here, amid fetes, pleasures, and military parades. Near by are the barracks, built for the accommodation of the regiment of horse formed by the marechal and devoted to his special guardianship and pleasure, and paid for by the king, who in turn repaid himself--with interest--from the public treasury. The exercising of this "little army" was one of the chief amusements of the illustrious old soldier.

"A de feints combats Lui-meme en se jouant conduit les vieux soldats"--

wrote the Abbe de Lille in contemporary times.

King Stanislas of Poland lived here from 1725 to 1733, and later it was given to Marechal Berthier, by whose widow it was sold in 1821.

It was bought by national subscription for a million and a half of francs and given to the Duc de Bordeaux, who immediately commenced its restoration, for it had been horribly mutilated by Marechal de Saxe, and the surrounding wood had been practically denuded under the Berthier occupancy.

The Duc de Bordeaux died in 1883, and his heirs, the Duc de Parme and the Comte de Bardi, are now said to spend a quarter of a million annually in the maintenance of the estate, the income of which approximates only half that sum.

There are thirteen great staircases in the edifice, and a room for every day in the year. On the ground floor is the Salle des Gardes, from which one mounts by the great spiral to another similar apartment with a barrel-vaulted roof, which in a former day was converted into a theatre, where in 1669-70 were held the first representations of "Pourceaugnac" and "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme," and where Moliere himself frequently appeared.

The second floor is known as the "_grandes terrasses_" and surrounds the base of the great central lantern so admired from the exterior. On this floor, to the eastward, were the apartments of Francois Premier. The chapel was constructed by Henri II., but the tribune is of the era of Louis XIV. This tribune is decorated with a fine tapestry, made by Madame Royale while imprisoned in the Temple. At the base of the altar is also a tapestry made and presented to the Comte de Chambord by the women of the Limousin.

The apartments of Louis XIV. contain portraits of Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Lafayette, a great painting of the "Bataille de Fontenoy," and another of the Comte de Chambord on horseback.