In Château Land - Anne Hollingsworth Wharton (fiction novels to read TXT) 📗

to include the servants' quarters and stables. Beyond this is the drawbridge which spans the wide moat and gives access to a spacious rectangular court. This moat of clear, running water, its solid stone walls draped with vines and topped with blooming plants, defines the ancient limits of the domain of the Marques family who owned this estate as far back in history as the thirteenth century. Where the beautiful chateau now stands there was once a fortified mill. The property passed into the hands of Thomas Bohier, in the fifteenth century, who conceived the bold idea of turning the old mill into a chateau, its solid foundations, sunk into the Cher, affording a substantial support for the noble superstructure; or, as Balzac says, "Messire de Bohier, the Minister of Finances, as a novelty placed his house astride the River Cher." A chateau built over a river! Can you imagine anything more picturesque, or, as Miss Cassandra says, anything more unhealthy? The sun shone gaily to-day, and the rooms felt fairly dry, but during the long weeks of rain that come to France in the spring and late autumn these spacious _salles_ must be as damp as a cellar. Miss Cassandra says that the bare thought of sleeping in them gives her rheumatic twinges. There are handsome, richly decorated mantels and chimney-places in all of the great rooms, but they look as if they had not often known the delights of a cheerful fire of blazing logs.

The old building is in the form of a vast square pavilion, flanked on each corner by a bracketed turret upon which there is a wealth of Renaissance ornamentation. On the east side are the chapel and a small outbuilding, which form a double projection and enclose a little terrace on the ground floor. Over the great entrance door are carvings and heraldic devices, and over the whole facade of the chateau there is a rich luxuriance of ornamentation which, with the wide moat surrounding it, and the blooming parterres spread before it, give the entire castle the air of being _en fete_, not relegated to the past like Langeais, Amboise, and some of the other chateaux that we have seen.

However Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici may have beautified this lovely palace on the Cher, its inception seems to have been due to Bohier, the Norman _general des finances_ of Charles VIII, or perhaps to his wife Katherine Briconnet, a true lover of art, who like her husband spent vast sums upon Chenonceaux. The fact that Bohier died before the chateau was anywhere near completion makes the old French inscription on the tower, and elsewhere on the walls, especially pathetic, "_S'il vient a point, m'en souviendra_" (If completed, remember me). Even unfinished as the Norman financier left Chenonceaux, one cannot fail to remember him and his dreams of beauty which others were destined to carry out.

Unique in situation and design is the great gallery, sixty metres in height, which Philibert de l'Orme, at Queen Catherine's command, caused to rise like a fairy palace from the waters of the Cher. This gallery of two stories, decorated in the interior with elaborate designs in stucco, and busts of royal and distinguished persons, is classic in style and sufficiently substantial in structure, as it rests upon five arches separated by abutments, on each of which is a semicircular turret rising to the level of the first floor. Designed for a _salle des fetes_, this part of the castle was never quite finished in consequence of the death of Catherine, who intended that an elaborate pavilion, to match Bohier's chateau on the opposite bank of the river, should mark the terminus of the gallery. The new building was far enough advanced, however, to be used for the elaborate festivities that had been planned for Francis II and Queen Mary when they fled from the horrors of Amboise to the lovely groves and forests of Chenonceaux.

Standing in the long gallery, which literally bridges the Cher, we wondered whether the masques and revels held here in honor of the Scotch Queen were able to dispel sad thoughts of that day at Amboise, of whose miseries we heard so much yesterday. Mary Stuart, more than half French, was gay, light-hearted and perhaps in those early days with a short memory for the sorrows of life; but it seems as if the recollection of that day of slaughter and misery could never have been quite effaced from her mind. To Catherine, who revelled in blood and murder, the day was one of triumph, but its horrors evidently left their impress upon the delicate physique as well as upon the sensitive mind of the frail, gentle Francis.

Since we have heard so much of the evil deeds of Catherine it has become almost unsafe to take Miss Cassandra into any of the palaces where the Medicean Queen is honored by statue or portrait. When we passed from the spacious _salle des gardes_, later used as the dining hall of the Briconnet family, into the room of Diane de Poitiers, it seemed the very irony of fate that a large portrait of the arch enemy of the beautiful Diane should adorn the richly carved chimney-place. I should not say _adorn_, for Catherine's unattractive face could adorn nothing, and this severe portrait in widow's weeds, with none of the pomp and circumstance of royalty to light up the sombre garb, is singularly undecorative. Although she had already announced that she had no great affection for Diane, Catherine's portrait in this particular room excited Miss Cassandra's wrath to such a degree that her words and gestures attracted the attention of the guide. At first he looked perplexed and then indignantly turned to us for an explanation: "What ailed the lady, and why was she displeased? He was doing his best to show us the chateau." We reassured him, smoothed down his ruffled feathers, and finally explained to him that Miss Cassandra had a deep-rooted aversion to Queen Catherine and especially resented having her honored by portrait or bust in these beautiful French castles, above all in this room of her hated rival.

"Diane was none too good herself," he replied with a grim smile; "but she was beautiful and had wit enough to hold the hearts of two kings." Then, entering into the spirit of the occasion, he turned to Miss Cassandra and by dint of shrugs, and no end of indescribable and most expressive French gestures, he made her understand that he had no love for Catherine himself, and that if it lay within his _pouvoir_ he would throw the unlovely portrait out of the window; no one cared for her,--her own husband least of all. This last remark was accompanied with what was intended for a wicked wink, exclusively for Walter's benefit, but its wickedness was quite overcome by the irresistible and contagious good humor and _bonhomie_ of the man. Finding that his audience was _en rapport_ with him, he drew our attention to the wall decoration, which consists of a series of monograms, and asked us how we read the design.

"D and H intertwined" we answered in chorus.

At this the guide laughed merrily and explained that there were different opinions about the monogram; some persons said that King Henry had boldly undertaken to interlace the initial letters of Catherine and Diane with his own, but he for his part believed that the letters were two Cs with an H between them and, whether by accident or design, the letter on the left, which looked more like a D than a C, gave the key to the monogram, "and this," he added with the air of a philosopher, "made it true to history; the beautiful favorite on the left hand was always more powerful than the Queen on the right, not that the ways of King Henry II were to be commended; but," with a frank smile, "one is always pleased to think of that wicked woman getting what was owing her."

"Rousseau thought that both the initials were those of Diane; he says in his _Confessions_: 'In 1747 we went to pass the autumn in Touraine, at the castle of Chenonceaux, a royal mansion upon the Cher, built by Henry II for Diane de Poitiers, of whom the ciphers are still seen.'"

We turned, at the sound of a strange voice, to find the Frenchman of the Bon Laboureur standing quite near us.

"These guides have a large supply of more or less correct history at hand, and this one, being a philosopher, adds his own theories to further obscure the truth." This in the most perfect English, accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders entirely French. "Chenonceaux being Diane's chateau and this her own room, what more natural than that her cipher should be here, as Rousseau says? And yet, as Honore de Balzac points out, this same cipher is to be found in the palace of the Louvre; upon the columns of _la Halle au Ble_, built by Catherine herself; and above her own tomb at Saint Denis which she had constructed during her lifetime. All the same, it must have pleased Henry immensely to have the royal cipher look much more like D H than like C H, and there is still room for conjecture which, after all, is one of the charms of history, so, Monsieur et Mesdames, it is quite _a votre choix_," with a graceful bow in our direction.

Evidently Monsieur Crapaud does not consider us savages, despite Walter's unsavory remarks about the _cuisine_ of his country, and noticing our interest he added with French exactness: "Of course, the chateau was not built for Diane, although much enlarged and beautified by her, and when Catherine came into possession she had the good sense to carry out some of Diane's plans. Francis I came here to hunt sometimes, and it was upon one of these parties of pleasure, when his son Henry and Diane de Poitiers were with him, that she fell in love with this castle on the Cher, and longed to make it her own. Having a lively sense of the instability of all things mortal, kings in particular, she took good care to make friends with the rising star, and when Francis was gathered to his fathers and his uncles and his cousins,--you may remember that his predecessor was an uncle or a cousin,--Henry promptly turned over Chenonceaux to Diane."

"There is a curious old story," said Monsieur Crapaud, "about Chenonceaux having been given to Diane to soothe her vanity, which had been wounded by the publication of some scurrilous verses, said to have been instigated by her enemy, Madame d'Etampes. Naturally, the petted beauty, whose charms were already on the wane, resented satirical allusion to her painted face, false teeth and hair, especially as she was warned, in very plain language, that a painted bait would not long attract her prey. These verses were attributed to one of the Bohiers, a nephew or a son of the old councillor who had built the chateau, and, to save his neck, he offered Chenonceaux to Henry, who begged Diane to accept it and forget her woes."

"Which she did, of course," said Walter, "as she always seemed to have had an eye to the main chance."

"I cannot vouch for the truth of the story; I give it to you as it came to me. There is no doubt, however, that certain satirical verses were written about the Duchesse de Valentinois, in which she and the King also are spoken of with a freedom not to be expected under the old regime. Perhaps you are not familiar with the quatrain:

"'Sire, si vous laissez, comme Charles desire,