Native Types in the SologneNative Types in the Sologne
Native Types in the Sologne
The Sologne, like most of the other of thepetits paysof France, is prolific in superstitions and traditionary customs, and here for some reason they deal largely of the marriage state. When thepaysan solognaismarries, hetakes good care to press the marriage-ring well up to the third joint of his spouse's finger, "else she will be the master of the house," which is about as well as the thing can be expressed in English. It seems a simple precaution, and any one so minded might well do the same under similar circumstances, provided he thinks the proceeding efficacious.
Again, during the marriage ceremony itself, each of the parties most interested bears a lighted wax taper, with the belief that whichever first burns out, so will its bearer die first. It's a gruesome thought, perhaps, but it gives one an inkling of who stands the best chance of inheriting the other's goods, which is what matches are sometimes made for.
The marriage ceremony in the Sologne is a great and very public function. Intimates, friends, acquaintances, and any of the neighbouring populace who may not otherwise be occupied, attend, and eat, drink, and ultimately get merry. But they have a sort of process of each paying his or her own way; at least a collection is taken up to pay for the entertainment, for the Sologne peasant would otherwise start his married life in a state of bankruptcy from which it would take him a long time to recover.
The collection is made with considerableéclatand has all the elements of picturesqueness that one usually associates with the wedding processions that one sees on the comic-opera stage. A sort of nuptial bouquet—a great bunch of field flowers—is handed round from one guest to another, and for a sniff of their fragrance and a participation in the collation which is to come, they make an offering, dropping much or little into a golden (not gold) goblet which is passed around by the bride herself.
In the Sologne there is (or was, for the writer has never seen it) another singular custom of the marriage service—not really a part of the churchly office, but a sort of practical indorsement of the actuality of it all.
The bride and groom are both pricked with a needle until the blood runs, to demonstrate that neither the man nor the woman is insensible or dreaming as to the purport of the ceremony about to take place.
As every French marriage is at the Mairie, as well as being held in church, this double ceremony (and the blood-letting as well) must make a very hard and fast agreement. Perhaps it might be tried elsewhere with advantage.
Montrichard, on the Cher, is on the borderland between the Blaisois and Touraine. Its donjon announces itself from afar as a magnificent feudal ruin. The town is moreover most curious and original, the great rectangular donjon rising high into the sky above a series of cliff-dwellers' chalk-cut homes, in truly weird fashion.
There is nothing so very remarkable about cliff-dwellers in the Loire country, and their aspect, manners, and customs do not differ greatly from those of their neighbours, who live below them.
Donjon of MontrichardDonjon of Montrichard
Donjon of Montrichard
Curiously enough these rock-cut dwellings appear dry and healthful, and are not in the least insalubrious, though where acavehas been devoted only to the storage of wine in vats, barrels, and bottles the case is somewhat different.
Montrichard itself, outside of these scores of homes burrowed out of the cliff, is most picturesque, with stone-pignoned gables and dormer-windows and window-frames cut or worked in wood or stone into a thousand amusing shapes.
Montrichard, with Chinon, takes the lead in interesting old houses in these parts; in fact, they quite rival the ruinous lean-to houses of Rouen and Lisieux in Normandy, which is saying a good deal for their picturesque qualities.
One-third of Montrichard's population live underground or in houses built up against the hillsides. Even the lovely old parish church backs against the rock.
Everywhere are stairways andpetits cheminsleading upward or downward, with little façades, windows, or doorways coming upon one in most unexpected and mysterious fashion at every turn.
The magnificent donjon is a relic of the work of that great fortress-builder, Foulques Nerra, Comte d'Anjou, who dotted the land wherever he trod with these masterpieces of their kind, most of them great rectangular structures like the donjons of Britain, but quite unlike the structures of their class mostly seen in France.
Richard Cœur de Lion occupied the fortress in 1108, but was obliged to succumb to his rival in power, Philippe-Auguste, who in time made a breach in its walls and captured it. Thereafter it became an outpost of his own, from whence he could menace the Comte d'Anjou.
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.
François 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 Château 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 château 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 château 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.
François 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 François supplied the wherewithal.
François 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 François 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'Alençon, the ever faithful and devoted sister of François, 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 mediæval 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 François'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 château-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 François 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, François achieved perhaps the greatest triumph that Renaissance architecture had yet known.
It was either Chambord, or the reconstruction by François 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. François 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 François began to introduce the famous salamander into hisdevices 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."
Arms of François Premier, at ChambordArms of François Premier, at Chambord
Arms of François Premier, at Chambord
Chambord, first of all, gives one a very high opinion of François 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 Château de Chambord, built under François 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 mediæval accessories, sliding panels, hidden doorways, and secret cabinets.
Beneath the dome which terminates the staircase in the Orleans wing are three caryatidesrepresenting—it is doubtfully stated—François Premier, La Duchesse d'Étampes, and Madame la Comtesse de Châteaubriand,—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 mediæval château—it may be a dry one or a wet one, in this case it was a wet one—has disappeared, though Brantôme 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 François'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 châteaux has the least desirable situation of any. There is a certain vagueness and foreignness about the sky-line that is almostEastern, 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.
Plan of Chambord
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 theconciergeand 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 façade 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 château of the Renaissance.
François 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 theFrench Renaissance—with the inspiration for its erection in 1526.
Château de ChambordChâteau de Chambord
Château de Chambord
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 François allowed his taste to have full sway.
The presumptuous François made much of this noble residence, perhaps because of his love ofla chasse, for game abounded hereabouts, or perhaps because of his regard for the Comtesse Thoury, who occupied a neighbouring château.
For some time before his death, François 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, andhe 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!"
"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 François 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 François'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.
François, truly, was failing, and he and his sister discussed but sorrowful subjects: thedeath 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 fêtes, pleasures, and military parades. Near by are the barracks, built for the accommodation of the regiment of horse formed by the maréchal 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 combatsLui-même en se jouant conduit les vieux soldats"—
"A de feints combatsLui-même en se jouant conduit les vieux soldats"—
wrote the Abbé de Lille in contemporary times.
King Stanislas of Poland lived here from1725 to 1733, and later it was given to Maréchal 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 Maréchal 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 Molière himself frequently appeared.
The second floor is known as the "grandes terrasses" and surrounds the base of the greatcentral lantern so admired from the exterior. On this floor, to the eastward, were the apartments of François 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.
From Chambord and its overpowering massiveness one makes his way to Chaumont, on the banks of the Loire below Blois, by easy stages across the plain of the Sologne.
One leaves the precincts of Chambord by the back entrance, as one might call it, through six kilometres of forest road, like that by which one enters, and soon passes the little townlet of Bracieux.
One gets glimpses of more or less modern residential châteaux once and again off the main road, but no remarkably interesting structures of any sort are met with until one reaches Cheverny. Just before Cheverny one passes Cour-Cheverny, with a curious old church and a quaint-looking little inn beside it.
Château de ChevernyChâteau de Cheverny
Château de Cheverny
Cheverny itself is, however, the real attraction, two kilometres away. Here the château is opened by its private owners from April toOctober of each year, and, while not such a grand establishment as many of its contemporaries round about, it is in every way a perfect residential edifice of the seventeenth century, when the flowery and ornate Renaissance had given way to something more severely classical, and, truth to tell, far less pleasing in an artistic sense.
Cheverny belongs to-day to the Marquis de Vibraye, one of those undying titles of the French nobility which thrive even in republican France and uphold the best traditions of thenoblesseof other days.
The château was built much later than most of the neighbouring châteaux, in 1634, by the Comte de Cheverny, Philippe Hurault. It sits green-swarded in the midst of a beautifully wooded park, and the great avenue which faces the principal entrance extends for seven kilometres, a distance not excelled, if equalled, by any private roadway elsewhere.
In its constructive features the château is more or less of rectangular outlines. The pavilions at each corner have their openingsà la impériale, with the domes, or lanterns, so customary during the height of the style under Louis XIV. An architect, Boyer by name, who came from Blois, where surely he had the opportunity of having been well acquainted with a more beautiful style, was responsible for the design of the edifice at Cheverny.
The interior decorations in Cordovan leather, the fine chimneypieces, and the many elaborate historical pictures and wall paintings, by Mosnier, Clouet, and Mignard, are all of the best of their period; while the apartments themselves are exceedingly ample, notably the Appartement du Roi, furnished as it was in the days of "Vert Galant," the Salle des Gardes, the library and an elaborately traceried staircase. In the chapel is an altar-table which came from the Église St. Calais, in the château at Blois.
Just outside the gates is a remarkable crotchety old stone church, with a dwindling, toppling spire. It is poor and impoverished when compared with most French churches, and has a most astonishing timbered veranda, with a straining, creaking roof running around its two unobstructed walls. The open rafters are filled with all sorts of rubbish, and the local fire brigade keeps its hose and ladders there.A most suitable old rookery it is in which to start a first-class conflagration.
Cheverny-sur-LoireCheverny-sur-Loire
Cheverny-sur-Loire
Within are a few funeral marbles of the Hurault family, and the daily offices are conducted with a pomp most unexpected. Altogether it forms, as to its fabric and its functions, as strong a contrast of activity and decay as one is likely to see in a long journey.
The town itself is a sleepy, unprogressive place, where automobilists may not even buyessence à pétrole, and, though boasting—if the indolent old town really does boast—a couple of thousand souls, one still has to journey to Cour-Cheverny to send a telegraphic despatch or buy a daily paper.
Between Cheverny and Blois is the Forêt de Russy, which will awaken memories of the boar-hunts of François I., which, along with art in all its enlightening aspects, appears to have been one of the chief pleasures of that monarch. Perhaps one ought to include also the love of fair women, but with them he was not so constant.
On the road to Blois, also, one passes the Château de Beauregard; that is, one usually passes it, but he shouldn't. It is built, practically, within the forest, on the banks of the little river Beauvron. An irongrillegives entrance to a beautiful park, and within is the château, its very name indicating the favour with which it was held by its royal owner. It was in 1520 that François I. established it asarendezvous de chasse. Under his son, Henri II., it was reconstructed, in part; entirely remodelled in the seventeenth century; and "modernized"—whatever that may mean—in 1809, and again, more lately, restored by the Duc de Dino. It belongs to-day to the Comte de Cholet, who has tried his hand at "restoration" as well.
The history of this old château is thus seen to have been most varied, and it is pretty sure to have lost a good deal of its original character in the transforming process.
The interior is more attractive than is the exterior. There is a grand gallery of portraits of historical celebrities, more than 350, executed between 1617 and 1638 by Paul Ardier, Counsellor of State, who thus combined the accomplishment of the artist with the sagacity of the statesman.
The ceilings of the great rooms are mostly elaborate works in enamel and carved oak, and there is a tiled floor (carrelage) in the portrait gallery, in blue faïence, representing an army in the order of battle, which must have delighted the hearts of the youthful progeny who may have been brought up within the walls of the château. This pavement is moreover anexcellent example of the craftsmanship of tile-making.
One gains admission to the château freely from theconcierge, who in due course expects herpourboire, and sees that she gets it. But what would you, inquisitive traveller? You have come here to see the sights, and Beauregard is well worth the price of admission, which is anything you like to give, certainly not less than a franc.
One may return to Blois through the forest, or may continue his way down the river to Chaumont on the left bank.
At Chaumont the Loire broadens to nearly double the width at Blois, its pebbles and sandbars breaking the mirror-like surface into innumerable pools andétangs. There is a bridge which connects Chaumont with the railway at Onzain and the great national highway from Tours to Blois. The bridge, however, is so hideous a thing that one had rather go miles out of his way than accept its hospitality. It is simply one of those unsympathetic wire-rope affairs with which the face of the globe is being covered, as engineering skill progresses and the art instinct dies out.
ChaumontChaumont
Chaumont
The Château de Chaumont is charmingly situated, albeit it is not very accessible tostrangers after one gets there, as it is open to the public only on Thursdays, from July to December. It is exactly what one expects to find,—a fine riverside establishment of its epoch, and in architectural style combining the well-recognized features of late Gothic and the early Renaissance. It is not moss-grown or decrepit in any way, which fact, considering its years, is perhaps remarkable.
The park of the château is only of moderate extent, but the structure itself is, comparatively, of much larger proportions. The ideal view of the structure is obtained from midway on that ungainly bridge which spans the Loire at this point. Here, in the gold and purple of an autumn evening, with the placid and far-reaching Loire, its pools and its bars of sand and pebble before one, it is a scene which is as near idyllic as one is likely to see.
The town itself is not attractive; one long, narrow lane-like street, lined on each side by habitations neither imposing nor of a tumble-down picturesqueness, borders the Loire. There is nothing very picturesque, either, about the homes of the vineyard workers round about. Below and above the town the great highroad runs flat and straight between Tours and Blois on either side of the river, and automobilists and cyclists now roll along where the state carriages of the court used to roll when François Premier and his sons journeyed from one gay country house to another.
It is to be inferred that the aspect of things at Chaumont has not changed much since that day,—always saving that spider-net wire bridge. The population of the town has doubtless grown somewhat, even though small towns in France sometimes do not increase their population in centuries; but the topographical aspect of the long-drawn-out village, backed by green hills on one side and the Loire on the other, is much as it always has been.
Signature of Diane de PoitierSignature of Diane de Poitiers
Signature of Diane de Poitiers
The château at Chaumont had its origin as far back as the tenth century, and its proprietors were successively local seigneurs, Counts of Blois, the family of Amboise, and Diane de Poitiers, who received it from Catherine in exchange for Chenonceaux. This was not a fair exchange, and Diane was, to some extent, justified in her complaints.
Chaumont was for a time in the possessionof Scipion Sardini, one of the Italian partisans of the Medici, "whose arms boretrois sardines d'argent," and who had married Isabelle de la Tour, "la Demoiselle de Limieul" of unsavoury reputation.
The "Demoiselle de Limieul" was related, too, to Catherine, and was celebrated in the gallantries of the time in no enviable fashion. She was a member of that band of demoiselles whose business it was—by one fascination or another—to worm political secrets from the nobles of the court. One horrible scandal connected the unfortunate lady with the Prince de Condé, but it need not be repeated here. The Huguenots ridiculed it in those memorable verses beginning thus:
"Puella illa nobilisQuæ erat tam amabilis."
"Puella illa nobilisQuæ erat tam amabilis."
After the reign of Sardini and of his direct successors, the house of Bullion, Chaumont passed through many hands. Madame de Staël arrived at the château in the early years of the nineteenth century, when she had received the order to separate herself from Paris, "by at least forty leagues." She had made the circle of the outlying towns, hovering about Paris as a moth about a candle-flame; Rouen, Auxerre, Blois, Saumur, all had entertained her, but nowshe came to establish herself in this Loire citadel. As the story goes, journeying from Saumur to Tours, by post-chaise, on the opposite side of the river, she saw the imposing mass of Chaumont rising high above the river-bed, and by her good graces and winning ways installed herself in the affections of the then proprietor, M. Leray, and continued her residence "and made her court here for many years."
Chaumont is to-day the property of the Princesse de Broglie, who has sought to restore it, where needful, even to reëstablishing the ancient fosse or moat. This last, perhaps, is not needful; still, a moated château, or even a moated grange has a fascination for the sentimentally inclined.
At the drawbridge, as one enters Chaumont to-day, one sees the graven initials of Louis XII. and Anne de Bretagne, the arms of Georges d'Amboise, surmounted by his cardinal's hat, and those of Charles de Chaumont, as well as other cabalistic signs: one a representation of a mountain (apparently) with a crater-like summit from which flames are breaking forth, while hovering about, back to back, are two C's:Two C's back to back. The Renaissance artists greatly affected the rebus, and this perhaps has some reference to the etymology ofthe name Chaumont, which has been variously given as coming fromChaud Mont,Calvus Mont, andChauve Mont.
Georges d'Amboise, the first of the name, was born at Chaumont in 1460, the eighth son of a family of seventeen children. It was a far cry, as distances went in those days, from the shores of the shallow, limpid Loire to those of the forceful, turgent Seine at Rouen, where in the great Cathedral of Notre Dame, this first Georges of Amboise, having become an archbishop and a cardinal, was laid to rest beneath that magnificent canopied tomb before which visitors to the Norman capital stand in wonder. The mausoleum bears this epitaph, which in some small measure describes the activities of the man.
"Pastor eram cleri, populi pater; aurea seseLilia subdebant, quercus et ipsa mihi."Martuus en jaceo, morte extinguunter honores,Et virtus, mortis nescia, mort viret."
"Pastor eram cleri, populi pater; aurea seseLilia subdebant, quercus et ipsa mihi.
"Martuus en jaceo, morte extinguunter honores,Et virtus, mortis nescia, mort viret."
His was not by any means a life of placidity and optimism, and he had the air and reputation of doing things. There is a saying, still current in Touraine: "Laissez faire à Georges."
The second of the same name, also an Archbishop of Rouen and a cardinal, succeeded his uncle in the see. He also is buried beneath the same canopy as his predecessor at Rouen.
The main portal of the château leads to a fine quadrilateral court with an open gallery overlooking the Loire, which must have been a magnificent playground for the nobility of a former day. The interior embellishments are fine, some of the more noteworthy features being a grand staircase of the style of Louis XII.; the Salle des Gardes, with a painted ceiling showing the arms of Chaumont and Amboise; the Salle du Conseil, with some fine tapestries and a remarkable tiled floor, depicting scenes of the chase; the Chambre de Catherine de Medici (she possessed Chaumont for nine years), containing some of the gifts presented to her upon her wedding with Henri II.; and the curious Chambre de Ruggieri, the astrologer whom Catherine brought from her Italian home, and who was always near her, and kept her supplied with charms and omens, good and bad, and also her poisons.
Ruggieri's observatory was above his apartment. It was at Chaumont that the astrologer overstepped himself, and would have used his magic against Charles IX. He did go so far as to make an image and inflict certain indignities upon it, with the belief that the same would befall the monarch himself. Ruggieri went to the galleys for this, but the scheming Catherine soon had him out again, and at work with his poisons and philtres.
Finally there is the Chambre de Diane de Poitiers, Catherine's more than successful rival, with a bed (modern, it is said) and a series of sixteenth-century tapestries, with various other pieces of contemporary furniture. A portrait of Diane which decorates the apartment is supposed to be one of the three authentic portraits of the fair huntress. The chapel has a fine tiled pavement and some excellent glass.
Chaumont is eighteen kilometres from Blois and the same distance from Amboise. It has not the splendour of Chambord, but it has a greater antiquity, and an incomparably finer situation, which displays its coiffed towers and theirmâchicoulisand cornices in a manner not otherwise possible. It is one of those picture châteaux which tell a silent story quite independent of guide-book or historical narrative.
It was M. Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, the superintendent of the forests of Berry and the Blaisois, under Louis XVI., who gave hospitality to Benjamin Franklin, and turned overto the first American ambassador to France the occupancy of his house at Passy, where Franklin lived for nine consecutive years.
Of this same M. de Chaumont Americans cannot have too high a regard, for his timely and judicious hospitality has associated his name, only less permanently than Franklin's, with the early fortunes of the American republic.
Besides his other offices, M. de Chaumont was the intendant of the Hôtel des Invalides, at Paris, holding confidential relations with the ministry of the young king, and was in the immediate enjoyment of a fortune which amounted to two and a half million of francs, besides owning, in addition to Chaumont on the Loire, another château in the Blaisois. This château he afterward tendered to John Adams, who declined the offer in a letter, written at Passy-sur-Seine, February 25, 1779, in the following words: "... To a mind as much addicted to retirement as mine, the situation you propose would be delicious indeed, provided my country were at peace and my family with me; but, separated from my family and with a heart bleeding with the wounds of its country, I should be the most miserable being on earth...."
The potteries, which now form the stablesof the château at Chaumont, are somewhat reminiscent of Franklin. M. de Chaumont had established a pottery here, where he had found a clay which had encouraged him to hope that he could compete with the English manufacturers of the time. Here the Italian Nini, who was invited to Chaumont, made medallions much sought for by collectors, among others one of Franklin, which was so much admired as a work of art, and became so much in demand that in later years replicas were made and are well known to amateurs.
The family of Le Ray de Chaumont were extensively known in America, where they became large landholders in New York State in the early nineteenth century, and the head of the family seems to have been an amiable and popular landlord. The towns of Rayville and Chaumont in New York State still perpetuate his name.
The two male members of the family secured American wives; Le Ray himself married a Miss Coxe, and their son a Miss Jahel, both of New York.
From an anonymous letter to the New YorkEvening Postof November 19, 1885, one quotes the following:
"It was in Blois that I first rummagedamong these shops, whose attractions are almost a rival to those of the castle, though this is certainly one of the most interesting in France. The traveller will remember the long flight of stone steps which climbs the steep hill in the centre of the town. Near the foot of this hill there is a well-furnished book-shop; its windows display old editions and rich bindings, and tempt one to enter and inquire for antiquities. Here I found a quantity of old notarial documents and diplomas of college or university, all more or less recently cleared out from some town hall, or unearthed from neighbouring castle, and sold by a careless owner, as no longer valuable to him. This was the case with most of the parchments I found at Blois; they had been acquired within a few years from the castle of Madon, and from a former proprietor of the neighbouring castle of Chaumont (thecalvus monsof mediæval time), and most of them pertained to the affairs of theseigneurie de Chaumont. Contracts, executions, sales of vineyards and houses, legal decisions,actes de vente, loans on mortgages, the marriage contract of a M. Lubin,—these were the chief documents that I found and purchased."
The traveller may not expect to come uponduplicates of these treasures again, but the incident only points to the fact that much documentary history still lies more or less deeply buried.